by Brian Dunning
August 11, 2026
Beginning in the 1970s, a series of cases of repressed memories having been recovered through psychotherapy made it big in the national headlines. Alleged rapists were being arrested and convicted decades after the crime, in some cases; all due to the new phenomenon of recovered memory therapy, or RMT. RMT was giving a new voice to victims who had previously been unable to even recall having been attacked, due to the trauma having been so great that their minds had blocked it out — a phenomenon now well established in fiction. RMT was even playing a role in solving other types of crimes, for example, helping an eyewitness to remember specific details of the crime that were too hard to remember, like a license plate number or what clothes the bank robber was wearing. But these days, RMT is found on the trash pile of old, discarded, discredited notions in psychology. Today on Skeptoid we’re going to see if it still belongs there, or if perhaps it might deserve to be recalled.
The idea of repressed memories traces back mainly to the 1895 book Studies on Hysteria, by Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer. They proposed that the brain protected itself from its most horrible memories by burying or repressing them so they could no longer be consciously recalled, yet they would still (inconveniently) trouble the person with anxiety and stress. Freud believed that such memories may be recoverable through techniques like dream analysis; something that today we would consider the least plausible of his proposals.
Freud’s idea of repressed memories was way ahead of its time in its understanding of the effects trauma can have on the mind. The diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder was still nearly a century away (it didn’t become a part of the DSM until 1980). However there was plenty of territory to experiment with; World Wars I and II provided hundreds of traumatized patients for Freud’s acolytes to practice on. The diagnosis of the day was “shell shock” or “combat fatigue,” indicating that we really didn’t have the first clue yet for what was the real cause behind the symptoms the soldiers presented with, though we now know it was PTSD in many cases.
The main therapeutic technique to come out of all this was called abreaction. Clinicians often administered barbiturates to put the patient into a relaxed state, and would then use hypnosis to get them to recall the traumatic events. This allowed the patients to recall the events and talk about them with less distress, and thus finally process them more fully. It’s not at all far from what many psychotherapists are trying unsuccessfully to get approved today: the use of mild psychedelics such as MDMA, psilocybin, and ketamine in PTSD therapy.
RMT mainly occupied this relatively obscure niche for a few decades, until it found an unexpected ally that helped it to explode into pop culture: the women’s liberation movement beginning in the 1960s. Psychotherapists began using it to help women recover repressed memories of sexual abuse. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, a long series of very high-profile cases really brought RMT to the public’s attention. One was the popular 1973 book and 1976 TV movie Sybil, about a woman said to have had Multiple Personality Syndrome (now known to be a misdiagnosis). Her sixteen personalities were allegedly recovered over a number of years by hypnotic regression, and there’s a complete Skeptoid episode on Sybil’s case, episode #361.
Next was the 1976 Chowchilla kidnapping, in which three young men kidnaped a school bus driver and 26 elementary school students. The driver, 55-year-old Ed Ray, managed to free the children and himself in a true-life story of genuine Hollywood-worthy heroism; but he couldn’t initially remember the license plate number of the vehicle he’d seen that blocked his bus. He did remember it under hypnosis, which helped secure the kidnapers’ convictions.
Then in 1980, psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder co-wrote Michelle Remembers, having been inspired by the success of the Sybil book. It was about his patient and co-author Michelle Smith — with whom he was also having an affair. Over the course of 600 hours of hypnosis, Smith remembered years of Satanic ritual abuse involving human sacrifice, being smeared with blood, rape, and all kinds of things; all memories which had supposedly been suppressed.
But the crowning achievement of RMT was the 1983 McMartin Preschool Case, which became the most expensive trial in United States history; and if you are old enough to remember 1983, you absolutely remember that this case dominated national headlines. Therapists working for a controversial social worker, Kee MacFarlane — inventor of the anatomically correct doll for children to point out where they were touched — found that an incredible 360 children at the preschool recovered memories of having been victimized in bloody Satanic rituals in underground caves and tunnels beneath the school. Some school employees spent time in prison during the trial, some without charges and one for over a year, and with bail set at millions of dollars.
MacFarlane even went before Congress in 1984 to warn about children being exposed to these Satanic rituals, prompting Congress to double its budget for child-protection programs.
Over these years, recovery of repressed memories of trauma was a darling of daytime TV talk shows. Its most public advocates were people like Lawrence Pazder (of Michelle Remembers); Bennett Braun, a Chicago psychiatrist who was largely responsible for lending legitimacy to belief in the existence of Satanic ritual abuse, which has never really existed at all; Roland Summit, who ran conferences and claimed that anyone skeptical of these claims must be a Satanic ritual practitioner themselves; and Carol and Brad Darling, regulars on TV and on Summit’s conference circuit, who invented whole histories for this supposedly ancient Satanic cult.
