Kindle Notes & Highlights
Much of the FMS narrative was built upon the work of Elizabeth Loftus, and her famous “Lost in the Mall” study (Loftus & Pickrell, 1995). Yet very few have taken the time to actually read the original paper, realise how tiny the study was (24 subjects) or review its backstory. As Lynn Crook and Ruth Blizard demonstrate in their chapters in this book, that seminal paper, which became a cornerstone of the FMS narrative, is itself highly questionable.
Indeed, tellingly, in looking at the introduction of the 1998 book, there is only one sentence we would need to change – it is where the societal contamination affected one of us (Sinason, 1998) unknowingly, as if it came from a scientific consensus. “Individuals with severe dissociative disorders are particularly hypnotisable, suggestible and fantasy-prone, and they can enter auto-hypnotic trance states by themselves”. Thanks to the seminal work of Simone Reinders (Reinders et al., 2012), we now know that individuals with Dissociative Identity Disorders are not more fantasy-prone than healthy
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Now there is a vast amount of evidence showing that people abused in childhood are able to “forget” the experience and subsequently recall it in later life. The line that the false memory groups have taken, that such things do not happen, is simply untrue.
Memory distortions happen, but naming the wrong person as an abuser is rare. But over the last 25 years such a narrative has received a vast amount of uncritical attention and belief in both the professional literature and popular press. This obsession with denying people’s accounts of their abuse has received an enormously disproportionate amount of attention compared to the millions of people who struggle daily with dealing with the consequences of abuse in their adult life.
In 2018 the British Psychological Society (BPS) was sent a letter from a number of eminent individuals and organisations questioning the wisdom of awarding honours to psychologists who had endorsed scientifically inaccurate statements in promoting a false memory narrative.
In his chapter Michael Salter examines the meaning of abuse, and the importance of being able to tell one’s story.
Irony?
Writing as both psychologists and survivors themselves, they explore how we can learn by listening to survivors’ accounts, and propose a trauma-informed code of ethics for those working with victims of child sexual abuse.
Whether expressed by apparently well-functioning adults, children, those with learning disabilities, complex PTSD, chronic dissociative states or other mental health problems, our hope is that personal histories will be listened to with the courtesy and respect they need and deserve.
IRONY!!! With the Mathew Robinson's talk at mclean
Richard Ofshe was ruled inadmissible as an expert witness in a previous case where he had appeared for the defendant who claimed he committed mail frauds as a result of being “brainwashed” by the Church of Scientology. The court ruling states that Dr Ofshe was not “a mental health professional, his testimony was not relevant to the issues, his theories regarding thought reform are not generally accepted within the scientific community …” (Burgess, 1994; Olio & Cornell, 1994; USA vs. Fishman, 1990).
