Freud and False Memory Syndrome (Postmodern Encounters)

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Freud and False Memory Syndrome (Postmodern Encounters)
By Phil Mollon
Publisher: Totem Books
Number Of Pages: 80
Publication Date: 2000-06-25
ISBN-10 / ASIN: 1840461330
ISBN-13 / EAN: 9781840461336
Binding: Paperback

Since about 1992, an astonishingly fierce scientific, professional and legal controversy has arisen around the allegation that psychotherapists may sometimes have fostered false memories of childhood sexual abuse. Some have blamed Freud for this, arguing that he sowed the seeds of 'false memory syndrome' 100 years ago. He has been accused by some critics of abandoning, out of professional cowardice, his original recognition of the prevalence of sexual abuse amongst his patients, substituting his theory of childhood sexuality and the Oedipus complex, and by others of fabricating and implanting false memories in his patients' minds.

Summary: A misleading account
Rating: 1
Although it purports to be an objective study, this little book is an exercise in Freudian apologetics. Mollon contends that critics' claims that Freud gave inconsistent accounts of the seduction theory episode are without substance. In fact several scholars have carefully documented numerous inconsistencies in Freud's accounts, the latest example being an article of mine in \"History of Psychiatry\", vol. xii (3), 2001. For instance, in one of his 1896 seduction theory papers Freud stated that the patients had no feeling of remembering the infantile \"sexual scenes\" he claimed to have analytically uncovered in their unconscious, and that they emphasised their \"unbelief\", yet in a later report he wrote that his patients \"told\" him that they had been sexually abused in early childhood. Mollon's lack of objectivity is illustrated by the way he takes anything Freud claimed in his 1896 seduction theory papers at face value despite abundant evidence of the unreliability of Freud's accounts of his clinical experiences. He reports that Freud claimed objective corroboration in two out of his eighteen cases in which he said he had uncovered infantile sexual abuse memories, yet the second of the examples supposedly involves the mutual infantile experiences of two women patients with the same man. That makes a total of *three* of the eighteen patients, a strange inconsistency indeed, but one which Mollon passes over in silence. Surprisingly for a clinician, Mollon simply accepts Freud claims of corroboration without the least analysis of these claims, which other scholars have shown to be unacceptable.
Mollon attempts to explain away the discrepancy between the original reports of a large range of categories of supposed abusers with Freud's later emphasis on fathers by saying (p. 46) that Freud \"freely admits\" that in his early papers \"he played down the role of seduction by fathers because the idea would seem too disturbing to his readers\". Mollon gives no reference for this statement, which is not surprising, since Freud never said anything of the sort. In the case of two instances of attempted sexual assault reported in \"Studies in Hysteria\" (1895) involving post-pubertal girls Freud later acknowledged that he had represented \"father\" as \"uncle\" for reasons of discretion, ie, to hide the identities of the individuals involved. Nowhere does he make any equivalent statement in relation to the 1896 seduction theory claims, let alone give the reason Mollon states. Again, Mollon acknowledges (p. 41) that Freud was using a questionable clinical procedure to try to induce material relating to the preconceived unconscious \"memories\" he was seeking, and writes that this procedure would \"not be advisable in the light of today's knowledge of the propensity for hypnotism and related methods to generate confabulation rather than memories\". But what Mollon describes as \"today's knowledge\" was precisely the basis of the criticism of Freud's clinical methodology which contemporary critics were making in the literature! (I leave aside the evidence provided by several scholars that the infantile \"sexual scenes\" reported in 1896 were essentially analytic reconstructions made by Freud himself, not \"memories\" reported by the patients.)
What about the contention that Freud had a sophisticated understanding of memory which was far ahead of his time? Mollon (pp. 58-60) attempts to explain away Freud's clear statement that \"all the essentials [of a repressed memory] are preserved\" by carefully selecting an example which enables him to blur the issue. This won't do. Freud's recognition of the unreliability of early memories was not based on a Bartlettian theory of the *general* reconstructive nature of memory, but on the notion that disturbing memories are covered up by recollections of later incidents which become incorporated in a way which disguises the content of the earlier event. But, crucially, Freud maintained (eg, in \"New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis\") that repressed memories \"are virtually immortal; after the passage of decades they behave as though they had just occurred\". Indeed he insisted that \"the unalterability by time of the repressed\" had been \"established beyond any doubt\". This is precisely what modern theories of memory reject...

Summary: thougtful thoughts
Rating: 4
For some time it has been known that that there has been anindustry of child abuse memories implated by psychotherapists. Amazingcases have turned out to be fantasies affecting numberless people. In this small book, only too small, the author takes us through the alledged first cause: Freud and psychoanalysis. Is he the one to blame for all these patients that are suddenly taking legal action against their parents and others for sexual abuse? It is a well argued book that tries to defend Freud. Though he does that, the subject deserves much more than a few pages to unravel the mysteries of memory, P.A. methods, factors of possible suggestion of symptoms in therapy and the unconcious. Nevertheless it is a well written introduction to a malady that affects the credibily of P.A., Freud and the establisment in general. The book provides a futher reading list that makes it valuable in itself.

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