by Hugh Manatee Wins » Fri Oct 27, 2006 5:18 am
Elizabeth Loftus is one of the psychologists supporting the False Memory Syndrome Foundation.<br><br>In fact, she's one the FMSF's key specialists and a Mockingbird celebrity shrink.<br><br>For some reason, Loftus doesn't remember her childhood before age eight. I think she found her mother dead in the family pool. Odd case herself and she brings it to prominent cases of child abuse, too. She's had counter-suits against her for meddling in cases.<br><br>Here is Loftus' own memory trauma history from the article below-<br>"Elizabeth Loftus' mother drowned when Elizabeth was 14. Elizabeth kept a diary before that terrible day and after. The diary reveals a child who is desperately hurt but believes that one day she will get past missing her mother. She has not.<br><br>It is, she believes, what fuels her own workaholism and her desire, sometimes, to see shattered families made whole. To this day, she cannot mention her mother without tears. Loftus, the memory whiz, says she is hard-pressed to remember much about the woman she still misses.<br><br>A few years ago, Loftus was told that she was the one who had found her dead mother in the pool.<br><br>For 35 years, Loftus believed it was her Aunt Pearl who first saw her mother's lifeless body in the water. For several days, Loftus searched her own memory for proof to support the new information. It came. She reinterpreted everything that happened that day in a new way, building up the memory. The scene was re-created in her mind with her in it.<br><br>Then her uncle called to say he was mistaken. She never saw her mother dead."<br><br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.rickross.com/reference/false_memories/fsm63.html">www.rickross.com/referenc...fsm63.html</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>War and Remembrance<br>The Orange County Register/November 3, 2002<br>By Amy Wilson <br>.....<br>She is, and has been for three decades, very much in the debate business. Her belief that memory is highly malleable and susceptible to all kinds of contamination was debated for a while, until she proved in the laboratory in the 1970s and '80s that she was right.<br><br>Then, just when she was getting bored, came a host of new cases, straight from therapy, that were claiming that memories of traumatic events - horrific and usually sexual - could be deeply submerged in childhood, then, like Jonah spit forth from the whale, plumbed and revived, wholly intact.<br><br>Loftus said, "I don't think so."<br><br>Thus, the Memory Wars - as they are called by Science News and Psychology Today - began. They pit one set of psychologists against another: one that says "recovered" memories, especially those of sexual abuse, are true and should always be believed, another that says these memories probably are implanted by therapists mucking around with something they don't understand; the result is memories that cannot be believed, or should not be believed without corroboration.<br><br>Loftus is the leader and the unapologetic lightning rod for the latter bunch, which lost a lot of the early battles in the 1990s but has lately been winning a lot, especially in the courtroom.<br><br>It's a war she is happy to fight, professionally and publicly. She has testified for the defense in more than 250 cases, saying that you can't trust memory.<br><br>But in fall 1999, the war, which was always personal, turned against her, personally. It almost broke her.<br><br>Ultimately, it made her leave a house she'd lived in for 28 years and a university that she had given her life to. It made her leave her breakfast club. It made her watch all those wronged- women movies on Lifetime television.<br><br>It made her come to the University of California, Irvine. Which has made her deliriously happy.<br><br>And if you think she was determined before to win this war, you should see her now.<br><br>This, then, is a story about how the most influential female psychologist of the past century came to Orange County, and all the stuff she brought with her.<br><br><!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>Less than a month into her new job in Irvine, an "NBC Nightly News" crew is in her office. Down the hall, waiting their turn, are folks from the Discovery Channel. CNN is calling at 2 p.m..</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--><br><br>She is absolutely at ease, citing her own research, explaining in sound-bite fashion how memory, especially of a crime, gets distorted. <br>.....<br>The great thing about Elizabeth Loftus is that she will tell you pretty much anything you ask. A couple of days in, and you know that a guy left her once because she used the wrong ply toilet paper. Or how, after writing a book on repressed memory, she got some death threats and tried to learn to use a gun, but "that it's not how I wanted to live," even though a practice range target in her office says she was handy with a .44.<br><br><!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>You know that she can't remember much about her mother, though, God, she'd like to. You know, too, that she was fondled once by her baby sitter but it was no big deal, in retrospect, given that her mother drowned when she was 14.</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--><br><br>You know that she's quite amicably divorced but genuinely proud that she was married for 23 years in the first place. That she doesn't consider herself a feminist, although she got a doctorate from Stanford in 1970, when a lot of feminists were just talking about what they were going to do with their lives.