or caretaker guilty on the basis of such tainted testimony. [note 1] Increasingly throughout the continent, grown children under going therapeutic programs have come to believe that they suffer from "repressed memories" of incest and sexual abuse. While some reports of incest and sexual abuse are surely true, these decade delayed memories are too often the result of False Memory Syndrome caused by a disastrous "therapeutic" program. False Memory Syndrome has a devastating effect on the victim and typically produces a continuing dependency on the very program that creates the syndrome. False Memory Syndrome proceeds to destroy the psychological well being not only of the primary victim but through false accusations of incest and sexual abuse other members of the primary victim's family. The American Medical Association considers recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse to be of uncertain authenticity, which should be subject to external verification. The use of recovered memories is fraught with problems of potential misapplication.[note 2] The dangers of this model are apparent: not only are false memories treated as real memories, but real memories of real abuse may be treated as false memories and may provide real abusers with a believable defense. In the end, no one benefits from encouraging a belief in memory which is unfounded. Whatever the theory of memory one advocates, if it does not entail examining corroborating evidence and attempting to independently verify claims of recollected abuse, it is a theory which will cause more harm than good. Carl Jung, an early Freudian disciple and later heretic, extended this model of memory by adding another area of repressed memories to the unconscious mind, an area that was not based on individual past experiences at all: the "collective" unconscious. The collective unconscious is the repository for acts and mental patterns shared either by members of a culture or universally by all ...
