False Memory Syndrome Foundation Research Articles

The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature: Writing the Unspeakable by Joseph Valente and Margot Gayle Backus

Reviewed by: The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature: Writing the Unspeakable by Joseph Valente and Margot Gayle Backus Ellen Scheible The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature: Writing the Unspeakable, by Joseph Valente and Margot Gayle Backus (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020, 300 p., paperback, $28) Joseph Valente and Margot Gayle Backus’s The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature: Writing the Unspeakable performs at least two essential, timely, and intimately dependent acts for literary criticism by testifying to literature’s ability to confront sexual trauma and offering such conclusions as the results of communal and collaborative work. Through intricate and rigorous close readings of literature, ranging from James Joyce to Anne Enright, and nuanced applications of psychoanalytic theory, Valente and Backus outline the way that Irish literature engages modern social and cultural discourse, as well as silence and abstraction, to identify sexual trauma in Ireland since the late nineteenth century. Just as they consistently suggest that intracommunity recognition of child sex scandal in Ireland is essential to recovering the social repression of trauma, they also offer academics a reminder of how we might save the Humanities from dissolution and despair: write, think, and witness together. Reinforcing their urgent call to face the consequences of years of sex scandal in Ireland and their clear commitment to collaborative writing, Valente and Backus join forces with another important voice critical of the Irish State’s approach to years of national violence, Fintan O’Toole. In giving O’Toole the opening pages for a thought-provoking foreword, Valente and Backus connect their work to current political writing outside the literary canon and underscore the social urgency of their project. After summarizing a brief history of scandal in Ireland following Irish independence, O’Toole points out a paradox underlying the state’s attention to sexual violence from the 1990s on: “the exposure of child abuse was at once profoundly political and largely depoliticized” (xii). O’Toole’s foreword is a cross-disciplinary call to arms, asking that critics and thinkers address the heart of scandal that lies in the isolated nationalism that developed in Ireland from “the tight intertwining of the Catholic Church with both the institutions of government after Irish independence in 1922 and the [End Page 143] moral and ideological underpinnings of independence itself” (xi). This is perhaps one reason why Valente and Backus’s text resonates in many ways outside of the disciplines of literature and literary criticism: the application of their work is internationally significant as we face another climax of global capitalism with a pandemic wreaking havoc on the most destitute and vulnerable members of our communities and immigration reform driving the platforms of most conservative politicians. Our ability to emerge from the trauma of loss and disenfranchisement caused by COVID-19, and experienced by refugees decades prior during mass migrations, will depend on our willingness to accept that its effects are wide ranging and prolific, not marginal or misrepresented. For Valente and Backus, this is how we must approach trauma stemming from institutional abuse and the rhetoric of citizenship, through recognition that it is a substantial component of modern life for many and not an anomalous state of existence for only a handful of survivors. In the United States in the 1980s, diagnoses of misremembered childhood trauma, or False Memory Syndrome, dangerously affected the way we understood the cultural and sociological representations of trauma that we used in our daily lives. One of the most dramatic and harmful effects of those discussions emerged in the way we understood trauma to be rare or inconsistent and, therefore, uniquely positioned to “other” those who underwent traumatic experiences, often marginalizing them as outsiders to normative culture. When discussing the impetus of the book, Backus occasionally tells the story of Jennifer Freyd, who began remembering sexual abuse by her father as an adult, and Freyd’s parents, who denied her claims by forming an organization called the False Memory Syndrome Foundation. Through the nonprofit’s work, they popularized a term—false memory—that became one of the most effective tools to instill doubt not only about allegations of child sex abuse but in all forms of sexual violence...

