Multiple Personalities - Only in America?

[Maia]

As far as I remember, any of Freud's "case studies" were not much better than your aunty's anecdotes about night air being poisonous and wouldn't qualify as "research" at all today. Viz, little Hans, who feared horses because of his Oedipal complex leading to castration anxiety. Freud never interviewed Hans, he relied on Hans's father's testimony,or as we term it today, hearsay. From this, Fraud spun the story that Hans was afraid of horses because they had large schvantenstupers, just like dear old dad.

Last post and then more studying!

Oh, you won't get any argument from me there. A substantial portion of Freud's work deserves to stay exactly where it is, IMHO-- sunk in obscurity. (For a fascinating and scathing dissection of "Little Hans, see Morton Schatzmann's Soul Murder.) But that's exactly why any discussion of which of Freud's ideas might merit resurrection and which might not (IMHO, again!) can only take place within the context of so many of the other pioneers of early psychiatry, all of whom were actually earlier than Freud. (Charcot, for example, considerably so). ETA: Take a look at the link upthread from the National Library of Health about some of them.) The story of the feud between Pierre Janet and Freud is absolutely fascinating, with Janet, as I noted earlier, arguing for a deficit theory of dissociative disorders and Freud for a repression-based one (Van der Hart & Friedman, 1989). I think it's so incredibly unfortunate that Freud changed his early thinking on the nature of memory (once again, based on his early research with Breuer), partly because he ended up with nonsense like the primacy of Oedipal complexes, castration anxiety, penis envy, and so forth, all of which could be summed up in the idea that human conflicts are basically internal rather than external (Van der Hart has done such interesting work on this subject). I would so love to really discuss this!

Let's be honest: I don't expect to convince anybody of anything they don't really believe in, whether it's about Freud or Janet or memories or dissociative disorders or the best peanut butter sandwich recipe. But what I'd like is to give people food for thought by making arguments that are supported by research, evidence, studies, logical thinking, and the considered opinion of respected bodies such as the AMA, APA, and WHO and their decisions to include certain disorders in the two standard medical and psychiatric reference texts, whether everybody agrees with everything about them or not-- and everybody doesn't have to agree about everything all the time. We all know what "pet woo-woos" really look like around here, and I think that seeing and reading too many of them have kind of soured us all. We've all seen people claim that they can detect missing kidneys, or dowse for water even though they don't want to be submitted to claims because they just don't need the million dollars, or that they've seen Bigfoot or UFO's, or that God came down and talked to them and told them that the Rapture is going to be next week. And I think we all know the difference between that and what we're talking about here, whatever our differing opinions on these subjects may be. This entire discussion is really making my mental wheels spin round and round, and I hope it's doing the same for all of you.


Van der Hart, O., & Friedman, B. (1989). A reader’s guide to Pierre Janet on dissociation: A neglected intellectual heritage. Dissociation, 2(1), 3-16.

 

[Roma]

Maia, did you just post above that you think Elizabeth Loftus has an AGENDA ?

let's just look at the credentials of this person :

Elizabeth F. Loftus

University of California, Irvine
Distinguished Professor
Department of Psychology and Social Behavior
Department of Criminology, Law, and Society
Department of Cognitive Sciences
Fellow, Center for the Neurobiology of
Learning and Memory

University of Washington
Affiliate Professor of Psychology and
Affiliate Professor of Law

The University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award in 2005 to Elizabeth Loftus.
American Psychological Association Award for Distinguished Scientific Applications of
Psychology (2003)

Yipes! God protect us all from people like Elizabeth Loftus.

Of course you know that all of the membes on the False Memory Syndrome Foundation Scientific Advisory Board have credentials like hers, it's a freaking conspiracy of the world's most accomplished and distinguished scientific minds, we're all doomed!

 

[leon_heller]

No, that's an anecdote. That's what I meant. And I'm trying to be civil and respectful here.

Have you actually found many papers on the condition in a reputable journal?

BTW, Freud's theories were based on ancient Jewish philosophical ideas, the dominant technology of the time (hydraulics) and studies of neurotic middle-class Viennese ladies, with many of whom he was having affairs.

