False Memory Syndrome Foundation Information Articles

False Memory Syndrome Foundation Information Articles

 

"Lost in a Shopping Mall" A Breach of Professional Ethics
http://users.owt.com/crook/memory/

 

Ethics Complaints Filed Against Prominent FMSF Board Member
APA Declines To Investigate
https://web.archive.org/web/20060218123608/http://fmsf.com/apa-complaint.shtml

 

Ethics Complaints Filed Against FMSF Board Member Elizabeth Loftus
http://www.astraeasweb.net/politics/loftus.html

 

The Alleged Ethical Violations of Elizabeth Loftus in the Case of Jane Doe
https://ritualabuse.us/research/memory-fms/the-alleged-ethical-violations-of-elizabeth-loftus-in-the-case-of-jane-doe/

There have been allegations that Elizabeth Loftus violated ethical codes in the field of psychology. (Al-Kurdi, 1998; Notes from the controversy ethics complaints filed against prominent FMSF board member APA declines to investigate). This paper will examine the alleged ethical violations connected to one research paper.

 

 

"Remembering Dangerously" & Hoult v. Hoult:
The Myth of Repressed Memory that Elizabeth Loftus Created
http://www.rememberingdangerously.com/ 

 

 

Taus v. Loftus et al.
http://www.leadershipcouncil.org/1/lg/taus.html 
The measures used to reinvestigate her case are alleged by Taus to include misrepresentation, defamation, and invasion of privacy. For instance, Taus alleges that the defendants hired a private investigator to learn her true identity and that Loftus then began contacting family members to gather data about her without her knowledge or consent. Taus alleges that Loftus misrepresented herself to gain the cooperation of her foster mother. Taus claims that Loftus claimed misidentified herself as Dr. Corwin's colleague and supervisor--someone she trusted. At the same time, Loftus apparently befriended Taus' birth mother, who had lost custody due to physical and sexual abuse.

False memory syndrome proponents have done the following to try and ensure that only their point of view is in the public view.
1) Harassing debate opponents
2) Misrepresenting the data in the field
3) Controlling the media
https://ritualabuse.us/research/memory-fms/false-memory-syndrome-proponents-tactics/ 

Controlling the media
U-Turn on Memory Lane by Mike Stanton – Columbia Journalism Review – July/August 1997
“Rarely has such a strange and little-understood organization had such a profound effect on media coverage of such a controversial matter. The foundation is an aggressive, well-financed p.r. machine adept at manipulating the press, harassing its critics, and mobilizing a diverse army of psychiatrists, outspoken academics, expert defense witnesses, litigious lawyers, Freud bashers, critics of psychotherapy, and devastated parents. With a budget of $750,000 a year from members and outside supporters, the foundation’s reach far exceeds its actual membership of about 3,000.”  

“As controversial memory cases arose around the country, FMSF boosters contacted journalists to pitch the false-memory argument, more and more reporters picked up on the issue, and the foundation became an overnight media darling. The story line that had dominated the press since the 1980s — an underreported toll of sexual abuse, including sympathetic stories of adult survivors resurrecting long-lost memories of it — was quickly turned around. The focus shifted to new tearful victims — respectable, elderly parents who could no longer see their children and grandchildren because of bad therapists who implanted memories…:” http://web.archive.org/web/20071216011151/http://backissues.cjrarchives.org/year/97/4/memory.asp 

Disinformation and DID: the Politics of Memory
https://ritualabuse.us/research/did/disinformation-and-did-the-politics-of-memory/

The False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF)

In March of 1992 the False Memory Syndrome Foundation was formed claiming to have discovered a new syndrome. “Syndrome” is a clinical term that requires certain agreed upon signs and symptoms indicative of a disorder. The FMSF definition of “false memory” does not meet these criteria:

Despite the fact that “False Memory Syndrome” remained undefined and had never been the subject of any research, the FMSF focused its early activities on influencing the media and legal system…The definition of “False Memory Syndrome” did not evolve from clinical studies; rather the purported syndrome’s description is based on the accounts of parents claiming to be falsely accused of child sexual abuse, usually by their adult daughters.

