I hesitate to repost polemical material but I feel this flower is too good to blush unseen. Anyway, it's all factual and it lets Dr. Brown speak for herself, so I think the presentation is fair enough. The source, be warned, is Peter Freyd, one of the founders of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, and it comes as a post from his newsletter service. Just think, she coulda bin President of the APA. -Stephen ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Stephen Black, Ph.D. tel: (819) 822-9600 ext 2470 Department of Psychology fax: (819) 822-9661 Bishop's University e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Lennoxville, QC J1M 1Z7 Canada Department web page at http://www.ubishops.ca/ccc/div/soc/psy Check out TIPS listserv for teachers of psychology at: http://www.frostburg.edu/dept/psyc/southerly/tips/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Tue, 24 Oct 2000 13:20:11 -0400 (EDT) From: Peter Freyd In 1997 Laura S. Brown, Ph.D. ran for the presidency of the American Psychological Association (APA) on what was described as an "Anti-FMSF platform" (she lost). Prior to that she had been a member of the three-person pro-RMT team for the 1996 APA position paper on recovered memories and she was Dr. Kenneth S. Pope's co-author of the APA's "Recovered Memories Of Abuse, Assessment, Therapy, Forensics". Her most recent appearance in the FMSF Newsletter was as a member of Dr. Paul Fink's "Leadership Council". (I have appended a few of Dr. Brown's more memorable quotes.) Last August I posted the following: www.doh.wa.gov/Publicat/2000_News/00-96.html#King. FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: AUGUST 25, 2000 OLYMPIA. The state Department of Health has taken the following disciplinary actions against health care providers..... In June the Psychology Board charged Laura S. Brown, a psychologist in King County, license number PY00000615, with unprofessional conduct for crossing professional boundaries by entering into a friendship with a client, reversing roles by telling clients her problems and seeking their advice, and putting two clients in contact with each other. The allegations include divulging privileged information about one client to another, and vice-versa. The latest news bulletin is from The Capital Times (Madison, WI.) -- excerpts from an article by Steven Elbow that appeared October 20: The keynote speaker at next week's Midwest conference on child sexual abuse has infuriated organizers by bailing for a better gig: the CBS show ''Survivor.''... Laura Brown, a psychologist known for her support of the theory that the repressed memories of abused children can be recovered through hypnosis, agreed to speak at the conference in Middleton a year ago. "In canceling her contract with us, she said her life was in disarray and she would be in Europe for three months," said conference co-organizer Jill Cohen. "In reality, she's going to be in Australia [from which Survivor will originate]." To say that Brown's eleventh hour snub miffed her would be an understatement. "To pull out of a keynote when 1,200 people are going to be waiting for a speaker, and then to leave us with no speaker -- that's pretty low." Cohen can find some solace in the fact that they may have had to pass on Brown anyway. She's facing a slew of charges of ethics violations in the state of Washington, including sharing personal information among three patients, not documenting her sessions and discontinuing treatments without helping her patients find alternative therapists. "When she called and pulled out of the conference, we assumed it was because of the ethics issue," Cohen said. "In reality she broke the conference with us for a better deal. She's fairly controversial. She's problematic with people who feel that repressed memories of trauma is not valid science." ********************************************************************** Some previous appearences in the press: Central to the debate is "false memory syndrome," a theory that says therapists, pastors, even police interrogators can get people to make up memories of events that never occurred. Many therapists and children's advocates call the theory a hoax. "There's no such thing as false memory syndrome," [Dr. Laura] Brown said. By Leslie Brown September 11, 1994, Sunday The News Tribune (Tacoma, WA) "Victims of Memory" is Pendergrast's 600-page attempt to exorcise the demons that took away his daughters. Some people will see the book as a father's ultimate act of love. Others will see it as a guilty man's obsessive attempt to clear his name. "He does have a bias," said Laura Brown, a clinical psychologist in Seattle, who opposes Pendergrast's belief that recovered memories are made up. "We're assuming he's telling the truth when he says he never did this, but how do we know?" By Anne Rochell December 11, 1994 The Atlanta Journal and Constitution The conference is hosted by the False Memory Syndrome (FMS) Foundation -- which has more than 4,000 members, all of whom say they were falsely accused of abuse. It is the first such meeting to be co-sponsored by a prestigious research institute [Johns Hopkins], and that has made the recovered memory camp furious. "This is a nonexistent syndrome," said Laura Brown, a clinical psychologist in Seattle, who believes memories can be repressed and retrieved. "I was appalled when I saw that this conference was going on," she added. By Anne Rochell December 18, 1994 Sunday Cox News Service ********************************************************************** Excerpts from the 1997 Brown-for-APA-President website: (www.en.com/users/abackan/headline.htm but now defunct) The appearance of FMS has been explicitly blamed by its erstwhile discoverers on misconduct by therapists, and frequently, in specific, by feminist and lesbian therapists such as myself and my colleagues... the goals of the false memory movement [are] ultimately designed to uphold rather than subvert the power arrangements of patriarchal culture, by privileging the voices of those who claim to be falsely accused over all else, and declaring them to be always per se true, and thus the voices of accusers as per se false...when I attempt to examine the outcomes that would ultimately emerge from following the directions of the false memory movement, as well as the actions already taken by individuals who represent this movement, I see only injustice and a silencing process going on... ...the control over this history of the family in general, and specific individual families is at least as important, if not more so, than the scientific realities, and that this attempt by the false memory movement to reassert patriarchal control over the definition of history and reality is the facet of the memory debate that potentially can deform the practice of therapy and turn our hearts to stone... ...the False Memory Syndrome Foundation has proposed a way to end the "epidemic" of FMS that they have identified by creating a new standard of care in therapy. It is a standard that I perceive as undermining the social justice narrative that has most therapists who work with trauma survivors, because of who it empowers, and who it silences. ...Paul McHugh, M.D. who teaches the standard of care segment of several of the FMSF CE workshops, has argued in his writings on this topic that when a client presents with either reported continuous or reported delayed recall of childhood sexual abuse, the therapist should refuse to accept this report at face value, and instead contact the accused perpetrator/family member to ask them to participate in the treatment (McHugh, 1993a, 1993b)...the power to define reality for the client and write the client's personal narrative should not be offered to the client,,,the job of the therapist is not empowerment and desilencing, but, as I would define it, the on-going creation of exile from self.
