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False Memories Quotes

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False Memories Quotes

“Despite this documentation for both traumatic amnesia and essentially accurate delayed recall, memory science is often presented as if it supports the view that traumatic amnesia is very unlikely or perhaps impossible and that a great many, perhaps a majority, maybe even all, recovered memories of abuse are false…Yet no research supports such an implication and a great deal of research supports the premise that forgetting sexual abuse is fairly common. and that recovered memories are sometimes essentially true.”

“The summary of Lambert and Lillenfelt’s “Bloodstains” in Scientific American Mind in the October 12, 2007 The Informed Reader passes along many of these authors’ strong opinions on complex and controversial topics without informing the readership that the authors’ perspective is extreme, polarized, and vulnerable to challenge at many crucial points. It is clear that false memories can be implanted in about 25% of subjects, when those memories concern issues in the normal and expectable range of experience. However, about 75% of subjects resist such efforts, and efforts to implant memories of abuse or offensive medical procedures are almost universally rejected. Therefore a wholesale attack against therapies that explore patients’ memories is unwarranted. “Recovered Memory Therapy” is not a school of treatment. It is a slur used to mischaracterize approaches offensive to the authors’ perspectives, designed to evoke an emotional bias against those to whom the slur is applied.”

“To what extent are such laboratory results generalizable to real traumatic experiences? Pezdek, Finger, and Hodge (1997) demonstrated the importance of event plausibility. Researchers were able to implant false memories of plausible events, such as being lost in a shopping mall, but were unsuccessful at causing participants to form false memories of implausible events, such as receiving an enema or participating in a religious ceremony from a tradition other than their own (Pezdek, Finger, & Hodge, 1997; Pezdek & Hodge, 1999). Besides failing to address event plausibility, laboratory experiments may also fail to capture emotions such as fear, shame, and betrayal that are often linked to interpersonal trauma." KNOWING AND NOT KNOWING ABOUT TRAUMA: IMPLICATIONS FOR THERAPY”

“Whatever people say about ‘false memories’ (which is mostly false, anyway) and whatever we feel about possibly making it all up, we can’t fake emotional illiteracy and screwed-up attachment patterns! That’s the real evidence of what happened to us. Someone who has had a car crash might have no memory of what happened, but they’ve got the evidence in terms of a mangled car and broken legs. I think it’s the same for us – we’ve got mangled emotions and broken personalities.”

“In musing on all that occurred in the course of the several years of harassment the error I decided I made, and others frequently make, is to assume that we are all academics trying to sort out intellectual issues. The False Memory Syndrome Foundation is a political organization composed primarily of individuals who have been accused of child sexual abuse and those who support and defend them, sometimes for considerable sums. Such people are not going to be swayed by the research. They start with a fixed point of view-the need to deflect threat. That threat comes in the form of public exposure, loss of income, monetary penalties, or even in some cases incarceration. I heard a colleague say recently, in referring to the 30 or so studies that document the existence of recovered memory, “You get to the point where you wonder when is it going to be enough.” It is never going to be enough if the point is not searching for the truth but protecting a particular point of view. Confessions of a Whistle-Blower: Lessons Anna C. Salter. Ethics & Behavior, Volume 8, Issue 2 June 1998”

“FMSF Advisory Board Members Dr Martin Orne and Dr Louis Jolyon West are CIA and military mind control contractors with TOP SECRET CIA clearance. Both received MKULTRA contracts to study dissociative disorders, implantation of false memories, and techniques for creation of Manchurian Candidates. The dissociative disorders, false memories, and the therapist-created multiple personality are the focus of the FMSF campaign.”

“Denial of perpetration is simply not evidence that none has occurred, because even when there is physical evidence of abuse, sexual abusers of children may continue to deny that they did anything....The tactics of the false memory movement have shown remarkable parallels to those of sexual abusers who attempt to silence their victims, and I wonder why this is.”

“Loftus was asked to be an expert witness because the idea of memories as formed through a manipulable process of rehearsal is important to new views of memory and her own research. In the course of her testimony, the prosecutor skeptically asked: "You really don't know anything about five-year old children who have been sexually abused do you?" At that moment a "memory flew out at me, out of the blackness of the past, hitting me full force." She answers the prosecutor, "I do know something about this subject because I was abused when I was six years old" (149). With the force of a blow, a forgotten and apparently unrehearsed memory of being abused by a baby-sitter suddenly emerges after many years, its truth uneasily opposed to the falsehood of children's "rehearsed" memories or "contaminated" memories that she produces in her laboratory to show memories are but "mist" (4). Nonetheless, in her second popular book, The Myth of Repressed Memory, she argues against the existence of "repressed" memories...”