Flipping the Script: Lesbian and Ex-Lesbian Child Sexual Abuse Survivors' Narratives, 1978–2003

This article traces connections between child sexual abuse survivors' narratives written by lesbian feminists in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and those written by Christian ex-lesbians in the 1990s and early 2000s. Many scholars have recognized the extent to which an anti-feminist countermovement led by the False Memory Syndrome Foundation stymied the gains of child sexual abuse survivor activists. But we have not yet examined the ways other opponents of feminism and lesbian feminism, in particular, weaponized child sexual abuse survivors' narratives in order to delegitimate lesbian identity. This latter response to the child sexual abuse survivors' movement was perhaps even more dangerous and effective in resisting feminist demands than the false memory movement's rejection. Embracing aspects of feminists' analyses of childhood sexual abuse crucially enabled Christian ex-gay and ex-lesbian leaders to portray their approach to sexual conversion as based in love, concern, and support for homosexuals and to frame lesbians as wounded, sympathetic, and in need of help. By couching their messages of conversion in therapeutic language that echoed earlier feminist arguments, ex-gay leaders increased the appeal and accessibility of their texts. As struggles against sexual violence have recently achieved a tremendous degree of public visibility, this history serves as a timely and sobering reminder that testimonies of sexual violence can serve conservative as well as liberating political purposes.

Sexual Violence, Narrative Authority, and Spectral Reading

Sexual Violence, Narrative Authority, and Spectral Reading Judith Goldman (bio) Total Recall Samantha Giles Krupskaya www.krupskayabooks.com/giles.html 185 Pages; Print, $17.00 Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents ([1929] rewriting Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals [1887]) obsessively speculates on the genesis of bad conscience. Offering up theory after theory behind the introjection of the super-ego, Freud comes to formulate the circuit of guilt as self-propelling, with conscience lacerating us even for sins sinned in thought only: indeed, the more acetic we are, the more we are unconsciously driven to punish ourselves and to seek punishment. He rues civilization for the pervasive discontent it causes through this moral masochism. In view of contemporary American culture, Freud's concern harbors a certain dramatic irony, as the malaise of interminable neurotic guilt seems to have given way to a psychotic incapacity for guilt. Of the sadistic pleasures pursued with impunity, perhaps the most enabling is the meta-sadism of gaslighting, whereby a sadistic pleasure is taken in the disavowal of sadistic pleasure. I read Samantha Giles's magnificent book Total Recall when it appeared shortly following the truncated investigations and hearings around, and speed confirmation of, Brett Kavanaugh, one of so very many sadistic episodes densely darkening the interminable time of the Trump administration. Total Recall is a tour de force, hybrid genre work dealing with incest. It comprises three, thematically interrelated prose pieces interleaved with two groups of poems, all of which deal with questions of traumatized memory in the aftermath of sexual assault. This review focuses on the two longer narratives bookending the work. The opening piece, entitled "Total Recall," is written in an elegant braided structure, the three discursive strands told by the same narrator: the family drama around the founding of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation; a plot summary of Total Recall, the 1990 science fiction thriller whose crux involves the indistinction between real and "implanted" memories, whose recounting the [End Page 11] narrator continually qualifies by commenting on the potential fallibility of her memory and understanding of the film; and a first-person narrative that describes an unsettling reunion, after a year-and-a-half hiatus, between a daughter (accompanied by her male partner), and her parents, due to a fight whose cause is never specified, but is implicitly connected to her father's physical, psychological, and sexual abuse of her in childhood. As this narrator explains, her life has been filled with her father "remembering things for her"—a problem of telling especially endemic to the manipulative, distorting representation of incest events by perpetrators to children even as they are unfolding. All of Giles's narrators' speech in this book is riddled with self-reflexive phrases that underscore the uncertainty of the accounts being given: "I think I remember," "maybe what happened," etc. In this particular piece, rather than undermining her epistemic authority, these qualifying tags shore up the narrator's account, as she offers a precise, considered sense of exactly how fallible her recollections may be: where, exactly, she may have inserted a merely probable, verisimilar detail, rather than an actual detail; where her "facts" may be wrong or her memory vague. As everywhere in the book, contesting evidentiary rubrics are perspicuously foregrounded: here, the juxtaposed threads work through implicature to offer the reader the sense that memories of childhood abuse do not yield, and do not need to yield, to a forensic approach. The False Memory Syndrome Foundation, as the narrator herself notes, doesn't directly refute the prevalence of sexual violence in families. What it focuses on, as has egregiously ramified in our culture, is that memory lacks provability, a verifiable, unshifting ontology, which thereby also leaves its referent in suspension. Which is to say, it shifts the stakes of the matter away from the real problem: that the patriarchal family formation is a machinery for the abuse of power. The father does not say the abuse never happened: he says she has "false memories." We catch patriarchal abuse in the act, as the executive power to declare its own narrative authority and to control the dispensation of epistemic positions. In the very gesture of violently disallowing...

