ABSTRACT
The brilliant William James, America’s first psychologist, had intuited the malleability of memory nearly a century earlier, although he conducted no experiments to test his guess and prove his point. As the recovered-memory movement caught on, a number of therapists, motivated by conviction and rage, developed methods of evoking memories that violate the canons of accepted and ethical psychotherapeutic technique. Some accused parents have sued recovered-memory therapists, a few winning substantial damages, and some patients treated by recovered memory methods have won major damages from those who treated them. In some cases, recovered memories of sexual abuse have been corroborated by other witnesses or by evidence such as medical records showing trauma to the child’s sexual parts, but many or most cases have no such confirmation. Feminist analyses of abuse within the family and feminist challenges to authoritarian practices became a palpable presence in the discourse on sexual abuse.
