week disc social

Mistakes

Were

Made (but not by me)

Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs,

Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts

CAROL TAVRIS and ELLIOT ARONSON

98 99 CAROL TAVRIS and ELLIOT ARONSON

difficulty, the psychotherapist decided that Grace's symptoms meant

that her father had sexually abused her when she was a child. At first,

Grace embraced her therapist's interpretation; after all, the therapist

was an expert on these matters. Over time, she, like Holly, came to

believe that her father had molested her. Grace accused her father di­

rectly, cut off relations with her parents and sisters, and temporarily

left her husband and son. Yet her new memories never felt right to

her, because they contradicted the overall history of her good and

loving relationship with her father. One day she told the therapist

that she no longer believed her father had ever abused her.

Grace's therapist might have accepted what her client told her and

begun working with her on finding a better explanation for her

problems. She might have read up on the latest research showing

which therapeutic approach is the method of choice for panic at­

tacks. She might have talked over the case with her colleagues, to see

if she was overlooking something. Grace's therapist, however, did

none of these things. When Grace expressed doubts that her recov­

ered memories were true, the therapist replied: "You're sicker than

you ever were."1

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In the 1980s and 1990s, the newly emerging evidence of the sexual

abuse of children and women set off two unintended hysterical epi­

demics. One was the phenomenon of recovered-memory therapy,

in which adults went into therapy with no memory of childhood

trauma and came out believing that they had been sexually molested

by their parents or tortured in Satanic cults, sometimes for many

years, without ever being aware of it at the time and without any cor­

roboration by siblings, friends, or physicians. Under hypnosis, they

said, their therapists enabled them to remember the horrifying expe­

riences they had suffered as toddlers, as infants in the crib, and some­

times even in previous lives. One woman recalled that her mother put

spiders in her vagina. Another said her father had molested her from

MISTAKES WERE MADE (but not by me)

the ages of five to twenty-three, and even raped her just days before

her wedding-memories she repressed until therapy. Others said

they had been burned, although their bodies bore no scars. Some said

they had been impregnated and forced to have abortions, although

their bodies showed no evidence. Those who went to court to sue their

alleged perpetrators were able to call on expert witnesses, many with

impressive credentials in clinical psychology and psychiatry, who tes­

tified that these recovered memories were valid evidence of abuse.2

The second major epidemic was a panic about the sexual abuse

of children in daycare centers. In 1983, teachers at the McMartin

Preschool in Manhattan Beach, California, were accused of commit­

ting heinous acts on the toddlers in their care, such as torturing them

in Satanic rituals in underground chambers, slaughtering pet rabbits

in front of them, and forcing them to submit to sexual acts. Some

children said the teachers had taken them flying in an airplane. The

prosecution was unable to convince the jury that the children had

been abused, but the case produced copycat accusations against day­

care teachers across the country: the Little Rascals Day Care case in

North Carolina, Kelly Michaels in New Jersey, the Amirault family

in Massachusetts, Dale Akiki in San Diego, and alleged molestation

rings in Jordan, Minnesota; Wenatchee, Washington; Niles, Michi­

gan; Miami, Florida; and dozens of other communities. Everywhere,

the children told bizarre stories. Some said they had been attacked

by a robot, molested by clowns and lobsters, or forced to eat a frog.

One boy said he had been tied naked to a tree in the school yard in

front of all the teachers and children, although no passerby noticed

it and no other child verified it. Social workers and other psycho­

therapists were called in to assess the children's stories, do therapy

with the children, and help them disclose what had happened. Many

later testified in court that, on the basis of their clinical judgment,

they were certain the day-care teachers were guilty.3

Where do epidemics go when they die? How come celebrities have

not been turning up on talk shows lately to reveal their recovered

JOO CAROL TAVRJS and ELLIOT ARONSON

memories of having been tortured as infants? Have all the sadistic

pedophiles closed down their day-care centers? Most of the teachers

who were convicted in the day-care cases have been freed on appeal,

but many teachers and parents remain in prison, or are confined to

house arrest, or must live out their lives as registered sex offenders.

