Recovered memory therapy

Recovered memory therapy (RMT) is a psychotherapy that was developed in the 1980s as a way to recover “lost” childhood memories of abuse, as well as other memories of neglect and abuse. The use of recovered memory therapy has been a subject of ongoing controversy, and its use has been largely abandoned by the therapeutic community.

Beginnings
When it was first used by therapists, the results obtained from patients were alarming. It came to be estimated that one in every three adults in the general population of the United States had been sexually abused as children. Self help books on how to "know" if one had been sexually abused were published and became top sellers. The high incidence of childhood sexual abuse by family members "revealed" by recovered memory therapy became a part of the social consciousness.

Dissociative Identity Disorder
The rise of the use of recovered memory therapy coincided with a sharp rise in the occurrence of Dissociative Identity Disorder (formerly Multiple Personality Disorder.) Skeptics of recovered memory therapy point out this sharp rise, in what had been considered an extremely rare disorder before 1980, as part of a body of evidence suggesting that the disorder, may be caused by false memories implanted by recovered memory therapy. Some have gone so far as to call it a "passing psychological fad".

Decline
Recovered memory therapy lost credibility with a growing belief that the memories that were “recovered” were actually being planted by the therapist. Legislation had been introduced to help prosecute the family members who had allegedly perpetrated the abuse on those with recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse, and sometimes juries jailed the accused solely on the basis of the recovered memories of the accuser. This practice of jailing family members on the basis of memory earned comparisons to the Salem witch trials (Jaroff). In one case, a girl who had had perfect attendance and grades as a teenager claimed, after visiting a therapist, that her family had performed ritual, Satanic sexual abuse on her all through her childhood. Also resulting from her visit to the therapist was that she began to claim to have developed 26 distinct personalities she said resulted from the abuse ("Divided Memories"). Cases like this had become fairly common, and they often took a great toll on the family of the alleged victim, as the victims and their families grew further and further apart. Some of the therapists who used recovered memory therapy on their patients have been sued for millions of dollars by the families of the patients, and the families have often won those cases. In Joan Acocella’s Creating Hysteria - Women and Multiple Personality Disorder, she writes:
 * "If only for financial reasons, one of the most disgraceful episodes in the history of psychotherapy seems to be coming to an end. “In all but a few years,” writes Paul Mchugh, the director of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins, “we will all look back” on the multiple personality disorder movement “and be dumbfounded by the gullibility of the public in the late twentieth century and by the power of psychiatric assertions to dissolve common sense."

Supporters
It should be noted that some practicing psychologists do believe in the benefits and correctness of repressed memory therapy, or at least the theory that memories of traumatic events get repressed and deliberately searching for them is a viable and worthy practice for helping a person deal with their problems. Typically, the view of supporters is that sexual abuse is common and repression of traumatic events is common, and some studies support the theory that forgetting traumatic events is not infrequent. The Courage to Heal is a 1988 book that actively promotes memory recovery as a form of healing that is often cited by supporters.

This support has however become a minority view in psychology, press, and public after its 1980s and 1990s heyday, see also repressed memory.

Notes and references

 * 1)  "Bass and Davis examine very traumatic experiences and offer hope to survivors of these experiences." http://www.division42.org/MembersArea/Nws_Views/articles/Reviews_Books/courage_to_heal.html
 * 2)  "A substantial body of empirical evidence of amnesia and delayed recall for abuse has existed for years." http://www.jimhopper.com/memory/