Tuesday, September 1, 2015

Expert: Feminist on Recovered Memory Therapy

The Measure of a Woman

Excerpt from an interview with social scientist  Carol Tavris

Question: Would you attribute, in part, the Recovered Memory movement to the gender shift within psychology?
Tavris: So many things fed that movement. First, it stemmed from feminist activism against rape and domestic violence against women, issues that only had come to public attention as social problems in the 1970s. Second, during the 70s and 80s, more and more women became feminist psychotherapists, which they saw as a way of doing social activism at a personal level. But for many of them, the kind of therapy they were learning was increasingly detached from the academic, university-based training that clinical psychologists got in the past. There has been an explosion of “free-standing” schools of therapy that are unconnected to any university departments; today you can become a psychotherapist without learning much about research methods or empirical findings. That’s why many therapists, male and female, still hold totally unsupported notions about memory—that it clicks on at the moment of birth, that it’s as accurate as a tape recorder, that hypnosis helps you accurately retrieve “repressed” memories, and so forth. All completely unvalidated beliefs. Obviously these folks have never taken an introductory psychology course.
Question: Given your commitment to feminism and to science, how did you react to the growing clash between them?
Tavris: In general, I don’t think feminism and science are inherently antagonistic, any more than conservatism and science are. Many feminists regard science as a hopelessly patriarchal institution; I see it simply as a set of tools and attitudes that, like any human creation, can be used intelligently or stupidly. Science has justly deserved the criticisms of feminists, but to throw out the whole institution is like saying, “well, the law and medicine are biased against women, so let’s get rid of all laws and doctors.” For me, science provides information that can be used to further the goals of feminism, and feminism is a way of improving science.
Question: Have they ever clashed?
Tavris: After the McMartin trial in 1986, I wrote an article for the Los Angeles Times about research that had been done on how to interview children in sex abuse cases. Evidence at the time suggested that sometimes you have to ask children leading questions or they will not tell you they have been molested. For example, if you interviewed a child after a genital examination and you asked her just to tell what the doctor did, almost no child would volunteer that the doctor touched her genitals. But if you asked a leading question, such as, “The doctor touched your private parts, didn’t he?” the children would say “yes.” The L.A. Times headlined this article, “Do Children Lie? Not About This.”
Of course that was preposterous. Of course children lie “about this” and lots of other things. But my essay, although based on research at the time, helped support the child advocates who were on a rampage against child molesters, and who were running around saying “children never lie” and selling bumper stickers that said “believe the children.” I didn’t foresee that prosecutors and therapists would use these same studies to coerce the hell out of kids. When I think of my own embarrassment about that little article, and how hard it was to say, “Boy, was I wrong about that research,” I realize how difficult it must be for all those “believe the children” people to acknowledge they were wrong, too. In fact, most of them haven’t. They are more entrenched than ever in their pernicious beliefs.
Question: But since then you have written and spoken out strongly against that movement, such as in your New York Times article, “Beware the Incest-Survivor Machine,” which was one of the first public critiques of the recovered memory movement.
Tavris: That article grew out of the last chapter of The Mismeasure of Woman. It was an exposé of the scientific illiteracy in all the popular incest-survivor books, notably the Do it Yourself Therapy.  These writers were prattling on about memory and incest and trauma and repression, and they didn’t know the first thing about them. “If you can’t remember the abuse, it probably means you were abused”—there’s clear thinking for you. Of course I was absolutely vilified for that article, accused of being a pedophile and anti-feminist and everything else. And it made me aware of how great the antipathy toward science had become in some feminist therapy circles.
This excerpt of the full interview is from:   http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/11-02-09/

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ALL Pictures are of life before false memories were recovered.
She is satisfied and happy with our hike overlooking Phoenix

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This is an effort to Break the Cycle of Shame 


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Location: Walla Walla, WA, USA

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