The heyday of the recovered-memory movement is past, although

many lives were shattered and countless families have never been re­

united. But cases still occasionally appear in the courts, in the news,

in films, and in popular books.4 Martha Beck's Leaving the Saints,

which describes how her Mormon father had allegedly subjected her

to ritual sexual abuse when she was a child, neglects to tell readers that

she had forgotten all about it until she consulted a recovered-memory

psychotherapist who taught her self-hypnosis.

Thus while the epidemics have subsided, the assumptions that ig­

nited them remain embedded in popular culture: If you were repeat­

edly traumatized in childhood, you probably repressed the memory

of it. If you repressed the memory of it, hypnosis can retrieve it

for you. If you are utterly convinced that your memories are true,

they are. If you have no memories but merely suspect that you were

abused, you probably were. If you have sudden flashbacks or dreams

of abuse, you are uncovering a true memory. Children almost never

lie about sexual matters. If your child has nightmares, wets the bed,

wants to sleep with a night-light, or masturbates, those might be

signs your child has been molested.

These beliefs did not pop up in the cultural landscape overnight,

like mushrooms. They came from mental-health professionals who

disseminated them at conferences, in clinical journals, in the media,

and in bestselling books, and who promoted themselves as experts

in diagnosing child sexual abuse and determining the validity of a

recovered memory. Their claims were based largely on lingering

Freudian (and pseudo-Freudian) ideas about repression, memory,

sexual trauma, and the meaning of dreams, and on their own confi­

dence in their clinical powers of insight and diagnosis. All the claims

MISTAKES WERE MADE (but not by me) 101

these therapists made have since been scientifically studied. All of

them are mistaken.

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It is painful to admit this, but when the McMartin story first hit the

news, the two of us, independently, were inclined to believe that

the preschool teachers were guilty. Not knowing the details of the

allegations, we mindlessly accepted the "where there's smoke, there's

fire" cliche; as scientists, we should have known better. When,

months after the trial ended, the full story came out-about the

emotionally disturbed mother who made the first accusation and

whose charges became crazier and crazier until even the prosecutors

stopped paying attention to her; about how the children had been

coerced over many months to "tell" by zealous social workers on a

moral crusade; about how the children's stories became increasingly

outlandish-we felt foolish and embarrassed that we had sacrificed

our scientific skepticism on the altar of outrage. Our initial gullibil­

ity caused us plenty of dissonance, and it still does. But our disso­

nance is nothing compared to that of the people who were personally

involved or who took a public stand, including the many psycho­

therapists, psychiatrists, and social workers who considered them­

selves skilled clinicians and advocates for children's rights.

None of us likes learning that we were wrong, that our memories

are distorted or confabulated, or that we made an embarrassing pro­

fessional mistake. For people in any of the healing professions, the

stakes are especially high. If you hold a set of beliefs that guide your

practice and you learn that some of them are mistaken, you must ei­

ther admit you were wrong and change your approach, or reject the

new evidence. If the mistakes are not too threatening to your view of

your competence and if you have not taken a public stand defend­

ing them, you will probably willingly change your approach, grate­

ful to have a better one. But if some of those mistaken beliefs have

made your client's problems worse, torn up your client's family, or

104 105 CAROL TAVRIS and ELLIOT ARONSON

clinics and emergency rooms. She found that residents are not ex­

pected to read much; rather, they are expected to absorb the lessons

handed them without debate or question. The lectures they attend

offer practical skills, not intellectual substance; a lecturer will talk

about what to do in therapy rather than why the therapy helps or

what kind of therapy might be best for a given problem.6

Finally, there are the many people who practice one of the many

different forms of psychotherapy. Some have a master's degree in

psychology, counseling, or clinical social work; they are licensed in

their specialty, such as marriage and family therapy. Some, however,

have no training in psychology at all, or even a college degree. The

word "psychotherapist" is unregulated; in many states, anyone can

say that he or she is a therapist without having any training in

anything.

In the past two decades, as the number of mental-health prac­

titioners of all kinds has soared, most psychotherapy-training pro­

grams have cut themselves off from their scientifically trained

cousins in university departments of psychology.7 "What do we need

to know statistics and research for?" many graduates of these pro­

grams ask. "All we need to know is how to do therapy, and for that,

I mostly need clinical experience." In some respects, they are right.

Therapists are constantly making decisions about the course of treat­

ment: What might be beneficial now? What direction should we go?

