To read this series from the beginning, click here and scroll down.

Today, the concept of False Memory Syndrome pervades the public consciousness, thanks in large part to the numerous press articles and television specials generated by the public relations efforts of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation and its $750,000-per-year budget.  Many people now believe, for example, that hypnosis automatically results in the generation of fantasy; that casual suggestion either in a waking or trance state can become the basis of an experience with no external reality; that people accused of child abuse are all automatically victims, that the accusers are either predatory, delusional or brainwashed; and that delayed memory recall isn’t a real phenomenon.*

Of course, most academics and mental health care professionals have, and in many cases expressed, doubts about the FMS diagnosis, and at the very least have never bought into FMS dogma.  It is not a recognized diagnosis listed in DSM-IV, or peer reviewed literature.  It’s not an empirically established concept.  In fact, it was never actually defined by anyone, just described.  So, one can note that the profound impact the FMS movement had on the public, made only a small dent in the minds of experts: people who actually have to deal with patients suffering from the aftereffects of trauma.

It would seem that the FMS movement was far more concerned with shaping the public consciousness than in conducting, presenting, or influencing science.  At the same time, the FMSF relied upon the prestige of its Scientific Advisory Board, along with a number of valid but irrelevant studies mixed with a sprinkling of pseudoscience, in order to  position the concept of false memory as the mainstream of academia and the professional community, when in fact the opposite is true.

Not that it mattered.  After all, in a logocentric society such as ours we tend to put science on a pedestal. People profess to “believe in” it, but oftentimes they don’t understand what science actually entails.  Thus, for the FMS movement, the point wasn’t so much to educate the public on the science of distorted memory (which is a valid thing to do) so much as to overgeneralize the implications of that research, therefore giving the notion of false memory a scientific veneer; a rationale for the public to believe its major tenets.

For an issue supposedly based in science, the FMSF exhibited rather pronounced ideological biases.  In her 1991 paper, “How Could This Happen?  Coping with a False Accusation of Incest and Rape,” Dr. Pamela Freyd, characterizing herself as “conservative,”  blamed her daughter Jennifer’s recollection on feminism and “political correctness.”  In general this implies an ideological bias against what strikes her as progressive or liberal attitudes.  For anyone reading this, she clearly draws a parallel between liberalism as the perceived enemy, and false memory as the perceived enemy.

Drs. Bessel van der Kolk and Alexander McFarlane gave a sharper perspective of the anti-feminist bias exhibited by the notion of FMS in their 1996 book Traumatic Stress: The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on Mind, Body and Society:

The issue of delayed retrieval of memories for childhood abuse has become a topic of intense public debate.  Interestingly, the issue of delayed recall was not controversial when Myers....and Kardiner gave detailed descriptions of it in their books on combat neurosis.....or when van der Kolk noted it in Vietnam combat veterans....It appears that as long as men were found to suffer from delayed recall of atrocities committed either by a clearly identifiable enemy or themselves, this issue was not controversial.  However, when similar memory problems started to be documented in girls and women in the context of domestic abuse, the news was unbearable; when female victims started to seek justice against their alleged perpetrators, the issue moved from science into politics.”

One also has to note that those supporting the FMSF, the driving force behind the FMS hypothesis, had emotional and legal biases.  The bulk of its membership consisted of parents accused by their offspring of sexually abusing them.  That they decry the accusations as false, one might expect.  But denials, however vehement, have no bearing on their guilt or innocence.  Commonsense would tell us that some of the FMSF’s membership probably abused its children, and probably some of it didn’t.  Unfortunately, commonsense can’t tell us the ratios of one to the other.

Moreover, commonsense is often misleading.  The FMSF once took the position that each and every one of its members was falsely accused.  Given the membership levels the FMSF reported to the public (21,000 at its peak), one would have difficulty believing that they parsed the particulars of each and every one of those cases to the point where they definitively knew of the individual’s innocence.  Of course, the FMSF only claimed 2,385 members to the IRS when it came to filing their taxes.  That’s still an enormous number of cases to scrutinize.  Simply put, one would have to wonder whether or not the FMSF was really in the business of protecting (at the very least) a few pedophiles by any means necessary.