Definition, assessment and rate of psychotherapy side effects.

Psychotherapy is often seen as a first line treatment, because patients and therapists consider this mode of treatment harmless in comparison, for instance, to drug treatment. This assumption is supported by the fact that there are only limited scientific reports on psychotherapy side effects (1,2). There is, however, some evidence which suggests that psychotherapy can have frequent or serious negative consequences, like all effective treatments (3–5). There are several reasons why awareness of psychotherapy side effects is limited and research on this issue is insufficient. First, the psychotherapist is the “producer” of treatment and therefore responsible, if not liable, for all negative effects, which results in a perceptional bias towards positive rather than negative effects (6). Second, psychotherapy does not only focus on symptoms but also on social behavior, so that the spectrum of possible negative effects is much broader than in pharmacotherapy (7). Third, there is even no consensus on what to call negative: for instance, when evaluating a manuscript on psychotherapy side effects, a reviewer wrote: “a divorce can be both positive and negative, and crying in therapy can reflect a painful experience but can also be a positive and therapeutic event”. Fourth, there is a lack of differentiation between side effects and therapy failure or deterioration of illness (8). Fifth, there are no generally accepted instruments for the assessment of psychotherapy side effects and no rules on how to plan scientific studies or monitor side effects in randomized controlled clinical trials (2).

The Mind Has Mountains: Reflections on Society and Psychiatryby Paul R. McHugh, M.D.; Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006, 272 pages, $25

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Book ReviewFull AccessThe Mind Has Mountains: Reflections on Society and PsychiatryMary E. Barber M.D.Mary E. Barber M.D.Search for more papers by this authorPublished Online:1 Sep 2006https://doi.org/10.1176/ps.2006.57.9.1349AboutSectionsPDF/EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InEmail Paul McHugh, professor of psychiatry emeritus and former director of the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, is a sharp thinker who is not afraid to tackle controversial topics. In this collection of essays, which appeared in The American Scholar, Commentary , and other journals, Dr. McHugh weighs in on many of the issues that have captured the attention of psychiatry and the public over the past 20 years. Through essays written over time, we read about the progression of the "memory wars" of the 1990s. We hear Dr. McHugh's thoughts on physicians' roles in death and dying, from Jack Kevorkian's moment in the public arena to Terry Schiavo's. We also read about McHugh's opinions on sex reassignment surgery and transgender identities, as well as on deniers of psychiatric illness, such as Thomas Szasz, and the death of psychoanalysis. Dr. McHugh, of course, has been no mere spectator in how these issues have played out in professional and popular discourse. He spoke loudly against advocates of dissociative identity diagnoses and recovered memories of childhood abuse in the 1990s, and he serves on the board of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation. He took a stand against sex reassignment surgeries at his own institution, and Johns Hopkins University indeed stopped doing such procedures in 1979. He has been on President George W. Bush's Council on Bioethics and was chosen by the U.S. conference of catholic bishops to be on their National Review Board for the elimination of sexual abuse of children by clergy. He is clearly someone who believes in psychiatry's engagement in wider psychosocial issues, an idea that is often associated with psychoanalysts and community psychiatrists, although Dr. McHugh is neither and is fairly scornful of psychoanalysts in this book.Dr. McHugh is not shy or measured in his opinions, and his bold tone often makes for engaging reading. It is likely that readers' views will resonate with some of those expressed and disagree strongly with others. However, readers will find the views entertaining and cogently argued and want to read on even while having differences with some of McHugh's ideas. His arguments are weakened at times when his convictions cause him to tip almost into an evangelistic stance or resort to stereotyping.Dr. McHugh argues for a new model of psychiatry with four categories of disorders, which are described roughly as disease, constitution, behavior, and life story. It is interesting to see the evolution of his thinking on this proposed system of classification happen over time through several essays. The four categories are refined throughout the 1990s as more has become known about how the mind and brain and how genes and environment are interdependent and interconnected.Overall, this is a well-written and though-provoking volume of essays that gives mental health professionals and interested lay readers one view into topics that have been prominent at the interface between psychiatry and society for the past two decades.Dr. Barber is clinical director and medical director of the Ulster County Mental Health Department in Kingston, New York. FiguresReferencesCited byDetailsCited ByNone Volume 57Issue 9 September, 2006Pages 1349-1349PSYCHIATRIC SERVICES September 2006 Volume 57 Number 9 Metrics PDF download History Published online 1 September 2006 Published in print 1 September 2006

