This is a really excellent list except for the inclusion of Elizabeth Loftus. Loftus has not much at all to say that is relevant to sexual abuse in childhood and its consequences in later life. Her thing is about the trustworthiness of some kinds of evidence used in court proceedings. For a better experimental psychologist who understands the effects of early abuse and its repression one can refer to Dr. Jennifer Freyd. Freyd is a much more accomplished authority in cognitive science and is also a professor of human cognition at the University of Oregon, an experimental psychologist of the highest water (like Loftus), and an author on the neurophysiology of repression of memores of abuse that constitute betrayal of trust (written about in her masterful book titled "Betrayal Trauma" published by Harvard University). The fact that some memories are reconstructed and thus unreliable (the notion advanced by Loftus) is not evidence that all are. However, I agree with Loftus that the standards of evidence used in prosecutions are much too low when they accept as proof the evidence of so-called "expert psychological testimony" in that there exists no such expertise adequate for courtroom testimony in criminal proceedings. And I agree with Loftus that eyewitness testimony is usually grossly untrustworthy (and, I think, will probably be probibited in law courts in future decades just as lie detector evidence is not accepted any longer). But the claim that repressed memories per se do not exist is an absurd claim. I even doubt that Loftus makes this claim. The only reasonable claim her expertise could entitle her to make on this subject is that repressed memories are extremely difficult to validate---that expert claims that such memories are real cannot be validated and that eyewitness testimony derived after presumed recovery of such memories in psychotherapy are too unreliable (and thus unable to be validated in that reliability is a prerequisite to validity) to meet the standards that ought to be required in a criminal proceeding. The claim that memories of childhood sexual abuse cannot be repressed, however, is absurd simmly because it contradicts abundant case-history evidence, clinical and otherwise, even while this evidence is not as reliable as we should want to accept in criminal court.
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