This article originally appeared in T&S Issue 37, Summer 1998.
At the 1997 Edinburgh festival, a new play about False Memory Syndrome, Mike Cullen’s Anna Weiss, was hailed by critics as ‘powerfully thought-provoking theatre’. It was also described as ‘not taking sides’.
In fact Anna Weiss does take sides: it takes the side of men against abused women and children. And as feminist legal scholars Jane Scoular and Denise Mina explain, what happens in the imaginary world of the theatre is increasingly being re-enacted in the real world of the law courts: the dramatic potential of ‘false memory’ encourages lawyers to introduce it even where it is patently irrelevant.
The newly invented ‘False Memory Syndrome’ describes a suggested condition where the sufferer remembers events which didn’t happen; it is most commonly associated with female accounts of sexual abuse. It was in fact created by the False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF) in America; a group of aggrieved parents accused of sexual abuse by their children (see ‘FMS: Fraudulent, Misogynist and Sinister’, T&S 31). The syndrome disputes the possibility of repressed memory of trauma. According to this formulation when such memories are recovered they are the result of being implanted by an external source. Among the most commonly cited means of implantment are the use of hypnosis or drug therapy by therapists.
The FMSF and its British counterpart, the British False Memory Society (BFMS) have recently widened the possible causes of implantment to include ‘softer’ forms of intervention such as a therapist’s questioning or ‘being with a patient’, or women’s reading books, watching television shows or even attending a feminist meeting. There is the suggestion that women cannot be trusted with information and political ideas and that the scarce resources we have campaigned for are in some way damaging to our individual and collective memories. The implication of this extension is that all memories can be tainted, and support of any kind is a potential pollutant.
Support, even in the sense of believing that memories can be repressed and later recalled, is seen by one commentator on the subject as being sufficient to implant. Psychologist Janet Boakes, interviewed in a recent Frontline Scotland programme about the Fairlie case (discussed below), stated: ‘It’s not just [memory recovery] techniques [which cause false memory syndrome], just believing in repression … becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy’. She adds that this belief makes it likely that professionals will find evidence to support child abuse allegations.
Through the campaigning activities of the two organisations, false memory syndrome has gained currency in the media, as Jenny Kitzinger notes in her article ‘Media Representation of Sexual Abuse Risks’ and increasingly in law. The way it has been adopted in these discourses has meant that ‘false memories’ appear as much a risk as child sexual abuse itself. The complexities of child abuse are sidelined as the battle between recovered and false memory takes centre stage. In this polar argument only one account can be true.
To illustrate how this polarisation works, we will use a play, Anna Weiss, and then draw parallels with the syndrome’s increasing adoption into law.
Anna Weiss
The play Anna Weiss by Mike Cullen, which debuted in 1997’s Edinburgh Festival, tells the story of the confrontation between a daughter claiming to have recovered memories of sexual abuse, her accused father and the attendant therapist. One of the most lauded aspects of the play in press reviews, was that it ‘refuses to take sides’. The playwright describes himself as being without ‘any social or political agenda, other than that this should be talked about’.
Yet the way in which Mike Cullen ‘talks about’ the issues is not neutral. Even before the play begins, the apparently neutral author’s presentation of alleged child abuse starts with a nursery rhyme; an adult representation of a child’s idiosyncratic world. The proem to the play reads:
I thought I saw upon the stair
A little man who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today
Oh, how I wish he’d go away
Children’s rhyme
The overactive imagination described is the property of a child. The child is frightened by an imaginary man, the child is scaring itself.
The first appearance of the daughter, Lynn, on stage clearly identifies her as the ‘child’ of the proem. She arrives on stage frantically trying to find something that she has lost; ‘In detail, I remember in detail… approaching this box.. putting the thing in the box. I can see myself’.
She cannot remember correctly where she has put a photograph of her father, taken on the day that she claims he raped her. It is later found in a different box. Her memory is flawed from the very first line, in the first scene. Despite her certainty over her memory Lynn has misremembered. This casts doubt on her version of events; she is an unreliable subject. She is the child who thought she saw a man, this man is her father yet he wasn’t there.
