Mistakes Were Made - Carol Tavris [126]
38 Mary Karr, “His So-Called Life,” The New York Times op-ed, January 15, 2006.
CHAPTER 4
Good Intentions, Bad Science: The Closed Loop of Clinical Judgment
1 The story of Grace was told to us by psychologist Joseph de Rivera, who interviewed her and others in his research on the psychology of recanters. See, for example, Joseph de Rivera (1997), “The Construction of False Memory Syndrome: The Experience of Retractors,” Psychological Inquiry, 8, pp. 271–292; and de Rivera (2000), “Understanding Persons Who Repudiate Memories Recovered in Therapy,” Professional Psychology: Research and Practice, 31, pp. 378–386.
2 The most comprehensive history of the recovered-memory epidemic remains Mark Pendergrast’s 1996 Victims of Memory (second ed.). Hinesburg, VT: Upper Access Press; revised and expanded for a HarperCollins British edition, 1996. See also Richard J. Ofshe and Ethan Watters (1994), Making Monsters: False Memory, Psychotherapy, and Sexual Hysteria, New York: Scribners; Elizabeth Loftus and Katherine Ketcham (1994), The Myth of Repressed Memory, New York: St. Martin’s Press; and Frederick Crews (ed.) (1998), Unauthorized Freud: Doubters Confront a Legend, New York: Viking. For an excellent sociology of hysterical epidemics and moral panics, see Philip Jenkins (1992), Intimate Enemies: Moral Panics in Contemporary Great Britain. Hawthorne, NY: Aldine de Gruyter.
The specific example of the woman who claimed that her father molested her from the ages of five to twenty-three is known as Laura B., who sued her father, Joel Hungerford, in the state of New Hampshire in 1995. She lost.
3 Two of the earliest and still best books on the day-care scandals and claims of widespread cults that were promoting ritual Satanic sexual abuse are Debbie Nathan and Michael Snedeker (1995), Satan’s Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt, New York: Basic Books; and Stephen J. Ceci and Maggie Bruck (1995), Jeopardy in the Courtroom: A Scientific Analysis of Children’s Testimony, Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Dorothy Rabinowitz, a Wall Street Journal editorial writer, was the first to publicly question the conviction of Kelly Michaels and get her case reopened; see also Rabinowitz (2003), No Crueler Tyrannies: Accusation, False Witness, and Other Terrors of Our Times. New York: Wall Street Press Books/ Free Press.
A related epidemic was the rise of alleged cases of multiple personality disorder, now called “dissociative identity disorder.” Before 1980, there were only a handful of such cases; by the mid-1990s, by one estimate, there were some 40,000. When the MPD clinics were closed by successful lawsuits against psychiatrists who had been inducing the disorder in vulnerable patients, the disorder began to fade away, though not completely. See Joan Acocella (1999), Creating Hysteria: Women and Multiple Personality Disorder. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. On hypnosis and other means of creating false memories of abduction, multiple personality disorder, and child abuse, see Nicholas P. Spanos (1996), Multiple Identities and False Memories: A Sociocognitive Perspective. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
4 For example, in February, 2005, a Boston jury convicted a 74-year-old former priest, Paul Shanley, of sexually molesting twenty-seven-year-old Paul Busa when Busa was six. This claim followed upon the Church scandals that had revealed hundreds of documented cases of pedophile priests, so emotions understandably ran high against the priests and the Church’s policy of covering up the accusations. Yet the sole evidence in Shanley’s case was Busa’s memories, which, Busa said, he recovered in vivid flashbacks after reading a Boston Globe article on Shanley. There was no corroborating evidence presented at the trial, and indeed much that disputed Busa’s claims. See Jonathan Rauch, “Is