Leon

 

[Professor Yaffle]

When I was studying for my psychology degree I took a course in abnormal psychology. The prof. once mentioned that true multiple personality disorder was so rare that a psychiatrist would be lucky to come across a single case in his or her career, and would write a paper about it.

Leon

That seems to be the most common attitude in the UK. I think when we see a vastly higher rate of a disorder in different countries, we have to consider whether there is a true difference in rate (and examne why that might be), or whether the disorder is over or under diagnosed in one of the places (or a combination of these). I tend to think it is overdiagnosis/iatrogenic that is the cause of the discrepancy because of the association of using hypnosis in many of these cases. Hypnosis is well known to be able to facilitate the distortion or creation of vivid memories.

Perhaps the first experimental attempt to examine the potential for hypnotically
facilitated recall was made in 1932 by Stalnaker and Riddle. They found that hypnotized
subjects’ recall of literary selections learned in a prior year could be improved by the use
of hypnosis. This finding seems to support the possibility of hypnotically enhanced memory.
However, upon further reflection, this improvement in recall was discovered to be
confounded by substantial inaccuracies (Laurence & Perry, 1988, p. 322). By reference to
Stalnaker and Riddle’s original lists, it was possible to determine that the apparent improvement
in memory was unreliable; therefore, this report did not actually confirm the
lore that hypnotic methods can improve memory.

Dywan and Bowers (1983) also came to the conclusion that hypnotic methods do
not reliably improve memory. They found that memory seemed to be credibly enhanced,
but that it was actually distorted by the hypnotic experience. Further, Laurence and Perry
(1983) also demonstrated that the mere subtle cueing of hypnotized subjects could produce
profoundly believed-in but totally false memory. With one modest exception
(Geiselman, Fisher, MacKinnon & Holland, 1985), the scientific literature is consistent in
its failure to find evidence supporting the claim that hypnotic suggestion can reliably improve
recall (Bowers & Farvolden, 1996a; Dasgupta, Juza, White & Maloney, 1995;
Dinges, Whitehouse, E. Orne, Powell, J. W., M. Orne, & Erdelyi, 1992; Geiselman &
Machlovitz, 1987; Steblay & Bothwell, 1994; Wagstaff & Mercer, 1993). A particularly
telling series of investigations of hypnotic age regression yielded unequivocal evidence
of the confounding of subjects’ memories and of the resulting unreliability of their
reports (Nash, Drake, Wiley & Khalsa, 1986). It may be that hypnotic methods
potentially facilitate recall, but they do so at the cost of also potentiating imaginal
processes.

http://www.chuckholton.com/Hypnosis_&_Memory.pdf

 

[leon_heller]

No one in the psych. dept. at Birkbeck, University of London, where I studied, believed in hypnosis. It wasn't mentioned once on the course, and I only found one book on it in the college library.

Leon

 

[HansMustermann]

Well, ok, I'll bite. Which of Freud's theories you want to revive, and on what basis? Freud himself equally postulated all of them without any proper studies, without any statistics, without disproving the null hypothesis, etc. And again we know that the examples of miraculously cured patients in his books are split between lies (patient existed, but was not actually cured by Freud at all) and fiction (fictive patient, fictive problem, fictive cure.)

Since you rail against anecdotes: Freud didn't have even anecdotes. He had fiction and lies.

So what basis do you have to accept one theory of his, but not, say, when he himself refutes the exact same 14 years later? On what base do you believe him about the whole repressed memories thing, but not on, say, that you've got a mental dysfunction if you can't get an orgasm while getting screwed by your man? And do you also believe his "penis envy" theory? Just curious.

And I see you quoted from his work on hysteria. Really? _That_ woowoo? Never mind that recent neurology shows actual neurological problems in hysteria, and nothing even vaguely resembling the psychoanalysis BS of a cunning subconscious faking symptoms to get a reward. But Freud's particular contribution didn't even endure that far.

So, really, why should I take _that_ particular book as any kind of reference at all?

 

[Belz...]

And again we know that the examples of miraculously cured patients in his books are split between lies (patient existed, but was not actually cured by Freud at all) and fiction (fictive patient, fictive problem, fictive cure.)

Well, he wasn't exactly the poster child for the scientific method, was he ?