The play opens by rehearsing the cultural construction of women and children as deceitful. This construction can be seen in judicial utterances, commonly in the area of rape, such as Judge Sutcliffe’s comment in 1976: ‘It is well known that women in particular and small boys are liable to be untruthful and invent stories’.
In contrast the male subject in law has integrity. This is paralelled in the play; the father’s memory is never presented as conditional. He can recall events from his earliest childhood; ‘[B]efore I could even walk, lying in my pram, for Christ’s sake.’ He recalls smells, he remembers his room ‘in every detail’; its colour, its shape, its texture. He talks of his uncomfortable bed, he can hear himself wetting it. He can feel the fuzzy blankets on his skin. His total recall even extends to a faulty knob on his chest of drawers and there follows an inventory of its contents; tight necked jumpers, gold and black hooped ankle socks from thirty five years ago. We have a clear impression of a man with acute cognitive senses. His recollections extend to Lynn’s own childhood, he remembers ‘every detail’ of Lynn’s childhood. He describes her birth, ‘[E]very birthday, every Christmas…every gift I bought her, every expression on her face’.
Empty vessels
Of all the characters, it is the father who is furnished with a history. In contrast, the only dimension to Lynn is her determination to confront him. She is constructed as an empty vessel to be filled with ideas and a history provided by external sources. These sources include her father, the therapist and a nameless self-help book. One cause of implanted memory commonly referred to in BFMS literature, is the best selling The Courage to Heal, a self-help book for survivors of abuse. In a 1996 case discussed below, referred to as the Cracker case, The Courage to Heal was directly implicated as a source of false memories. Cullen echoes this: ‘The things he did. I wrote them down, like it said in the book.’ Lynn is silenced, it is the book which appears to speak.
The Courage to Heal is often discredited by tainting it with a pseudo-religious characterisation. Such an association operates to reduce recovered stories to scripture and turns subjects into disciples, once again denying their subjectivity. Anyone who facilitates the telling of the story is discredited; therapists and feminists become the high priestesses of the cult of repressed memory. The playwright, Mike Cullen, repeats this device in his characterisation of the therapist Anna Weiss who is a mish-mash of misogynist fears. She is a man-hating, covert lesbian who uses the therapeutic relationship to press her agenda on Lynn. In Act 1 Scene 1 she launches into her regular diatribe ‘Hole Blindness — The male affliction’, ‘a man, any man, looks at a woman… when everything’s stripped away [ and sees] a big pink gaping hole that must be filled.’
Throughout the play this is cast as the motivating force behind the confrontation rather than any truth of the memories. This mirrors the BFMS’s frequent claims that therapists have their own political agenda. Anna’s agenda is even more questionable as Anna and Lynn also live together. This relationship is not furnished in any way, and the silence serves to cast it as sinister and abusive. The sinister pall is deflected from the father: he begins to question Anna, ‘You get off on this…fuck[ing] with peoples lives.’ And later, ‘Where do you sleep, Lynn?’
The suggestion of a sexual relationship casts Anna Weiss as both unprofessional and predatory. Neither of the two women talk about their relationship; we are left with the father’s aspersions.
Protecting the family
In a similar manner, it is the therapeutic relationship that BFMS constantly interrogate without questioning the familial dynamics. The family are only mentioned in their accounts to document the damage done by therapeutic intervention. In the legal setting it is the therapeutic relationship which comes under scrutiny. For example, in two cases we discuss below, the Ramona and Fairlie cases, the action is for damages for insult to the father’s reputation caused by therapists’ actions. In clearing their name the safety of the family is reinforced. Accounts routinely focus on the damaged family and their attempts to rebuild relationships which have been ‘torn apart’ by the violence of therapeutic intervention. In Frontline Scotland’s account of the Fairlie case, the final scene is of the Catriona and Jim Fairlie ‘learning to do the things that other fathers and daughters take for granted’.