 

Calof, D.L. (1998). Notes from a practice under siege: Harassment, defamation, and intimidation in the name of science, Ethics and Behavior, 8(2) pp. 161-187. Abstract: I have practiced psychotherapy, family therapy, and hypnotherapy for over 25 years without a single board complaint or law suit by a client. For over three years, however, a group of proponents of the false memory syndrome (FMS) hypothesis, including members, officials, and supporters of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, Inc., have waged a multi-modal campaign of harassment and defamation directed against me, my clinical clients, my staff, my family, and others connected to me. I have neither treated these harassers or their families, nor had any professional or personal dealings with any of them; I am not related in any way to the disclosures of memories of sexual abuse in these families. Nonetheless, this group disrupts my professional and personal life and threatens to drive me out of business. In this article, I describe practicing psychotherapy under a state of siege and places the campaign against me in the context of a much broader effort in the FMS movement to denigrate, defame, and harass clinicians, lecturers, writers, and researchers identified with the abuse and trauma treatment communities. http://ritualabuse.us/research/memory-fms/notes-from-a-practice-under-siege/

 

Whitfield, C. L. (2001). The “false memory” defense: Using disinformation and junk science in and out of court. In Whitfield, C. L., Silberg, J. Fink, P. J. Eds. (2001). Misinformation Concerning Child Sexual Abuse and Adult Survivors New York: Hawthorn Press, Inc. (pp. 53 – 78)

“Attorneys for accused, convicted or found-responsible child molesters tend to use a superficially sophisticated argument, which can be described as the “false memory defense.” This defense is fraught with disinformation, smoke screens, and other untruths that are a distortion of what the available science of the psychology of trauma and memory shows. In this article, this seemingly sophisticated, but actually mostly contrived and often erroneous defense, is described and it is compared in a brief review to what the science says about the effect of trauma on memory.” http://web.archive.org/web/20061210182243/childabuse.georgiacenter.uga.edu/both/whitfield/whitfield2.phtml

 

False Memory Syndrome
The term False Memory Syndrome was created in 1992 by the False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF)[1]. It has been called "a pseudoscientific syndrome that was developed to defend against claims of child abuse."[1] The FMSF was created by parents who claimed to be falsely accused of child sexual abuse.[1] The False Memory Syndrome was described as "a widespread social phenomenon where misguided therapists cause patients to invent memories of sexual abuse."[1] Research has shown that most delayed memories of childhood abuse are true[2]. In general, it has been shown that false allegations of childhood sexual abuse are rare, with some studies showing rates as low as one percent[3][4] and some studies showing slightly higher rates[3]. It has been found that children tend to understate rather than overstate the extent of any abuse experienced[3]. It has been stated that misinformation on the topic of child sexual abuse is widespread and that the media have contributed to this problem by reporting favorably on unproven and controversial claims like the False Memory Syndrome[5].
http://childabusewiki.org/index.php?title=False_Memory_Syndrome 

Elizabeth Loftus - critiques of her research

The accuracy of Elizabeth Loftus' research and its ethics have been critiqued by several people over the last two decades. Below is a brief synopsis of some of this research.

"Lost in a Shopping Mall" A Breach of Professional Ethics
Lynn S. Crook, Martha Dean ETHICS & BEHAVIOR, vol. 9, #1, pp. 39-50
The "lost in a shopping mall" study has been cited to support claims that psychotherapists can implant memories of false autobiographical information of childhood trauma in their patients. The mall study originated in 1991 as 5 pilot experiments involving 3 children and 2 adult participants. The University of Washington Human Subjects Committee granted approval for the mall study on August 10, 1992. The preliminary results with the 5 pilot subjects were announced 4 days later. An analysis of the mall study shows that beyond the external misrepresentations, internal scientific methodological errors cast doubt on the validity of the claims that have been attributed to the mall study within scholarly and legal arenas. The minimal involvement or, in some cases, negative impact of collegial consultation, academic supervision, and peer review throughout the evolution of the mall study are reviewed.
http://users.owt.com/crook/memory/

Elizabeth Loftus (from jimhopper.com)
Unfortunately, thus far reporters and journalists have almost completely failed to critically evaluate her claims. Nor have they addressed three crucial facts about her work:

1) Loftus herself conducted and published a study in which nearly one in five women who reported childhood sexual abuse also reported completely forgetting the abuse for some period of time and recovering the memory of it later.
....

3) Loftus is aware that those who study traumatic memory have for several years, based on a great deal of research and clinical experience, used the construct of dissociation to account for the majority of recovered memories. However, she continues to focus on and attack "repression" and "repressed memories," which has the effect of confusing and misleading many people.
http://www.jimhopper.com/memory/#el



Consider the Evidence for Elizabeth Loftus'
Scholarship and Accuracy. "Remembering Dangerously" & Hoult v. Hoult: The Myth of Repressed Memory that Elizabeth Loftus Created
by Jennifer Hoult, Esq.
http://www.rememberingdangerously.com/


Elizabeth Loftus herself has published studies showing evidence of recovered memory. The 4 January 1996 issue of Accuracy About Abuse notes: Elizabeth Loftus, high profile FMSF advocate, published a paper with colleagues on Remembering and Repressing in 1994. In a study of 105 women outpatients in a substance abuse clinic 54 % reported a history of childhood sexual abuse. 81% remembered all or part of the abuse. 19% reported they forgot the abuse for a period of time and later the memory returned. Women who remembered the abuse their whole lives reported a clearer memory, with a more detailed picture. Women who remembered the abuse their whole lives did not differ from others in terms of the violence of the abuse or whether the violence was incestuous. [Psychology of Women Quarterly, 18 (1994) 67-84.]

