The recovered memory / false memory debate
Elizabeth Loftus has been an active participant in controversies over memory since the last decades of the 20th century, known as the recovered memory / false memory debate, or as the "Memory Wars" (as in the title of the book The Memory Wars).
Loftus was a member of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation Scientific Advisory Board. She along with Peter Freyd, Pamela Freyd and the False Memory Syndrome Foundation have argued that there is sufficient experimental evidence that people distort their memories, that human memory is not usually faithful to objective facts, and that false memories can be implanted in other people through suggestion and recovered-memory therapy. Thus, the memories of childhood abuse that people recover in psychotherapy, and which are sometimes presented in court, may be false memories. While memory distortion is described as a universal human experience, Loftus has specialized in serving as a defense witness for over 300 accused murderers, rapists, and child abusers.
Other scholars and specialists including Bessel van der Kolk, Lenore Terr, Jennifer Freyd and Linda Williams argue that there are well-documented cases of forgetting and later remembering traumatic events that occurred during childhood or adulthood by people in both clinical and non-clinical populations.
Elizabeth Loftus has argued that the concept of memory inhibition or repression is inadequate and that there is no such thing as repressed and later recovered memories of traumatic events. Loftus criticizes recovered-memory therapy and in particular Freud's psychoanalysis for spreading these inadequate concepts.
Richard McNally argues that forgetting of childhood abuse events can be explained by other factors such as ordinary forgetting or nondisclosure and that the theory of a motivational mechanism for forgetting (repression) is unnecessary.
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5) and the Eleventh revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11) do not use the concept of repression but that of dissociative amnesia. Dissociative amnesia is the forgetfulness due to psychological causes, including stress, of certain autobiographical events, which can cover short or long periods. The DSM-5 includes dissociative amnesia as a disorder (a clinical syndrome) and also as a symptom (among others) of post-traumatic stress disorder as these events have been reliably witnessed and studied.
In 1977 Florence Rush argued that Freud's theory about the Oedipus complex was created to cover up real cases of sexual abuse committed by adults against children. According to this, Freud changed his initially posited seduction theory because he wanted to hide the reality of the traumas that his patients would have suffered. In 1984 Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson published The Assault on Truth, where, like Rush, he argues that Freud covered up the reality of sexual abuse.
Drawing on Rush and Masson, Susie Orbach argues that Freud replaced his theory of seduction and childhood sexual trauma with the theory of the Oedipus complex. Freud changed his views and decided that his patients' memories of sexual abuse were actually imaginary, neurotic fantasies of unrealized events and Oedipal wishes. This change in Freudian theory was criticized by Sandor Ferenczi and John Bowlby among other mental health specialists.
Phil Mollon claims that Freud was ahead of his time and that the new findings on false memory syndrome confirm the claims Freud made a century ago about imaginary memories. However, there has been no meaningful confirmation of the existence of a clinical syndrome tied to false memories.
On the other hand, in addition to Elizabeth Loftus, several reputable modern psychologists and psychiatrists, including Ulric Neisser, Julia Shaw and Daniel Schacter agree that human memory is usually not true to the facts.
The book edited by Robert Belli True and False Recovered Memories. Toward a Reconciliation of the Debate (2012) tries to make a synthesis that takes into account the part of truth and reason that both parts have in the debate.
