The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science

by Will Storr

  ‘Is that Dr Fleur Fisher?’ I ask.

  ‘Yes?’

  I tell her that I want to talk to her about Carole.

  ‘I’m very leery about putting my head above the parapet on that subject. And, if you don’t mind my saying so, it’s not wise for you to be involving yourself in this story either. That family, they’re bloody terrifying.’

  ‘You’re frightened of them?’

  ‘Of course I’m frightened. They’re frightening people. And the things they’ve been saying about me!’ she says, adding confusingly, ‘I’m not a psychiatrist! I’m not a therapist!’ She rings off, warning me darkly: ‘Tread carefully.’

  *

  The building in which Joseph Felstead lives is a red-brick terrace, whose heavy net curtains, draped in low, funereal arcs across its front windows, block the gaze of strangers, as well as most of the light. The rooms inside are painted mauve and dark-red and are tall and shadow-struck and quiet. They are decorated with golden candlestick holders, old family portraits, strange urns and statues of dogs, birds and deer. Walking in from the street, the change is sudden and enveloping. The atmosphere has a halting, crowding quality.

  Today Joseph sits glowering in the lounge, his muscular patriarch’s hands gripping his armchair. Kevin – a softer presence – informs me that Richard’s at work, and Anthony’s too distraught to speak. Their mother, Joan, passed away last year. David is here, though, friendly yet possessed of an anxious, wiry tension. Over the coming hours, he will answer questions with flumes of facts and furious analysis, fossicking in boxes for the relevant document to illustrate his point.

  For these men, Carole’s life is as much of a mystery as her death. She had been a friendly, bolshie and academically successful teenager who loved watching M*A*S*H and wearing the tartan shorts beloved of her favourite band, the Bay City Rollers. She was popular at school and had a noted instinct for caring, going out of her way to play with Michael, the neighbour with Down’s syndrome, and spending long hours with a lonely old man down the road. At fifteen she got a weekend job in a home for the disabled. At twenty-one she qualified as a nurse at Stockport College and rented a nearby flat, making frequent visits back to Mum and Dad to borrow milk and money, and sunbathe in the garden. And then, in the mid-1980s, there began a silent drift away from the family.

  ‘Her attitude became hostile,’ says Joseph.

  ‘What did she say was the problem?’ I ask.

  ‘We didn’t have any conversations about it,’ he says.

  ‘But you must have been worried?’

  Joseph shifts in his seat. ‘I was more cross than anything,’ he says, glancing away. ‘It just seemed indifferent, that’s all. Nothing sinister. She was our daughter. We’d spoiled her. And then to being almost anti-social? It was ill mannered.’

  In 1986 the family discovered that Carole had moved to Macclesfield. She would still send Christmas cards and ring occasionally, assuring them that her career was going well. But by 1992 she had moved to London and changed her name from Carol Felstead to Carole Myers. They had to accept that, for some reason, she had chosen to stay away.

  After her death, they began searching. It was slow, at first, but the family fought. Angry letters were written, court orders were threatened, freedom of information requests were made. They discovered that Carole had become mentally ill. Her medical records were a grim, broken history, told in photocopied doctors’ letters and psychologists’ reports, of self-harm, alcohol abuse and stretches in psychiatric wards. She had frequently been suicidal. Over the years, she had been seen by a series of mental health professionals and had, in 1992, been diagnosed with multiple personality disorder.

  The family were informed that Dr Fleur Fisher had no legal right to claim to be Carole’s ‘next of kin’. They also learned that a strange call had been made from Carole’s flat, eight days after her death, to a company called Diamond Insurance. They requested a recording of it and today, they gather around an old boxy portable hifi to play me the cassette. It turns out to be a woman, getting herself insured on Carole’s car – the one that went missing: ‘I’m dealing with her flat and possessions,’ says the caller. ‘I need to drive down to Plymouth … She was the survivor of brutal family abuse over many years … I’m a consultant in healthcare ethics … My name? It’s Dr Fleur Fisher.’

  The family’s fury and suspicion towards Dr Fisher grew, like roots, through their sadness and their outrage at the claims Carole had made in her life assessment. She said that she had been abused by Joseph and his wife, who were the high priest and priestess of a satanic cult, and that during her teens she had given birth to six children – some fathered by Joseph – that she had been forced to kill. She also said that a childhood friend that she had confided in had been murdered in front of her.

