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> Recovered memories are deeply suspect, [...] especially when 'recovered' decades later during psychotherapy.

> This goes back to Freud's original sin - not believing the direct accounts of family sexual abuse from his female patients, and instead perceiving them as fantasies.

I can't understand how these two statements are not contradictory, could you elaborate?

Sure - since talk therapy was pioneered it's vacillated wildly in approach between what we would today call depth and cognitive approaches. At times the emphasis has been entirely on teaching socialisation and behavioural strategies, at other times it's been delving into unconscious motivations. More specifically Freud (and successors, especially Anna Freud) identified a series of defence mechanisms, that have been widely validated and are now accepted far outside of analysis. Two of these are denial (literally refusal to accept or acknowledge reality) and repression.

Meanwhile Freud's developmental framework had young children going through early stages of 'opedipal' development involving attraction towards their opposite sex parent, and fantasies involving them - which would usually be repressed and could emerge as neurotic symptoms.

So you have this concept of memory as a potentially hidden repressed desire or trauma, and also this idea of attraction to the primary care giver. Psychoanalytics techniques - like hypnotism and later free association, were designed to uncover the unacceptable thoughts and primal trauma that lead to neurotic symptoms. So you have this delving for hidden desire and the one original source of trauma (this is another major issue with psychoanalysis, the idea that all trauma connects to an original primal trauma), combined with a fixation on the desire for the parent.

Over time techniques and theory have balkanised, so you have people simultaneously seeking desires in the unconscious and refusing to accept the surface level meaning of symptoms and patient communication - while simultaneously latching on to any 'recovered memory' of trauma. This contradiction can motivate patients to perform for their therapists, producing symptoms, dreams, memories etc which explain the 'origin' of issues which may have other causes - from personality disorders to physiological disease, to social contagions.

I think they are saying that belief in repressed memories, to the current extent, are a result of the pendulum swinging too far in the opposite direction of Freuds skepticism and denial.

Things are far less clear cut than you make them out.

Yes, there is good science that shows that eyewitness testimony can be unreliable. There is also some okay science that shows that people can be prompted to create false memories.

However, there is no good science that shows people can be prompted to create false memories of deeply traumatic or personal events such as you are saying. There is definitely no good science showing that recovered memories of traumatic events are more likely to be false than true.

Much of the rhetoric around the potential for falsely recovered memories comes from a foundation that was founded by an alleged abuser and has a loose relationship with scientific truth and a fairly sketchy history of protecting child abusers. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_Memory_Syndrome_Founda...

> there is no good science that shows people can be prompted to create false memories of deeply traumatic or personal events such as you are saying. There is definitely no good science showing that recovered memories are more likely to be false than true.

You're absolutely correct that theres a poverty of experimental research in implanting / recovering memories of sexual abuse. It's difficult to devise experiments with any ecological validity in this area, for obvious reasons. However we have the existence proof of thousands of such allegations proven to be false [1]. For obvious reasons, experimental studies on implanted memories of sexual abuse would be unethical, but less than half of US clinical psychologists believe repressed memories can be recovered accurately, and 95% agree that recovered memories can sometimes be false [2].

While child sexual abuse is horrifically common. Given the age of the victim during the alleged offence, and the delay in recovery, this particular case seems extremely unlikely to be true - in the absence of any collaborating evidence.

> Much of the rhetoric around the potential for falsely recovered memories comes from a foundation that was founded by an alleged abuser and has a loose relationship with scientific truth and a fairly sketchy history of protecting child abusers

I'm much more familiar with the work of Elizabeth Loftus on the construction of memory than I am with any media facing foundation. Her lab research shows it's trivially easy to create memories of early childhood experience - although again, she never researched implanting memories of abuse. She also did some great work on demand characteristics in psychotherapy - i.e.: unconsciously producing behaviour performatively for a therapist, such as symptoms or false memories.

[1] https://www.npr.org/2023/04/18/1170710006/texas-continues-to...

[2] https://www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/false-memories-childhood...

[3] https://webfiles.uci.edu/eloftus/KanterKohlenbergLoftusCogTh...

> However we have the existence proof of thousands of such allegations proven to be false [1]

That's nothing like what is alleged here. A mentally ill mother pressuring a son into giving false testimony is very different from an adult "recovering" a memory.

> Given the age of the victim during the alleged offence, and the delay in recovery, this particular case seems extremely unlikely to be true

Based on what?

> I'm much more familiar with the work of Elizabeth Loftus on the construction of memory than I am with any media facing foundation.

She was recruited as a founding board member of that foundation and makes a lot of money off of the idea of implanting false memories as a expert witness.

> Her lab research shows it's trivially easy to create memories of early childhood experience - although again, she never researched implanting memories of abuse.

Yet she gives expert testimony saying that it is common.

Replication of her work has shown that while yes, some people can have relatively minor memories implanted, like getting lost at a mall, it is much harder or impossible to implant a less plausible memory, such as getting an enema.

If you want to learn more about all this from a different perspective than the one you have now, I recommend this article: https://www.thecut.com/article/false-memory-syndrome-controv...

Wow you really have no way of knowing if it's true at all yet you've got this giant framework that lets you assume she's fabricating it. Yikes.

Family matters can be messy. I have a family member with an alternate reality where our parents never supported her, she had to overcome bad parents. Its a lie. I was there. She just didn’t like them asking her to be responsible. However, I totally could see everyone in her life thinking she came from such an abusive family. Im one of like 4 people on earth that know the truth.

The point is, families can be messy, especially with money involved, so we shouldn’t even try to insert ourselves.

Recovered memories are not a valid source of evidence. We should always presume the accused is innocent, that's the basis of any reliable justice system. Especially when no evidence is presented beyond extremely dubious self report.