The tide began to turn when the McMartin preschool trial began to unravel. Pazder and Smith had been meeting with some of the children and were believed to have influenced their testimony. The sole accuser in the case — the mother of one of the students — was diagnosed as schizophrenic and then killed herself. No evidence of any abuse, or of the alleged caves and tunnels, was ever found. It took a mistrial and then a retrial, but after seven long years, all the defendants were finally acquitted — though with their lives shattered and reputations irreparably tarnished. It was the most public blow to the supposed “science” of RMT.
More science soon emerged. The world’s foremost memory researcher, Dr. Elizabeth Loftus of UC Irvine (go Anteaters!), co-published the now-famous “lost in the mall” experiment, wherein it was shown just how easily and effectively completely false memories could be implanted in many people, simply by the type of questioning done to the children in the McMartin case and many others like it. The research, and much similar research done since then, proved that so-called recovered repressed memories are indistinguishable from implanted false memories of events that never happened.
During this same period, Dr. Loftus had also unsuccessfully testified on behalf of George Franklin, a man convicted of the 1969 murder of one of his daughter’s friends, based entirely upon his daughter’s memory, allegedly recovered via hypnosis, some 20 years later. It was the first conviction in the United States that depended wholly on recovered memory testimony. However in 1995 his conviction was thrown out on other grounds, and the prosecutors became unable to retry him when the daughter revealed her recovered memory had been obtained under hypnosis, thus making it inadmissible (more on that in a moment). It was another major blow to RMT.
The trouble for RMT was really piling up. A prominent Napa Valley wine executive named Gary Ramona lost his family, his job, and everything when his daughter confronted him with witnesses present of having raped her from the ages of 5 to 8. It turns out her two psychiatrists had given her sodium amytal and implanted the false memories. Gary successfully sued them and was awarded half a million dollars for lost wages, marking the first time a non-patient won a malpractice suit against psychiatrists.
Suffice it to say that by the end of the 1990s, the whole concept of “repressed memories” had been discarded as fictional by the psychological profession, and as an incidental, the practice of RMT was discredited as well. And even today, that’s where the majority of the profession still stands. The American court system adopted the Daubert standard in 1993, which gives defense attorneys a tool to challenge the scientific validity of a type of evidence presented by prosecutors before the trial even begins, and this has included the exclusion of testimony given under hypnosis. This was what made it impossible to retry George Franklin. Lawyers typically have no difficulty in demonstrating to judges that RMT is not generally accepted.
The exception was, for a long time, the state of Texas; which had introduced its own Zani standard which classified hypnotically-induced testimony as a category of evidence separate from those impacted by Daubert. It wasn’t until 2023 that the Texas legislature finally got rid of it.
But though the use of recovered memories may now be universally excluded in the courts, it’s still not quite yet universally discarded by the psychology profession. In the early 1990s, Frederick Crews published a series of papers in which he coined the term “memory wars,” referring to the scientific literature warfare between those who believed the concept was entirely fictional and those who held that traumatic dissociation, a subtype of PTSD, represented essentially the same thing as what was formerly termed a “repressed memory.”
But please don’t get confused here, because there really isn’t any debate as far as today’s subject goes. Nearly the entire profession is in lockstep that the kind of thing put forward in the 1970s is, indeed, completely fictional: these are the cases where the memory of an event was somehow buried away in the brain and the person had no idea that anything happened, but then via some therapeutic mechanism, had the entire event come flooding back to them in full detail. This absolutely does not happen, and we have decades of experimental data supporting that conclusion.
Where the debate exists is in a more subtle PTSD manifestation that is clearly not part of the scope of what we’ve talked about today. When someone was part of a horrible traumatic event, in extreme cases this can result in traumatic dissociation; they are unable to consciously recall the event in detail without triggering a dissociative episode (or a “PTSD attack” as some term it), but they are absolutely consciously aware that the event happened. There is debate around whether this can constitute “dissociative amnesia,” a valid debate that is, again, outside of the claimed phenomenon we’ve discussed today.
As far as “repressed memories” go as they are commonly understood in the pop cultural context, they are absolutely not a thing. And necessarily, RMT — recovered memory therapy — is absolutely not a magical way to bring back a detailed memory of an old event that you’d previously had no idea that it ever happened at all. The persistence of belief in such a thing is harmful in many ways: It harms actual patients who were victims of RMT therapy; it introduces clouds of doubt onto victims of actual molestation; and it does institutional damage to the psychological profession through mischaracterization. None of these things are something we need more of today.