Is this the right time to risk challenging my client's story, or will I

challenge him right out of the room? Making these decisions re­

quires experience with the infinite assortment of quirks and passions

of the human psyche, that heart of darkness and love.

Moreover, by its very nature, psychotherapy is a private transac­

tion between the therapist and the client. No one is looking over the

therapist's shoulder in the intimacy of the consulting room, eager to

pounce if he or she does something wrong. Yet the inherent privacy

of the transaction means that therapists who lack training in science

MISTAKES WERE MADE (but not by me)

and skepticism have no internal corrections to the self-protecting

cognitive biases that afflict us all. What these therapists see confirms

what they believe, and what they believe shapes what they see. It's a

closed loop. Did my client improve? Excellent; what I did was effec­

tive. Did my client remain unchanged or get worse? That's unfortu­

nate, but she is resistant to therapy and deeply troubled; besides,

sometimes the client has to get worse before she can get better. Do I

believe that repressed rage causes sexual difficulties? My client's erec­

tion problem must reflect his repressed rage at his mother or his wife.

Do I believe that sexual abuse causes eating disorders? My client's bu­

limia must mean she was molested as a child.

We want to be clear that most therapists are effective, and that

some clients are resistant to therapy and are deeply troubled. This

chapter is not an indictment of therapy, any more than writing about

the mistakes of memory means that all memory is unreliable or that

writing about the conflicts of interest among scientists means that all

scientists do tainted research. Our intention is to examine the kinds

of mistakes that can result from the closed loop of clinical practice,

and show how self-justification perpetuates them.

For anyone in private practice, skepticism and science are ways

out of the closed loop. Skepticism, for example, teaches therapists to

be cautious about taking what their clients tell them at face value. If

a woman says her mother put spiders in her vagina when she was

three, the skeptical therapist can be empathic without believing that

this event literally happened. If a child says his teachers took him fly­

ing in a plane full of clowns and frogs, the skeptical therapist might

be charmed by the story without believing that teachers actually

chartered a private jet (on their salary, no less). Scientific research

provides therapists with ways of improving their clinical practice and

of avoiding mistakes. If you are going to use hypnosis, for example,

you had better know that while hypnosis can help clients learn to

relax, manage pain, and quit smoking, you should never use it to

118 CAROL TAVRIS and ELLIOT ARONSON

Child· They didn't touch me!

Kell : ey Who didn't touch you?

Child: Not my teacher. Nobody.

Kell : ey Did any big people, any adult, touch your bum

there? Child: No.27

"Who didn't touch you?" We are entering the realm of Catch-22,

Joseph Heller's great novel, in which the colonel with the fat mus­

tache says to Clevinger: "What did you mean when you said we

couldn't punish you?" Clevinger replies: "I didn't say you couldn't

punish me, sir." Colonel: "When didn't you say that we couldn't

punish you?" Clevinger: "I always didn't say that you couldn't pun­

ish me, sir."

At the time, the psychotherapists and social workers who were

called on to interview children believed that molested children won't

tell you what happened to them until you press them by persistently

asking leading questions, because they are scared or ashamed. In the

absence of research, this was a reasonable assumption, and clearly it

is sometimes true. But when does pressing slide into coercion? Psy­

chological scientists have conducted experiments to investigate every

aspect of children's memory and testimony: How do children under­

stand what adults ask them? Do their responses depend on their age,

verbal abilities, and the kinds of questions they are asked? Under

what conditions are children likely to be telling the truth, and when

are they likely to be suggestible, to say that something happened

when it did not?28

For example, in an experiment with preschool children, Sena

Garven and her colleagues used interview techniques that were based

on the actual transcripts of interrogations of children in the Mc­

Martin case. A young man visited children at their preschool, read

them a story, and handed out treats. He did nothing aggressive, in­

appropriate, or surprising. A week later an experimenter questioned

MISTAKES WERE MADE (but not by me) 119

the children about the man's visit. She asked one group leading ques­

tions, such as "Did he shove the teacher? Did he throw a crayon at a

kid who was talking?" She asked a second group the same questions

along with influence techniques used by the McMartin interroga­

tors: for example, telling the children what other kids had suppos­

edly said, expressing disappointment if answers were negative, and

praising children for making allegations. In the first group, children

said "yes, it happened" to about 15 percent of the false allegations

about the man's visit; not a high percentage, but not a trivial num­ ber, either. In the second group, however, the three-year-olds said

