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Therapy History
I'm reading Judith Herman's Trauma and Recovery, the book that first named complex PTSD and is still one of the seminal PTSD books. There are some interesting moments where, if you know what else was going in 1992, it becomes very obvious that she's trying to comment on both the satanic ritual abuse stuff and the memory wars without actually coming right out and commenting on either of them. She outright says at one point that therapists going "You have clearly suffered ritual abuse" based on a symptom list should not be doing that and implies that the "ritual abuse specialists" are practicing irresponsibly, but both of these are brief asides in a more detailed discussion about amnesia and recovered memory in PTSD. She also remonstrates the recovered-memory people a bit by pointing out that you really shouldn't need dramatics most of the time: talking about what the patient is currently feeling is usually enough to start memories surfacing on its own, and if after a lot of doing that there are still major memory gaps "judicious use of powerful techniques" may be warranted, and goes on to describe much calmer forms of hypnosis than the ones that got famous, with a heavy emphasis on leaving control in the hands of the patient. And I'm just looking at this like "Yeah, you were totally trying to be a voice of reason without actually saying that's what you were doing." (The book does show its age in this respect: while she's clear you shouldn't use anything on her last-resort list until the traditional approach has failed exhaustively, group therapy and hypnosis have fallen out of favor for that sort of thing these days and no one ethical is still using sodium amytal.)
This supports something else I read recently that was talking about memory gaps and the recovery thereof having been largely uncontroversial within war-based PTSD treatment and only got controversial when people started talking about child-abuse based trauma, which there was much less opportunity for external corroboration, since most of the war memories had a lot of other people present and military reports documenting them. Though I think it also has something to do with that being when the dramatic and unreliable methods of memory retrieval started getting popular. (As an aside, I don't remember which Elizabeth Loftus book I read, but I've read one of them-- one of the later ones, since she talked about experiences she'd had since getting famous. She didn't prove repressed memories don't exist; she proved false memories are possible. That gets lost a lot in discussing her work. As does her resigning from APA suspiciously close to an ethics complaint being brought, almost like someone tipped her off there was about to be an investigation.)
I like studying the history of psychology, and this is a neat example of putting pieces together through context clues in a book about something else: this is how the contemporary people talked about it.
This supports something else I read recently that was talking about memory gaps and the recovery thereof having been largely uncontroversial within war-based PTSD treatment and only got controversial when people started talking about child-abuse based trauma, which there was much less opportunity for external corroboration, since most of the war memories had a lot of other people present and military reports documenting them. Though I think it also has something to do with that being when the dramatic and unreliable methods of memory retrieval started getting popular. (As an aside, I don't remember which Elizabeth Loftus book I read, but I've read one of them-- one of the later ones, since she talked about experiences she'd had since getting famous. She didn't prove repressed memories don't exist; she proved false memories are possible. That gets lost a lot in discussing her work. As does her resigning from APA suspiciously close to an ethics complaint being brought, almost like someone tipped her off there was about to be an investigation.)
I like studying the history of psychology, and this is a neat example of putting pieces together through context clues in a book about something else: this is how the contemporary people talked about it.
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Are you aware of the nature of the main complaint against her? Because it's bad. Really, really bad.
And then there are... other complaints, since then.
She didn't prove repressed memories don't exist; she proved false memories are possible.
The person who has industriously confused this issue about Elizabeth Loftus' findings has been Elizabeth Loftus. She's been a little cottage industry of expert testimony against CSA victims, and basically ran an organization premised on the idea that all allegations of CSA are false.
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I had not been aware of other complaints against her-- though I did know about the cottage industry, since my introduction to this entire topic was books from her and her contemporaries in my college library. (I was not yet in the habit of thinking critically about what I read, and naturally assumed that things in the college library were probably scholarly and accurate, and so while I noticed some inconsistencies in the ones I read I didn't think too hard about the "repressed memories are fake" thing until I encountered L. B. Lee at Arisia a few years ago.)
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Breaking anonymity on a case study, wasn't it?
Breaking anonymity on someone else's published case study, by hiring a private eye to find out who the patient-subject described was, and basically stalking the patient, and then identifying the patient in a paper of her own, with absolutely zero consent on the part of the patient.
This American Life covered it: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/676/heres-looking-at-you-kid/act-two-6 (Transcript: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/676/transcript)
They interview Loftus and, uh, I recommend hearing it for yourself.
though I did know about the cottage industry, since my introduction to this entire topic was books from her and her contemporaries in my college library.
Yeah, but that's just her books. Do you know about the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, which she was on the board of? https://youtu.be/bTfJ_ge4LTo?t=555 Content warning: as bad as you might think. "In retrospect it makes sense that people who advocate against false convictions would be easy targets for actual guilty rapists to use to their advantage and they're particularly susceptible if the organization itself is founded by people who might also be guilty of those crimes."
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It also says something that it was in the sort of magazine she could get in a Barnes and Noble, written with the help of a reporter, and not in an actual psych journal; that's definitely suggestive of either desire for publicity or being so unethical no journal will touch your study. Or both.
I knew the False Memory Syndrome Foundation existed-- the book I read that most left me wondering about inconsistencies was written by someone who opened the introduction with "I've been falsely accused!" and I was like "Okay, but shouldn't we still... not have your book in the library?"-- but wow was that thought apparently just scratching the surface!