(4 of 8)
Judie Alpert, a professor of applied psychology at New York University, refutes the critics of recovered-memory therapy. "There is absolutely no question that some people have repressed some memories of early abuse that are just too painful to remember," she says. "In their 20s and 30s some event triggers early memories, and slowly they return. The event has been so overwhelming that the little girl who is being abused can't tolerate to be there in the moment, so she leaves her body, dissociates, as if she is up on a bookshelf looking down on the little girl who is being abused. Over time, she pushes it deep down because she can't integrate the experience."
Christine Courtois, also in the APA work group and a clinical director at the Psychiatric Institute in Washington, charges that criticism of the recovered-memory phenomenon is part of a backlash against society's tardy recognition of widespread sexual abuse. The "wholesale degradation of psychotherapy by some critics," she says, represents "displaced rage" at therapists for bringing the issue to public attention.
That kind of reasoning does not sit well with Margaret Singer, a retired professor from the University of California, Berkeley, and an expert on cults and influence techniques. She has interviewed 50 people who once believed they had recovered repressed memories of incest or ritual abuse but now think they were mistaken. All 50, Singer emphasizes, were in therapy when they "recovered" terrifying memories of abuse. "These people are reporting to me that their therapists were far more sure than they were that their parents had molested them."
Singer insists that trauma does not cause people to repress memories, although bits and pieces of experience can be lost through amnesia. In fact, she says, trauma has just the opposite effect: people can't forget it. As an example, she cites the cases of Vietnam veterans who suffer flashbacks and posttraumatic stress disorder.
Psychologist Ofshe is particularly disdainful of the concept of what he calls "robust" repression: the instantaneous submergence of any memory of sexual abuse. Recovered-memory therapists, he says, "have invented a mechanism that supposedly causes a child's awareness of sexual assault to be driven entirely from consciousness." According to these therapists, Ofshe explains, "there is no limit to the number of traumatic events that can be repressed, and no limit to the length of time over which the series of events can occur." Belief in robust repression, he concludes, "can be found only on the lunatic fringes of science and the mental-health professions."
"Repression definitions are so loose and varied, so abundant, so shifting that it is like trying to shoot a moving target," says Elizabeth Loftus, professor of psychology and law at the University of Washington and an authority on cognitive processes, long-term memory and eyewitness testimony. "If repression is the avoidance in your conscious awareness of unpleasant experiences that come back to you, yes, I believe in repression. But if it is a blocking out of an endless stream of traumas that occur over and over that leave a person with absolutely no awareness that these things happen, that make them behave in destructive ways and re-emerge decades later in some reliable form, I don't see any evidence for it. It flies in the face of everything we know about memory."