 

[Dancing David]

Please. I would like to see some from, well, everyone. I'm sorry, but saying "millions of people" and having no citations is just not the best way to make a very reasonable argument. It doesn't look verifiable. So how about making specific citations now? I want to read those studies. I do want to be respectful because I think that's the only way to have a discussion here, but honestly, talking about "millions of people" without backing it up in any way in that post... I think you have to see how silly that really did sound. And if your grandma corroborated memories from when you were below the age of 3, well, I don't know any reason why an intelligent person would have been totally incapable of having any memory at all before that age. Does anyone else know?

Okay first of all there is something major here but while you are on you psycho-educational jaunt here you haven't noticed it.

MOST people here are not disagreeing about the dissocialize disorders. It is about multiple personalities and for me the use of the word 'repression'.

Secondly, many people do have memories from before the age of three. And I don't think that is a matter of dispute, the validity of the memories and their accuracy is even called into possible question in the study I linked to from your list.

Why do you keep ignoring those two points?

I'm very familiar with Freud's unfortunate change of opinion about the nature of memory, and also with his vastly different earlier work with Breur (1893). And please, can we avoid things like the story about the psychiatrist in the class? Anecdotes prove anecdotes. That's it.

Now here is the issue, Frued's work and the work of many people from that time period does not provide the following:
1. A sound theoretical mechanism and basis for flights of fantasy and imagination, poetic allusion and the like.
2. Predictions based upon the theories of 'mind' that Frued and others at the time suggest.
3. Large scale data and verification of the theory based upon verifiable predictions.

There is no research basis to support most of Frued’s work. Period. His observations of things are often accurate, it is the imaginary ideas about why things happen that is the problem. There is no basis for the id, ego and superego for example, they are not meaningful terms. And despite the continued use of the term neurosis, it is meaningless as well.

DD, when I get some time, I'll go back over that article you mentioned. I went over the Elizabeth Loftus article problems in GREAT detail and tried to hit all the high points as far as the methodological problems with it, and they are fatal. I just don't see the same problems with the van der Kolk article, but I will analyze it in depth when I get time.

the critique of Loftus was not something I was talking about.

Now, the entire point of the substantive criticism of the Loftus article-- the criticism which is not based on the extremely severe methodological problems with her work, and also upon the fact that she misrepresented her results to the media by saying that she had a higher success rate at convincing people of false memories than she did and that it much easier to convince them than it was-- is that even considering these differences, which are important in themselves, there is a massive difference between convincing people of memories that are either irrevelant or of modest importance, and of memories that are traumatic. It's all in the section where I dissected her article, which is the first part, and so is the reference to the 1995 study which was unable to implant a traumatic memory in subjects. The crucial difference between the Loftus study and other studies about memory, as I said in the post, is that Loftus was the only one I've ever heard or read of who actually and literally claimed that her study proved that it was easy to implant memories of child abuse in people. This is why there's a world of difference between "past memories are not perfect" and "well, anyone can be convinced to believe they were severely abused in the past." That's why seeing that other researchers are working in the field of memory study, and Loftus is working in something that she also calls that, is conflating two things together that aren't the same. Now, as far as why she does the work she does, it's clearly not necessary to know it in order to point out the severe flaws in her work. But in case anybody wondered why Loftus decided to do this study only after going to a lecture about how memories of abuse were all fake and suggested by therapists and media reports, everyone should at least know that Loftus is an apologist for the "False Memory Syndrome Foundation." She has an agenda.

yes but there are also other studies on memory and confabulation and suggestion. I will begin a literature review, which would go in a separate thread.

the issue is that people are open to suggestion and conditioning, we can also start a thread about Sybil if you wish, it is a great case study in many of the issues of suggestibility, especially in the need for some therapists to be special and have a special ability to help people others can't.

Now, more about the disassociative disorders specifically... The Structured Clinical Interviews are the gold standard diagnostic tools used for all mental illnesses and disorders in the DSM. The SCID-D has passed the same reliability tests as all the other versions, and it's done a better job than most of them. So that's a big part of the problem right there-- if it doesn't work for the disassociative disorders, then do we throw out all the SCI's? Do we say that we can't diagnose anybody for anything-- depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, nothing? But it goes a little further than that.

