Unrecovered memory

A few weeks ago Dr. Laura, the straight shooting afternoon radio personality, made a strong statement that "recovered memory" was a sham and an absurd outrage.  I like Dr. Laura for her candor and I love her for her strong stand on this issue.

No one can forget years of physical abuse and no one has come up with a mental mechanism to explain how such abuse could be forgotten.

But America was in an hysterical state from the beginning of the 1980s to the end of the 1990s in which 99.9% of Americans believed memories of serious and extensive abuse could be "recovered" in a therapeutic setting.  In 1997 a college student reported that she had falsely said she was sexually abused as a child because every other woman in her dorm at a prestigious Eastern college had a story of being sexually abused.

This is the subject that got me interested in the issue of hysteria.  In 1986, Catherine Campbell, a lawyer and close friend told me about the trials in Fresno and around the country based on "recovered memory" and satanic rituals being carried out on pre-school children.  The evidence didn't exist, but juries were sending dozens of people to prison on hearsay and allegations by children and recovered memory experts.  I looked into it and into the other hysterical claim of the time that hundreds of thousands of children were being abducted.

I wrote the first article on the hysteria in the Whole Earth Review of 1986.  I got no response to the article or from anyone I talked to or from anyone other than the victims who could see the hysteria.  By 1986, over 1,000 people were enmeshed in the web of court trials but all of America was united in believing in recovered memory, satanic child abuse and massive child abductions. The second article, after mine, on the hysteria didn't come until 1990, in a Tennessee newspaper, followed by two in the Village Voice by Debbie Nathan titled "The Ritual Sex Abuse Hoax".

The beginning of the end of the hysteria was recorded by two more prestigious articles in the New York Review of Books by Berkeley professor of literature Frederick C. Crews in 1993 and 1994.

The hysteria still lingers in 2006, I would guess 20% of Americans still believe it.  Thank you Dr. Laura for your strong stand.