True Believers

Sceptics

Most persons who are seeking attention by saying that they have been sexually abused have Borderline and related Personality Disorder

Most persons who are seeking attention by saying that they have been sexually abused have Borderline and related Personality Disorder and multiple problems

Borderline Personality Disorder is actually complex Posttraumatic Stress Disorder caused by repressed memories of CSA.

People with Borderline and related Personality Disorders have a disturbance of inner life and perception and are likely to perceive themselves as victims and report having been sexually and otherwise abused.

Borderline Personality Disorder has some features on common with Posttraumatic Stress Disorder so they must have a common cause: traumatic stress

Symptom similarity has no relationship to causation. It is illogical to reason from effect to cause as any effect can have any number of causes.

Borderline Personality Disorder is caused by CSA. 

No one has demonstrated a causal link between proved sexual abuse to Personality problems in later life. .

CSA has been repressed so it cannot b  e recalled but it manifests in the Personality and in life

Preoccupation with sexual and other abuse is a manifestation of Borderline and similar Personality Disorders where disturbances of perception and inner life are prominent

Therapists treat 'memories'

The diagnosis of false belief states is not in the repertoire of counsellors and psychologists.

Up to 90% of Borderlines (Cluster B Personality Disorder) in clinical populations have a history of child sexual abuse.

In the early 1980s, about 10% of such patients gave a history of CSA; in the late 1990s the number giving this history has risen to 90%.

We rely on clinical experience, and believe what our patients tell us

So did Freud until he stopped, having gained insight into how he was encouraging these improbable disclosures.

Reports of CSA are the equivalent of instances of CSA

No one has tried to validate these reports nor interview relatives nor assess the credibility of the patients.

Provide sufficient recognition cues  and you will overcome resistance to remembering.

Repeated suggestive questioning can result in very vivid memories which are false but which are still believed.

Children, like torture victims, teach themselves to dissociate while they are being sexually abused and this leads to repression and not remembering it.

Dissociation occurs during the 'remembering' not during sexual abuse, nor is dissociating a plausible explanation for forgetting it happened,

People who have been abused show it in their lives and are now seeking help for it as patients.

People who seek therapy for past sexual abuse have many problems of living.

Neither incidence nor prevalence of having been abused is known and, on some estimates, by some criteria, range between 3% and 60% of the community.

Neither incidence nor prevalence of having been abused is known and, on some estimates, by some criteria, range between 3% and 60% of the community.

At a prevalence of 3–5%, one child in a class of thirty will be abused in childhood.

Agreed: One child in a class of thirty represents a big problem and it demands huge resources.

Therapists doing memory work in the USA have over a million women per year reporting that they were abused. This involves an incidence of one family in 25.

Reports of CSA are not the same as instances of CSA. The incidence of reports correlates to the number of available therapists.

25% of post doctoral therapists in USA believe that memory is stored and will replay like a video.  They encourage their patients' memories in accordance with that belief.

Reports of events which read like stage directions for a video are fabrications and elaborations, not memories which are far less detailed, and confused in sequence.

Sexual abuse sets up new rules for memory.

No reason why this should be so. This is special pleading to explain that 'memories' of sexual abuse are different from all other memories.

Memory functions differently for sexual abuse. It is something else entirely: traumatic memory: Sexual abuse is remembered through different pathways from other kinds of memories

There is no reason to suspect this. Memory research reveals that children who witness rape, suicide, and violence do not forget those traumas. Some forget or fail to recall significant parts of real traumas, but one cannot assume a trauma because of the absence of a memory of it.

Memories of sexual abuse are true and recalled in substantial detail.

Memory is frail, unreliable, fades with time and is extremely vulnerable to suggestion

Never mind the context in which these memories emerged, or the events that triggered remembering

Context and subsequent development are crucial as they enable psychiatric diagnosis, identify contamination, suggestion, hysterical contagion and motivation

What emerges in therapy is a previously repressed 'memory'

Anything we say is prefixed with "I know' or 'I remember'

Traumatic events are robustly repressed each time they happen, even if they occur many times

No experimental evidence available to support this nor could one devise an experiment to differentiate repression from ordinary forgetting

The fact that memory was repressed because the event was so traumatic that the patient dissociated at the time of these horrid events

Dissociation, an hysterical phenomenon, is at the base of remembering Studies of hypnotism, trance-mediumship, multiple personality, hysteria, brain disorders, epilepsy and psychosis reveal that memory associated with these states is qualitatively different from that found in laboratory studies of healthy individuals.

