Publishers Review | SF Chronicle Review | Kirkus Review | San Jose Mercury Detroit Free Press F A L S E  M E M O R Y  S Y N D R O M E  F O U N D A T I O N June 1997 'Vol.6 No.6 Spectral Evidence chronicles what may someday be considered one or the most influential legal cases in the history of psychiatry. In Ramona v.Isabella et al, a father, Gary Ramona, successfully sued two therapists and a hospital on the charge of implanting false memories of childhood sexual abuse in the mind of his daughter, Holly. From the outset of her book, Moira Johnston catches the seismic implications of the trial: "The rare act of granting a third party-not a patient-the right to sue a therapist was a chilling warning to the entire profession of psychotherapy. If Gary Ramona won it would be a surgical strike to the heart of the international recovered memory movernent; it would Open the flood-gates to lawsuits and force public scrutiny of, and perhaps wrenching change in, one of the most potent forces in American culture, the "talking cure." The ghosts of Freud and the founding fathers of psychoanalysis would also sit on the defendants' bench:' (p.1) But whatever its historic significance, Rarnona was also the story of a prominent family shattered by the effects of "recovered memories:' Gary had been a wealthy and successfull business man, stably married for more than 20 years, with three apparently happy daughters Then the eldest, Holly, began to develop bulimia nervosa (the syndrome of binge eating and vomiting) in high school. After Holly was in college, she started to see a Master's level therapist and within months she began to have "flash-backs" of her father sexually abusing her, She entered the hospital for an Amytal interview. mistakenly believing that Amytal was a "truth serum" that would help to confirm the truth of her "memories:' And then, in a family meeting organized by her therapist, she confronted her unsuspecting father with the allegation that he had raped her. The next three years saw high legal drama and mounting human tragedy,as the most intimate details of the Ramona family were bared in legal depositions court appearances, and the media. Stephanie Ramona, convinced that her daughter's "memories" must be true, promptly served divorce papers on her husband. Holly brought a lawsuit against her father for the alleged sexual abuse. As time went by, she even recovered new "memories" that her father had orally, anally, and vaginally raped her up to the age of 16, and had even forced her to have sex with Prince, the family dog. All of these memories, she believed, had been repressed from her consciousness for years before she started psychotherapy. Meanwhile, Gary made numerous efforts to talk with Holly and with her therapists. He tried to arrange for family meetings. He even offered to take Amytal himself to show that he was telling the truth. But all of his attempts failed. Finally, after many long discussions, he decided to sue the therapists for malpractice, as the only way to clear his name. I remember those discussions, because I served as an advisor to Gary, and subsequently to his legal team. Having been a player in the case, I obviously cannot pretend to be a cornpletely dispassionate reviewer of Spectral Evidence. But on the other hand, I witnessed firsthand many of the scenes that Johnston brings to life in her book. And even I had forgotten the full measure of human tragedy that she so vividly portrays, as the case worked its way through innumerable legal wranglings, into the courtroom, into the newspapers, and eventually onto the major television networks and even the BBC World News. Johnston takes pains, I believe, to tell the story in a neutral fashion, never passing judgment on the truth or falsehood of a given observer's version of the story. Typically. she lets a "single eye describe the scene:" "When the story arrives at an event that has high significance for Stephanie, I let her tell it. I let Gary tell his most powerful moments....what emerges for the reader, then, is the story like the one the jury heard, seven weeks of opposing truths. half of which had to be untrue or only partly true." (p.401) Nevertheless, as Johnston draws the parallel between Ramona and the Salem witch trials, where "spectral evidence" justified the hanging of innocent people, one cannot miss her skepticism about the validity of "recovered memories" as evidence for legal accusations. And on the question of whether a third party should be allowed to sue a therapist--a question hotly debated since the Ramona victory--Johnston's sympathies seem to favor the rights of accused fathers like Gary Ramona. In any event, whether or not one agrees with these positions, Spectral Evidence is mandatory reading for anyone lay or professional, who has been touched by the "memory war's." You cannot hear this story without being moved by the private tragedy of this family and the public implications of a case that will continue to reverberate in legal and scientific debates for years to come. Harrison C Pope, Jr;, M.D., is Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and a member of the Professional Advisory Board of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation. A consultant to Gary Ramona legal team, Dr.Pope has written a scienrific article on the case ("Recovered memory" therapy for eating disorders: implications of the Ramona verdict. co-authored with James Hudson, M.D.. International Journal of Eating Disorders, 19: 139-145.1996).
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