Marshalling the Media - False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF)
By Katy Butler
Psychotherapy Networker - March/April 1995
In
less than three years, the False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF) has
catalyzed a national debate about therapeutic accountability, denial,
and the nature of memory. But it began with a painful dispute within a
single family that of Pamela and Peter Freyd of Philadelphia, and their
daughter Jennifer, of Eugene, Oregon over a shared and equivocal past.
Their account of their once-private difficulties is
contained in two documents. The first, by the mother, Philadelphia
educator Pamela Freyd, was published anonymously in October 1991, in a
small-circulation Minnesota journal called Issues in Child Abuse Accusations. I t was entitled, "How Could This Happen? Coping With A False Accusation of Incest and Rape."
The second was delivered as a speech by her daughter,
cognitive psychologist Jennifer Freyd, at a mental health conference in
Ann Arbor. Michigan, in the summer of 1993, more than a year after her
mother and her father founded the False Memory Syndrome Foundation. In
that speech, later republished in a small newsletter for incest
survivors, Jennifer Freyd said, "I remember incest in my father's
house."
By all accounts, the trouble among the Freyds began or
surfaced a week before Christmas in 1990, when Jennifer Freyd went to
her second therapy session with a Ph.D level licensed clinical
psychologist who was part of a medical group in Eugene, Oregon.
Freyd was 33, married, with two children. She was also a
tenured research professor at the University of Oregon, a former fellow
of the Guggenheim and National Science Foundations and an expert on
memory. A colleague has described her as a "tough cookie."
But she didn't seem so tough as she sat in the therapy
office speaking of her agitation at her parents' impending Christmas
visit and a lifetime of uneasiness with her father. During the session,
her therapist asked her if she had a history of sexual abuse.
Freyd said no. But later that evening, according to a
carefully researched account by Stephen Fried in the January 1994 issue
of Philadelphia Magazine, she found herself trembling, overwhelmed by intense and terrible flashbacks of male genitals.
Her agitation continued until two evenings later, when
her parents Pamela and Peter, a brilliant and unconventional
mathematician who had entered a treatment center for alcoholism in the
early 1980s arrived for Christmas. Over chicken dinner that night,
Jennifer Freyd later said, her father talked at length, in front of her
young children, about how lesbians use turkey basters to inseminate
themselves a conversation that Pamela Freyd saw as nothing more than a
good-humored and open family discussion.
That night, Jennifer Freyd found herself so inexplicably
afraid for the safety of her children that she asked her husband to
sleep outside the children's bedroom door.
The next morning, she and her family fled the house, and
her husband later phoned the elder Freyds to ask them to take a cab to
the airport and fly home. Jennifer, he told them, had remembered being
seriously abused by her father.
"I have no memory of that," said Peter Freyd. according to Philadelphia Magazine. "Either I'm psychotic or she's under someone's control."
Not long afterward, Jennifer at her distressed parents'
urging but against her therapist's express advice sent her father, via
e-mail, an account of vivid recollections of abuse ranging from a
molestation in the bathtub at age 3 or 4 to a rape at age 16. She
suggested that her parents read The Courage To Heal.
She also began, for the first time in her life, to
question what she saw as lifelong family patterns of sexualized
conversation and invasiveness. She said she had told about 20 friends
about her memories of abuse, including her children's teachers and many
of the people the elder Freyds had met on previous visits to Eugene.
To Pamela, who believed her husband's denials almost
immediately, the changes in her formerly affectionate and compliant
daughter amounted to a shocking and frightening "personality change."
She and her husband consulted her former psychiatrist, Harold Lief, who
suggested Peter Freyd take a lie detector test and came to believe the
eider Freyds. Pamela also went to the library, read the literature of
the incest recovery movement, and became convinced that her daughter had
manufactured false incest beliefs through exposure to suggestive
self-help books and a trigger-happy therapist.
For several months, all of the Freyds communicated
frantically by e-mail. Peter Freyd took the lie detector test and passed
it, but that had little effect on his daughter.
Things went from bad to worse. The elder Freyds
fruitlessly offered to fly Jennifer's therapist to Philadelphia to show
her tapes of the lie detector test and other evidence that they said
demonstrated Peter's innocence. Meanwhile, Jennifer told her paternal
uncle and her sister, both of whom believed and supported her. Jennifer
has been quoted as saying that her sister, referring to their shared
childhood, responded to her disclosures by saying, "So that's why you
had all those locks on your door."
In the summer of 1991, after repeated e-mail exchanges
and after negotiations between Jennifer and her mother to arrange a
family therapy session failed, Jennifer announced via e-mail that she
was cutting off contact for a few months.
