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Unlike the countless adults who have lived for years with painful memories of actual childhood sexual abuse, most individuals with "recovered memory" initially have no specific recollection of incest or molestation. At worst, they have only a vague feeling that something may have happened. Others, simply seeking help to alleviate depression, eating disorders, marital difficulties or other common problems, are informed by unsophisticated therapists or pop-psychology books that their symptoms suggest childhood sexual abuse, all memories of which have been repressed.
In the course of the therapy, many of these troubled souls conjure up exquisitely detailed recollections of sexual abuse by family members. Encouraged by their therapists to reach deeper into the recesses of their memories -- often using techniques such as visualization and hypnosis -- some go on to describe events that sorely strain credulity, particularly tales of their forced childhood participation in satanic rituals involving animal and infant sacrifices, as well as sexual acts.
In many cases the therapists conclude, and eventually convince the patients through suggestion, that the repressed memories of childhood abuse have caused them to "dissociate." As a result, they appear to develop multiple- personality disorder, the strange and, until recently, rare condition brought to wide public attention by the 1973 book, Sybil, which describes the condition of a woman who develops several strikingly different but interchangeable personas.
Legislatures in nearly half the states have responded to the widespread public acceptance of recovered memories by applying a strange twist to venerable statute-of-limitations laws. In general, the new legislation allows alleged victims of child abuse to sue the accused perpetrators within three to six years after the repressed memories emerge. This means that with little more than the recollection of the accuser, a parent or other relative can be hauled into court decades after the supposed crime.
Taking advantage of the newly enacted legislation, some of the supposed victims have successfully brought civil and even criminal actions against members of their own families. Juries have awarded them damages, and in a few cases the accused parent has been sentenced to jail -- based entirely on the recovered memory of his adult offspring.
To many critics of the recovered-memory movement, the accusations and convictions are reminiscent of the 17th century Salem witchcraft trials, in which elderly women and an occasional man were condemned to death, often on the basis of a single unsubstantiated charge that they had demonstrated witchlike behavior.
"Recovered-memory therapy will come to be recognized as the quackery of the 20th century," predicts Richard Ofshe, a social psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley. And in the process, Emory University psychiatry professor George Ganaway fears, it may "trigger a backlash against ((legitimate charges of)) child abuse. As these stories are discredited, society may end up throwing the baby out with the bath water -- and the hard- earned credibility of the child-abuse-survivor movement will go down the drain."