The Sudden Emergence of New Categories of Evidence

For as long as psychoanalysis has existed, most psychoanalysts paid lip service to the idea that the psychoanalytic treatment will result in the recall of hitherto repressed childhood events, which were causally responsible for their ailments at adults. In psychoanalytic writings we find formulations like the following ones. Ideally the patient should recall the causal events. But "sometimes" [!!] psychoanalysts must be satisfied with less than that, viz. that the psychoanalyst "recalls in place of the patient" (that is, that he constructs interpretations of what the patient had allegedly experienced), and that the patient will eventually come to believe in these interpretations. Such beliefs may be as effective as complete recall. And when the patient has terminated the psychoanalytic treatment, he will be in the possession of his true biography.

Psychoanalysts have never bothered about contradictions, so we can also find the opposite assertion, viz. that mere belief in interpretations will have no therapeutic effect. But no matter what psychoanalysts said or wrote, they were satisfied if the patient gave verbal assent to the interpretations. They never requested that the patient should recall any causal event.

Freud's three seduction papers were published in 1896. In the third one he claimed to have cured 18 patients of all their symptoms, by enabling them to truly recall those causal events that they had experienced at the age of 2-4.

We know from many sources that the patients did not recall any events, and that none of them were cured. In this chapter, however, we shall foremost examine certain other features. Freud soon retracted his seduction theory, and until 1960 his followers agreed that it was merely a youthful aberration. There is a single exception. Around 1930 two and only two psychoanalysts (Sandor Ferenczi and Elizabeth Severn) applied Freud's three "seduction papers". But there is no indication that Ferenczi's and Severn's patients recalled any events. They merely came to believe in the interpretations.

It is widely believed that Alice Miller and Jeffrey Masson initiated the new admiration of Freud's seduction papers, including the idea that his early patients had really been sexually seduced. But this is by no means true. I do not know what was the earliest paper, but the oldest paper I have found so far is "The Parents as Sphinx" by Leonard Shengold (1963) – which is almost twenty years older. However, Miller and Masson are responsible for the fact that the "new" idea became a world-wide movement.

When did the sexual abuse craze reach Sweden The psychiatrist Elisabeth Bosaeus, not a pseudonym) testified in the case of the girl with the phenomenal memory in 1988 (cf. chapter 40). She claimed to have 30 years of clinical experience. But prior to 1981 she had hardly seen any cases of sexual abuse prior to 1981. However, in that year she had learned from the United States that sexual abuse is common.

Bosaeus's temporal information is in agreement with my general impression. And to confirm the exact year is not sufficiently important for justifying the amount of labour that would be needed for this task.

But in the 1980s the temporal and causal relations between (a) the abuse craze, (b) the new admiration for the seduction papers, and (c) recovered memory therapy, was not clear. Miller's and Masson's books led to a world-wide debate, both among scholars and among laypeople. Everyone involved in the debate agreed that Freud's early patients had told him about sexual assaults at their own initiative (although the three seduction papers made it perfectly clear that Freud was the one who had invented the seduction explanation, and that the patients denied having had any such experiences). There was only disagreement in one single respect: whether Freud was gullible when he in the beginning believed his patients' accounts, or whether he was a coward when he later rejected their accounts as fantasies.

When it became a widespread view that sexual abuse is a frequent occurrence, a large number of people were tried and convicted, even in Sweden. And "sexual abuse symptoms" were repeatedly invoked as evidence.

Whatever the reason, prior to the 1990s I have not encountered any legal case in Sweden, in which therapeutic recollections had emerged. Nor have I encountered any legal cases in which Freud's seduction papers were invoked.

In 1973 the American psychoanalyst Anny Katan published an article entitled the title Children who were raped. We shall return to her in chapter 40. What is important here, though, is that Katan applied Freud's seduction papers and explained the symptoms in her adult patients as the effect of sexual experiences during preschool age. Nevertheless, Katan was also satisfied if her patients believed in her interpretations. She did not request them to recall the postulated experiences.

In other words, the fact that Freud's seduction theory had come into favour again, did neither immediately nor by itself lead to recovered memory therapy. I cannot supply any exact temporal information as to when the practice of indoctrinating memories instead of indoctrinating interpretations, started.