Sexual abuse can be forgotten or not given consideration and later recalled. The rate of forgetting genuine abuse is in the order of 12%  of validated cases.

Sexual abuse, just like any other event, can be forgotten or recalled. The rate of forgetting genuine abuse is in the order of 12% of validated cases.

Is it a true or a false memory?

It is rarely even 'memory,' It is better defined as a 'belief state'

What emerges in therapy is repressed or forgotten material, of which the patient was either unaware or was not fully cognisant of its role in her life

'Pseudo memories' include beliefs based on fantasy , information from another person, scenarios borrowed from television, films and books; the products of guided imagining, delusions, dreams and nightmares; elaborations engendered by therapeutic processes or by hypnosis or trance in a process known as 'hypnotic pseudomemory production' inadvertently done by therapists; indoctrination, inserted memories, mystical experiences, oedipal fantasies, plausible explanations, reconstructed scenarios and unverified conclusions achieved by short-circuiting in panic situations, suggestion and lying for money

Money and Criminal injuries compensation are irrelevant as motivating forces as the claimant is entitled to compensation

There are no more disinterested complainants. Money, revenge, an explanation for one's predicament and the desire to belong to a social movement are all strong motivating forces. Belief is governed by desire and reason is, and ought to be, a slave of the passions.

CSA inevitably causes serious harm to personality development.

 25–50% of sexually abused children suffer no coincident effects. Effects of sexual abuse cannot be distinguished from abuse and neglect which co-exist

Sexually abused children need therapy to help them recover.

Abused children who have therapy fare  worse on many indicators than those who are left alone.

Trauma therapy for sexual abuse is necessary to assist recovery after traumatic events.

Those who get trauma therapy display more morbidity measured as time off work, continuing symptoms and delayed recovery. While patients like therapy, it is, at best, value-neutral.

Sexual abuse of children was thought to be rare but memory therapists have uncovered a massive hidden epidemic involving one family in twenty-five each year.

The sexual abuse epidemic is a cultural artefact caused by counting reports of abuse as instances of abuse and rewarding those who remember abuse with money, fame and unlimited attention.

CSA is very common and incest can occur in seemingly normal families.

CSA is rare, comprising 3% of the spectrum of abuse and neglect.

Untrue and implausible memories are a consequence of bad therapy

Untrue memories are an artefact of hypnotic trance formation in therapy and suggestion which comes from culture, the vector of beliefs.

Good therapists only get only true material and true memories

What is good therapy and what benefits are reported from it?

Only bad therapists cause their patients to generate false memories

Numerous retractors, now litigants claim to have been virtually hypnotised into developing false memories by the leaders of the recovered memory movement

70% of patients in therapy for recovered memory were able to get corroboration for their experiences

A report by the person whose information is to be corroborated to the effect that a third party said something is neither evidence in science nor corroboration in law. Corroboration involves a second, report, independently provided

The accuser is to be believed, protected from character questioning and encouraged with monetary compensation.  The accused is guilty until proved otherwise.

The presumption of innocence, the null hypothesis, is paramount. Sexual charges should stand up to falsification like any other crimes.

CSA can be diagnosed from behavioural signs, play therapy, the abused child syndrome, and other behavioural characteristics

These are no more than witches marks and, where they have investigated, have repeatedly been shown to be invalid

Child abuse is easily substantiated. DOCS substantiated 2,640 cases in 1999 in NSW

The best anyone can do without an convincing and spontaneous report from a child, and without physical evidence or confession is to hold a hypothesis to the effect that CSA might have taken place. This is different from 'substantiation'.

Sexual abusers of children are evil criminal persons who need to be identified and punished.

Most paedophilic crimes are carried out by a small group of multiple offenders, with a hard wired sexual preference for children and treat them with affection.

Sexual abusers of children can be normal persons,  so no one is above suspicion.

Perpetrators of CSA who are not preferential paedophiles have abnormal personalities high levels of psychopathy alcoholism and might need professional help

Let the jury decide if the allegations are true or false

Relevant experts should examine the evidence to see if there is a false belief state or if hysterical phenomena account for the material.

