It is significant either way, that that is the only post Califlower ever has made on the SDMB.
It was such a horrifying experience that Califlower repressed the memory of ever having been here.
I see that RationalWiki was pointed to already, good summary and links there as usual.
Other skeptical sites also reported on that panic:
Let me apologize for reviving this zombie. It originally appeared at the time I was having two operations to repair (or attempt to repair) a detached retina and never saw it. I was originally going to start a thread asking what is the status of repressed memories. But the thread pretty much answered the question. But I am not sure it completely answered it because this Wiki entry: Jennifer Freyd - Wikipedia shows that Jennifer Freyd is a highly respeced psychologist at U. Oregon a major part of whose entire research career has been based on the reality of recovered memories. Can anyone explain that?
Full disclosure: I am a close friend of her parents and have been au courant on the whole story since 1991. I simply cannot believe her accusations (which came about during hypnosis) are real.
Let me try: “She’s wrong.” What do I win?
At this point, the evidence is very strong that “satanic ritual abuse” in general never happened at all, and that “recovered” memory via hypnosis never actually recovers memories that can’t otherwise be recalled, and has a high probability of creating false ones. The burden of evidence is on those who wish to claim otherwise at this point. Being wrong about something (even in your field) doesn’t mean you can’t be highly respected in that field.
True enough, but her reputation is mainly based on her claims on recovered memory. It makes me wonder about the status of psychology as a science. I would love to hear from a psychologist.
Quite easily.
If you look at the history of that article (easy View history link at the top) you’ll see relatively few people overall have edited it.
One of the most frequent editors (and the most recent right now) is someone calling him/herself Dingbatty. Clicking the contribs link next to that name on the history page shows the editing history of that editor across all of Wikipedia. On that page you can click the diff link next to each entry in the list to see the changes made in that edit. Literally all of the edits that person has made to Wikipedia over several years have been to promote Jennifer Freyd in various ways, either directly to her article or by adding links to papers she wrote which are hosted on her personal faculty page at the University of Oregon to other articles. We can speculate about who that editor is, and I think the obvious answer is probably correct in this case.
While others who edited that article aren’t quite so blatant, there are others whose editing history, once examined, show similar bias. Jack-A-Roe, for example, is a name I recognize as someone who is clearly out to promote the idea that recovered memories and Satanic Ritual Abuse are completely real.
Wikipedia is open to editing by everyone, but, unless it’s an article about some major topic or pop culture phenomena, most people do not bother. Individuals who have a strong bias can totally rewrite the articles that other people aren’t paying attention to and slant them whichever way they want.
Good explanation! Thanks.
The general consensus is that recovered memory is the bullshit it appears to be on first glance. It has torn her and many other families apart.
Additionally, Wikipedia has a Biographies of living persons policy, which is an expression of how gunshy they are about being sued for defamation. In specific:
It’s enforced. It might even be enforced to a fault, but that ultimately comes from an official dictate, not the editors themselves.
On the other hand, you’ll notice that a lot of users are banned from editing certain articles, such as SRA-related articles, to stop them from spreading a bias or simply vandalizing articles. This is part of what makes reading the talk pages so interesting.
Says you…watch this:
"Good grief, I’ve told you about that evidence at least half a dozen times, and each time you claim that you’ve never heard of it. "
hh: “Oh, yeah, I remember, now.”
Don’t you be telling me nothin’ about funny.
To make sure I have this right, there’s no evidence that repressed memories in general, even those not about Satanism or abuse, exist?
In the sense of “accurate memories which cannot be recalled under normal circumstances, but which hypnosis can recover,” yeah, basically. I’d call it “weak” evidence rather than “no evidence.” People do remember things they’ve forgotten, and sometimes relaxation helps with it, but that sort of mundane memory recovery is not the sort of claim that’s usually being made.
The real problem is that it’s astoundingly easy to create “memories” out of whole cloth, even when neither party is intending to deceive, and it’s often difficult to check the accuracy of it.
The actual losing of memories (often traumatic ones) is commonplace: many accident victims don’t remember their accident, memories of traumatic events are often fragmentary or missing altogether. How this mechanism works, and whether it’s fair to call it “repression,” is (I think) still an open question. And sometimes memories come back as physical or mental trauma heals.
The “woo” here is the active recovery of them; the idea that there’s a process you can use to get them back, and particularly that these processes are reliable and accurate. That there’s not much evidence for, and a lot of evidence against.
“I’m a waitress at Denny’s” vs. “I was abused by Satanists as a child !!!”/“My daughter was raped in a black mass !!!”. Though I believe the latter is somewhat more prevalent, what with all the hypnosis bullshit & manufactured memories. Fucking up your child’s mind for good is such a small price to pay to be on teevee once, for about 20 minutes, in an afternoon slot, on a Tuesday. Top that, neighbours ! That prize rosebush ain’t so hot now, is it ? WELL IS IT ?
I went to hear him in the late 1980s, a few years before he was debunked, and I knew he was a fraud when he talked about a compound he had “where we’re trying to keep ex-satanists alive until they can accept Christ”.
A book exposing him was written in the early 1990s; can’t remember the title but it was very interesting.
I read Patricia Crowley’s book Not My Child, about the supposed abuse at the Wee Care Nursey School by Margaret Kelly Michaels, written by the mother of one of the alledged victims. Michaels served five years in prison before being released when it was realized she was innocent.