However, when the False Memory Syndrome Foundation was established in 1992, and when Stephanie Salter & Carol Ness & Elizabeth Godley wrote their many long articles in the San Francisco Examiner, April 4-9, 1993, 12,000 families had experienced one member who had accused some of the others of assaults, which had been pseudo-recalled in therapy.

In Sweden, during the 1980s, I learned about a few cases in which hitherto repressed events of sexual abuse had been recalled during psychotherapy. But none of these reached the courts. As late as in 1990 Larseric Bergqvist & Ulla Rydå published a booklet about a group of recalling patients. Even at that time none of the patients had their recollections examined by a court.

In the booklet there is a chapter called "Confrontation". But this chapter is not about patients who met the alleged perpetrator and accused him of what he had supposedly done. Instead it is about "transference reactions" toward the therapists, and in particular toward Ulla Rydå, because she is a woman. The patients were allegedly indignant toward their mothers, because these had not protected them against assaults perpetrated by their fathers.

Prior to the 1990s I have not found any recovered memory case in Sweden that had resulted in a trial. But whatever may have been the true year in different countries, there must be few judges in any North-European or Anglo-Saxon country, who were not aware that the phenomenon of recalling events of sexual abuse (or other criminal events) after many years or decades of "repression", was a very recent phenomenon.

Some attention should be paid to the question whether real occurrences could have emerged so suddenly.

Many judges must also have noticed that the proponents of the "theory" of sexual abuse did not invoke new methods for disclosing the existence of repressed memories. Neither did they invoke new therapeutic techniques for lifting repression.

Elvira repeatedly states that this or that recollection has emerged recently. And she often claims that she does not yet recall certain things, but she promises that she will recall them at a later date. She will go home and train in the task of recalling them.

It does not matter how unaware judges are of psychological and psychiatric matters, they cannot have been blind to the fact that these new "theories" run counter to all previous ideas about the function of human memory. And it should be the duty of judges to perform some kind of test to reveal whether the theories have empirical support.

Would it be a satisfactory solution to appoint an expert Definitely not. Scharnberg (1996) has documented many cases of perjury committed by expert witnesses.

In January 20 and 22 1994 Swedish Television showed a documentary about the Little Rascals trial in North Carolina (TV: Innocence Lost: The Verdict). On the second of these days the documentary was immediately followed by a long debate as to whether things were equally bad in Sweden. (TV: Kan vi lita på våra domstolar) Both the documentary and the debate aroused an unusual amount of attention, and the debate was continued in the newspapers.

I feel myself unable to believe that the five judges of the court of appeal, who handled the case of Elvira one month later, had not seen these television programmes, or even heard about them, or had not directly or indirectly learned from them about the existence of the false memory syndrome.

Nor can all of them have been ignorant of the fact that the daughter of the defendant in the Umeå case (which we shall resume in chapter 47) suffered from pseudo-memories of sexual abuse, which had been indoctrinated by a team of psychiatrists.

I can therefore find no excuse for the fact that these judges did not take therapeutic indoctrination into account, not even as a theoretical possibility.

One expert had clearly grasped that this was a RMT/FMS case, viz. Astrid Holgerson (not a pseudonym), the head of The Witness Psychological Laboratory at Stockholm University. But she was forbidden to state this important fact in court. Such a prohibition was a most unusual decision in Sweden. It may have been motivated by the correct insight of the chairman of the court (Bengt G. Nilsson, not a pseudonym) that it would be difficult to convict Oswald, unless the most important part of the evidence was concealed.

One of the five judges (Ulf Karlholm, not a pseudonym) voted in favour of convicting Oswald of having hired out Elvira as a prostitute in sex clubs, and for convicting Helena of having sexually abused Elvira. He also wrote in his addendum that Astrid Holgerson was incompetent, because she had not seen a difference in trustworthiness between Elvira's sexual allegations and her murder allegations.

As stated above I have been unable to find any Swedish case prior to 1994 in which posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was attributed to the injured party in a sexual abuse case. The profession of Swedish judges can hardly have been ignorant of this fact. And it is an absurd idea that nine out of ten testifying clinicians, two of whom had given Elvira psychotherapy for years, had not discovered that she suffered from PTSD, if she really did so. In addition, during the four previous sets of proceedings concerning Oswald and Helena in 1992 and 1993, PTSD was not even mentioned.