That fall, against the express advice of Lief, an
anguished Pamela Freyd anonymously published her side of the family
story as "Jane Doe." She said she could continue loving her daughter by
regarding her as "temporarily deranged" She blamed her daughter's
therapist for what Jennifer reported as memories. And in her search for
psychological stresses that might have generated what she thought were
delusions, .she questioned Jennifer Freyd's academic productivity and
inaccurately said that her daughter had left an earlier university job
after being turned down for tenure. (In fact, Jennifer Freyd had left
one university after being refused a decision on early tenure, and had
gone to the University of Oregon because it offered her tenure at 29.)
In the article, Pamela Freyd also revealed intimate details that her
grown daughter had confided to her about her first marriage, her present
marital life, her experiences with breast feeding, her teenage drag
experimentation and her college-age anorexia.
Nothing in the article revealed Jennifer Freyd's
identity, but in the course of the next year, as Pamela solicited
support for her fledgling False Memory Syndrome Foundation, she sent her
article to mental health professionals all over the country and spoke
to the press, sometimes identifying herself as "Jane Doe."
Four of Jennifer Freyd's departmental colleagues at the
University of Oregon received copies of the article while she was being
considered for promotion to full professor two from Pamela Freyd
directly, one anonymously, and one from a research psychologist who had
become a member of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation board.
Jennifer Freyd, who is now a MI professor at the University of Oregon, has barely spoken to her parents since.
In March 1992, not long after the "Jane Doe" article was
published the elder Freyds incorporated the False Memory Syndrome
Foundation and asked psychologists, psychiatrists and academics,
including experts in memory ironically, their daughter's field to join
its scientific advisory board. They also asked Jennifer Freyd, who", not
surprisingly, declined Peter Freyd, referring in a general way to the
Foundation's parent-members, later wrote to Jennifer, "I still insist on
thinking of. . the Foundation as being primarily a way of communicating
with our daughters.''
The Freyds placed classified ads looking for other
accused parents and listed an 800 number that rang in the Minnesota
offices of psychologists Hollida Wakefield and Ralph Underwager,
publishers of Issues in Child Abuse Accusations and
frequent expert witnesses for the defense in child sexual abuse cases.
By February 1992, after two supportive columns appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer, the
Freyds had been contacted by 180 parents who reported they had been
falsely accused of abuse. Pamela continued to contact the press, and a
stream off avorable coverage began. More parents called after The New York Times published an article headlined "Childhood Trauma: Memory or Invention?" In April 1993, the San Francisco Examiner published a six-day, front-page series called "Buried Memories, Broken Families"; and Time later published "lies of the Mind."
Jennifer Freyd did not speak publicly about her family
for two years after the e-mail confrontation with her parents. Then, in
August 1993, visibly pregnant with her third child, she spoke in Ann
Arbor before an audience of mental-health professionals. .She refrained
from elaborating on what she called her "recovered memories" of events
that she acknowledged she could not prove. But she described a long
history of what she characterized as invasive and sexualized
interactions with her father that she had never forgotten. She said that
since she bad told her parents of her recovered memories of abuse, they
had invaded her privacy, contacted her elderly mother-in-law and
embarrassed her to academic colleagues and family friends.
"I am being punished," she said, "at a national and
professional level... for my private and personal memories." The debate
was only partly about memory, she said. It was also about "a family in
pain"
But at the same time, she revealed intimate details about
her parents' private life. She said her parents continued to minimize
her father's history of :heavy drinking, and that he had been a
"late-stage alcoholic" by the time he was treated for alcoholism in the
1980s and quit entirely. She said he referred to himself as a "kept boy"
when describing a year of sexual abuse, at the age of nine, by a
nationally known male artist
"At times I am flabbergasted that my memory is considered
false' and my alcoholic father's memory is considered rational and
sane," she said. "Am I not believed because I am a woman? If Peter Freyd
were a man who lived in my neighborhood during my childhood instead of
my father, would he and his wife be so believable? If not, what is it
about his status as my father that makes him more credible?" She denied
her memories had arisen, as newspaper stories and her mother sometimes
suggested, through hypnosis. "Terrible therapeutic things did not happen
to me," she said. "And yet my story is told as though they did. .. For
my parents' sake I hope they can find a way to look inward, to do their
own healing, instead of waging a kind of war at the national level"
Jennifer Freyd's speech fell into a black hole, receiving
little attention except among professionals in trauma therapy, in the
newsletters of incest recovery groups and in Philadelphia Magazine, to
which she granted an interview in January 1994. Since then, she has
refused to be interviewed by the press. Pamela Freyd continues to say
publicly that she knows of no cases in which memories of repeated sexual
abuse, over many years, that surface during therapy-as her daughter's
did were found to be corroborated.