"yes, it happened" to over 80 percent of the false allegations sug­

gested to them, and the four- to six-year-olds said yes to about half

the allegations. And those results occurred after interviews lasting

only five to ten minutes; in actual criminal investigations, interview­

ers often question children repeatedly over weeks and months. In a

similar study, this time with five- to seven-year-olds, the investigators

found they could easily influence the children to agree with prepos­

terous questions, such as "Did Paco take you flying in an airplane?"

What was more troubling was that within a short time, many of the

children's inaccurate statements had crystallized into stable, but false,

memories.29

Research like this has enabled psychologists to improve their

methods of interviewing children, so that they can help children

who have been abused disclose what happened to them, but without

increasing the suggestibility of children who have not been abused.

The scientists have shown that very young children, under age five,

often cannot tell the difference between something they were told and something that actually happened to them. If preschoolers over­

hear adults exchanging rumors about some event, for example, many of the children will later come to believe they actually experienced

the event themselves.30 In all these studies, the most powerful find­ ing is that adults are highly likely to taint an interview when they go

into it already convinced that a child has been molested. When that

122 CAROL TAVRIS and ELLIOT ARONSON

problems. Should you assume that years of incest, repressed from

memory, are the primary cause?

There you are, at the top of the pyramid, with a decision to make:

Leap onto the recovered-memory bandwagon or stay on the sidewalk.

The majority of mental-health professionals were skeptical and did

not go along. But a large number of therapists-between one-fourth

and one-third, according to several surveys33-took that first step in

the direction of belief, and, given the dosed loop of clinical practice,

we can see how easy it was for them to do so. Most had not been

trained in the show-me-the-data spirit of skepticism. They did not

know about the confirmation bias, so it did not occur to them that

Bass and Davis were seeing evidence of incest in any symptom a

woman has, and even in the fact that she has no symptoms. They

lacked a deep appreciation of the importance of control groups, so

they were unlikely to wonder how many women who were not mo­

lested nonetheless have eating disorders or feel powerless and unmo­

tivated. 34 They did not pause to consider what reasons other than

incest might cause their female clients to have sexual problems.

Even some skeptical practitioners were reluctant to slow the bandwagon by saying anything critical of their colleagues or of the women telling their stories. It's uncomfortable-dissonant-to re­

alize that some of your colleagues are tainting your profession with

silly or dangerous ideas. It's embarrassing-dissonant-to realize

that not everything women and children say is true, especially after

all your efforts to persuade victimized women to speak up and to get

the world to recognize the problem of child abuse. Some therapists

feared that to publicly question the likelihood of recovered memo­

ries was to undermine the credibility of the women who really had

been molested or raped. Some feared that criticism of the recovered­

memory movement would give ammunition and moral support to

sexual predators and antifeminists. In the beginning, they could not

have anticipated that a national panic about sexual abuse would

erupt, and that innocent people would be swept up in the pursuit of

MISTAKES WERE MADE (but not by me) 123

the guilty. Yet by remaining silent as this happened, they furthered their own slide down the pyramid.

Today, some of the psychotherapists who joined the recovered­

memory movement continue to do what they have been doing for

years, helping clients uncover "repressed" memories. (Most have

become cautious, however, fearing lawsuits.) Others have quietly

dropped their focus on repressed memories of incest as the leading

explanation of their clients' problems; it has gone out of fashion, just

as penis envy, frigidity, and masturbatory insanity did decades ago.

They drop one fad when it loses steam and sign on for the next,

rarely pausing to question where all the repressed incest cases went.

They might hear vaguely that there is controversy, but it's easier to

stay with what they have always done, and maybe add a newer tech­

nique to go along with it.

But, undoubtedly, the practitioners who would have the greatest

dissonance to resolve are the clinical psychologists and psychiatrists

who spearheaded the recovered-memory movement to begin with.

Many have impressive credentials. The movement gave them great

fame and success. They were star lecturers at professional conferences.