It is also an absurd idea that a teenager suffering from PTSD would go to school, associate with long-term friends at her own age, sometimes visit the homes of her friends; and yet nobody would discover such a serious syndrome. Note also that the general practitioner who had treated both sisters for years, had for some time suspected that Ingrid but not Elvira had been sexually abused.

Moreover, the judges cannot have been unaware of the fact that PTSD is not listed as a possible effect of sexual abuse in any of the books on such effects that had been published in Sweden by The National Board of Health and Welfare, the Police, and Save the Children.

Another sudden novelty is that of multiple personality disorder (MPD), a syndrome that was not invoked in the case of Elvira. Between 1920 and 1971 the medical literature contains a total of 12 cases. During the 1980s more than 20,000 patients have been given this diagnosis (Salter & Ness & Godley, 1993).

A further entity that suddenly developed in the 1970s was "abuse symptoms". One category consists of unspecific symptoms such as headache, stomach-ache, etc.). This category of symptoms may accompany a large number of highly discrepant diseases. They may also arise without any detectable cause. The second category is based on the principle that the cause is similar to the effect. Hence, constipation is caused by anal abuse. And aversion towards soured milk is caused by oral sex (Dahlström-Lannes, 1990:64).

Common to both categories was that prior to 1970 hardly anyone had got the idea that such ailments were sexual abuse symptoms.

A large number of innocent individuals in many countries have been tried and convicted on the basis of PTSD, MPD, abuse symptoms, or indoctrinated pseudo-recollections.

Arthur Janov was primarily re-known because of his "the primal scream" theory, which was postulated to cure neuroses. Allen Esterson examined the retroactive change of Janov's view. The 1970 edition of Janov's book The Primal Scream comprises 451 pages. In this book there is one single reference to sexual abuse in childhood. This event was recalled by a psychotic woman, but not until she had had 20 primal scream sessions.

		"What we do find in the book however, over and over again, are patients recovering 'scenes´ in which their needs of love and care were not met by their parents. In other words, they recover scenes reflecting precisely what Janov (and society) at that time saw as the trauma which was the root of emotional problems in adulthood." (Esterson, 1995:11) [Q-38:1]

Likewise in the 1972 edition of Janov's book, which still had the same title, there is only one single reference, and the latter is merely hypothetical.

But in 1991 The New Primal Scream was published. Note the year! And on p. 302 Janov writes: "I have treated a great number of incest victims."

Wakefield & Underwager (1994) have also documented instances of psychiatrists whose clinical experience had changed retroactively.

The Franklin case has been effectively analysed by many objective investigators; inter alia, Crews (1995, 2006), MacLean (1993), Ofshe & Watters (1994), Pendergrast (1996), Wakefield & Underwager (1994).

I cannot abstain from saying a few words about Unchained Memories by Terr (1994). This book differs markedly from the others. Her testimony was a commissioned work for the prosecutor, and it agreed neither with the indisputable facts of the case, nor with the theories Terr had adhered to, until a prosecutor was in need of a device for explaining away a lot of conspicuous facts. A clear survey is provided by Crews:

		[Lenore Terr's] "studies of children who had lived through the notorious Chowchilla bus kidnapping and the Challenger explosion had shown unambiguously that such experiences do not get repressed. Why, then, should the jury believe that Eileen Lipsker had repressed her harrowing ordeal Just in time for the trial but too late for prior publication, Terr came up with a face-saving theory. True, she granted, one-time trauma victims always remember the event; but victims of multiple traumas like Eileen Lipsker, whose father had been a bullying drunk and a sexual abuser of two of his other daughters, turn repression into a daily routine. By the time of the murder, according to Terr, Eileen had become an old hand at stuffing bad memories into the mental freezer. Terr's brainstorm was remarkable in several respects. For one thing, it overlooked the fact, later acknowledged in Unchained Memories, that Eileen had always remembered her father's violence around the house (Terr, p. 11). Second, it contradicted universal human experience of protracted duress. Has anyone past the age of, say, six who has survived racial persecution, a famine, a bombing campaign, or a brutal enemy occupation ever forgotten that it occurred [] And third, Terr was refusing to grant any distinction in memorability between George Franklin's usual brutality and the witnessed rape and murder of Eileen's best girl friend." (Crews, 1995:173f.) [Q-38:2]

Other books of great relevance are Therapy's Delusions by Watters & Ofshe (1999), and Remembering Trauma by Richard J. McNally (2003).


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Uppdaterad: 2009-11-19

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