CSAAS, child sexual abuse accommodation syndrome accounts for true remembering of real events and then denying these true memories again

Karl Popper would say that this is an unfalsifiable hypothesis, so it is nonsense. There is no possibility of denying a sexual abuse allegation after it has surfaced.

Claimants were awarded tens of thousands of dollars in compensation for having been abused.

Accused persons are being awarded millions in compensation for having had their lives and families destroyed by false memories, clinically-implanted or therapeutically-enhanced.

A thin person sees and herself as fat.

Beliefs which crystallise out of a confusing situation or mental state,  often the mechanism of false confessions in interrogation.

One has lived before in different personae.

A strong belief that a part of the body is abnormal, unresponsive to reason.

Personality Disorders are characterised by a disturbance in inner life and systematic distortions of perception and self-presentation.

Paranoid and Schizotypal personality disorders are most likely to be involved.

The paranoid believes in the untoward intentions of others as a matter of course, See also erotomanic beliefs and delusions which are a manifestation of paranoia.

Suspicious of others' motives, likely to draw idiosyncratic conclusions from events and signs. Communicates with spirits in an altered mode of consciousness, senses a presence.

Antisocial, Borderline, Histrionic, Narcissistic.

Anxious, concerned, and nervous, she presents herself as victimised, manipulated, coerced, and physically or psychologically abused. May be organised intellectually, assertive, with a justified agenda with facts, figures, and opinions supporting her evidence, presenting herself as justifiably outraged. However, when clarification is sought on the details, becomes hostile, passively-aggressive and may make ethical complaints or threaten suit.

Highly dysfunctional, likely to misinterpret or misremember social interactions, lie manipulatively and convincingly, and enter  destructive sexual relationships, possibly even at young ages. May lose contact with reality and  prone to psychotic episodes, often unrecognised. May be most readily identified by bizarre descriptions of many events in her history.

Entitled, complain that they are mistreated, not recognised, take what they want, override ordinary rules, indulge in grandiose fantasies and exaggerate their achievements with little concern for the truth. They will exploit. Prone to pseudologia fantastica.

When alcoholic, brain-damaged and developmentally disabled persons fill in memory gaps with plausible scenarios and .

Temporary state caused by misinformation or misinterpretation which might persist if uncorrected.

Mistaken but tightly held beliefs about non existent disease causing symptoms.

A sense of familiarity with a strange place.

Beliefs inconsistent with culture, firmly held in the teeth of evidence to the contrary.

Recurrent or persistent belief that a significant other is unfaithful.

Misremembering the past in accordance with present delusional state. Also called retrospective delusion.

Misinterpretation of real events in accordance with delusions.

Belief and behaviour in accordance with ideas transmitted by hypnosis or suggestion. Are easily generated in therapy. See Sybil.

Inter-related false, plausible non bizarre beliefs. 'Just knowing' something to be the case without being able to provide a source.

Involves false beliefs about the erotic desires and intentions of others, that another is secretly in love but cannot reveal it.

Shared beliefs where dominant partner's influence is strong, sometimes psychotic, sometimes malevolent. Provides the basis of the 'parental alienation syndrome' associated with divorce

On the borderline between hysteria and malingering, understanding but missing. For example, two and two are five.

Unvalidated belief states achieved in a panic situation by short circuiting of reasoning.

Unvalidated beliefs which short-circuit of reasoning to explain ambiguous phenomena

Several sharing unvalidated beliefs where each gets validation from another which are

An intense feeling of familiarity with a scene and conviction that one has been there before, typically post epileptic.

A belief acquired though acceptance of a mistaken source

Belief that a significant other is unfaithful.  Often psychotic

Fabricated stories about self or one child being a vctim of abuse, usually palyed for pity..

Belief that one has many alternate personalities, unaware of each other and many different lives

An intense sensation of grandeur, importance, often associated with psychotropic drugs.

Bizarre delusions for more than six months in a psychotic individual.

Tendency to perceive events as relating to the self, in a negative way, but might be imputing 'significance' to the self.

Story–telling, not improbable, built upon a matrix of truth, enduring, not told for personal profit but self-aggrandising. Distinct from delusions as the person can acknowledge falsehoods.

A strong belief that one has a disease in the absence of evidence.

Trance-induced dissociative state for a specific purpose.

Confusional state caused by fever, psychotropic drugs or toxins.

The belief that one's sex was incorrectly assigned at birth, associated with action on this belief