In the wake of the Freyd family's dispute, news coverage of false and recovered memory has equalled, and sometimes eclipsed, combined coverage of all other issues relating to incest and child sexual abuse.
Between mid-1993 and mid-1994, for example, the three leading news magazines ( Time, Newsweek, and U .S. News and World Report) published 54
pages concerned with child sex abuse. After subtracting 20 pages
devoted to Michael Jackson and the Menendez brothers, media researcher
Michael Males discovered that 17 pages were devoted to "false memory"
and 17 to all other questions related to the sexual victimization of
children.
By the end of 1994, more than 300 articles on "false
memory" had appeared in magazines and newspapers. Headlines included,
"When Tales of Sex Abuse Aren't True," ( Philadelphia Inquirer) "Beware the Incest Survivor Machine" (New York Times Sunday Book Review), and "Cry Incest" (Playboy). Only
a handful mentioned the ambiguous nature of the Freyd family's own
story. Only a few reporters seemed aware of two excellent research
studies, one by FMSF board member Elizabeth Lotos and the other by Linda
Meyer WilIiams of the Family Research Laboratory in New Hampshire,
suggesting that between 19 percent and 38 percent of sexual abuse
survivors have a period of amnesia for abuse.
With some exceptions notably the Boston Globe and US. News and World Report articles
quoted a predominance of experts who were members of the FMSFs
scientific advisory board without listing their affiliation with it or
searching out opposing academic views. On the whole, says psychiatrist
Judith Herman, author of Father-Daughter Incest, the
coverage "favored the position of those accused of sexual abuse,
allowing them to claim the support of educated opinion, while relegating
their accusers to the realm of 'mass hysteria.'"
In an article published last spring by Harvard's Nieman
Foundation for journalism, Herman argued that only one side of the false
memory debate the accused parents were organized and eager to speak to
the media, while the other side composed of incest survivors and their
therapists often didn't want to identify themselves and wanted mostly to
be left alone.
The rules of journalism, Herman said, assume that the
truth will emerge out of an intellectual contest between two equally
matched opponents who come forward and aggressively press their points
of view. "These rules, she said, "are made for the public world, the
world of war and politics, the world of men ... The same principles that
ensure a reasonable degree of equity in conflicts between men do not
ensure equity in conflicts between men and women, parents and children.
Rather, they guarantee an advantage to those who command status and
power in the public realm; they favor men over women, parents over
children."
The False Memory Syndrome Foundation has a yearly budget
of about $700,000, funded by dues and by larger grants from more wealthy
members, supporters and family foundations. Its members run about 48
local parents' action and support groups in the United States and
Canada. In Seattle, as many as 400 people attend local group meetings.
Many of its active and vocal volunteers are, like executive director
Pamela Freyd, the wives of men who say they have been falsely accused.
The Foundation puts out a newsletter ten times a year and
acts as a non-profit public relations group, distributing selected
research about memory and advocating deep skepticism about "recovered
memories." Lawyers have been featured speakers at a number of recent
FMSF events and have been mentioned in its newsletter. "Although we do
not actively promote or fund lawsuits, we feel that this may be one
avenue that retractors and parents have to hold therapists accountable,"
said a spokeswoman for the Foundation. The Foundation also acts as a
support group for accused parents, provides them with some information
when they want to file complaints with state mental health licensing
boards, and advocates its cause with professional associations.
Nobody knows how many cases of false accusation and/or
suggestive therapy are represented by the families of the Foundation,
which does not investigate its members' accounts. But it continues to
raise questions about the therapeutic misuse of hypnosis, sodium amytal,
incest symptom "checklists," unconfirmed beliefs in Satanic
conspiracies, and heavy-handed suggestions that incest must lie behind
all eating disorders, sexual difficulties, substance abuse or
depression.
The Foundation's large advisory board of M.D.s and PhD.s
conveys the impression to the media and the general public that an
overwhelming scientific consensus favors the Foundation's position on
the rarity of the delayed recall of traumatic events. But, as in every
human conflict, especially those involving the more than 200 competing
dogmas of the mental health field, "experts" on both sides are motivated
and informed not only by research data and the search for abstract
scientific truth but by personal experience and education, allegiance to
a particular psychological tradition, deeply felt beliefs about human
nature, what constitutes probable and improbable behavior, and what
constitutes convincing evidence.