In response to that question, Dr. Pamela Freyd penned an essay for the first FMS Newsletter (dated 29 February 1992) titled “How Do We Know We Are Not Representing Pedophiles,” stating in part:

There are two ways that we will address this concern.  The first has to do with who we are.  If I had taken a camera to any of the three meetings held here in Philadelphia, I would have been hard put to know whom to photograph.  We are a good looking bunch of people:  graying hair, well-dressed, healthy, smiling.  The similarity of the stories is astounding, so script-like and formulaic that doubts dissolve after chats with a few families.  Just about every person who has attended is someone you would like find interesting and want to count as a friend….
   
The second way that we will address this concern involves lie detector tests….If all members of the FMS Foundation either have had or express a willingness to be polygraph, we will have a powerful statement that we are not in the business of representing pedophiles.

As for polygraph tests, the results under the best of situations are not reliable.  Many people register as deceptive when telling the truth, and vice versa.  Frequently repeating a story, whether knowingly inaccurate or not, can possibly fool a polygraph.  So can memory blackouts, psychotic episodes, or psychopathy.  Polygraphs don’t meet the Daubert standard for court-quality evidence.  Performed even in ideal circumstances, they can only give investigators a notion of where to proceed with an investigation. 

When people contract for private polygraph tests, the results can be wildly inaccurate for a number of reasons, the chief of which is the fact that the taker gets to design the polygraph.  The existence and the distribution of flag questions is therefore no longer a surprise to the subject--and that’s assuming the subject included any flag questions.  So the polygraphs don’t give very good evidence of anything, much less proof.**  

As for Dr. Pamela Freyd’s first point, the good-looking, affability defense also does not meet the Daubert standard.  It doesn't meet any scientific standard, either.  Yet, there's a shrewdness to this statement, especially if one's appeal is not to the courts or the hallowed walls of ivy, but to the masses.  After all, if the public generally pictures the pedophile as a sleezy middle-aged loner, prowling the playgrounds and baseball diamonds in his trench coat while barely able to mask the maniacal grin on his face, then Freyd’s description successfully played upon a prevailing stereotype as proof of her membership’s innocence. 

Of course, many experts didn’t buy it, and many have taken Dr. Freyd to task for the assertion.  In a 1993 interview published in Treating Abuse Today, the aforementioned Dr. David Calof discussed the statement with Freyd, asking for her to clarify what she meant.  This prompted a response that indicated a retreat from the position that all FMSF members were inherently innocent:

TAT:  I'm sure you regret it. I want to remind you of what you wrote in that article ["How Do We Know We are Not Representing Pedophiles?:"]. This is an important question. 

Freyd: It's a tremendous question, and I would like to think that we've carried it further since then.

TAT: I would like to know how you've done that, because what you said in your article was disturbing. You talked about the issue in terms of its importance to your image and the ability of the Foundation to get things done. There was less indication that it would be a terrible fact if true. 

Freyd: It would be horrible if that's what we're doing. We have stated -- I don't know how many times -- that there is no way we can know the truth or the falsity of events to which we're not a party. I don't know how therapists know that either.***

Except for in the movies, or on TV shows, one cannot infer that a protestation of innocence, however vociferous and seemingly sincere, is proof of innocence.  Nor can one infer that it is proof of guilt.  But there is one thing we can infer by the tactics of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation.  As Dr. Calof put it:

I cannot know whether members or supporters of the FMSF whom I have not examined or evaluated have abused their children.  However, after 3 years of unrelenting siege, I can say with certainty that many of them have abused me and innocent others connected to me and that the FMS movement tolerates and supports this type of ad hominem attack, encumbrance, and vindictiveness at the expense of reasoned dialogue.

