Mistakes Were Made - Carol Tavris [60]
Today, some of the psychotherapists who joined the recovered-memory movement continue to do what they have been doing for years, helping clients uncover “repressed” memories. (Most have become cautious, however, fearing lawsuits.) Others have quietly dropped their focus on repressed memories of incest as the leading explanation of their clients’ problems; it has gone out of fashion, just as penis envy, frigidity, and masturbatory insanity did decades ago. They drop one fad when it loses steam and sign on for the next, rarely pausing to question where all the repressed incest cases went. They might hear vaguely that there is controversy, but it’s easier to stay with what they have always done, and maybe add a newer technique to go along with it.
But, undoubtedly, the practitioners who would have the greatest dissonance to resolve are the clinical psychologists and psychiatrists who spearheaded the recovered-memory movement to begin with. Many have impressive credentials. The movement gave them great fame and success. They were star lecturers at professional conferences. They were and still are called on to testify in court about whether a child has been abused or whether a plaintiff’s recovered memory is reliable, and, as we saw, they usually made their judgments with a high degree of confidence. As the scientific evidence that they were wrong began to accumulate, how likely was it that they would have embraced it readily, being grateful for the studies of memory and children’s testimony that would improve their practice? To do so would have been to realize that they had harmed the very women and children they were trying to help. It was much easier to preserve their commitments by rejecting the scientific research as being irrelevant to clinical practice. And as soon as they took that self-justifying step, they could not go back without enormous psychological difficulty.
Today, standing at the bottom of the pyramid, miles away professionally from their scientific colleagues, having devoted two decades to promoting a form of therapy that Richard McNally calls “the worst catastrophe to befall the mental-health field since the lobotomy era,” 35 most recovered-memory clinicians remain as committed as ever to their beliefs. How have they reduced their dissonance?
One popular method is by minimizing the extent of the problem and the damage it caused. Clinical psychologist John Briere, one of the earliest supporters of recovered-memory therapy, finally admitted at a conference that the numbers of memories recovered in the 1980s may have been caused, at least in part, by “over-enthusiastic” therapists who had inappropriately tried to “liposuction memories out of their [clients’] brains.” Mistakes were made, by them. But only a few of them, he hastened to add. Recovered false memories are rare, he said; repressed true memories are far more common.36
Others reduce dissonance by blaming the victim. Colin Ross, a psychiatrist who rose to fame and fortune by claiming that repressed memories of abuse cause multiple personality disorder, eventually agreed that “suggestible individuals can have memories elaborated within their minds because of poor therapeutic technique.” But because “normal human memory is highly error-prone,” he concluded that “false memories are biologically normal and, therefore, not necessarily the therapist’s fault.” Therapists don’t create false memories in their clients, because therapists are merely “consultants.”37 If a client comes up with