In Anna Weiss the shifting of responsibility for damaging the child, Lynn, is complete when the confrontation between father and daughter is overtaken by the therapist. After a sound slap from the father it is Anna who suddenly remembers being abused by the same characters, in the same setting and with the same emotional content as Lynn. The suggestion is that Anna has penetrated Lynn’s consciousness and filled it with her own memories. The abusive relationship in Lynn’s life is her relationship with Anna.
At the end of the play the hapless women are confused; Lynn confesses, ‘[H]ow can we know… what’s yours, what’s mine…?’ Anna and Lynn’s subjectivities are conflated. The therapist is so powerful that she takes over the patient’s voice, her agency and even her abuse.
The dynamics in the play are mirrored when False Memory Syndrome appears in a legal context. As therapists and health professionals become the subjects of legal suits the issue becomes an adversarial contest between them and the accused parent. Any account of abuse is sidelined, the family is re-established as a safe-haven and the therapeutic relationship is cast as dangerous.
False Memory Syndrome In Law
The development of False Memory Syndrome in law is an interesting one, involving two crucial misrepresentations by the pro-FMS bodies. Firstly, from the moment of its establishment in 1993 the BFMS established a pattern of falsely claiming legal victories which supported the syndrome. In these initial cases the facts did not correspond to the syndrome as defined by the BFMS and FMSF. Often there had been no repressed memories and the accuser had not been in therapy at the time of the initial allegation.
The second misrepresentation concerns the legal weight attached to these ‘legal victories’: the submission of a defence in court by a lawyer does not amount to legal recognition or adoption. Even if a court finds for the defence, unless the syndrome is referred to in the judgement of the court, it is not authoritative and has no precedential value in later cases; this means it cannot be relied upon as a set legal rule.
The first case which the BFMS claimed supported their cause demonstrates both deliberate errors. The case was heard in 1993, the same year that the BFMS was founded. It concerned Linda Bolland Heaton, a worker for the charity Barnardos whose 22 year old daughter had gone into therapy after alleging that she had been sexually abused by her stepfather. Before going into therapy the daughter extended the allegations and accused her mother of sadistic sexual abuse. As a result Heaton was dismissed from her job at Barnardos and subsequently brought an action against the charity for unfair dismissal. The industrial tribunal found for her, awarding her £14,000 in damages.
Both Heaton and the BFMS claimed that this case represented the adoption of FMS into the UK courts. However, the tribunal’s hearing centred on the procedures for dismissal. They quite properly found ‘insufficient’ evidence for the allegations: the daughter had not made her allegations public, nor had she pursued a criminal investigation. The only mention of the veracity of the daughter’s memories came in the form of evidence led, not in the judgement. The mother called a psychologist who, using Freudian theory, contended that women with ‘hysterical personalities’ are more likely to report fantasy or untruths as fact. These submissions did not find their way into the judgement, and the tribunal did not find on the question of false memory at all. The case is not even a false memory case as defined by the societies: the daughter accused her mother of abusing her before she went into therapy and there was no suggestion of lost memories being recovered, much less of memories recovered under intrusive therapeutic intervention.
One year later the society claimed victory in another case which again did not fit within the parameters of the syndrome, nor did the court find on the issue. Fiona Reay, a 33 year old care assistant, accused her father of systematic sexual abuse during her childhood. The facts of her childhood were not in dispute: she had run away from home on a number of occasions and there was evidence that she had never been enrolled in secondary school. Her father said it was because she was ‘young and stupid’. He had physically assaulted Fiona on a number of occasions, one of which occurred when she was sixteen. The police had been called to the house by her boyfriend; after he had dropped her home, he heard her screaming as her father beat her with a dog chain.
As before there was no evidence of repression of memory in this case. Fiona Reay had been telling the same story to different health professionals for years. Her medical records document her consistent reference to family problems from the age of 14. She finally made a clear statement in 1982 when she asked a gynaecologist if her need for a hysterectomy could be related to the fact that she had been sexually abused by her father. Five years later she was admitted to psychiatric hospital stating that one of the precipitant factors causing her breakdown had been an unexpected visit from her father. She found him stroking her daughter. There had been no therapy, no regression and no hypnosis prior to the allegations being made public.
