http://mentalhealth.about.com/cs/dissociative/a/dabaterec.htm
A war continues to rage between advocates of "recovered memories" and advocates of "false memory syndrome." When the battle gets this heated it is difficult to determine where the truth lies. I believe that both sides have some points to make Are these recovered memories necessarily true? There is much debate about this. Some therapists who work with trauma survivors believe that the memories are true because they are accompanied by such extreme emotions. Other therapists have reported that some of their patients have recovered memories which could not have been true (a memory of being decapitated, for example).
Alan W. Scheflin
Mr. Scheflin is a professor of law at Santa Clara University School of Law in Santa Clara, Calif. He is the only nonpsychiatrist to win the Manfred S. Guttmacher Award twice. In addition, Professor Scheflin has received five other awards for his work in the field of mental health, particularly memory and hypnosis.
http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/display/article/10168/1158280 Prof. Alan Scheflin.
The recovered memory debate has been the most acrimonious, vicious and hurtful internal controversy in the history of modern psychiatry. From its very beginning in the late 1980s, it has been more an "ad hominem" war, appealing to feelings and prejudices, rather than a matter of reasoned professional disagreement.
To quiet this cacophony, we must make one fundamental observation: there is a crucial difference between opinion and belief on the one hand and science on the other. It is only by separating them that we can hope to understand and benefit from this unquiet controversy.
Susan Clancy: "One of the most bitter and volatile debates ever to occur in psychology concerns the reality of repressed and recovered memories of traumatic events."
Susan Clancy reports Recruiting people who truly believed they'd been abducted by extraterrestrials; she found a way to study memory creation without directly engaging the bitter debate over recovered memories of abuse. And listening to their grotesque and often sexually explicit accounts, she could be reasonably sure that the memories she was studying were not vivid recollections of traumatic abuse. Claims of alien abduction have become increasingly common over the past thirty years