Victims, courts, academics debate truth of recovered memories in abuse cases.

When 34-year-old Steven Cook dropped a civil suit against Cardinal Joseph Bernardin of Chicago in late February, it made headlines all over the country. The suit alleged that Bernardin had seduced Cook when he was a high-school student considering entering the seminary Cook said he was no longer sure his memories of the alleged abuse were reliable

The memories had emerged during and after hyphotherapy sessions Cook undertook to relieve stress connected with AIDS But during discovery, Cook's legal team found evidence that the hypnosis process could have been contaminated--evidence bearing on the reliability of the memories and their admissibility. Cook and the team decided it would be unethical to proceed.

Cook's suit is one of many recent cases where adults (usually women) have accused teachers, family members, or other caretakers of abusing them sexually when they were children. Most authorities agree that the great majority of these charges are valid. (See Miriam Horn, Memories Lost and Found, U.S. News & World Rep., Nov. 29,1993, at 52.)

But sometimes the charges raise questions. In some cases, the allegations are based on memories that were lost for years but returned when the victims went into therapy or when the memory was triggered by a similar event. In a few cases, the memories were midwifed using novel or controversial techniques like massage, sodium amytal ("truth serum") sessions, hypnosis, or regression (which uses hypnosis to put adults in an infant state of mind and make them believe they are experiencing earlier events). In rare cases, the memories have included elaborately costumed, apparently satanist rituals.

Counselor credentials may raise questions, too. Many states have strict licensing requirements for psychiatrists and psychologists but do not require counselors or therapists to have any particular training.

The loss of memory of traumatic events is variously called repression, suppression, denial, dissociation, and selective amnesia. The concept that the mind has a mechanism for burying painful or shameful memories, which nevertheless influence the traumatized person and can be recovered later, was first put forward by pioneering theorist Sigmund Freud a century ago.

The theory's validity is being hotly debated, in both the legal and the therapeutic communities. For example, doubters may accept that specific incidents were forgotten, but they question how victims could blank out long-standing patterns of abuse. ( See Lucy Berliner & Elizabeth Loftus, Sexual Abuse Accusations, 7 J. Interpersonal Violence 570 (1992).)

Psychiatrist Lenore Terr, a San Francisco medical school professor, says that children commonly suppress memories of painful and incomprehensible events. Children may dissociate (feel detatched) during bizarre experiences. In some cases, they may separate the "bad" part of themselves, to which they assign the abuse, into a separate personality. Later they may suffer post-traumatic stress disorder, which often involves memory disturbances. (See Judith Herman, Tauma and Recovery (1992).)

Evidence of child abuse is often difficult to uncover. Rarely are there direct witnesses; often perpetrators intimidate their victims into silence. When memories of childhood abuse return in adulthood, it is even harder to corroborate the long-ago events. Physical evidence may have vanished; witnesses may have forgotten.

But some victims seek legal recourse. A widely circulated 1988 self-help book by Ellen Bass and Laura Davis, The Courage to Heal, suggests bringing civil suits against molesters to deter them from future abuse and defray therapy costs. Civil suits also avoid the heavy burden of proofin criminal cases.

Suits based on recovered memories may encounter statute-of:limitations problems. Traditionally, victims had to file charges soon after they reached legal majority. But those with repressed memories may not know they were abused until much later. Advocates argued that these statutes denied victims their fundamental Fourteenth Amendment right to equal protection. Those accused argued that setting the statutes aside violated their due process rights. Some courts have ruled that these statutes are primarily administrative and that the victims, right to their day in court takes precedence. (See, e,g., Cosgriffe v. Cosgriffe, 864 P.2d 776 (Mont. Ct. App. 1993).)

At least 23 states have revised their statutes of limitations in recent years, adopting a "delayed discovery" doctrine. The limitations clock doesn't begin to run until the victim discovers the harm by remembering the abuse or by recognizing that other problems, like drug abuse, grew out of it.

This change has enabled some victims to bring successful civil suits. In Doe v. Hood, for example, an Ohio woman won substantial damages from her uncle for abuse from ages 3 to 11. The plaintiff had repressed the memory of the abuse for almost 20 years. She brought suit a year after she remembered. The court held that the statute of limitations was suspended during the amnesia. (No. CV89-12-4048 (Ohio, Summit County Ct. Common Pleas Aug. 3, 1992).)