The scientific advisory board includes many eminent
research-oriented psychologists and several biologically oriented
psychiatrists and several prominent older psychoanalytically oriented
psychiatrists, but no younger female therapists who have worked closely
with incest survivors; and some perennial expert witnesses for parents
and other aduits accused of child sex abuse.
Perhaps the best known are: a Biologically oriented
psychiatrists Harrison Pope, jr., M.D., chief of the Biological
Psychiatry Laboratory at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass; and Paul
McHugh, M.D. of Johns Hopkins University.
Clinicians concerned about suggestive therapy and
excesses in incest treatment, including George K. Ganaway, an Atlanta
psychiatrist who treats dissociative disorders and psychiatrist August
Piper, Jr. of Seattle, who wrote in a recent Foundation newsletter that
he hoped to find ways to bridge the "chasm" between the two sides of the
false memory debate.
« Cognitive psychology researchers Elizabeth Loftus of me
University of Washington and Uric Neisser of Emory University. They and
others have shown that normal memory is malleable, that adults
sometimes have vivid but erroneous recollections, and that some people,
especially children, can be persuaded to report traumatic events that
never took place.
They are not therapists and give little credence to
research and clinical accounts reporting total amnesia and later recall
of traumatic events. "Memory is distorted every day," says Neisser,
"while the scenario postulated by these people happens rarefy, if ever."
For the past 20 years, Loftus has also appeared frequently as an expert
witness for the defense in criminal trials, casting doubt on the
validity of eyewitness identifications.
Psychiatrist Martin Orne, an early board member who has
spent a lifetime publicizing the suggestive effects of hypnosis. A
veteran psychiatrist and nationally known forensic hypnosis expert, he
was poet Anne Sexton's psychiatrist, the early 1990s, Orne told Sexton's
biographer, Diane Middlebrook, that he believed that Sexton's reports
of sexual abuse by her alcoholic father were "pseudomemories." (Sexton
had alcohol problems, sexually abused her own daughter, wrote a play
about incest, and became sexually involved with her next psychiatrist
before committing suicide.)
Richard Ofshe, a sociologist at the University of
California at Berkeky and a researcher into persuasion techniques used
in cults and other authoritarian communities. He was co-awarded a
Pulitzer Prize, along with the editors of California's Point Reyes Light newspaper,
for reporting about Synanon. More recently, Ofshe has studied
persuasion by police who extract confessions and by the incest recovery
culture. He was promi-nently featured in a 1993 New Yorker magazine account, which became the book, Remembering Satan, about
Paul Ingram, a sheriffs deputy in Olympia, Washington, who confessed to
molesting his two daughters and then, under suggestive interrogation,
to increasingly bizarre satanic cult rituals and group sex.
Ofshe, in an experiment to prove Ingram's suggestibility,
persuaded Ingram, before trial, to "remember" a sexual abuse crime that
Ofshe had actually invented, {He told Ingram that Ingram had been
accused of forcing his children to have sex with each other, and within
hours, Ingram said he'd visualized the scene and confessed to it.) Ofshe
and New Yorker writer
Lawrence Wright have widely publicized their view that Ingram was
probably innocent of everything except suggestibility. The judge in the
case found Ofshe's expert testimony on this point unconvincing and found
Ingram guilty of molesting fats daughters. The judge noted that Ingram
had confessed to those crimes within hours of being questioned by junior
colleagues in his department, and before he was subjected to suggestive
interrogation and intense psychological and religious "counseling."
In 1994, another Washington state judge described Ofshe's
testimony as "cynical" and unconvincing and awarded $150,000 to Lynn
Crook, who had sued her parents on the basis of "recovered: memories" of
sexual abuse. Ofshe, who appeared on behalf of Crook's parents,
testified that Crook had been led, by books like The Courage to Heal and
suggestive therapy, into false memories of abuse progressing toward
delusions of satanic ritual Superior court judge Dennis Yale disagreed
Just as [Dr. Ofshe accuses therapists] of resolving at the outset to
find repressed memories of abuse and then constructing them," Yule said,
"(Qfshe)| has resolved at the outset to find a macabre scheme of
memories progressing toward satanic cult ritual and then creates them,"
In 1993, Ofshe and psychologist Margaret Singer sued the
American Psycho-logical Association, the American Sociological
Association, and 12 individuals, charging them with having conspired
under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) to
discredit them as expert witnesses and deprive them of income. The
defendants disagreed with Ofshe and Singer's views on brainwashing and
coercive persuasion in cults, and the APA had rejected as "lacking in
scientific rigor" a draft report on persuasive techniques in
nonconventional religious movements written by a committee headed by
Singer in 1987.