Crisis or Creation? A Systematic Examination of False Memory Syndrome

SUMMARY In 1992, the False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF), an advocacy organization for people claiming to be falsely accused of sexual abuse, announced the discovery of a new syndrome involving iatrogenically created false memories of childhood sexual abuse. This article critically examines the assumptions underlying “False Memory Syndrome” to determine whether there is sufficient empirical evidence to support it as a valid diagnostic construct. Epidemiological evidence is also examined to determine whether there is data to support its advocates' claim of a public health crisis or epidemic. A review of the relevant literature demonstrates that the existence of such a syndrome lacks general acceptance in the mental health field, and that the construct is based on a series of faulty assumptions, many of which have been scientifically disproven. There is a similar lack of empirical validation for claims of a “false memory” epidemic. It is concluded that in the absence of any substantive scientific support, “False Memory Syndrome” is best characterized as a pseudoscientific syndrome that was developed to defend against claims of child abuse.

Masculinity and Sexuality: Selected Topics in the Psychology of Men

Masculinity and Sexuality: Selected Topics in the Psychology of Men

Recovered Memories of Child Sexual Abuse: Psychological, Social, and Legal Perspectives on a Contemporary Mental Health Controversy

Recovered Memories of Child Sexual Abuse: Psychological, Social, and Legal Perspectives on a Contemporary Mental Health Controversy

Creating Hysteria: Women and the Myth of Multiple Personality Disorder

JOAN ACOCELLA: Creating Hysteria: Women and the Myth of Multiple Personality Disorder. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, CA, 1999, 214 pp., $25.00, ISBN 0-78794794-6. Joan Acocella's expose of the multiple-personality-disorder diagnosis is almost too convincing. There is no room for half tones or uncertainties: Creating Hysteria is an argument rather than a discussion, and Acocella argues with wit and elegance, leaving the battlefield strewn with casualties. Her main targets are the therapists whose public embrace of the MPD diagnosis during the last twenty years created an almost cultlike following, extensive media attention as well as a plethora of publications. Acocella claims that these practitioners knowingly and cynically used the diagnosis to win riches and fame, in the process sacrificing their patients. She is especially scathing about Satanic Ritual Abuse (SRA), the spread of which does defy understanding. (One must be a quick study of acronyms to follow this book.) Yet, unethical therapists are not the sole casualties of Acocella's battle. This is war, and she sweeps away all that clutters her path. As most of the women diagnosed with MPD also reported childhood sexual abuse, Acocella questions the reality of these reports as well as the good faith and suffering of the survivors, thus returning full circle to the Freudian assumption that childhood sexual abuse is a product of female fantasy. The child-protection movement, twelve-step self-help groups, feminism, insight therapy, new age theory, and social constructionism are just a few of the other corpses that litter this field. Acocella also has a disconcerting habit of using one set of beliefs, events or institutions as evidence, then discarding the same set when the next stage of her argument requires it. The media, for example, are transformed from hypocritical traders of truth for ratings in its embrace of MPD to champions of justice when they renounce the diagnosis, instead championing FMSF (the False Memory Syndrome Foundation) (pp. 97-98). Managed care, villainous when it supports the MSD diagnosis, becomes heroic when it balks at financing long-term treatment of MPD or indeed any long-time therapy (pp. 113-116). The DSM, as a diagnostic tool, is alternatively dismissed and used as scientific proof for Acocella's claims. Acocella's argument also depends heavily on clusters of associations. If we agree that most reported cases of SRA defy credibility, we must also doubt the credibility of well-documented cases of disassociative identity disorder (DID) (the new name for multiple personality disorder) (p. 57). Autobiographical accounts of cannibalism and baby sacrifice, which abound in the SRA literature, such as Jenny Walter Harris's Suffer the Child, a ghost-written account of a woman with over four hundred alters who was accosted by legions of demons (p. …

