Remembering Things That Never Happened? : The therapeutic community must police itself better

A jury in Napa has the unenviable task of doing what leaders of the psychotherapy professions have been unwilling or unable to: determine whether certain therapists have been planting false memories of childhood sexual abuse in patients. The jury is hearing a civil suit filed by Gary A. Ramona. The first of its kind, the suit charges that two therapists persuaded the winery executive’s grown daughter that he raped and otherwise abused her for 13 years during childhood. As a result, he says, he lost his job, marriage and home and he is demanding $8 million from the therapists, one a psychiatrist and the other a marriage, family and child counselor.

Memory experts say horrible childhood experiences can indeed be buried and recovered later in therapy. However, evidence grows that some therapists driven by ideologues of the feminist fringe, others by the quest for money, find signs of incestuous sexual abuse in almost all patients. Mostly the patients are female, but male patients are involved too.

SATANIC DOINGS: The False Memory Syndrome Foundation in Philadelphia claims 12,000 families have been affected by erroneous memory recall. In a San Francisco Examiner series last year, Stephanie Salter documented many questionable cases, such as one in which a college student sued her parents after an Orange County psychologist helped her “remember” that her parents had subjected her to sodomy, rape, torture and cannibalism in a satanic cult. All of this echoes the McMartin Pre-school case in Manhattan Beach, in which therapists elicited from children tales of molestation, satanic rituals and other horrors, none of which could be corroborated by physical evidence. The defendants were acquitted after years of trials in which Los Angeles County spent $15 million in taxpayer money.

Certainly psychiatry and psychology for too long ignored the devastating effects of childhood sexual abuse on its victims. This deplorable history makes it difficult to ignore anyone making a claim of abuse, no matter how dated. The memory therapists have found support from some leading academic psychiatrists, notably Judith Lewis Herman of the Harvard Medical School, who calls the Ramona case part of the “social backlash” against women’s advancement and argues that such suits are yet another example of what sexually exploitative men do to their daughters.

Recovered memory has found fertile ground in California, with its 75,000 licensed therapists (about 20,000 of them marriage and family counselors), not to mention all manner of unlicensed therapists practicing unconventional methods like screaming and Rolfing. Those seeking lost memories, sometimes using unproven memory-enhancing techniques like hypnosis, have been encouraged by recent changes in law in California and other states extending the statute of limitations to up to six years from the time of recall rather than actual abuse.

JOB FOR SACRAMENTO: The vast majority of therapists are capable and ethical. By its nature psychotherapy is more difficult to standardize and monitor than, say, gall bladder surgery. Boards that oversee the counseling professions are notoriously lax, seldom acting except in cases of extreme misconduct, such as a therapist having sex with a patient.

The therapeutic community must police itself better. The professions should require the same kind of informed consent on risks and alternative treatments that patients normally give for surgery. Meanwhile, state lawmakers must make it easier for true victims of abuse to seek redress and harder for false ones. The rules of evidence in trials must be tightened: Recovered memory can be real, but should it be admitted as trial evidence without corroboration? Lives should not be ruined on the basis of the kind of spectral evidence used to burn witches in Salem.