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Comment by mcpackieh | Hacker News Reader

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-...

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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.

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