How the False Memory Debate Rewrote the Rules of Practice

When you’ve been writing and reporting on psychotherapy for over a decade, not much surprises you. The field is chock-full of antiquated philosophies and methods that would make most modern therapists chuckle, wince, or shake their head in disbelief. Primal scream therapy?! Who thought of that? Whether they’re bizarre but harmless or shocking and dangerous, it’s easy to dismiss most of these as mere fads, relics of a bygone era conjured up by a handful of rogue clinicians who dared to push the limits of “conventional” therapy but whose ideas were doomed to fail. Is there any point in seeking mea culpas for the strange, short-lived notions of psychotherapy’s forefathers? Probably not.

But last fall, I encountered a story from psychotherapy’s recent history that made me not only pause, but seriously question the field’s infatuation with whatever topic or trend happens to be popular at a given time. It all began when I came across a newly published article in New York Magazine’s The Cut: “The Therapy That Can Break You.”

The article opens with the story of Elizabeth, a teenager who was sent by her family to Missouri’s Castlewood residential treatment center in 2011 for an eating disorder. After four months, this “vivacious, gregarious” girl emerged barely recognizable—and was suddenly claiming that her father and his friends had been sexually assaulting her since age four. When Elizabeth took the stand at a later court hearing, she “appeared to act out different characters,” inner parts she referred to as managers, firefighters, and protectors. This language belongs to the Internal Family Systems model, widely used by the therapists at Castlewood.

The Cut piece was a scathing takedown of IFS, claiming it, “could destabilize already fragile mental states.” It went on to describe how Castlewood’s staff had reportedly made numerous patients believe they’d been sexually assaulted, and even led some to believe they’d been involved in satanic cults. Eventually, these “recollections” were debunked. The evidence simply didn’t exist. But the damage had been done. Elizabeth’s family, like so many others who’d turned to Castlewood, had been torn apart.

I was curious how the clinical community felt about the article, but nearly every therapist I reached out to declined to speak on the record, not wanting to fan the flames. But many did point out that this story shared shocking similarities with another from our field, one so outlandish you could probably pass it off as a work of paranormal fiction: the false memory debate (or recovered memory therapy debate) of the 1990s.

Ghosts of Psychotherapy Past

Admittedly, I knew very little about the false memory debate before I started digging. I knew they referred to a period when hundreds of Americans, mostly women, suddenly came forward with recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse, as if by some strange contagion. I knew the field had been seriously divided on whether psychotherapy—particularly hypnosis—could be used to retrieve and explore these memories.

But I soon learned that this was only the tip of the iceberg: not only did this debate pit some of therapy’s biggest names against one another—like Bessel van der Kolk and Salvador Minuchin—but it landed falsely accused parents, neighbors, and doctors in jail, tore families apart, and led to countless providers being blacklisted, sued, or fired.

The positive developments that had fueled the debate—increased attention to childhood sexual abuse and survivors’ stories, and a growing women’s rights movement—were quickly overshadowed by overzealousness and infighting in the field. Some therapists, like renowned clinical hypnosis expert Michael Yapko—the first person I thought to call—say the ensuing fallout impacted nearly every aspect of practice today.

“How old are you, Chris?” Yapko asks when I confess my ignorance about this chapter of our history.

“Thirty-eight,” I tell him.

“Ahh,” he replies. “Well, that explains it. If you want to know why therapists have to fill out vast amounts of paperwork to justify their methods, and why there’s such a heavy promotion of empirically validated treatments, it’s largely because of the repressed memory controversy. Therapists were using arbitrary and even misinformed interventions that required stronger guardrails to protect vulnerable clients.”

Yapko, now 71, wasn’t just a bystander during the false memory debate. He was on the front lines, and took heat for his conviction that most of these recovered memories weren’t based on real experiences, but instead due to suggestion by misguided therapists. In his 1994 book, Suggestions of Abuse: True and False Memories of Childhood Sexual Trauma, he recounts how some therapists would use checklists of physical symptoms, like headaches and acne, to diagnose abuse that never occurred.

