Loftus was the first to make such a public declaration of skepticism about the theory of repressed and recovered memory, and considering the climate in which this book was written her bravery is commendable. At the time--and still perhaps today--some therapists diagnosed a history of incest within minutes of the intake session, spurious evidence was routinely admissible in the courts, and Multiple Personality Disorder was apparently as common as the flu. Things have changed, and there are more than a few red-faced recovered memory enthusiasts around these days.
One of the things that becomes obvious in this book is the fact that, while the debate was a raging one, few people who took part in it understood what it was really about. The recovered/false memory debate is not about whether the sexual abuse of children is a lie, or that the family is the seat of all evil. It is an essentially scientific debate about the operations of memory and the clinical applications of such knowledge. Loftus navigates through the cultural and rhetorical detritus of the debate to this core issue, and we benefit from her position as an expert researcher.
The book is clearly written for lay people, or for clinicians wanting a very quick summary of the issues. More clinically pertinent summaries of the research findings and theories are available elsewhere. If you're a therapist or researcher looking for professional information, you'll find the journalistic style slow going. However, if you're a lay person, the book is an excellent introduction to the debate.
The core debate that Loftus addresses is not whether or not sexual abuse exists. Rather, what she wisely chose to target was the essential issues of defining "repression" and its validity as a concept, how memory storage and retrieval operate, and what the relationship between psychological trauma and memory impairment is. She demonstrates that the concept of repression is a dubious though not necessarily invalid one, but that far too much assumption and clinical arrogance were invested in the recovered memory mania of the 80s and 90s.
This book was obviously controversial, but despite its lay orientation and stylistic flaws I believe it will endure as an important work in the history of psychotherapy. The legion of detractors demonstrated the truth of Loftus' thesis by construing the book as an attempt to disprove the existence of incest. And, because Loftus is a woman, she was a complicated target and therefore subjected to more condescending and intense attacks. Her accomplishment in this book was not to settle any questions, but to take the risk of attacking cherished, widely held, and richly funded clinical errors that were derailing public mental health and the reputation of psychotherapy. Highly recommended.