<br><br>You find out that she was swatted with a newspaper by a woman who sat down next to her on a plane and that Gloria Steinem took pen to paper once to explain how Loftus was wrong about everything.<br><br>You find out she once asked a lone man at Los Angeles' Fern Bar to join her large group of friends for dinner. He turned out to be an ex-con who was wearing an ankle cuff monitor. She was disappointed that he wasn't more interesting because of that.<br><br>Then she'll explain to you, in real words because you don't have a Ph.D. and a 46- page resume and four honorary degrees and 19 books to your credit, how memory works and how it doesn't. <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>She'll laugh when she adds that her first memory is from when she was 8, which is ridiculously late for a first memory.</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--><br><br>She'll tell you how she's helped a lot of people you don't like. <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>Like Ted Bundy, O.J. Simpson, the Hillside Stranglers, the McMartin Preschool workers and almost every parent accused of incest suddenly remembered in a therapist's office. </strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--><br><br>In fall 1989, Holly Ramona, a troubled Napa Valley girl, came to UC Irvine to study. She was bulimic and depressed. She sought therapy. On the first day with Irvine therapist Marche Isabella, Ramona and her mother, Stephanie, were told that 70 percent to 80 percent of bulimics had been sexually abused as children.<br><br>During Holly's therapy, under Isabella's encouragement, Holly began to remember repeated sexual abuse by her father. Holly was unsure if the memories were true and agreed to be given sodium amytal, a drug she had been told was "truth serum." In that interview, which was overseen by psychiatrist Richard Rose at Western Medical Center-Anaheim, Holly retold her stories of abuse that she said began when she was 5 and continued until she was 16.<br><br>While at the hospital, Holly confronted her father, Gary, who was then a $500,000-a- year executive with the Robert Mondavi wineries. He denied everything, explaining that he could not apologize or seek therapy for something he had not done. His wife divorced him. The stories of the incest led to his expulsion from Mondavi. He lost everything.<br><br>"It is somehow so preposterous, the process by which people can be led to believe such things," Loftus says, "and then are led to act upon them." It is, she adds, as if they need an explanation that is large enough to encompass the depth of their unhappiness.<br><br>"And they search until they find one that fits that description."<br><br>With the help of Loftus and others, Gary won the unprecedented right to sue his daughter's therapist, the psychiatrist involved in the confessions and the Anaheim hospital in which they took place. Then Loftus was among those who convinced a Napa jury in 1994 that Holly's Orange County caregivers had created Holly's memories for her, assured her they were true, then forced a confrontation that split the family irreparably, harming everyone in their path.<br><br>Gary was awarded $475,000. Isabella and Rose left the state. Holly, who did not respond to the Register's request for an interview, went on to study psychology at Pepperdine University.<br><br>A subsequent lawsuit that Holly brought against her father was summarily dismissed as groundless.<br><br>The net result: "The trial took the teeth out of the witch hunt," says Moira Johnston, who chronicled the family's story in "Spectral Evidence: The Ramona Case, Incest, Memory, and Truth on Trial in Napa Valley" (Houghton- Mifflin, 1997).<br><br>Prosecutors filing charges began asking for more evidence than a single recovered memory, and medical malpractice insurers were less willing to go to bat for therapists. George Franklin, who had been imprisoned for murder based on the sole evidence of his daughter's recovered memory of the killing, was emboldened to appeal his case in 1995. It was dismissed in 1996, and Franklin is now free.<br><br>The Ramona trial was also, Johnston adds, "a war between two women" (the other was San Francisco psychiatrist Lenore Terr) "who represented different points of view. Beth won. (The other side) still hates her because she discredited and humiliated them."<br><br>Terr declined to be interviewed for this story.<br><br>The tide is continuing to turn. At a meeting this year of the American Psychiatric Association, a team of panelists determined that Recovered Memory Treatment controversy was dead. But, the statement from the APA reads, "Psychiatry still needs to help the main victims of RMT: those falsely accused of heinous crimes which never happened."<br><br>Elizabeth Loftus' mother drowned when Elizabeth was 14. Elizabeth kept a diary before that terrible day and after. The diary reveals a child who is desperately hurt but believes that one day she will get past missing her mother. She has not.<br><br>It is, she believes, what fuels her own workaholism and her desire, sometimes, to see shattered families made whole. To this day, she cannot mention her mother without tears. Loftus, the memory whiz, says she is hard-pressed to remember much about the woman she still misses.<br><br>A few years ago, Loftus was told that she was the one who had found her dead mother in the pool.<br><br>For 35 years, Loftus believed it was her Aunt Pearl who first saw her mother's lifeless body in the water. For several days, Loftus searched her own memory for proof to support the new information. It came. She reinterpreted everything that happened that day in a new way, building up the memory. The scene was re-created in her mind with her in it.