Recovered Memory Therapy: Responses to All

I am pleased at the extent of response to my article. I believe that the issue of recovery work is an important one that deserves careful discussion in our profession, and I thank my colleagues who have replied to this article for their part in further developing this discussion. James Lein Lein said that my article should be considered in the context of the positions of an organization not discussed in my article, the False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF). I confess that I do not understand the relevance of Lein's discussion of the FMSF to my discussion. My article was not intended to be reflective of the positions of the FMSF. For the record, I am not now, nor have I ever been, a member of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation. positions of the FMSF are not relevant to the validity or invalidity of my arguments. Lein implied that research is exclusively used in trials to discredit women who have recovered of sexual abuse. However, research frequently is used in the courts on behalf of women and children who have brought actions against their therapists for professional malpractice (Alkon, 1997; Associated Press, 1996; Gregory, 1997; Gustafson, 1996a, 1996b; Jones, 1997; Yapko, 1994). Lein implied a straw man argument by asking, Is a false because it is not totally complete, down to the tedious details, or because it contains inaccuracies? This was not what I said. I said that recovery techniques may lead to recovery of accurate [but] they can also result in the recovery of distorted or wholly constructed memories (Stocks, 1998, p. 431) and that there are no procedures that have been demonstrated to reliably distinguish confabulations from accurate memories (p. 431). Lein was correct that a is not necessarily false because of inaccuracies in details. However, it is just as correct that such a is not necessarily true either. Lein missed the point when he characterized my article as advocating the assiduous avoidance of abuse memories. I did not take such a position. well-supported position of my article was that recovery techniques recover confabulations as well as accurate and that there is no way to distinguish between them. warning in the article was that recovery techniques are procedures that entail documented risks without balancing benefits. His quotation of LeDoux (1992) was misleading. It did not refer, as Lein states, to memories, but rather memories. entire sentence reads: findings suggest that are indelible and normally maintained by subcortical circuits involving the (p. 280). These are not of events, but rather of responses to events. Earlier in the article, LeDoux noted that the amygdala generates responses based on features of the event rather than the total event. The responses and established would therefore not necessarily correspond to the ongoing conscious perceptions of the individual (p. 277). It is not necessarily the case that an emotional memory would lead to a correct narrative memory. As soon as we talk about an memory, it is transcribed into the declarative system and is subject to social influence. This opens the door to distortion and confabulation. Lein ended his reply with a quotation from Karon and Widener (1997) that purported to provide evidence that recovery techniques can lead to remission of symptoms. article dealt with the treatment of war neuroses during World War II. However, an evaluation of Karon and Widener's sources did not support the contention that recovery work helped war neurosis patients. Many, if not most, of the cases did not involve repressed memories of the traumatic incident. Most of the sources were descriptive of war neuroses rather than evaluative of treatment. …

