In an effort to bring scientific understanding to this complex and highly emotional controversy, psychologist Robert A. Baker has collected important essays by noted experts on child sexual abuse.

Introduction / Charlotte Prozan -- Psychic reality and historical truth / Howard B. Levine -- Repression, dissociation, memory / Murray Bilmes -- An overview of cognitive processes, childhood memory and trauma / Daniel J. Siegel -- A lawyer's view of invented memory: the Ramona case / Ephraim Margolin -- Legal issues for psychotherapists / Mary R. Williams -- Historical truth and narrative truth in psychoanalytic therapy / Jerome D. Oremland -- Uncovering memories of sexual abuse in psychoanalytic psychotherapy / Charlotte Prozan -- Assessment of trauma in the female psychiatric inpatient: impact and treatment implications / JoEllen Brainin-Rodriguez -- Reflection on a false memory of childhood sexual abuse / Jill Jeffrey -- Reconstructing childhood sexual abuse: the case of Penelope / Charlotte Prozan -- Discussion: the retrieval of repressed memories / Katherine Mac Vicar -- Discussion: clinical technique and the political surround: the case of sexual abuse / Stephen Seligman -- Response / Charlotte Prozan.

Taking on the issue of repressed memories in incest cases, the author speaks from painful experience and questions whether therapists are revealing actual happenings through hypnosis, guided imagery, dream analysis, and suggestion--or shattering lives with false accusations. Original. IP.

Maintains that there is no controlled scientific evidence that memories of trauma may be "recovered" years later.

Since about 1992, an astonishingly fierce scientific professional and legal controversy has arisen around the allegation that psychotherapists may sometimes have fostered false memories of childhood sexual abuse. Some have blamed Freud for this, arguing that he sowed the seeds of false memory syndrome 100 years ago. He has been accused by some critics of abandoning, out of professional cowardice, his original recongition of the prevalence of sexual abuse amongst his patients, substituting his theory of childhood sexuality and the Oedipus complex, and by others of fabricating and implanting false memories of abuse in his patientes' minds.

Meredith Maran lived a daughter's nightmare: she accused her father of sexual abuse, then realized, nearly too late, that he was innocent. During the 1980s and 1990s, tens of thousands of Americans became convinced that they had repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse, and then, decades later, recovered those memories in therapy. Journalist, mother, and daughter Meredith Maran was one of them. Her accusation and estrangement from her father caused her sons to grow up without their only grandfather, divided her family into those who believed her and those who didn't, and led her to isolate herself on "Planet Incest," where "survivors" devoted their lives, and life savings, to recovering memories of events that had never occurred. Maran unveils her family's devastation and ultimate redemption against the backdrop of the sex-abuse scandals, beginning with the infamous McMartin preschool trial, that sent hundreds of innocents to jail—several of whom remain imprisoned today. Exploring the psychological, cultural, and neuroscientific causes of this modern American witch-hunt, My Lie asks: how could so many people come to believe the same lie at the same time? What has neuroscience discovered about the brain's capacity to create false memories and encode false beliefs? What are the "big lies" gaining traction in American culture today—and how can we keep them from taking hold? My Lie is a wrenchingly honest, unexpectedly witty, and profoundly human story that proves the personal is indeed political—and the political can become painfully personal.