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. *