Recovered Memories: Context and Controversy

With the article Recovered Memory Therapy: A Dubious Practice Technique by J. T. Stocks (September 1998, pp. 423-436), Social Work has acknowledged, and obliquely, the controversy about trauma victims' recovered memories. I use the term belatedly because many professional publications, some with special editions, have, for several years now, focused directly on this extended and heated debate; for example, the Harvard Mental Health Letter (1993, 1994, 1995); almost all of the Winter 1995 Journal of Psychohistory; Professional Psychology: Research and Practice (October 1996); American Psychologist (September 1996, September, 1997). I use the term obliquely because Stocks never outright mentioned the controversy and thus failed to place the Social Work article in context. Most obviously, Stocks neglected to mention the main protagonists in the recovered memory or false memory debate: Peter and Pamela Freyd and their daughter, Jennifer Freyd. In 1990 Jennifer, a psychologist, recalled childhood sexual by her father, a mathematics professor. In response, her mother, an educator, founded in 1992, the False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF), now with more than 18,000 members, people allegedly falsely accused of sexually abusing children (Brown, Scheftin, & Hammond, 1998). The foundation helps link alleged abusers with attorneys, who specialize in portraying therapists as false memory implanters, and with prominent scientist-experts, such as Elizabeth Loftus, who testify on the ease of implanting false memories of childhood trauma. Thus, a woman charging her father with molesting her as a child may face a well-orchestrated defense team, expert at discrediting her accusations and memories. This is the context never mentioned in Stocks's (1998) article, which began: Throughout most of this century, public response to sexual of children had been to disregard, minimize, or deny allegations of child sexual abuse (p. 423). In fact, the tactics of FMSF are a new and apparently scientific way of disregarding, minimizing, or denying allegations of child abuse. Not surprisingly, those accused of abuse, innocent or guilty, are likely to deny. Also, according to Rubin (1996), abusers, and not just victims, may have false memories; abusers certainly are strongly motivated to have false memories. They also are motivated to implant false memories in their victims. And they have considerable opportunity to influence or brainwash a child whom they may be with 24 hours a day by withholding or dispensing primary reinforcers, such as food or security. Compare this with a therapist working with an adult, an hour a week, withholding or dispensing secondary reinforcers, such as praise. Who has more power to implant so-called false memories? Who is more strongly motivated? Yes, some therapists may persuade some clients of that never happened. But some perpetrators may persuade victims - as well as courts or researchers - that the never happened. As Rubin has cautioned, perpetrator denial should not be denied: A balanced discussion must include consideration of explanations for forgetting episodes of perpetrating childhood sexual abuse, because accused perpetrators are certainly motivated not to admit abusive acts. . . . The longstanding denial of childhood sexual harms society by permitting future victims. Denial harms perpetrators by ignoring the need and opportunity for treatment. . . . As psychologists, we must not perpetrate the denial of any aspect of sexual victimization. (p. 450) A very effective way of denying or muting charges of sexual is to focus on so-called false memories. A very misleading term, false memory confuses two separate measures of memory: completeness and accuracy. As Brown et al. (1998) noted, a given memory may be incomplete yet highly accurate, as is often the case in young children's memory reports, or a given memory may be complete yet highly inaccurate. …

Prevention and management of false memory syndrome

As with most issues in medicine, the prevention and management of a problem is best understood when the origins are known. The term ‘false memory syndrome’ (FMS) came into use in March 1992 with the foundation of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF), a non-profit-making organisation established in the USA by a group of families in which one or more of the parents was accused. The parents in these families were reacting to a phenomenon which developed in a characteristic form in the preceding decade and had become common enough by 1991 for a number of them to realise that they were not alone, and to join in setting up the Foundation with a professional and scientific advisory board.

Notes From a Practice Under Siege: Harassment, Defamation, and intimidation in the Name of Science

I have practiced psychotherapy, family therapy, and hypnotherapy for over 25 years without a single board complaint or lawsuit by a client. For over 3 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 multimodal 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 place 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.

Consider This, Skeptics of Recovered Memory

Some self-proclaimed skeptics of recovered memory claim that traumatic childhood events simply cannot be forgotten at the time only to be remembered later in life. This claim has been made repeatedly by the Advisory Board members of a prominent advocacy group for parents accused of sexual abuse, the so-called False Memory Syndrome Foundation. The research project described in this article identifies and documents the growing number of cases that have been ignored or distorted by such skeptics. To date, this project has documented 35 cases in which recovered memories of traumatic childhood events were corroborated by clear and convincing evidence. This article concludes with some observations about the politics of the false memory movement, particularly the tendency to conceal or omit evidence of corroboration. Several instances of this vanishing facts syndrome are documented and analyzed.

