The problem of false accusation first became salient for psychologists in the work of Sigmund Freud. In the early years of his practice, Freud noticed something remarkable: All his hysteric patients recovered vivid memories of childhood sexual experience at some point in their analyses. His initial interpretation (Freud, 1896/1985) was that repressed memo-ries of such experiences, in combination with less repressed later events, were the underlying cause of their illness. Soon afterward, however, he decided that the patients must have been recalling fantasies rather than real experiences. It was those fantasies, again in combination with later memories, that produced the symptoms of hysteria.
In terms of Freud's overall theory, this was a relatively small change. Even in the first interpretation he had insisted that the basic cause of hysteria was not the event itself but its mental representation: "The mat-ter is not merely one of the existence of the sexual experiences, but that . . . the scenes must be present as unconscious memories; only so long as, and in so far as, they are unconscious are they able to create and maintain hysterical symptoms" (Freud, 1896/1985, p. 280; italics in original). In fact, however, this revision has had momentous consequences. From that time onward, psychoanalysts have systematically sought the origins of mental illness in early fantasy rather than in concrete life experience.
Just why Freud abandoned the "seduction theory" so easily is a hotly disputed question (Masson, 1985). I will not enter that dispute here; the real facts of the matter (i.e., whether the reported sexual experiences actually happened) are forever beyond our reach. Unfortunately, how-ever, the issue is of much more than historical interest today. Very similar reports - apparent memories of sexual traumas that were experienced in childhood and then long forgotten - are often given by patients today. A full century after Freud's initial investigations, it is still hard to be sure what they mean.
These sexual-abuse memories appear during psychotherapy, often to-gether with participation in "incest survivor" groups. Often they strike the patient as surprising, having "emerged" for the first time during the therapy itself. This fact does not arouse the therapist's skepticism; on the contrary, it is usually taken as evidence that the memories must have been very deeply repressed. With the lifting of that "repression," many terrible recollections may appear. At that point, the presumptive experience of childhood sexual abuse becomes the turning point of the patient's life
narrative. (See Bruner, chap. 3 of this volume, for more on turning points.) She (most of the patients are women) now sees herself as victim; formerly beloved family members are seen as perpetrators. Accusations are made, lives changed, families broken up; legal action may be under-taken. The sheer number of such cases is remarkable. The False Memory Syndrome (FMS) Foundation, set up in 1992 as a support group for per-sons accused in this way, received thousands of calls for help in its first year of operation.
Are these accusations justified? For therapist and patient, the vividness of the memories and the coherence of the narrative that they support seem to be self-validating. Nevertheless, they may be far less plausible to outsiders. The alleged perpetrators typically deny everything: The accu-sations seem to take them by surprise and their friends may warmly de-fend their characters. In addition, the reported abuses are often wildly implausible. In an FMS Foundation (1993) survey, 18% of the narratives include "satanic cult" stories - bizarre torture rituals conducted by robed figures, children made pregnant to produce babies for human sacrifice, infants killed and eaten. In other cases the events are described as oc-curring so openly and often, with so many people, that it seems impos-sible they could have gone unnoticed. In one case the victim reported that her father and his poker buddies used to rape her routinely, every weekend, with the collusion of her mother (Wright, 1993). Then, appar-ently, normal family life would resume.
Patients like these are dominated by their remembered selves. Their current life problems are interpreted as resulting from their awful past experiences. They may recall those experiences in rich detail; when this happens, the vividness of the memories is taken as strong evidence for the narrative they support. Oddly, however, patients can also be con-vinced that they were sexually abused in childhood without remembering very much at all. Recalling/imagining just the faint touch of a hand, or having an indefinite feeling that "something bad was done to me," is often enough to confirm the therapist's abuse hypothesis. These mini-mal fragments often lead to further suggestions: "Tell me what that bastard did to you!" Because strong conviction is contagious, the pa-tient may accept the therapist's interpretation without actually recalling any specific memories to substantiate it. A "remembered self" con-structed in this way is based less on the patient's own life experiences than on whatever incest narratives the therapist takes to be prototypi-cal. Albright (chap. 2 of this volume) might want to call it a "plagiarized self" instead.
The acute reader will have detected a skeptical note in this discussion. I believe that many of these memories are confabulated, many of the accusations false. In some cases, my disbelief rests on the implausibility of
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