The suit was dismissed within weeks by the federal
district court in New York on the grounds that although the defendants
expressed disagreement with Ofshe and Singer, there was no evidence of a
criminal conspiracy. A similar suit, filed later in California and
opposed with the assistance of the American Civil liberties Union, was
dismissed last year on First Amendment grounds. Ofshe and Singer have
appealed.
Hollida Wakefield and her husband Ralph Underwager, a
psychologist, Lutheran minister, and former FMSF Advisory board member.
Both run the Institute for Psychological Therapies in Northfield,
Minnesota, where the FMSFs original 8 00 number was answered.
Underwager has appeared as an expert witness for the defense in more than 200 sexual abuse trials. He and his wife co-edit Issues in Child Abuse Accusations, which
promotes the view that most sexual abuse accusations involving children
stem from memories implanted by faulty clinical techniques rather than
by genuine sexual contact.
The Supreme Court of the state of Washington has held that Underwager's views are not accepted by the scientific community.
In the mid- 1980s, Underwager testified in a preliminary
hearing in Australia on behalf of Tony Deren, whom the Australian press
had nicknamed "Mr. Bubbles" because he was accused of sexually
assaulting children in the whirlpool bath of his wife's daycare center.
In the hearing, Underwager presented as scientific consensus the notion
that there are nine "false positives" or false accusations of child
abuse for every one genuine case. He also testified that children rarely
remember or describe sexual events accurately. After his testimony at
the hearing, charges against Deren were dropped.
The "Mr. Bubbles'' case caused a scandal in Australia,
and was the subject of an investigative report by "60 Minutes Australia"
a television news program. Subsequently;, Anna Saltier, a New Hampshire
psychotherapist, and Patricia Toth, a former prosecutor, spoke at
several sexual abuse conferences publicizing their opinions that
Underwager had severely misstated me research in "Mr. Bubbles" and other
child abuse cases. Underwager and Wakefield later sued Toth and Salter
for defamation. A federal appeals court dismissed the suit The court's
opinion stated that Tom and Salter had come to their views on the basis
of their research, and mat their opinion that "Underwager is a hired gun
who makes a living by deceiving judges about the state of medical
knowledge and thus assisting child moles-ters to evade punishment" -were
sincerely held and did not constitute defamation.
Underwager and Wakefield were closely involved in
founding the FMSF in 1992, and Underwager spoke frequently as an expert
on its behalf on television programs and in newspaper articles. That
role ended in 1993, after an interview with Underwager and Wakefield,
conducted in 1991, was published in Paidika: the Journal of Paedophilia, which
is published in English in the Netherlands, In the interview, the
couple stated that they thought pedophile relationships, while never
positive, could be a neutral event in a child's life, and said that
condemnatory attitudes in the United States made it impossible to
conduct research to explore that possibility.
Paidika quoted Underwager as saying, "Paedophiles need to become
more positive and make the claim that paedophilia is an acceptable
expression of God's will for love and unity among human beings." He also
blamed "radical feminism" for child sex abuse hysteria and opposition
to pedophile sex.
In the same interview, Hollida Wakefield said, "It would
be nice if someone could get some kind of big research grant to do a
longitudinal study of, let's say, a hundred twelve-year-old boys in
relationships with loving paedophiles . . . that is impossible in the
U.S. right now."
Underwager now says "at no point have I approved or condoned sexual contact with children." In a 1993 interview with the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, he said in response to criticism of the Paidika interview
that he thought pedophiles must begin to take responsibility for their
actions and that the interview was a means of speaking to the
"intellectual and political leadership of pedophiles in Europe" as a
means of primary prevention.
After the Paidika interview appeared, Underwager agreed to resign from the
FMSF's Professional and Scientific Advisory Board. Hollida Wakefield
remains a member.
IN INFLUENCING
PUBLIC OPINION, the FMSF has been a remarkable success. "Major changes
in thinking have begun to take place," says Pamela Freyd. "Three years
ago, people were strongly advocating the use of hypnosis. Now people are
extremely cautious. Three years ago, people were saying that if
somebody had a memory, it must be true, and they don't say that any
more. When we first started, the assumption was that all the families
were guilty. Now people may give all kinds of different estimates, but
they recognize the fact that there is a problem." On a personal level,
however, things are no better between Pamela and Jennifer Freyd. "Why
won't she speak to me?" Pamela asks. "Why are the grandchildren not
allowed to see me?" She still hopes, eventually, for reconciliation. "I
probably would just have to die," she says, "if I couldn't keep some
hope."
