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The Evening Post
September 2, 2000
Thanks for the memories
by Diana Dekker
Some psychologists lost their cool this week when Professor Elizabeth Loftus
visited New Zealand
to speak at the Psychological Society's annual conference.
Diana Dekker finds out why.
The lowered voices of therapists in action, the soft tapping at computers in
university psychology departments all became strident this week while these
bastions of reason made way for a nasty slanging match. Psychotherapists all
have the advantage of knowing they're right about human behaviour so when
they clash amongst themselves it's not a pretty sight.
The clash was over the presence of Professor Elizabeth Loftus. She's world
famous in psychological circles.
Loftus is Professor of Psychology at the University of Washington,
is the recipient of many awards and is the only American to hold a lifetime
honorary membership of the British Psychological Society. She has a big
reputation for her scepticism of the recovered memory theory.
She makes part of her comfortable living appearing as an expert witness for
people who have been accused of sexual abuse after their alleged victims have
had their memory of the events "recovered" by therapists.
Psychotherapists are sometimes sued. It hasn't happened here.
The beliefs Loftus brought to New
Zealand - largely that memory is malleable
and can be influenced by some psychological techniques - were no surprise.
She's been expounding them for nearly a decade. The surprise was the almost
hysterical reaction to her visit.
She probably isn't joking when she says she didn't wear her best jacket when
she spoke on the Waikato campus "in
case of tomatoes. I found it wasn't the right season."
Loftus was once bopped on the head with a newspaper by her seat-mate in an
aeroplane between California
and Seattle.
Her assailant was a woman who had been in New Zealand doing lectures and
workshops on surviving childhood trauma and recognised her.
Before she had even spoken at the conference at Waikato University Dr John
Read, senior lecturer in the psychology department at Auckland University
had resigned from the society in protest at it making her keynote speaker.
Then when she did speak, a clutch of incensed psychologists handed out a
28-page packet of anti-Loftus material culled from the Internet and
disappeared.
"Not a very professional thing to do," says Loftus.
"They made no attempt to verify the accuracy of the information, and
they did not even have the courtesy to ask Professor Loftus if she would like
to comment on any of the material," huffed Victoria University
psychology lecturer Maryanne Garry when she introduced the professor -
cheered and jeered - on the Victoria
University campus.
"They just distributed their collection of misinformation and maybe went
off for a coffee to celebrate,"
Garry called the group's decision, and Read's, not to challenge Loftus in
public at the conference "a breathtaking display of cowardice".
LOFTUS and Garry see eye-to-eye. Garry worked with her in Seattle and calls her "the most famous
psychologist in the world."
But Garry's colleague at Victoria Judith McDougall does not. She was one of
the collaborators on the stack of Internet material. She wouldn't talk to The
Post about her stand at all, blaming what she claimed as mis-reporting in The
Dominion for her silence.
"I have no faith in reporters any more. Reporters need to clean up their
act a bit," she said.
Loftus is not the only sceptic in the field of recovered memory. She thinks New Zealand
is behind the eight-ball in recognising this.
"It does feel a little bit - and I hope it won't be seen as insulting -
that New Zealand is four or five years
behind the States in recognising this well-founded scepticism."
Loftus decries the idea that it might be better "to lock up a few
innocent people rather than have one abuser out there".
Her detractors, like Read, think otherwise. By the end of the week Read, who
was becoming very nervous of talking to the media and would only talk off the
record and write his considered views for publication, wrote: "Of course
false allegations occur, as they do with all crimes, and when that happens it
can be devastating. But exaggerating the frequency of false allegations is
irresponsible. For every false allegation there are literally hundreds of
genuine cases that are never reported to anyone."
His gripe is also that Loftus's academic ivory tower research is
"largely irrelevant to real-life situations involving trauma, because of
its artificiality, but it is particularly irrelevant to New Zealand
where to gain access to an ACC abuse counsellor, one has to disclose abuse to
someone else first".
Loftus thinks therapists with drugs or suggestion or hypnosis can implant
false memories. When she appears as an expert witness for the accused she
points this out.
Read says "even though her research involves highly artificial
approximations of real trauma situations (such as getting lost in a shopping
mall) defence lawyers frequently use her research as if it was relevant to
the real world.
"The concerns of the many psychologists who expressed worries about Professor
Loftus' position on recovered memory is the way it is used to discredit adult
survivors of child abuse in courts."
Loftus says the argument that people will use her work to help the guilty is
the same as saying the world should not have been given nitroglycerine
because it would get into the hands of the wrong people. Some of her work is
going to get into the hands of people who will use it to try to hide
paedophiles, just as nitroglycerine gets into the hands of people who misuse
it.
Read says people are "less likely to disclose abuse if they fear they
will be discredited in the courts with accusations that the abuse was a false
memory".
He maintains the fear of hearing or implanting a false memory is making
professionals reluctant to do their jobs properly. He hopes once Loftus goes
"we can all refocus on the crucially important task of preventing child
abuse and making sure that those who have been abused receive the help they
need".
Sue Fitchett, an Auckland
clinical psychologist, and another responsible for the anti-Loftus paper
attack, accuses Loftus of creating a "milieu which has made it difficult
for mental health consumers".
Loftus, she says, does not acknowledge partial or full amnesia and Loftus has
also linked herself, a scientist, to a "populist and voracious"
lobby group, the US False Memory Syndrome Foundation.
There's no populist group for traumatised people, says Fitchett.
"Perhaps we could start one for people with amnesia."
Loftus is quite used to creating a disturbance in the mental health area.
Once she became involved in court cases after years as a quiet academic, she
says she became "almost a symbol of the sceptical point of view.
"There were efforts to get me in trouble, threatening law suits at
people having me to speak. I kept at it and survived the assaults. I'd see
horrible things happening to accused people and their appreciation would give
me energy to get back on the horse and continue."
Loftus has been working on repressed memory for more than nine years and
she's looking for another challenge. Something new.
"But I'm not going to leave it, like when you take thalidomide off the
market what do you do with all the people with no limbs." Imagery which
will make her detractors gnash their teeth as she departs. *
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