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Title: The Myth of Repressed Memory : False Memories and Allegations of Sexual Abuse by Elizabeth Loftus, Katherine Ketcham ISBN: 0-312-14123-8 Publisher: St. Martin's Press Pub. Date: 01 February, 1996 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $11.00

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Average Customer Rating: 3.54 (13 reviews)

Rating: 5
Summary: Important book. A must-read.
Comment: This book is a much-needed cry for sanity, much like Sagan's _The Demon-Haunted World_. The author, Elizabeth Loftus, is a well-known and well-respected psychologist who specializes in eyewitness memory; anybody who has taken a Gen Psych course should recognize her name.

As a budding psychologist, I found Loftus's comments on the therapeutic community both insightful and well-directed. Her arguments are powerful and difficult to deny; she convinced me shortly after the first few chapters.

Sexual abuse is a problem. A big one. But attempting to root out totally unconfirmed instances of sexual abuse is, as well. Loftus tries to walk a line between compassion for people who have truly been abused and those who believe they have, and scientific accuracy.

Her sharpest knives are reserved for the therapists. The tools of therapy used to "recover" abuse memories which have no corroborating evidence are the same as those used to "uncover" reports of alien abduction, past lives, infant memories, and ritual cult torture. All the above are truly unlikely, so why would memories recovered using this method about abuse be any more accurate than memories about big-eyed aliens?

All in all, this book does a marvelous job in presenting its points and should be a must-read for any serious student of psychology. It shows what a fragile thing memory really is; a lesson we all need to learn.

Rating: 4
Summary: A book for defense lawyers, not for therapists.
Comment: Dr. Loftus and Ms. Ketcham make many good points about a few notorious cases where people have been convicted of criminal offenses based solely on testimony of "memories" that have suddenly been "recovered" after years or decades. Some of these cases involve accounts outlandish and bizarre events like cannibalism and widespread cult ritual abuse. Others arise from misguided psychotherapy techniques, at least as described by the authors. Unfortunately, the authors appear to argue from these extreme cases that =any= memory that surfaces after a long period of repression, suppression or otherwise being "forgotten" must be false. Dr. Loftus recounts her own experience of recovering memories and later learning that they were inaccurate. From this, she concludes that any recollection of distant events is inherently unreliable. The authors spend most of the book denouncing so-called "repressed memories," saying that there is no demonstrated physiological mechanism for the phenomenon. Yet at one point they describe the well-known phenomenon of traumatic amnesia, which has a widely accepted physiological model. Traumatic amnesia, as described by these authors and others, would appear to account for the "repressed memory" phenomenon that is denounced in this book. Being a lawyer, I recognize that Dr. Loftus's book will serve to raise "reasonable doubts" in laymen's minds about the accuracy of recovered memories. That's all a defense lawyer has to do: to blow smoke without proving a thing. I believe a psychologist should aim a bit higher, especially when dealing with a widespread phenomenon like childhood sexual abuse.

Rating: 5
Summary: Ketcham and Loftus get two thumbs up
Comment: These two women are geniuses. All I have to say is with the intelligence of these women combined, this book will blow you away. Ketcham is a fantastic writer, leaving the reader in a state of awe and utter amazement. Two thumbs way up.

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