Satanic Ritual Abuse - False Memories

False Memories

One explanation for the SRA allegations is that they were based upon false memories caused by the over-use of hypnosis and other suggestive techniques by therapists underestimating the suggestibility of their clients. The altered state of consciousness induced by hypnosis rendered patients unusually able to produce confabulations, often with the assistance of their therapists. Advocates of false memory syndrome (FMS), a controversial term promoted by the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, claim that the purported "memories" of ritual abuse are actually false memories, created iatrogenically through suggestion or coercion. The FMSF has used the idea of ritual abuse as a strategy to illustrate their position that most allegations of sexual abuse uncovered by the suggestive techniques used during recovered memory therapy are false "memories" of events that never happened. According to Kathleen Faller this has contributed to the sensationalization of the ritual abuse cases in the media.

Paul R. McHugh, professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University discusses in his book Try to Remember the developments that led to the creation of false memories in the SRA moral panic and the formation of the FMSF as an effort to bring contemporary scientific research and political action to the polarizing struggle about false memories within the mental health disciplines. According to McHugh, there is no coherent scientific basis for the core belief of one side of the struggle, that sexual abuse can cause massive systemic repression of memories that can only be accessed through hypnosis, coercive interviews and other dubious techniques. The group of psychiatrists who promoted these ideas, whom McHugh terms "Mannerist Freudians", consistently followed a deductive approach to diagnosis in which the theory and causal explanation of symptoms was assumed to be childhood sexual abuse leading to dissociation, followed by a set of unproven and unreliable treatments with a strong confirmation bias that inevitably produced the allegations and causes that were assumed to be there. The treatment approach involved isolation of the patient from friends and family within psychiatric wards dedicated to the treatment of dissociation, filled with other patients who were treated by the same doctors with the same flawed methods and staff members who also coherently and universally ascribed to the same set of beliefs. These methods began in the 1980s and continued for several decades until a series of court cases and medical malpractice lawsuits resulted in hospitals failing to support the approach. In cases where the dissociative symptoms were ignored, the coercive treatment approached ceased and the patients were removed from dedicated wards, allegations of satanic rape and abuse normally ceased, "recovered" memories were identified as fabrications and conventional treatments for presenting symptoms were generally successful.