But it was the methods these therapists frequently used to plumb their clients’ subconscious—like hypnosis, guided imagery sessions, and imagination sessions—that Yapko says “worked in the worst of ways.” Used in this manner, hypnosis “increases the amount of inaccurate recall and increases the client’s level of certainty,” he explains. “So the client is very wrong but very sure, which makes for a very compelling testimony.”

Meanwhile, therapists pressed the issue. In 1995, as the debate reached its apex, a survey published in the journal Ethics & Behavior found that nearly a quarter of all psychologists were using suggestive methods to extract supposedly buried memories of sexual abuse, including sodium amytal, a fast-acting barbiturate used for sedation.

“They say in the world of religion, if you believe, you’ll be saved,” Yapko says. “And in the mental health profession it was If you believe, you’ll recover. Uncovering presumably repressed memories was considered essential for healing. If a client didn’t believe they had repressed memories of abuse, they were said to be ‘in denial.’ Some therapists literally told their clients, ‘I’m not going to work with you if you can’t face what happened.’”

But it wasn’t long before some recovered memories began to take dark and bizarre turns. There were claims of abuse at the hands of satanic cults or alien abductors and stories of missing and murdered children. A 1993 New Yorker magazine article, “Remembering Satan,” included one survivor’s frightening “recollection”:

I remember being carried from my bed by my father in the middle of the night. There were many people waiting outside by the barn…. There was a lot of blood everywhere [and] pitchforks in the ground…. They would lay the sacrifice first on the table, then the high priestess would pick it up and all the people would chant, and then the baby would be put on the table, and all of the people, including my mother and father circling the table, would stab it with knives…. They would say, “you will not remember this” over and over again, like a chant.

These stories quickly captured public attention, with nearly every major news outlet covering the debate around recovered memories. Cold cases were reopened as police departments across the country mobilized to investigate, including more than 300 precincts with forensic hypnotists on staff—with no psychology background—who would do their own subconscious digging.

Meanwhile, skeptics like Yapko continued to come under fire. “When I started discussing the potential for false memories that the research in hypnosis made clear, some therapists accused me of aiding and abetting abusers,” he says. “On the contrary, I’d hoped to stop therapists from unwittingly creating victims in the name of therapy. What I clearly said was these recovered memories could be true or they could be false, but without objective evidence, there was no way to know. It got really ugly as the profession split into polarized positions. You were either a believer or a nonbeliever.”

No Good Deed

How did therapists, of all people, get swept up in something so outrageous? The short answer, says therapist Bill Doherty, is good intentions.

In 1986, when the false memory debate was first gaining steam, Doherty was a young clinical supervisor at the University of Minnesota, where he “saw the debacle begin to unfold.” It had only been a few years since the field had begun to turn its attention to childhood sexual abuse, he explains, after being “kind of in denial about its prevalence.”

As popular media like The Oprah Winfrey Show and the 1988 bestselling book The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse began to elevate survivor testimonies of sexual abuse, “there was a collective regret that we’d ignored the issue for long,” Doherty says. “So we really started to emphasize and search for it, and that’s when it began to take on a life of its own.”

Of course, there were other influences, too. On top of therapists’ longstanding tendency to attribute current problems to past traumas, Doherty says the culture was ready to embrace this movement. “This was part of a trend—a good trend—to take clients, especially women, seriously,” he says. “There was a big self-empowerment aspect to what was going on: believe women. Why would anybody make up something so horrible?”

Then, in 1991, the Soviet Union fell. “Some historians believe that countries look for evil within when they’re not threatened by evil without,” Doherty says. “In this case, the evil empire was gone, and the threat became not just the dysfunctional family, but a specific, heinous trauma tied into morality. There was a sense that we were combating a terrible evil.”

As his case consultations continued, Doherty says he heard disturbing myths again and again, like the false statistic that 90 percent of women with bulimia had been sexually abused as children—and, he adds with a tinge of regret, he failed to challenge them. “I ask myself why I didn’t,” he says, “and the fact is that even though I was already an established professional, I hadn’t paid any real attention to childhood sexual abuse. The skeptical side of me thought, Where’s the data for that? But I also thought I was behind the curve.”