The jury took 27 minutes to find Fiona Reay’s father not guilty of rape and indecent assault. As before, the court did not hear evidence from expert witnesses stating that Fiona was suffering from false memory syndrome. The only suggestion of this was by the defence counsel, Toby Hedworth. In his closing remarks he referred to the ‘worrying phenomenon of people coming to believe in phantom memories’.
The next case which was claimed as a triumph for false memory was heard in March 1995. A father was aquitted of raping his daughter. The claims of the BFMS followed the familiar pattern of not fitting within the parameters of false memory at all. The daughter made the allegations to staff members whom she had befriended during her stay in psychiatric hospital. As before there was no evidence of memory repression or recovery during therapy and again the case failed due to lack of corroborating evidence. Yet the society picked up on the defence solicitor’s statements that the daughter was a prone to ‘fantasise’ about sexual matters and had been sexually promiscuous with other patients in the hospital.
The Crocker case
Ironically, the first English law case where the judgement was based on a finding of ‘false’ memories induced through therapy has been ignored by the BFMS. We can only presume that the reason was that the case was not about sexual abuse. It concerned a woman suing the Coal Board for compensation for her psychiatric injuries sustained during the Aberfan pit disaster of October 1966. Ms Crocker was a ten year old child at the time and had since experienced both physical and emotional symptoms relating to the disaster, such as the disturbing sensation of having pins stuck under her nails, a feeling which she later attributed to the memory of scrabbling through the slag as she attempted to free her friends underneath it.
Ms Crocker entered into therapy in an attempt to overcome these debilitating symptoms. She underwent a form of abreaction therapy which included the use of sodium amytal (a so-called ‘truth drug’), reading contemporaneous news reports and watching documentaries about the disaster. The judgement of the court stated: ‘[A]breaction itself represents a powerful process, which is capable of generating as well as bringing back memories.’ and later in the judgement,
It is clear, as I have already mentioned, that some of the ‘memories’ induced were false in that objective sense ….. I would say only that they are not to my mind established for present purposes as objective fact on a balance of probabilities.
This case, while not fully adopting the concept of false memory syndrome into law, does represent an opening of the door and the adoption of some of its central tenets.
False confession become ‘false memory’
The case of Michelle Uncles in May 1996 shows how woolly and broad the original concept of false memory had now become and yet it demonstrated the continued willingness of defence lawyers to use it as a device to discredit any contentious memory presented by a woman. In this case Michelle confessed to the police that she had smothered her baby who had died 6 years before. The pathologist’s report made at the time of the original death concluded that the baby had died from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). There was no forensic evidence suggesting that Michelle had smothered her baby. Her lawyer claimed that she was suffering from false memories of killing her child, memories induced by guilt over his death. The judgement of the court centred on the fact that there was no evidence of smothering and Michelle was released. This classic case of a false confession was recharacterised by the defence as an example of false memory syndrome and was reported in the press as further evidence of the rise of false memory syndrome.
In Manchester in 1996 yet another case was reported by BFMS as ‘the first British case of False Memory Syndrome’. The defence barrister, Stephen Meadowcroft, stated that the complainant had been influenced by reading The Courage to Heal and watching an episode of ‘Cracker’ in which a rape occurred. Reporting restrictions on the case were very tight; it has been unreported in the legal literature and information about the case has been hard to come by. It is therefore unclear whether or not the case was decided directly on the issue of false memories. What is known is that Roger Scotford, the head and founder of the BFMS, stood on the steps of the court handing out press releases to journalists claiming that this was a case of false memory syndrome. Stephen Meadowcroft has subsequently claimed that Scotford misquoted his submissions to the court in these press releases and Bryan Tully, an expert witness on false memory syndrome, has complained about Scotford’s behaviour during the case.
