Childhood Sexual Abuse and Psychotherapy Memories

The movie "reality" has been transposed to real-life. For about a decade, a lot of legal cases were re-opened, accusing people, which were often convicted, on the basis of "recovered memories."

These memories, a recollection of childhood abuse, are ripped off many years after the event occurred, during intensive psychotherapy sessions. But the accuracy of the "recovered memories" is still a vivid debate in the domains of psychology and psychiatry.

Dr. Elke Geraerts, a psychologist at Harvard University and Maastricht University, the Netherlands, has made a large-scale investigation on the validity of these memories. These memories can hardly be taken as real for several motifs, the most important of which is the fact that the people who hold them are deeply convinced of their authenticity.

That's why Geraerts's team has tried to corroborate the memories with external sources.

The team selected a sample of volunteers who reported being sexually abused as children and assigned them to different categories based on how they recalled the event, as either "spontaneously recovered" (the subject had forgotten and then spontaneously remembered the abuse without therapy), "recovered in therapy" (the subjects had remembered the abuse by therapy employing suggestion) or "continuous" (the subject had never forgotten the abuse).

The interviewers, without knowing the subjects' categories, appealed to other people who could confirm or refute the abuse events (they had heard about the abuse soon after its occurrence, or were victims of the same perpetrator, or the abuser confessed his deeds to them).

The spontaneously recovered memories (37 %) were almost as accurate as continuous memories (45%) were. But memories which were recovered in therapy did not corroborate at all. These memories are not necessarily false, but they must be viewed with a careful eye, as "the therapy context often involves an explicit effort to unearth forgotten memories and thereby raises the opportunity for suggestion."