What about the more outlandish claims—about satanic cults and alien abductions and murdered and missing children? How did therapists ever take those seriously?

“Some of us were starting to get off the train at this point,” Doherty says, “but not everyone. So your client is describing horrible shame about satanic rituals involving murdered babies. And you’re going to say you don’t believe her? You’re dedicated to believing! What do you do with that?”

A House Divided

The more I learn about the false memory debate, the more I wonder whether therapists are the good guys or the bad guys in this story. Do good intentions outweigh giant clinical and ethical missteps? When therapists like Yapko stand up and challenge a popular stance they know in their heart to be wrong, is that redemption enough for the field? I’m not sure.

“Here’s what you should do,” Yapko tells me. “Watch Divided Memories”—a PBS Frontline documentary that came out in 1995. “It’s on YouTube,” he says. “You’ll see in a visual form how therapists are approaching this.”

I find the video online. It’s four hours long. Against my better judgment, I press play.

The film opens with a crackly shot of three adolescent children playing—a home movie—slowed down as if someone is operating the video with an old hand crank. Melancholy piano music begins to play, and a series of sepia-toned images appear: a child’s Halloween party. A shuffling toddler in a blue dress and matching bonnet. A father scooping up his two children while their mother snaps a happy photo.

“What I remember the most is fear,” a female voice says. “I can’t remember a time when I didn’t feel afraid.”

“She seemed very outgoing,” says an older, fatherly male voice. “She always just seemed like a normal, happy kid to me.”

“I’d just lie there curled up in a ball,” says the female voice, “and I’d cry and cry and cry. And I’d stay there for a while. I know he’s not going to follow me there, and I feel safe.”

What comes next is shocking: tear-filled survivor testimonies, their faces obscured by shadow. Shots from group therapy sessions, where clients collapse into their therapist’s lap in a moment of catharsis. “Why would I want to spend even one minute in this office if I didn’t have to!” exclaims one client. “And yet I have to come back to this office. It’s like a magnet. I need the healing.” She turns to the therapist. “I need your healing powers, Joanne.” Then, she turns to the other clients in the room. “We all need each other, too.”

But it’s the therapists’ takes, interspersed with these shots, that really bring the debate into focus. There’s renowned trauma and incest researcher Judith Herman, who tells the interviewer, “If we take seriously our duty to our patients, then we are allies in their healing, and we are helping them to become more powerful, freer, more assertive, and in a psychological condition where they can hold perpetrators accountable.”

The late family therapy pioneer Salvador Minuchin appears onscreen. “We need to be very clear that there are two issues,” he says. “One is that at this historical point in the United States, we are discovering a tremendous amount of incest and sexual abuse. We are not challenging that fact. What is important is that therapists are creating together with patients memories that may be false.”

About an hour into the film, we see a shot of a young Bessel van der Kolk—clean-shaven and bespectacled, with a swoop of brown hair combed neatly over his brow. Sporting a dark suit and tie, and silently reading a book in his lap, you’d be forgiven for thinking you’d accidentally changed the channel to Masterpiece Theatre.

“How do you know what the patient is saying actually happened?” the interviewer asks van der Kolk. He pauses for a moment. “It’s like reading a novel,” he replies. “When you read a bad novelist, after a while, you put the book down because the story doesn’t cohere. It doesn’t make sense—people don’t talk this way, or act this way, and the book is lousy. But if you read a great book and the characters are true to life, that’s the way people really feel and interact with each other. And when you do clinical work with people, how the story coheres, how it all hangs together, is not all that different from what the great novelists do.”

Finally, there’s Yapko—whose takes the filmmakers often juxtapose against van der Kolk’s. “The recovery therapist tends to view problems in terms of a presumed history of abuse,” he says. “And so by looking for abuse, expecting to find abuse, it’s no surprise when they uncover abuse. I think it was Abraham Maslow who said if the only tool you have is hammer, then everything around you begins to look like a nail.”