Other suits have failed. In Vaughn v. Gardner, the plaintiff never forgot the years of abuse by her stepfather but did not recognize its connection to her physical and emotional distress until she went into therapy. The court held the delayed discovery doctrine inapplicable because the plaintiff always knew of the past acts. (231 Cal. App. 3d 268 (1991) (review denied) . )

Backlash

The stigma of being a child abuser is great, and those accused of it fight back hard. Most claim their accusers are deluded, lying, or trying to blackmail them. They may say the memories are due to suggestive, sloppy, or misleading questioning by social workers, police interrogators, or one-track therapists who think that incest is the root of all psychological ills.

These arguments can be effective in court. In Mateu v. Hagen, a Seattle woman lost a civil suit against her mother's former boyfriend for molesting her. The court accepted the defense argument that unconventional techniques--psychodrama, hypnosis, and age regression--that had been used to help her retrieve memories could have reshaped or implanted the memories. (No. 91-208053-4 (Wash., King County Super. Ct. June 9, 1993).)

Those accused of abuse may counter sue. In Ramona v. Isabella, a California man is suing the hospital therapists who helped his bulimic daughter recover memories of abuse. After her hospital stay, she confronted and then sued her father. His wife divorced him, and he lost his job. He has accused the therapists of destroying his reputation and breaking up his family. The trial was in progress at press time. (No. 61898 (Cal., Napa County Super. Ct. filed Mar. 14, 1991) . )

Sometimes the backlash includes patients who believe their "memories" were suggested by therapists. In recent Kansas City cases, three patients sued a clinic for negligent supervision of a therapist who persuaded them inaccurately that they had been molested as children. (Staggs v. Matrix, No. CV86-20779 (Mo., Jackson County Cir. Ct. filed Aug.22,1986) and Jester v. Matrix, No. CV89-029236 (Mo., Jackson County Cir. Ct. filed Nov. 17, 1989).)

Their lawyer, Sidney Willens, said implanting false memories is apparently easier than he ever imagined before litigating these cases. "Hypnotism tied to regression therapy distorts reality; it can turn therapists into surrogate parents and patients into children." He said the clinic used "reparenting," a cantroversial offshoot of a school of therapy named Transactional Analysis that was founded by Eric Berne. Willens said reparenting creates total dependency on the therapist, with "regressed" adults sucking baby bottles and wearing diapers.

Willens believes false memories are spawning witch hunts. "Brainwashed adult children are accusing innocent parents and grandparents of childhood molestations that are as real to the accusers as Halloween goblins are to children," he said.

Controversy Among Academics

Recovered memories have also come under fire in academic circles. Elizabeth Loftus, a professor of psychology and law at the University of Washington in Seattle, said some victims have been misled by ill-trained therapists who asked leading questions and used untrustworthy techniques that can easily implant false memories. Loftus believes that many people are so suggestible that their memories are inherently untrustworthy.

Another skeptic, U.C. Berkeley sociologist Richard Ofshe, has argued that some "victims" are carried away by religious beliefs and popular books like Michelle Remebers, a 1980 book by Michelle Smith and Lawrence Pazder describing a childhood of sexually abusive satanic rituals. (See Lawrence Wright, Remembering Satan, New Yorker, May 17, 1993, at 60, and May 24, 1993, at 54.)

Judie Alpert, a psychology professor at New York University with a private clinical practice, said academics like Loftus and Ofshe are comparing apples and oranges experimental and clinical data. Researchers cannot ethically traumatize experimental subjects to see what they are going to remember about the trauma later. Normal memory may not be recorded or retrieved like traumatic memory forged in terror, shame, or pain.

Traumatized people--shell-shocked war veterans, hurricane and flood victims, plane crash survivors, torture victims, concentration-camp survivors-have been studied. These studies show that selective amnesia is a fairly common response to trauma. ( See Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery 33 (1992).)

Sexual abuse has been shown to have this effect. In a recent study of 100 women who had been treated at a city hospital in childhood for sexual abuse, over a third said they had no memory of the event. ( See Linda Meyer Williams, Adult Memories of Childhood Abuse: Preliminary Findings from a Longitudinal Study, APSAC Advisor, Summer 1992, at 19.)

The American Psychiatric Association, the American Psychological Association, and the Society of Forensic Hypnotists are all working on new guidelines to ensure that questioners do not inadvertently suggest answers. Terr serves on the psychiatry working group, Loftus and Alpert on the psychology group.

Thus far, the debate over recovered memories shows no signs of abating.