Dr. Jennifer Freyd, the first target of the FMSF, could only grimly muse over the irony that her memories are called into question, and not those of her alcoholic father.  Her uncle, William Freyd, found it considerably more than ironic.  After watching the PBS Frontline episode titled “Divided Memories,” he fired off a letter to the show’s producers reading:

Gentlemen:

Peter Freyd is my brother. Pamela Freyd is both my stepsister and my sister-in-law. Jennifer and Gwendolyn are my nieces There is no doubt in my mind that there was severe abuse in the home of Peter and Pam, while they were raising their daughters. Peter said (on your show, "Divided Memories") that his humor was ribald. Those of us who had to endure it, remember it as abusive at best and viciously sadistic at worst.

The False Memory Syndrome Foundation is a fraud designed to deny a reality that Peter and Pam have spent most of their lives trying to escape. There is no such thing as a False Memory Syndrome. It is not, by any normal standard, a Foundation. Neither Pam nor Peter have any significant mental health expertise.

That the False Memory Syndrome Foundation has been able to excite so much media attention has been a great surprise to those of us who would like to admire and respect the objectivity and motives of people in the media Neither Peter's mother nor his daughters, nor I have wanted anything to do with Peter and Pam for periods of time ranging up to more than two decades.. We do not understand why you would ‘buy’ such an obviously flawed story. But buy it you did, based on the severely biased presentation you made of the memory issue that Peter and Pam created to deny their own difficult reality.

For the most part, you presented very credible parents and frequently quite incredible bizarre and exotic, alleged victims and therapists. Balance and objectivity would call for the presentation of more credible alleged victims and more bizarre parents. While you did present some highly regarded therapists as commentators (Dr. Herman, for example), most of the therapists you presented as providers of therapy were clearly not in the main stream. While this selection of examples may make for much more interesting T.V., it most certainly does not make for objectivity and fairness. 

I would advance the idea that "Divided Memories" hurt victims, helped abusers, and confused the public. I wonder why you thought these results would be in the public interest that Public Broadcasting is funded to support.”

Of course, it’s supposed to be a free country.  If you want to make your case in the courts, on the picket line, on the streets, or through public relations, you are mostly within your right to do so. And you can call what you do anything you like.  But if you try to call it science, forgive me for not taking you seriously.
________________
*A popular literature example I found, in Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Tunes into TV, reads:

Repressed memories are not completely accepted by the mainstream psychiatric community.  While repressed memories often involved childhood abuse, those cases are so rare–and each one is so unique–that it makes it hard to define the condition.

As worded, this is true, but grossly misleading.  Mainstream psychologists discount the antiquated notion of repression, i.e. the active and willful suppression of unpleasant memories, as the primary mechanism behind dissociative amnesia.  Yet numerous mainstream studies validate both the existence and relative accuracy of delayed explicit memory.  And as to rarity, the writer doesn’t really explain how that’s quantified or defined (after all, it’s only the smurphing Bathroom Reader, for crying out loud).  Nevertheless, from this example one can see how much the ideology of FMS has ingrained itself within popular culture and understanding.

**I have noted that although FMS proponents tout the frequency of passed polygraphs among its members on its website, it does not actually provide any transcriptions for such proceedings, even for cases that have completed adjudication.  One could speculate that if independent, not-for-hire polygraph experts reviewed these transcripts, they would find methodological or procedural errors.

***I’d like to point out a couple of things.  First of all, this interview took place in 1993, before the harassment of Dr. Calof began in earnest.  Calof documented numerous attempts to engage FMS proponents in civil discussion.  According to him, they sometimes talked to him, and sometimes did not.  Again, one could speculate that this particular interview played a role in Dr. Freyd's support of Charles and June Noah's tactics.

Second: “How Do We Know We Are Not Representing Pedophiles” appeared in what appeared to be the inaugural issue of the FMS Newsletter, published 29 February 1992.  It has been cited by numerous researchers as appearing in that issue on that date.  In its web archive, however, the FMSF gives its inaugural issue the date of 15 March 1992, some two weeks later. This issue does not contain the article in question.

I can’t say that the embarrassment of this particular piece prompted the FMSF to try to wipe it, and the entire issue, out of existence.  Nevertheless, the thought crossed my mind.


That concludes the series you thought would never end.  Thank you for staying for it all.