The politics of survivorship: incest, women's literature, and feminist theory

The topic of incest began to emerge in the early 1990s, producing a spate of television specials and providing the material for a surging industry of talk shows as well as an anti-feminist campaign against incest survivors and their therapists. The validity, reality, and readability of recovered memories of incest has become a highly contested and difficult subject. This heightened interest has benefited incest survivors, according to Rosaria Champagne, by allowing them to speak up and make political their experiences. Victims, formerly entwined in their own abuse by remaining silent, have learned to voice their protest and to challenge the societal order that allows incest to occur. In The Politics of Survivorship Champagne explores a range of cultural representations of incest, from the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley to mother-daughter incest in contemporary true crime novels, to Oprah Winfrey's television special Scared Silent, in order to examine expressions of survivorship. In the process, Champagne attempts to level the disparity and the hierarchy of value among theory, literature, popular culture and social movements. Champagne makes a powerful argument that community and academic feminists should embrace survivorship as a potential site of feminist political intervention into patriarchy and heterosexism. She concludes with a critical look at the way in which the False Memory Syndrome Foundation has conducted an anti-feminist campaign against incest survivors and their therapists.

Women, “False” Memory, and Personal Identity

We contest each other's memory claims all the time. I am concerned with how the contesting of memory claims and narratives may be an integral part of many abusive situations. I use the writings of Otto Weininger and the False Memory Syndrome Foundation to explore a particular strategy of discrediting women as rememberers, making them more vulnerable to sexual harm. This strategy relies on the presentation of women as unable to maintain a stable enough sense of self or identity to be trustworthy testifiers to their own harm.

Victims of Memory: Incest Accusations and Shattered Lives

Incest is one of the most horrendous forms of sexual abuse and lends itself to the creation of a body of both serious and sensationalistic literature. Accusations of imagined transgressions and their legal consequences have the potential of creating victims. At this time Philadelphia's False Memory Syndrome Foundation states that at least 800 civil and criminal cases have been filed based on repressed memories. Although long debated, judges in four cases have ruled that testimony based on so-called repressed memories cannot be admitted because scientists say there is no evidence that such recollections are reliable ( National Law Journal , Monday, June 12, 1995, p A7). In the foreword to his book Victims of Memory , Paul Pendergrast, not just as a parent but also as a professional investigative journalist and scholar, has probed the question of perfectly normal people like me could come to believe in such horrible delusions, and how

A Meta/Multi-Discursive Reading of `False Memory Syndrome'

To understand all the complexities and ramifications of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation's (FMSF) construct of False Memory Syndrome (FMS), we place FMS in the context of larger contemporary western cultural trends, including: anti-feminism; the deconstruction of mental illness; anti-psychiatry; and the postmodern deconstruction of truth and subjectivity. In these contexts, FMSF emerges as an accomplice of the mental health establishment and a leading force in the heteropatriarchal backlash against women.

Retractors of false memories: The evolution of pseudo-memories

The formation of pseudomemories and the subsequent methods used by subjects to eventually distinguish between true and false memories are the primary foci of this study. A survey instrument was distributed to 100 “retractors” after an initial telephone interview with False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF) staff. Forty respondents (40% of the subjects) who returned the questionnaire comprise our study population. The survey inquired about personal and family information, events surrounding the subject's accusations of sexual abuse, childhood history, and the subject's reflections on his or her experience. The process of the development of pseudomemories is highlighted. Subjects also described their feelings and experiences in open-ended questions, including their subjective experience as memories evolved, factors influencing thoughts, feelings and doubts, the process of questioning memories, the process of restoring relationships with family members, and uncertainties about views of memories currently held. We focus on the evolution of pseudomemories, especially the influence of the therapist; we explore the nature of therapy, one that makes an ill patient much worse and that eventually becomes so onerous that patients who still have some remaining reality-testing flee from therapy.