really happen, how could people be so convinced that something as traumatic
as sexual abuse occurred?

The question involved the nature of memory. Were these adults actually re-
trieving repressed memories under the careful direction of therapists and fel-
low victims during group therapy, or were these memories being "created" by
repeated suggestion? Evidence for both claims existed in the psychological liter-
ature. And were children telling the investigators about events that actually hap-
pened to them, or were the interviewing techniques used to get at children's
unpleasant experiences serving to implant false memories that eventually be-
came their own?

Most issues investigated by psychologists doing basic research in cognition,
cognitive development, and psychotherapy do not have the potential for social
impact that these issues have. Depending on where the truth lay, at stake were
the lives of innocent victims of sexual abuse and their abusers, or the lives of
falsely accused family members and child-care workers and their duped accus-
ers. People were going to jail and families were being destroyed. If the memo-
ries were true, few of us would disagree that the abusers should be punished
and put away so that they cannot practice their evil on other unsuspecting chil-
dren; but if the memories were false, the lives of innocent people, both the al-
leged victims and the alleged abusers, were being ruined.

Memory researchers responded, and studies of memory for traumatic
events, suggestibility, and false-memory creation in children and adults boomed
in the late 1980s and continued through the next decade. The American Psycho-
logical Association, recognizing the explosive nature of this problem, asked
three clinical psychologists and three memory researchers to explore the issue,
hoping to arrive at a consensus. When the report was completed, a consensus
had not been reached ( Alpert et al., 1997). All could agree that both repression
and false-memory creation were possible, but the clinical psychologists and the
memory researchers generally disagreed on the extent to which such phenom-
ena occurred in clinical practice and forensic interviews. By then, however, the
tide had turned, and the number of new abuse cases based on "recovered mem-
ories" and the number of new preschool abuse cases diminished. It seems that
many of the cases over the previous decade were indeed the product of
false-memory creation.

In February 1998, Florida Atlantic University hosted a symposium titled
"False Memory Creation: Theory, Research, and Clinical and Legal Implica-
tions," sponsored by The Eleanor and Elliot Goldstein Foundation. The three
memory researchers who contributed to the APA's Working Group on Investiga-
tion of Memories of Childhood Abuse -- Stephen Ceci, Elizabeth Loftus, and Peter
Ornstein -- were invited to present their research. Also invited was Daniel
Schacter, whose research on the neurological basis of memories, both true and

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