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Frederick Crews's Letter: (*Note: only the first paragraph was published in CJR. Professor Crews is the author of Memory Wars) Letter to the Editor Columbia Journalism Review Pretending to be a call for journalistic balance, Mike Stanton's "U-Turn on Memory Lane" is in fact a hit piece abounding in slurs, vicious innuendoes, and large and small misrepresentations. Underlying the whole shameful performance are two principles that your readers may hesitate to embrace: first, the McCarthyite assumption that if many are accused, many must be guilty; and second, the resentful partisan's assumption that only the machinations of a pressure group can account for the public's abandonment of his favorite cause. The False Memory Syndrome Foundation has indeed played a role in promoting wariness of therapeutically "recovered memory," but it has done little more than publicize an emerging legal and scientific consensus that Stanton willfully beclouds. I became alarmed by Stanton's evident bias when he interviewed me by phone on August 7, 1996. Here is part of what I faxed him the following day, without receiving a reply: 1. I have reread my letter to Newsweek, and I stand by every word of it. It is patently not an attempt at censorship; indeed, it explicitly disavows any intent to kill Katy Butler's article-in-progress. What I did was to call for editorial alertness to issues that, I worried, might not get adequately treated in Butler's yet-to-be-submitted draft. In a word, I was asking Newsweek to make sure that whatever it published would match the current state of scientific awareness about recovered memory. This was clearly meant as a public service. I hope I need not admonish you to avoid misportraying my actions and motives. 2. Since you have that letter to Newsweek in your possession, I urge you to study it, because it makes a crucial point that I evidently failed to articulate to you convincingly on the phone. This is that the existence of corroborated recovered memories, such as Ross Cheit's, is not germane to the central issue in the recovered memory debate--namely, whether belatedly acquired "memories" that are (a) contradictory to the subject's whole previous sense of his/her childhood, (b) inconsistent with the impressions of other family members, (c) acquired in therapy under techniques of hypnosis or trancelike "relaxation," and/or (d) inherently implausible (sadistic woundings without scarring, incest without a ruptured hymen, etc.) deserve to be afforded the same forensic status as observed or continuously recalled acts by an accused child abuser. Ross Cheit's memory of abuse belongs to none of these four categories. 3. On the phone, you spoke of incest memories as possessing greater inherent plausibility than memories of Satanic ritual abuse. It is hard to disagree, since no Satanic cults have been found anywhere, whereas incest is tragically common. But as I failed to make sufficiently clear, you are very drastically missing the point, which is that the memories of Satanism are generated by exactly the same investigative techniques as the memories of incest "recovered" in psychotherapy. The very fact that those techniques produce patent absurdities ought to make you cautious about assuming that the less manifestly absurd charges bear a claim on our credence. Indeed, perhaps the most scandalous aspect of many convictions in recovered memory and day care cases is that prosecutors cynically lop off the outlandish allegations and get defendants sent off to prison on the "plausible" ones--knowing full well that the accuser is mentally unstable or mendacious and capable of "remembering" anything that comes to mind. If you fail to take into account the difference in credibility between always remembered events and visualizations stimulated under therapy, and if you then treat the "therapeutically accused" as standing under grave suspicion until proven innocent, you will be contributing to the perpetuation of a vicious epidemic. 4. I gather that you share Ross Cheit's view that all charges of sexual abuse deserve to be investigated in depth. Once a person has been publicly accused, that is obviously the only proper way to proceed. But I don't think that you have grasped just how damaging it is for someone to be falsely and publicly accused on the basis of "recovered memory" alone. In speaking with you, I got the impression that you see the therapeutically accused as a blend of the innocent and the guilty (perhaps 50--50%?) and that the cause of justice requires vigorous investigation of each and every case. The problem with that attitude is that it does nothing to prevent the generating of endless new charges against the innocent. We find ourselves today in exactly the same situation as the Massachusetts authorities who stood by while the "witches" were being executed in 1692--until finally the outrageousness of the whole procedure overwhelmed them, and they called a halt to it. That is what needs to be done, and is gradually being done through the courts, as I write. And this development merits your applause as a citizen who adheres to the idea that solid evidence rather than folkloric "science" ought to govern the pursuit of justice. It doesn't mean that we are going soft on "perpetrators." Quite the contrary: only when the madness of therapy-induced "memories" is curbed can full attention be given to the clear and present horror of child abuse. Frederick Crews Professor Emeritus, Department of English, UC Berkeley
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