See you keep coming back to this straw argument again and again. the point is not (for me) and many others about the usefulness of the DiD and similar diagnosis. It is the claptrap associated with it, and for me personally the lack of differential diagnosis. And lack of appropriate clinician boundaries.

The disassociative disorders as a whole are one of the very few classes that have shown their validity through taxometric research, not dimensional research. Depression is dimensional. You take the Beck Depression Inventory; it's a self-administered test. If you come out at a certain scale-- well, truthfully, you really are probably depressed, although I don't think people should be given antidepressants just on the basis of that, and of course they often are. (They should get the SCI for depression, which certainly doesn't always happen!) The Dissociative Experiences Scale, however, is a screening scale and can't possibly tell anybody if they have a dissociative disorder. You either have a dissociative disorder, or you don't. You can't be "just a little bit dissociative." You can have daydreaming, spacing out, getting lost in a book or movie, being a space cadet so that you're not listening to anyone, etc., but these are not dissociation, and this is another example of how I think that there's unfortunately so little public education about the DD's, because people do tend to think that this is true. But that's what taxometric research tends to show; it's a disorder that's either there, or it isn't. (There's a short version of the DES, called the DES-T (taxon), that has eight questions; essentially, if you don't have a dissociative disorder, it's very unlikely that you'll answer yes to even one of those-- but that's REALLY not a screening instrument!)

keep making straw men and attacking them.

Now, the UFO question is a little silly, as I think we all know. There are certainly some nut cases who actually believe in this kind of thing, but in order to come within light-years of making it into the DSM, an "abductee questionaire" would have to prove every type of validity, to begin with (as the first of about a zillion tests, frankly.) Diagnostic instruments aren't randomly chosen. I will post more about this later with lots of references.
But that's why I included all the different ways in which the different screening instruments and diagnostic instruments for dissociative disorders (ALL dissociative disorders as a class, not just DiD) had indeed shown validity. I spent a lot of time putting that together earlier this year (it wasn't published, unfortunately, but hope springs eternal!), because I take this topic very seriously.

Anyway, more later about the validity of the DD's as a category.

excuse me, you are way offtopic and rather pedantic, most people here now exactly how this stuff works.

In the meantime, here's some info about types of validity:

EXTERNAL VALIDITY
External validity is about generalization: To what extent can an effect in research, be generalized to populations, settings, treatment variables and measurement variables?
External validity is usually split into two distinct types, population validity and ecological validity, and they are both essential elements in judging the strength of an experimental design.

INTERNAL VALIDITY
Internal validity is a measure which ensures that a researcher’s experiment design closely follows the principle of cause and effect.

“Could there be an alternative cause, or causes, that explain my observations and results?”

TEST VALIDITY
Test validity is an indicator of how much meaning can be placed upon a set of test results.

Criterion Validity
Criterion Validity assesses whether a test reflects a certain set of abilities.


Concurrent validity measures the test against a benchmark test, and high correlation indicates that the test has strong criterion validity.

Maybe , maybe not, it depends on the correlation used and the level it rises to.

Predictive validity is a measure of how well a test predicts abilities. It involves testing a group of subjects for a certain construct, and then comparing them with results obtained at some point in the future.


Content Validity
Content validity is the estimate of how much a measure represents every single element of a construct.


Construct Validity
Construct validity defines how a well a test or experiment measures up to its claims. A test designed to measure depression must only measure that particular construct, not closely related ideals such as anxiety or stress.


Convergent validity tests that constructs that are expected to be related are, in fact, related.


Discriminant validity tests that constructs that should have no relationship do, in fact, not have any relationship. (also referred to as divergent validity)

FACE VALIDITY
Face validity is a measure of how representative a research project is ‘at face value,’ and whether it appears to be a good project.

ETA: link: that reference

More refs later...

Breuer, J. & Freud, S. Studies on Hysteria. (1955). (J. Strachey, Trans.) London: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1893)

Stop promoting Frued will you.

 

[Pup]

BTW, Freud's theories were based on ancient Jewish philosophical ideas, the dominant technology of the time (hydraulics) and studies of neurotic middle-class Viennese ladies, with many of whom he was having affairs.

Not to mention humoral theory medicine that was barely lingering from the middle ages (catharsis).