Crowley wrote the book to make money and defend her position. Period.
Anyone further interested in the phenomenon should read Elizabeth Loftus’s The Myth of Repressed Memories. I was a therapist in So. Calif during this period of time, and it was…interesting, trying to sort it all out at the time. And I did have several clients who claimed to have survived satanic experiences.
Much as it pains me to have to say it, credulous psychotherapists fueled the hysteria.
Social psychology studies have shed some light into these sorts of episodes, but it still boggles me personally, I have to say.
One of the most bizarre stories to come out of the satanic ritual abuse scare concerns a woman who called herself Lauren Stratford. She wrote an “autobiography” detailing all the horrors she had experienced after being handed over to a pornography ring at the age of six, including sacrificing babies. This book appeared at the height of the satanic abuse hysteria and it was thoroughly debunked some years later.
But then an odd thing happened. Lauren Stratford, now calling herself Laura Grabowski, began to claim that rather than a childhood of sexual abuse at the hands of Satanists, she was in fact a survivor of the Holocaust. She made contact with another fantasist, Binjamin Wilkomirski, who had written a fake memoir about his time at Auschwitz as a child. They both insisted they remembered each other from the concentration camp. I imagine their encounters must have been something like a prolonged game of psychological chicken. Both knew they were lying, each one knew that the other was either lying or deluded, and they must have been waiting to see who would swerve first.
Some people seem to crave the status of victim, and from a psychological perspective it makes a certain kind of sense that such people would create for themselves the most vulnerable identities they could imagine: a child suffering at the hands of evil Satanists or sadistic Nazis.
“Selling Satan” was the title.
A Google alert for “ritual abuse” showed up in my email this morning with a link to this thread/forum, and I’m so glad to see this under-recognized problem being discussed here. This subject has been of great interest to me since around October 2012, when I discovered a pro-Satanic Ritual Abuse book that had just been published a few months prior. After reading more about the book, the author (a retired therapist), and the protagonist (a mentally ill, emotionally vulnerable woman who, in my opinion, was exploited by the author), I was shocked at how many people still believe in, and worse, actively promote the notions of repressed memories, “dissociated identities”, and Satanic Ritual Abuse.
As for your question, Hari Seldon: I can’t explain why so many come to be lauded as “experts” when they promote unsupported, and in some cases, thoroughly debunked theories, but I can tell you that Jennifer Freyd is not alone.
The expert witness testimony of Dr. Randy Noblitt, an esteemed faculty member at Alliant University in California (where he teaches a course on Ritual Abuse), helped get daycare owners Fran and Dan Keller wrongfully convicted and imprisoned on ludicrous SRA charges. Noblitt’s a staunch supporter of the Dissociative Identity Disorder (multiple personalities) diagnosis and still believes the Kellers are guilty, even as they were released and their conviction overturned a few months ago. Dr. Colin Ross, who runs his own treatment center in Texas and is also consulted as an expert witness in trials, also has a long history of supporting delusion. In the UK, Dr. Valerie Sinason is another “expert” known for seeing Satanists around every corner, and invariably, her patients turn out to have “repressed memories” of Satanic abuse. Neil Brick is a licensed, practicing Mental Health Counselor in Massachusetts who openly discusses, on his website, his “history” as an assassin for the Illuminati and his background as a victim of Satanic Ritual Abuse and government mind control.
Castlewood Treatment Center, a treatment facility for people with eating disorders, recently had four pending (individual) lawsuits. The plaintiffs’ claim: they were led to believe they had repressed memories of extreme abuse – sometimes Satanic abuse – and that they had Dissociative Identity Disorder (aka multiple personality disorder).
Douglas Mesner, an investigative journalist, has written extensively on this topic for the past several years. His articles can be found at process.org, dailykos.com and dysgenics.com, among other places.
This is an illuminating read about ritual abuse claimants written by a contributing author at Dysgenics.com.
And, for more information on the people mentioned above:
1] More info on Randy Noblitt
2] A compelling piece on Neil Brick
3] A recent (2011) court case where Colin Ross testified for the defense, suggesting that the defendant may be suffering from multiple personalities. (And, harrowing but well worth checking out, an interview with Roma Hart, one of Ross’s former patients. This article links to affidavits and court documents)
4] Article about a former patient of Valerie Sinason who died under questionable circumstances, and how DID therapy and the Satanic Ritual Abuse narrative contributed to her death
5] Article about the recent Castlewood Treatment Center lawsuits
6] Heartbreaking account from a family whose now-estranged daughter was treated at Castlewood
7] A very compelling look at the author of “Rabbit Hole”, the book mentioned in the opening post
I’ll second this book, and add that Loftus is an expert on human memory as a general subject, not just repressed, recovered memory. Loftus has a number of very readable books on memory.
I’d also like to add that post-traumatic stress disorder wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the persistence of traumatic memories. Heck, children have nightmares after seeing scary movies. If we really could deal with bad memories by repressing them, we wouldn’t see so much of the exact opposite problem. I’m not the victim of anything really horrible myself, but I have known a number of Holocaust survivors, and not one repressed any of their experiences. I know one person who was in hiding as a child, and her very early memories have normal early childhood fuzziness, but some very scary things that happened to her are in sharp focus, and always have been.