Um no we should not presume the accused is innocent; we're not a justice system at all, we're a commentariat. Nor should we presume the accused is guilty; the information we have is precisely what we know, which leaves the question open, and it would be wrong to presume an answer either way. We should assume the accuser has a probability of being correct and not invalidate their claims based on some spurious framework designed to justify doubting them.

Especially not when there's a HUGE and incredibly well-documented pattern of "ignoring accusations of abuse against powerful people" which our society is, like, right in the middle of trying to get better about (while for some reason you are advocating for undoing all that progress?).

> developed in adulthood

Where does it say that in the article you posted?

Probably this, where she is discussing her first memories on a podcast:

> Annie then basically proceeds to mention that “panic attack” doesn’t quite feel like her first memory, but doesn’t decisively settle on a “first memory.” She concludes the article: “TBD on the first memory of that history. Here’s to exploring.”

> This becomes relevant later on, as Annie ends up remembering an earlier memory than her panic attacks—Sam sexually assaulting her.

Her presentation is poor, but it seems pretty clear something terrible happened to her and was invalidated. Her pattern of behavior is consistent with others with major childhood traumas. Most people are not having panic attacks and thinking of killing themselves before elementary school.

Her pattern of behaviour is also consistent with the bpd, which frequently involve delusions of persecution. Suicidal ideation and severe anxiety are unfortunately not rare in adolescence either, and certainly don't evidence sexual abuse - when not reported or remembered at the time.

BPD itself is known to be caused by childhood trauma, though both psychological and physiological mechanisms:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5472954/

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2021.7213...

Not to mention the well-established phenomenon of repressing memories of traumatic events, as well as the general memory impairment effects of chronic stress.

Is your position then that if a pre-adolescent child does not immediately report abuse with objective evidence and coherent testimony that we can only conclude nothing happened?

Section 9.1. "At this point in time [her Dec 2018 podcast with Sam], Annie still has not yet remembered / processed what Sam did to her at age 4."

boy do I need to have a talk with all my trauma patients...

Daniil Khlomov once said, that when a patient talks to him about traumatic scenario from their past, it doesn’t matter if it actually happened or not, the only thing that matters is that the patient wants to discuss this exact scenario.

Hey girl some dude on hacker news says your trauma is fake

Okay this right here is PR.

This is perception management by an oligarch.

I'm readily googleable bub, I have no financial relationship with Open AI. Closest I've come is using the free version of Dall-E.

So let me get this straight, your training as a psychoanalyst qualifies you to discredit a woman's testimony, despite you never having met with her? How wonderful.

By the way, have you read this?

> Today, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) reiterates its continued and unwavering commitment to the ethical principle known as "The Goldwater Rule." We at the APA call for an end to psychiatrists providing professional opinions in the media about public figures whom they have not examined, whether it be on cable news appearances, books, or in social media. Armchair psychiatry or the use of psychiatry as a political tool is the misuse of psychiatry and is unacceptable and unethical.

https://www.psychiatry.org/newsroom/news-releases/apa-calls-...

Just to be clear. I'm not a psychologist or psychoanalyst. I trained as a psychoanalyst (and not in the US) but don't practice. Also to note - the APA don't represent psychologists or psychoanalysts, but rather psychiatrists. Anyone discussing the motivations of any public figure is engaging in armchair psychoanalysis, and although I agree with the premise behind prohibiting professionals from doing so, psychiatrists often do in fact provide professional opinions to the media about people they have not examined (for example diagnosing certain political figures).

In any case, I don't think anyone is qualified to credit or discredit a claim in a medical or psychologically diagnostic sense without a clinical interview (something that few psychiatrists are qualified to perform by the way). That's not what I'm doing here. What I'm pointing out is the unreliability of recovered memory. Specifically someone claiming that they repressed sexual abuse at age 4, for decades, and then remembered it accurately. That's simply not how memory usually works.

> In any case, I don't think anyone is qualified to credit or discredit a claim in a medical or psychologically diagnostic sense without a clinical interview (something that few psychiatrists are qualified to perform by the way). That's not what I'm doing here. What I'm pointing out is the unreliability of recovered memory.

Uh huh... and in another comment in this discussion you've gone on to speculate that she has BPD, with the implication that her accusations shouldn't be believed for that reason.

It would be consistent with motivating the confused cognition (e.g.: her rambling and contradictory statements in the article linked by OP), and producing false or disingenuous allegations. However so could lots of other things. My point wasn't to diagnose this person, but to make clear "it seems pretty clear something terrible happened to her and was invalidated" is a dubious rationale for believing any kind of allegation.

Ah yes, the woman who provided paid testimony on behalf of Ghislaine Maxwell, Harvey Weinstein, OJ Simpson, Robert Durst, among others.

Who better to invoke to smear another insufficiently diabolical human?

https://lawandcrime.com/live-trials/ghislaine-maxwell/false-...

edit: If you want to get a clearer (or fuzzier) picture of this career expert witness, this piece in the New Yorker is fascinating:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/04/05/how-elizabeth-...

> , among others.

Which includes the Duke Lacrosse players -- who were actually innocent.

I read the (long!) New Yorker article and I was left with three impressions: psychologists and their families are really weird people, I don't like her as a person, and she is right that memories aren't very reliable.

> Which includes the Duke Lacrosse players -- who were actually innocent.

She did say she takes every case (although she drew the line at a Nazi). Memory is unreliable, but it’s tough to argue that was the issue in the lacrosse case.

Leveraging that against a person who is risking everything to get justice against a person in power is a lot to put on them. Preventing that pressure opens up a way for manipulators to get through. Gödel probably has something to say about all that.

As an aside it’s interesting that in specific comments referencing the recent Altman events I have been repeatedly downvoted to -3.