 

[leon_heller]

I remember reading a paper many years ago about a piece of research on monkeys that (sort of) confirmed one of Freud's theories. It was found that adult monkeys who were frustrated by withholding an expected food reward for performing a task spent much longer indulging in "non-nutritive sucking" behaviour (they had a teat in the cage that didn't deliver anything, IIRC) than non-frustrated subjects. This could be interpreted as them regressing to an infantile oral phase.

Leon

 

[Maia]

Maia, did you just post above that you think Elizabeth Loftus has an AGENDA ?

let's just look at the credentials of this person :

Elizabeth F. Loftus

University of California, Irvine
Distinguished Professor
Department of Psychology and Social Behavior
Department of Criminology, Law, and Society
Department of Cognitive Sciences
Fellow, Center for the Neurobiology of
Learning and Memory

University of Washington
Affiliate Professor of Psychology and
Affiliate Professor of Law

The University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award in 2005 to Elizabeth Loftus.
American Psychological Association Award for Distinguished Scientific Applications of
Psychology (2003)

Yipes! God protect us all from people like Elizabeth Loftus.

Of course you know that all of the membes on the False Memory Syndrome Foundation Scientific Advisory Board have credentials like hers, it's a freaking conspiracy of the world's most accomplished and distinguished scientific minds, we're all doomed!

Informal fallacy. Along the lines of:

"If a researcher with credentials does research, it is correct.
Elizabeth Loftus does research. She's a researcher with credentials.
Therefore it's true that her research is correct."

I believe that you could also say this is a variety of ad hominem argument. Either way, her work has to stand or fall on its own, not on the strength of her credentials. Credentials do not create good work where it does not exist. Credentials do not do the research. The researcher has to do the research. Her work has fatal flaws. Specific to the mall experiment, the methodology was terrible, she misrepresented her results, and she literally and specifically stated that her results tended to show that implanting false memories of child abuse in people's minds would be easy when her experiment had absolutely nothing to do with that.

Have you actually found many papers on the condition in a reputable journal?

Yes. Please see my first post. I also have a much longer list.

Secondly, many people do have memories from before the age of three. And I don't think that is a matter of dispute, the validity of the memories and their accuracy is even called into possible question in the study I linked to from your list.

Why do you keep ignoring those two points?

? I think that's only one point... I will have to print out and analyze the study and I think I should be able to do it tonight, because I really do want to address what you said in genuine detail and make sure absolutely nothing was missed.

Now here is the issue, Frued's work and the work of many people from that time period does not provide the following:
1. A sound theoretical mechanism and basis for flights of fantasy and imagination, poetic allusion and the like.
2. Predictions based upon the theories of 'mind' that Frued and others at the time suggest.
3. Large scale data and verification of the theory based upon verifiable predictions

Oh, they definitely don't. Again, no argument from me on that end at all. That's why I think the main thing that's worth doing is to look at what was interesting about their theories, what might be worth taking another look at, what might be worth resurrecting, and so forth. There's nothing that would be sort of uncritically taken into the present day.

There was a great discussion about memory in a thread from about a month ago-- one of Undercover Elephant's weird unending threads, I will try to find which one. Several people discussed this exact issue. What we discussed was the same thing I've brought up in previous posts, and it just has not been addressed-- that there's a world of difference between inaccurate memories about things that are not important, such as words or numbers being added to a list that people inaccurately remember as being on it (I'll find those refs from the old thread) and implanting elaborate false memories of childhood abuse. Again, the two are not the same, and I believe that this would be an incorrect analogy fallacy. This really is the biggest problem with the Loftus study, although again, it's far from the only one.

The question isn't whether any nutcase therapist have ever implanted memories at any time, in anyone, as I noted in my above post (about three posts ago, I think.) The question isn't whether it's possible to do this, somehow, somewhere, under some combination of circumstances, to someone, and that's what I meant in that post when I mentioned a few nutcase therapists. There's no question that there have been cases. None at all. But stop and think about this for a minute. Why are we even thinking about bringing up a case from a book that was published in 1973, 26 years ago? If we search, we can find a few more recent cases, but it really is a handful of stories. The question isn't whether it's possible to do to anyone, and it never was, but whether it's possible to do to more than an extremely tiny percentage of the population. I thought long and hard about discussing "Roma Hart's" case. In the final analysis, I had to decide that I just don't believe it's ethical to discuss certain things on a public forum, and I can't do it. Some things are more important than "being right" or "winning the argument".

