Response: The Dilemma of Validation

There is widespread agreement in the scientific community on a number of facts out memory. It is clear that what is stored in the mind concerning events we have experienced is fragmentary, and that reconstructive processes operate at the time of recall. These reconstructive processes serve to fill out the narrative by inserting routine items which had not been stored at the time (such as the addition of milk to coffee in our memory of yesterday's breakfast), but could also incorporate information from the record of another, similar, event or, possibly, from something read or seen or even imagined. Next time we try to recall the event, it will rarely be possible for us to distinguish between elements which were present in the original and those which were imported during the previous recall.

Given these properties of our cognitive system, it is not surprising that there is agreement that it is possible for suggestible patients to be led to believe falsely that they were sexually abused in childhood. The relevant question concerns the conditions under which this could occur. Lindsay and Read (1994) said in a recent comprehensive review:

There is little reason to fear that a few suggestive questions will lead psychotherapy clients to conjure up vivid and compelling illusory memories of childhood sexual abuse. (p. 294)

However, it is agreed that sustained pressure by an authority figure on a susceptible person would be likely to lead to false beliefs. It is also agreed that use of techniques such as hypnosis could lead to confusion as to whether the source of a particular thought was reality or imagination.

The scenario characteristic of the recovered memory debate is that an adult in their thirties or forties, in therapy for some reason (the reasons most commonly mentioned are depression, sexual dysfunction or eating disorder), comes to believe that they had been sexually abused as a child by their father. As an illustration, I will summarize a case which was brought to co