A Rough Start

Of all the therapists I’ve met, none have been more perpetually optimistic than Lynn Lyons. But what happens when a bright-eyed optimist enters the field in the thick of one of the most schismatic debates in modern psychotherapy?

In 1990, just as the false memory debate was getting off the ground, Lyons was 24 years old, a newly minted social worker who’d just landed a job at a prominent academic teaching hospital—something she’d fought hard to get.

“I didn’t know my ass from my elbow,” Lyons tells me. “But I learned a ton—despite all the nonsense that was unfolding. There were very experienced clinicians and psychiatric nurses who got really sucked into this talk about satanic sexual abuse. Clients were scheduling admissions on full moons and coming in carrying their stuffed animals with The Courage to Heal tucked under their arm. It was craziness.”

But Lyons kept her head down, despite finding her colleagues’ rush to embrace these implausible claims unnerving. Cults?! Infant sacrifices?!

“I was a baby therapist watching this happen,” Lyons says, “and it really affected me. “The therapist community was absolutely on board with this nonsense. Clinicians were testifying in court, and people were losing their businesses and going to jail. It’s made me very skeptical of our field. A lot of damage was done. There’s a dark cloud over our profession because of this.”

As the debate raged on, accusations continued to fly, and court cases kept piling up, Lyons seriously considered calling it quits—until she met Michael Yapko.

“It was random luck that we met,” she says. Interested in learning clinical hypnosis, she began attending his workshops—and his reputation as a no-nonsense clinician preceded him. “Michael was really in the minority, having said early on that using hypnosis to retrieve repressed memories was dangerous,” Lyons says, “and he got tarred and feathered for it. But he was a voice of reason. Had we not met, I’m not sure I would’ve kept doing therapy.”

The Pendulum Swings Back

Over the next several years, recovered memories continued to dominate conversation. But by the turn of the century, the commotion had largely subsided. Enough survivor testimonies had been thoroughly investigated by journalists and law enforcement, and no satanic cults, murders, missing children, or alien abductions were ever uncovered.

But the counterpunch was swift. In 1992, parents who’d been falsely accused of sexually assaulting their children created The False Memory Syndrome Foundation, engaging in a series of campaigns, legal activities, and public advocacy efforts that targeted recovered memory therapists, forcing an ideological retreat. By 1993, the American Psychiatric Association had explicitly acknowledged the difficulty of distinguishing true memories from false or suggested ones, and formally recommended that clinicians approach memory claims with caution. Two years later, the American Psychological Association followed suit.

Meanwhile, Yapko and other acclaimed memory researchers, like psychologist Elizabeth Loftus, had been poking holes in memory recall techniques and drawing attention to the prevalence of suggestion. One of Loftus’s most famous experiments, which later became known as the “Lost in the Mall” study, recruited relatives of study participants to describe true and fabricated childhood events to see if the participants could identify the fake. By the end, nearly a quarter believed the false event had actually happened.

“Beth said it really well,” Yapko tells me. “She said the potential vulnerability of memory is when misinformation is presented by a credible authority with no apparent motivation to deceive. That defines a therapist.”

In Suggestions of Abuse, Yapko published his own research, a national survey of therapists who’d been asked whether they considered memories recovered during hypnosis, or ones that were richly detailed and highly emotional, to be accurate. He asked whether they thought clients could potentially recover memories of their birth or being in utero, or memories of past lives. Many answered yes.

“I gave therapists enough rope to hang themselves with the ignorance of their responses regarding memory and repression,” Yapko says. “Some were so confident that they claimed they could spot an abuse victim simply by the way they stood or dressed. This is what contaminated the field and created so much division. You had ‘experts’ who were promoting viewpoints nothing short of wrong and dangerous.”

In 1994, the hammer really came down. “‘Memory Therapy’ on Trial: Healing or Hokum?” read a front-page New York Times article, detailing an $8 million malpractice lawsuit that had been filed by two parents against their child’s therapist for “conning” her into remembering childhood sexual abuse that never occurred.

“Experts expect the trial to start a new wave of malpractice lawsuits against psychotherapists, members of a largely unregulated profession,” the article reads, “and to alter the way they are trained and supervised.”