I have to answer what's addressed. If someone asks about the reliability of a diagnostic instrument for the dissociative disorders, then that's what I'm going to answer. I'm sorry. I just don't see creating straw men and attacking them or being pedantic or off topic when I'm trying to answer what's been asked, or promoting anything when I'm trying to provide a reference( instead of quoting Freud or anybody else *without* a reference, which I don't think is a good idea.)

I'm not sure what else to do here. I think that if this were a real-time, face to face discussion, it would be a lot easier, but I'm not sure how to answer all of this without sounding defensive, which I don't want to do, and I definitely don't want to get snippy or sarcastic. I really want to have a respectful discussion, and I hope that's what others want to do as well. This is what I mean when I say that I don't like the way that debates online tend to go, because it just seems that they always drift further and further away from that. I realize that a lot of people don't agree with my opinions here, and that's okay. Everyone doesn't have to agree with everyone else all the time, but I hope that we can all stick to respectful discussion and not drift into anything else, because I'm just not interested in that at all.

 

[Belz...]

Frued's work

Frued and others

There is no research basis to support most of Frued’s work.

Stop promoting Frued will you.

Freud, Dave.

 

[Dancing David]

Okay first of all there is something major here but while you are on you psycho-educational jaunt here you haven't noticed it.

MOST people here are not disagreeing about the dissocialize disorders. It is about multiple personalities and for me the use of the word 'repression'.

Secondly, many people do have memories from before the age of three. And I don't think that is a matter of dispute, the validity of the memories and their accuracy is even called into possible question in the study I linked to from your list.

Why do you keep ignoring those two points?

So you just quoted a bunch of stuff from another web site and you haven't read teh papers?
Bad form, almost on research on memory will tell you the same thing. (Including probably most of the papers you linked to!)

The issue if not DD it is the psycho babble jargon and lack of meaning for multiple personalities, repression and alters.

 

[Dancing David]

Freud, Dave.

Ooops spell check did not have any suggestions, yeah that would be Frood as in rhymes with food...

 

[Dancing David]

I can't beleive that you just posted a laundry list and did not vette it!
http://www.trauma-pages.com/a/vanderk2.php

All these subjects, regardless of the age at which the trauma occurred, claimed that they initially "remembered" the trauma in the form of somatosensory flashback experiences. These flashbacks occurred in a variety of modalities: visual, olfactory, aff ective, auditory and kinesthetic, but initially these sensory modalities did not occur together. As the trauma came into consciousness with greater intensity, more sensory modalities came into awareness: initially the traumatic experiences were not conden sed into a narrative. It appears that, as people become aware of more and more elements of the traumatic experience, they construct a narrative that "explains" what happened to them. This transcription of the intrusive sensory elements of the trauma into a personal narrative does not necesarily have a one-to-one correspondence with what actually happened. This process of weaving a narrative out of the disparate sensory elements of an experience is probably not dissimilar from how people construct anarrati ve under ordinary conditions. However, when people have day-to-day, non-traumatic experiences, the sensory elements of the experience are non registered separately in consciousness, but are automatically integrated into the personal narrative.

And please note that a lot of this is just a bunch of psychobabble with now meaning any way.

 

[HansMustermann]

Why are we even thinking about bringing up a case from a book that was published in 1973, 26 years ago? If we search, we can find a few more recent cases, but it really is a handful of stories.

Maia, you basically still insist on equating _studies_, of which there were several in the meantime, with individual and isolated stories or even anecdotes. So I'll repeat the question: so a published and peer reviewed study is just a story for you, if it doesn't fit your pet woowoo?

Also, I have to wonder about someone who asks "Why are we even thinking about bringing up a case from a book that was published in 1973, 26 years ago?" right after posting quotes from an 1893 book, you know, a whole 206 years ago.

I mean, honestly, even by the standards of sophistry and handwaving, that's pretty darned silly.