Loftus has also discussed "motivated forgetting", and has presented the documented study of a college professor who became unable to remember a series of traumas, but after some time was able to recover those memories. Loftus remarked "after such an enormously stressful experience, many individuals wish to forget... And often their wish is granted." (Loftus, 1980/1988, p. 73)" http://web.archive.org/web/20030608221633/http://www.feminista.com/v1n9/false-memory.html

"The hypothesis that false memories can easily be implanted in psychotherapy (Lindsay & Read, 1994; Loftus 1993; Loftus & Ketcham, 1994; Ofshe and Watters, 1993, 1994; Yapko, 1994a) seriously overstates the available data. Since no studies have been conducted on suggested effects in psychotherapy per se, the idea of iatrogenic suggestion of false memories remains an untested hypothesis. (Memory, Trauma Treatment, And the Law Brown, Scheflin and Hammond (D. Corydon) 1998, W. W. Norton 0-393-70254-5)


Memory, Abuse, and Science: Questioning Claims About the False Memory Syndrome Epidemic Pope, K. (1996)
American Psychologist 51: 957. doi:10.1037/0003-066X.51.9.957

Does the trauma specified in the lost-in-the-mall experiment seem comparable to the trauma forming the basis of false memory syndrome? Loftus (1993) described the implanted traumatic event in the shopping-mall experiment as follows: "Chris was convinced by his older brother Jim, that he had been lost in a shopping mall when he was five years old" (p. 532). Does this seem, for example, a reasonable analogy for a five-year-old girl being repeatedly raped by her father? Pezdek (1995; see also Pezdek, Finger, & Hodge, 1996) has suggested that this may not be the case. In attempting to arrive at a more analogous situation-that of a suggested false memory of a rectal enema-her experimental attempts at implantation of a suggestion had a 0% success rate.

What is the impact of the potentially confounding variables in claiming the shopping-mall experiment to be a convincing analogue of therapy (Loftus, 1993; Loftus & Ketcham, 1994)? Is it possible that the findings are an artifact of this particular design, for example, that the older family member claims to have been present when the event occurred and to have witnessed it, a claim the therapist can never make? To date, replications and extensions of this study have tended to use a similar methodology; that is, either the older family member makes the suggestions in his or her role as the experimenter's confederate, or the experimenter presents the suggestion as being the report of an older family member, thus creating a surrogate confederate.

Has this line of research assumed that verbal reports provided to researchers are the equivalent of actual memories? Spanos (1994) suggested that changes in report in suggestibility research may represent compliance with social demand conditions of the research design rather than actual changes in what is recalled. In what ways were the measures to demonstrate actual changes or creations of memory representations validated and confounding variables (e.g., demand characteristics) excluded? Given that being lost while out shopping is apparently a common childhood experience, how is the determination made that the lost-in-the-mall memory is not substantially correct? What supports the claim that "Chris had remembered a traumatic episode that never occurred" (Garry & Loftus, 1994, p. 83). That is, is there any possibility that Chris's family had forgotten an actual event of this type?

If the experiment is assumed for heuristic reasons to demonstrate that an older family member can extensively rewrite a younger relative's memory in regard to a trauma at which the older relative was present, why have false memory syndrome proponents presented this research as applying to the dynamics of therapy (e.g., Loftus, 1993; Loftus & Ketcham, 1994) but not to the dynamics of families, particularly those in which parents or other relatives may be exerting pressure on an adult to retract reports of delayed recall? Is it possible that older family members can rewrite younger relatives' memories in regard to traumatic events at which they were present? Might this occur in the context of sexual abuse when the repeated suggestion is made by a perpetrator that "nothing happened" and that any subsequent awareness of the abuse constitutes a false memory?
http://www.kspope.com/memory/memory.php


Quotes: Elizabeth Loftus, Ph.D.
http://bit.ly/hxkUbT

A Brief History of the False Memory Research of Elizabeth Loftus
"The lost- in- a-shopping-mall study (Loftus and Pickrell, 1995) provided initial scientific support for the claim that child sexual abuse accusations are false memories planted by therapists. However, the mall study researchers faced a problem early on—the participants could tell the difference between the true and false memories." http://bit.ly/dH9uST


The Alleged Ethical Violations of Elizabeth Loftus in the Case of Jane Doe "In conclusion, I believe Loftus made several ethical breaches during her research and when publishing her study. The right to freedom of speech and academic debate does not allow for the kind of ethical breaches that were made. The violating of Jane Doe’s confidentiality without her written consent around such a sensitive issue appears to have been unnecessary and inappropriate."
http://bit.ly/6bbAW6