<br><br>Then her uncle called to say he was mistaken. She never saw her mother dead.<br><br>Five years ago, Loftus read an article by psychiatrist David Corwin about a woman named Jane Doe. A lot of people knew about Jane Doe and were citing her case repeatedly in research literature, calling it up as proof that memories can be repressed, then reliably recovered.<br><br>Loftus knew that psychological case histories such as this were so compelling that the stories lived long after the theories they engendered were put to rest: Bruno Bettelheim's refrigerator mothers thesis about autism, created from a limited sample. The whole world of multiple personality disorder developed around Sybil, a case that was more a product of book publishers than therapy. Freud's entire psychological construct based on a few female patients.<br><br>Jane Doe was just such a case, Loftus believed, and the conclusions were just as wide.<br><br>Corwin's case history of Jane Doe explained how, in 1984, a 6-year-old girl was videotaped recounting the specifics of her mother's abuse. The mother lost custody and contact with her daughter. Corwin returned when Jane was 17. For legal reasons, Corwin, who had been using the tapes for a decade in talks and seminars, needed her permission to continue to use them. Jane replied that she had never seen the tapes.<br><br>And so Corwin videotaped Jane again, at 17, as she viewed the tapes of herself 11 years earlier.<br><br>While being shown the tapes, Jane says, she doesn't remember any of it. Then, somewhat startlingly, she does. Proof, said Corwin and others, of repression.<br><br>Loftus thought it sounded "fishy." Still, if this was a true story of remembered abuse, Loftus wanted to find proof of the abuse, beyond Jane's words. If it was not true, Loftus wanted Doe out of the legal and scientific literature.<br><br>First she found Jane Doe by searching public records and newspaper clips. She then found Jane Doe's mother, who had lived for 13 years without her daughter. She found Jane's stepmother in a grocery store. The stepmother explained to Loftus about the fight for Jane's custody.<br><br>"This is how we finally got her," Loftus reports the stepmother said. "The sexual angle."<br><br>Loftus had compiled a lot of other evidence - medical and in depositions taken at the time - that she believed threw doubt on Jane's story. The stepmother's comment had clinched it for her.<br><br>She wanted to tell the story big but she wondered, "Who am I to be the one to tell her that the story she'd heard all her life wasn't true?"<br><br>She consulted ethicists who told her the woman was old enough to vote. She could talk to her.<br><br>She even consulted a staff member at the Human Subjects committee at the University of Washington. She was given suggestions how the questions to Jane Doe might be asked.<br><br>The interview never took place. But, through Loftus' efforts, the mother and daughter were temporarily reunited.<br><br>In September 1999, somewhat bewilderingly to Loftus, who believes it was prompted by others, Jane Doe complained to the university about Loftus' invasion of her privacy. With 15 minutes notice, the university seized Loftus' files on the case and denied her the right to talk about it or publish anything she'd discovered.<br><br>For a year and nine months, Loftus stood accused of doing research on a human subject without her permission. Loftus had never thought of it as research, she said. It was, if anything, journalism.<br><br>The university's action hit her hard.<br><br>"They were my family," she says. "It was like I was betrayed by my kids. My work is what I'm devoted to. But I was going to give up my job if I couldn't publish my Jane Doe story."<br><br>In July 2001, Loftus was officially exonerated by the University of Washington. The university never did say it was sorry.<br><br>She'd racked up $30,000 in legal fees and enough vitriol to last a lifetime. She published the story in The Skeptical Inquirer, and Loftus got the satisfaction of knowing that "people will be embarrassed to use Jane Doe's case in court or in papers again."<br><br>She regrets nothing.<br><br>The tide of recovered- memory cases has been stemmed in the past six to eight years. Loftus testifies six to seven times a year, mostly now in cases that have interesting twists. One she took recently involved a 60-year- old woman accusing her 90- year-old father of abuse that supposedly occurred a half century earlier.<br><br>Loftus and others on her side are privately braced for the next surge, the recovered- memory cases accusing priests of abuse.<br><br>With Distinguished Professor titles in psychology and criminology and a $155,000- a-year salary and a lab being built to her specifications, complete with sofa, Loftus hadn't been in Irvine for a week when she got an e-mail from a local couple.<br><br>The Cowderys of Laguna Hills wrote to tell her that their daughter, Gail, had been estranged from the family for three years after accusing her parents, her uncle and her grandmother of sexual abuse.<br><br>The depression their adopted daughter suffered was not new, but her accusations, Kathy Cowdery explained, were vague - and the result of freshly remembered events, memories recovered after working with a new therapist.<br><br>Loftus wrote Cowdery back, asking for the name of the therapist.<br><br>Cowdery explained that her daughter had been seeing a woman who had come highly recommended by the Orange County therapeutic community, a therapist working out of Irvine and Mission Viejo.<br><br>Loftus opened up the e-mail and shuddered.<br><br>The therapist's name was Holly Ramona.<br><hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><br><br> <p></p><i></i>