Carol Tavris mixes recovered-memory therapy with multiple personality disorder: a fallacious, guilt-by-association argument in today’s Wall Street Journal

In the course of reviewing the book I mentioned in yesterday’s post, Carol Tavris says:

“Here are the psychiatrists…who prospered by promoting recovered-memory therapy and multiple personality disorder.”

“…But feminists contributed to the panic as well: For them, the day-care trials validated everything they feared about the mistreatment of children. This concern caused many to uncritically support the multiple-personality and recovered-memory epidemics…”

Whenever you read an article that conflates “recovered-memory” (also known as “repressed-memory”) with multiple personality, you know that you can’t trust the article. Neither I nor any psychiatrist I know who is interested in multiple personality has ever practiced “recovered-memory therapy.”

Now, multiple personality disorder is a condition of secrecy, and much may be unknown to the regular, host personality. So it is possible for traumatic experiences to be known to alternate personalities and not to the host. But such memories are not accessed by pressuring the host personality. You have to speak with the alternate personalities, themselves. Moreover, I, and most, psychiatrists have always known that you can’t accept improbable “memories” as historical facts without corroboration.

Writers like Tavris don’t put these issues in the historical context that I provided in yesterdays’s post: Before these “epidemics,” child abuse was thought to happen to only one child in a million. And after these “epidemics,” multiple personality is still much more common than she thinks. But how would she know that? She has never screened people for multiple personality or made the diagnosis.