The question isn't whether it's possible to do to anyone, and it never was, but whether it's possible to do to more than an extremely tiny percentage of the population.

No, the question is if there is any scientific basis for the whole silly idea of repressed memories at all. The question is whether memory works like that or not.

Because if it does not, if there is no magic vault where memories stay pristine until a therapist makes you unlock it, then every single person who's had memories "recovered" that way is a scam victim.

And, please, "percentage of the population" has got to count as one of the silliest objections so far. Thalidomide also affected only a tiny percentage of the total population, but nobody would call it good. Nigerian 419 scams only scammed a tiny percentage of the total population, but they're still a scam. Victor Lustig only sold the Eifel Tower to two victims -- a truly infinitesimal percentage of France's population, you'll agree -- but it's still a scam.

The question isn't whether it's one, or a thousand, or a million, who have been scammed, but whether the whole thing is one big scam. _Are_ there any repressed memories to recover? Do hypnosis, regression or whatever actually work to that end? Are there any checks to distinguish genuine repressed memories from just false ones created by confabulation, or is it just a matter of faith that you got the genuine article for your money?

And, in the end, does the whole thing even help? Because with the mounting evidence that all conditions traditionally treated by psychotherapy, from hysteria to schizophrenia, boiling down to actual biological conditions or damage... how do you propose that chatting and digging up memories would help with that? Did anyone actually measure a positive change in the chemical balance or a repairing of the neural damage, compared to a control group that gets a chat with a cabbie instead? Does recovering repressed memories actually cause the abnormal brain patterns to normalize?

Or is it just a fancier and more dignified version of the same scam that Popoffs and Hinns all over the world are doing on a stage? You know, they convince you that you're healed, so you must be healed.

 

[Kariboo]

quotes from an 1893 book, you know, a whole 206 years ago.

Um, it is 2009 right? or did I just repress the last 90 years?

And I really, really hope I did the mental math correctly.

 

[HansMustermann]

Ah, right, thanks for the correction. Need more coffee

 

[Jeff Corey]

Ooops spell check did not have any suggestions, yeah that would be Frood as in rhymes with food...

I thinks it's Freud as rhymes with froid.

 

[Roma]

Her work has fatal flaws... the methodology was terrible.... she misrepresented her results....

Yes, yes, the recovered memory proponents have done quite a nasty job of trashing Dr.Elizabth Loftus, and to further their agenda these same recovered memory proponents have gone so far as to highjack the False Memory Syndrome Foundation acronym and in a disgusting attempt to confuse and decieve the public have been calling themselves fms.org.
So since I am quite sure that you don't have the time I will provide this for you from the real False Memory Syndrome Foundation website regarding Dr.Elizabeth Loftus:

http://www.fmsfonline.org/fmsf07.930.html

" ELIZABETH LOFTUS SETTLES LAWSUIT

The lawsuit against Elizabeth Loftus has been settled. The lawsuit had
been brought by Nicole Taus who was the subject of an article by
Loftus and Mel Guyer that was published in the Skeptical Inquirer
called "Who Abuse Jane Doe?" (Background of the case reprinted from
Spring 2007 FMSF Newsletter appears as at the end of this e-mail).

There are three important results of the case.

First, the California Supreme Court said that the plaintiff should pay
attorney fees. Subsequently, a fee motion was prepared and submitted
for over $450,000. The hearing on that motion will be held October 2,
2007.

Second, of the 21 counts that Taus filed against Loftus and her
co-defendants, Taus lost soundly on 20 of them. The right of Loftus
and others to speak about the Jane Doe case remains protected and
inviolate.

Third, based on a declaration that Loftus states did not correctly
state the facts, the California Supreme Court left a single claim
alive. Attorneys urged Loftus to settle because of the great burden
that would be placed on her to litigate the single claim and to prove
that it was false.

The $7,500 that Taus demanded to settle was a pittance compared to the
more than a million she had previously requested.

The settlement is not an admission of wrongdoing, Loftus categorically
denies the allegations Taus made against her in that count, but she
wanted to avoid further harassment by Taus and her supporters.

The case has now gone on for several years and Loftus and colleagues
prevailed on all the important legal and ethical issues. By settling
for a trivial sum, everyone will be spared a futile "she said/she
said" trial."

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