The false memory debate, it seemed, was finally over.

Case Closed?

It’s tempting to consign the false memory debate to the dustbin of history, to wipe our hands clean and say what’s done is done. But the therapists who prevailed say there’s no justice in this scenario. Where’s the lesson? Where’s the closure?

“We just moved on. We just moved on,” Bill Doherty sighs. “There was no reckoning. Apparently, we can move on quickly from our convictions when our livelihoods are affected, when we’re going to get sued or lose our license.”

Make no mistake, Yapko says: the false memory debate “literally changed the practice of therapy. You’ll notice that almost every therapist, no matter their orientation, now puts the phrase empirically supported or empirically validated before whatever therapy they’re promoting” to avoid accusations of malpractice or quackery.

But it’s not just the field that’s suffered, says Elizabeth Loftus. It’s everyone.

“The public standing of the mental health profession was seriously damaged, and virtually nothing was done to cure the patients themselves,” she later wrote. “The uncritical acceptance of even the most dubious claims trivialized the experiences of the survivors of genuine abuse, and increased their suffering. Happily, that harm has lessened, but I do not believe the war is over. Innocent people remain in prison, unable to disprove the charges against them. Thousands of families have not fully recovered from years of estrangement.”

So did the field take any lessons from the false memory debate to heart? Surely, I ask Yapko, Doherty, and Lyons, something on this scale could never happen today, right?

“Even now there are therapists who never got the memo that this thing was crazy,” Lyons tells me. “I still hear things from clinicians like ‘children never make things up.’ I still hear them say you can use hypnosis to recover memories. I still hear about repression, or that physical symptoms must be indicative of hidden trauma.”

“The psychotherapy field is a field of fads and fashions,” Yapko says. “Do you know how many models of therapy I’ve seen come and go over the last 50 years? There’s a herd mentality and a lot of hero worship for whatever the therapy du jour happens to be. This isn’t nice to say, but it’s true: therapists aren’t always the most critical thinkers, and it’s why so many questionable methods are used in the name of therapy.”

“The lack of soul-searching means that a generation later, when we forget, it comes back,” Doherty says. “That New York Magazine article on IFS was appalling, because that’s exactly what was happening 35 years ago. We never learned that when we’re arguing about widespread, terrible behavior, we need to have some data to back it up.” Take the clamor around trauma, he adds. “Now, everything is ‘trauma’ or ‘attachment wounds.’ Estrangement and cutoffs were big in the ‘90s—you discovered the abuse, you cut off your parents. Now that’s back big time, and therapists are participating in it.”

At this point in my journalistic journey, I’m beginning to feel a bit weary—and not just because I sat through four hours of the Divided Memories documentary. It pains me to think that maybe therapists—and I—have always been operating under some sort of hypnotic delusion, that whatever clinical subject we deem important isn’t so much a choice as it is a sneaky cultural influence. Some zombie mistake we’re destined to repeat. A ticking time-bomb wrapped in good intentions.

I desperately search for something that indicates the field will turn a corner. Maybe it’s the next generation of therapists! I think to myself. Maybe they’ll think more critically than the last about the fads sweeping our field. Maybe they’ll do better.

“When I do my clinical trainings,” Yapko tells me, “I ask the audience, ‘How many of you learned about false memories during your academic program?’ Hardly anybody raises their hand. When therapists don’t know about the malleability of memory, the danger is that they’ll suggest memories that may seem plausible but aren’t actually true. That’s what puts therapy clients at risk today.”

Ugh. Well, I tried.

But right before I decide to give up, I think back to a moment from my phone call with Bill Doherty.

“I want to normalize our blind spots,” he says. “Because we’re not trained as cultural anthropologists. We’re trained as therapists. Every profession has their blind spots. If we want to prevent another repeat, we need to start with some humility. We need to step back and ask ourselves what trends we’re experiencing now, why we’re focusing on them, and what the potential downsides might be. We need to ask ourselves how much this thing that we embrace has value, and acknowledge that it’s not the gospel truth.”