They were and still are called on to testify in court about whether a

child has been abused or whether a plaintiff's recovered memory is re­

liable, and, as we saw, they usually made their judgments with a high

degree of confidence. As the scientific evidence that they were wrong

began to accumulate, how likely was it that they would have em­

braced it readily, being grateful for the studies of memory and chil­

dren's testimony that would improve their practice? To do so would

have been to realize that they had harmed the very women and chil­

dren they were trying to help. It was much easier to preserve their

commitments by rejecting the scientific research as being irrelevant

to clinical practice. And as soon as they took that self-justifying step, they could not go back without enormous psychological difficulty.

Today, standing at the bottom of the pyramid, miles away profes­

sionally from their scientific colleagues, having devoted two decades

124 CAROL TAVRIS and ELLIOT ARONSON

to promoting a form of therapy that Richard McNally calls "the

worst catastrophe to befall the mental-health field since the lobot­

omy era,"35 most recovered-memory clinicians remain as committed

as ever to their beliefs. How have they reduced their dissonance?

One popular method is by minimizing the extent of the problem

and the damage it caused. Clinical psychologist John Briere, one of

the earliest supporters of recovered-memory therapy, finally admit­

ted at a conference that the numbers of memories recovered in the

1980s may have been caused, at least in part, by "over-enthusiastic"

therapists who had inappropriately tried to "liposuction memories

out of their [clients'] brains." Mistakes were made, by them. But

only a few of them, he hastened to add. Recovered false memories

are rare, he said; repressed true memories are far more common.36

Others reduce dissonance by blaming the victim. Colin Ross, a

psychiatrist who rose to fame and fortune by claiming that repressed

memories of abuse cause multiple personality disorder, eventually

agreed that "suggestible individuals can have memories elaborated

within their minds because of poor therapeutic technique." But be­

cause "normal human memory is highly error-prone," he concluded

that "false memories are biologically normal and, therefore, not nec­

essarily the therapist's fault." Therapists don't create false memories

in their clients, because therapists are merely "consultants."37 If a

client comes up with a mistaken memory, therefore, it's the client's

fault.

The most ideologically committed clinicians reduce dissonance

by killing the messenger. In the late 1990s, when psychiatrists and

psychotherapists were being convicted of malpractice for their use of

coercive methods, and courts were ruling against them in cases of al­

leged recovered memories, D. Corydon Hammond advised his clin­

ical colleagues at a convention thus: "I think it's time somebody

called for an open season on academicians and researchers. In the

United States and Canada in particular, things have become so ex­

treme with academics supporting extreme false memory positions, so

MISTAKES WERE MADE (but not by me) 125

I think it's time for clinicians to begin bringing ethics charges for sci­ entific malpractice against researchers, and journal editors-most of

whom, I would point out, don't have malpractice coverage."38 Some

psychiatrists and clinical psychologists took Hammond's advice, send­

ing harassing letters to researchers and journal editors, making spu­

rious claims of ethics violations against scientists studying memory

and children's testimony, and filing nuisance lawsuits aimed at block­

ing publication of critical articles and books. None of these efforts

have been successful at silencing the scientists.39

There is one final way of reducing dissonance: Dismiss all the sci­

entific research as being part of a backlash against child victims and

incest survivors. The concluding section of the third edition of The

Courage to Heal is called "Honoring the Truth: A Response to the

Backlash." There is no section called "Honoring the Truth: We Made

Some Big Mistakes."40

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There are almost no psychotherapists who practiced recovered­

memory therapy who have admitted that they were wrong. Of course,

they may fear lawsuits. But from the few who have publicly admitted

their errors, we can see what it took to shake them out of their pro­

tective cocoons of self-justification. For Linda Ross, it was taking

herself out of the closed loop of private therapy sessions and forcing

herself to confront, in person, parents whose lives had been destroyed

by their daughters' accusations. One of her clients brought her to a

meeting of accused parents. Ross suddenly realized that a story that

had seemed bizarre but possible when her client told it in therapy

now seemed fantastical when multiplied by a roomful of similar

tales. "I had been so supportive of women and their repressed mem­

ories," she said, "but I had never once considered what that experi­

ence was like for the parents. Now I heard how absolutely ludicrous

it sounded. One elderly couple introduced themselves, and the wife

told me that their daughter had accused her husband of murdering