Suing the therapists
It is against this background that two cases will be heard in the next few months, which once again bring up the issue of false memory syndrome. Anna Hunter has just been granted legal aid to pursue her suit against a psychiatric hospital in Newcastle upon Tyne. After numerous suicide attempts and developing an eating disorder she was admitted to hospital. While there she alleged that her father and grandfather had abused her when she was a child. She has subsequently retracted her allegations and is suing the hospital for negligence, on the grounds that the hospital did not question her memories and treated them as true.
The second case, reported on the 15th October 1997 in The Daily Telegraph involves a daughter’s allegations of abuse against her father, Jim Fairlie, the former Scottish National Party deputy leader. She made the allegations while under medication in a psychiatric unit and has since recanted. In a recent Frontline Scotland programme screened in early March 1998, Catriona Fairlie said, ‘There was no corroboration so it didn’t happen’. What she claims did happen was that while dealing with flashbacks to childhood sexual abuse (which remains undisputed), a nurse who was listening to her ‘disclose’ an episode asked, ‘Has your Dad ever abused you?’. Catriona replied ‘No’. The nurse asked her whether she was sure. Catriona said that yes, she was sure. It appears to be on the basis of this conversation that false memories are supposed to have been implanted. Her father is now suing the Hospital Trust for defamation, the Scottish equivalent of libel, on the grounds that his daughter’s memories were believed without question.
The usual defence in defamation cases is ‘veritas’ — that the allegations are true. If the court finds for Fairlie the implications could be staggering: health care workers may find themselves under a legal obligation to interrogate memories of abuse and will be unable to report it to the police until they have some physical or other corroborating evidence. The outcome of these cases remains to be seen.
Ready-made arguments
The campaigning of the BFMS has had an effect and the law does appear to be becoming increasingly receptive to this model of memory despite its contentious nature. One of the reasons is that it provides defence lawyers with a ready made explanation of allegations of child abuse. When Bea Campbell asked the father’s solicitor in the Fiona Reay case why he had used false memory syndrome in his defence the solicitor, David Smee, replied that his job ‘was not to pursue the truth but to protect his client, to get him off’. In the same article Smee claimed as inspiration the BBC Inside Story documentary film on false memory, screened only a few weeks earlier.
In an adversarial contest defence solicitors have everything to gain and nothing to lose from making such a damaging claim. Yet as we can see from the earlier cases, the law does not have to decide cases on the issue of false memory syndrome. A case can be dismissed as a false allegation or on the grounds that there is insufficient evidence. These findings are routinely returned in cases every day. Yet why is it that when a case involves a woman’s allegation of child abuse her memory becomes suspect and medicalised? In order to answer this we must look at the various characteristics of legal discourse, many of which are also evident in the play Anna Weiss.
Silencing women
The law presents itself as a neutral forum in which disputes can be resolved in a balanced manner. The play also presents itself as neutral, yet any enquiry into the methods deployed in both discourses uncover a pervading sexism. Women and children come from a position of social and historical inequality. The law’s claim of neutrality ignores this context, and its method, amplifies their marginalisation.
In the legal cases, as in the play, the audience is being asked to determine whose memory of events is correct. By presenting it as a polar issue both discourses detract attention from the fact that the playing field is not level. The central issue before the audience and the court is the women’s agency and integrity. Attempts are made to destabilise both as it is debated and decided upon. The reliability of the female subject is interrogated, it has to be: it forms the very nub of the question before the court.
As FMS gains currency female voices lose audibility. This silencing takes place in the play and has happened in the media coverage of stories. The danger is that if this syndrome is fully transferred into law, in the up coming cases, an already hostile discourse will become an utterly inaccessible forum for survivors to tell their stories of abuse and seek any kind of redress.
References
Bea Campbell ‘Mind Games’ The Guardian, 11th February 1995
Beth Follini ‘FMS: Fraudulent, Misogynist and Sinister’ T&S 31 (Summer 1995)
Jenny Kitzinger ‘Media Representations of Sexual Abuse Risks’ Child Abuse Review (Vol 5 No5 , 319-333)
Mike Cullen Anna Weiss (Nick Hern Books, 1997)