It is entirely possible that a person sincerely believes that what didn't happen actually happened, be it sexual abuse (abusing another, getting abused) or confession of guilt or anything else. It is also entirely possible that a person listens to what another says and interprets it to mean what the person wants to hear. Memory and interpretation are no simple matter, and there is a large area between consciously telling the truth and consciously telling a lie.
Stephen Philion raised the myth of spat-upon veterans, the topic of Jerry Lembcke's research (cf. <http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0430-21.htm>), as an example of the unreliability of memory. It is not necessary for us to believe that veterans who claim that they were spat upon by anti-war protesters are consciously lying. It is much more likely that they sincerely believe what they want to believe, without being aware of any gap between their belief and reality. Indeed, the image of spat-upon veterans would probably not have become a widely held myth if those who say they were spat upon or those who say they know veterans who have been spat upon had been consciously lying.
Here's an interesting study of the making of a false memory:
<blockquote><http://www.apa.org/monitor/mar00/memory.html> Monitor on Psychology Volume 31, No. 3, March 2000
New theory on the making of a false memory
A new study finds support for the theory that the more sources of perceptual information people have about an event--the sight, sound, feel or taste of an experience--the more likely they are to believe they actually experienced the event, even if they haven't.
In particular, the "realness" of a false memory results from the brain's ability to pull together perceptual information from unrelated experiences and wrongly read it as a single, authentic memory. This "source monitoring" theory of false memories postulates that people misattribute perceptual information experienced in a different context to support a memory for something that never happened.
The more perceptual information people can connect to the false memory, the more likely they are to have that false memory in the first place, the study finds. In particular, Linda Henkel, PhD, and her colleagues find that study participants were more likely to falsely remember seeing an object if they previously imagined the object and heard the sound it makes.
In two separate experiments, they had more than 170 undergraduates view, imagine or listen to the sound of common, easily recognized events, such as a baby crying, a toilet flushing, a hammer hammering or a basketball bouncing. And they found that participants were much more likely to incorrectly say they saw, for example, a hammer if they previously imagined a hammer, or heard a tape of hammering, than if they had no previous exposure to anything "hammer-like." And they were even more likely to falsely remember the hammer if they visually imagined it and, at a different time, heard hammering.
The findings suggest that repeated exposure to certain objects and events through sight, sound or just imagination can muddle people's memories of where or how they experienced something or even whether their experience is real, conclude Henkel, now at the University of North Florida, and her colleagues Nancy Franklin, PhD, of the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and Marcia Johnson, PhD, of Princeton University.
"People commonly have repeated experiences with certain objects and events," says Henkel. "And what we're seeing is that similar types of memories can get confused and people can mistake one instance for another."
In fact, the most compelling false memories may be those in which fragments of real experiences--viewing photos, hearing others recount events or daydreaming--play a role, the researchers say. Their study appears in this month's issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition (Vol. 26, No. 2).
--B. AZAR</blockquote>
Those who have false memories are not consciously lying.
> Stephen P. and others are right that there is incredible hysteria about child
> sexual abuse in the U.S. But it's important to note that this hysteria is
> mainly around non-family members.
The "recovered memory" craze quite often led adults to file lawsuits against their parents, grandparents, and other family members. Once the craze began to subside, attempts to seek redress started e.g.,
<blockquote>. . . Ramona v. Ramona, in which a father was awarded $475,000 by a California court on the grounds that his daughter's therapists had negligently induced false memories that he had sexually abused her as a child (2). Although clinicians ordinarily are responsible only to their patients for their actions, the trial court in Ramona decided that the situation presented in the case constituted an exception to the usual rule. The therapists, a family counselor and a psychiatrist, were charged with negligence for having suggested to the patient that her bulimia must have been due to sexual abuse, misrepresenting to her that an amobarbital interview had confirmed her recovered memory of having been raped by her father. They encouraged her to confront her father and participated in the confrontation. As a result of the confrontation, the father lost his job, his marriage collapsed, and his daughter filed a civil suit against him. (Paul S. Appelbaum, _Law & Psychiatry: Third-Party Suits Against Therapists in Recovered-Memory Cases_, Psychiatr Serv 52:27-28, January 2001<http://www.psychservices.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/full/52/1/27>)</blockquote>
-- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>