  The most extreme of Carole’s charges are easily proved to be false. The sister, whose murder she had apparently witnessed, actually died of a heart condition two years before Carole was born. The house fire, too, predated her birth. And yet Carole’s medical records showed that the mental health professionals involved in her case rarely challenged the grotesque visions of her memory. Most concluded that Carole’s psychological problems came as a result of family abuse. But the Felsteads point the blaming finger straight back at the clinicians.

  They believe that Carole came to have these recollections only after receiving treatment known as recovered-memory therapy. RMT is predicated on the Freudian notion that traumatic experiences are somehow repressed by the brain and that these festering, forgotten memories can cause psychological and physical problems later in life. They can only be treated, says the theory, if they are brought to the surface with the aid of techniques such as dream interpretation and hypnosis, which critics believe can sometimes create false memories. The Felsteads think that blame for Carole’s psychological downfall lies with satanist-obsessed therapists who implanted these ideas in Carole’s head and helped her black fantasies to flower. After all, they point out, something similar has happened before – most famously in Orkney in 1991, when nine children were forcibly removed from their homes following interviews with social workers, who were led by an individual who has subsequently been accused of being ‘fixated on finding satanic abuse.’

  I ask the Felsteads when the first mention of mental health problems appear in Carole’s medical records. A letter of December 1986 refers to his referral for therapy, in August 1985, for insomnia and nightmares related to ‘family abuse.’ A letter written in November 1986 mentions further ‘psycho-sexual counselling’ by someone whose name sends a cold stun of recognition through me. It is her: the next of kin; the woman who baffled me by insisting, ‘I’m not a therapist!’ It is Dr Fleur Fisher.

  But despite all this evidence, as I leave the Felsteads’ home, I remain troubled. Can what they are saying be true? Can it really be possible for someone to develop memories that are entirely false, and yet overwhelmingly rich, dramatic and powerful – so much so that they caused a bright young woman to separate from her family and be slowly driven mad?

  *

  As part of an assignment set by Professor Elizabeth Loftus, of the University of Washington, a cognitive-psychology student named Jim Coan asked his fourteen-year-old brother Chris to describe the occasion when he became lost in the University City shopping mall in Spokane, Washington. Chris did as he was told. ‘I went over to look at the toy store – Kay-Bee toys,’ he remembered. ‘And I thought, Uh-oh. I’m in trouble now.’ He became scared – ‘I thought I was never going to see my family again’ – but luckily, a ‘really cool’ elderly, balding man wearing spectacles and a blue flannel shirt arrived, and helped him to find his parents. The strange thing was that Chris had never been lost in that mall. He had never been rescued. The cool old man in the blue flannel shirt did not exist. His brother Jim had simply told him that he had once gone missing, on the instructions of Professor Loftus.

  For the study, Jim had asked his brother to recollect, in as much d
etail as he could manage, four events from his childhood – and one of them was an invention. Over five days, as he was asked to provide more and more information about these events, Chris’s false memory became richer. Weeks later, when asked to guess which one of the occasions was false, Chris picked a real one.

  Professor Loftus was interested to see whether it was possible for a therapist to generate a memory of an event simply by suggesting it. In a further study, she gave twenty-four adults a brief description of four past events that they were told had been supplied by a close family member and asked to write about them. Unbeknown to them, one of these events was false. Six of them – 25 per cent of the group – actually remembered the false event. When asked to choose which of their memories was fiction, five got it wrong.

  Professor Loftus tells me that she began studying memory in 1970. ‘I decided to study the process by which I believe therapists are leading people into these very rich false memories,’ she tells me. ‘Since the “lost in the mall” study was published, I and many others have planted more bizarre and unusual false memories: of accidents, of being attacked by an animal, of nearly drowning, of witnessing demonic possession. What we have found is absolutely stunning. These memories can be very detailed, and people can be very emotional about them. A lot of these therapists say, “I believe she was abused because every time she talks about it she cries,” as if somehow the emotion is proof that it’s true. It’s not.’ False accusations are typical, she says, in people who unconsciously seek to blame shortcomings in their life on others. ‘Abuse is a much more palatable explanation for the problems in your life,’ she says, ‘and that’s why it’s so appealing.’

  Just like the myriad healthy biases in our brains, the memories Loftus speaks of tend to serve us in one direction: to bolster our sense of self; to tell a better story about ourselves. It is curious, when you consider the different genus of false memory that I heard about in the counselling room of Vered Kilstein: all those past-lifers who had been brave knights and Cleopatras and principal members of the Beatles. All that twisting, weaving brain-work creating all those heroes.

  When I tell Professor Loftus the Felsteads’ theory of what happened to Carole, she does not react with any great expression of surprise. In her experience, as an expert witness in US courtrooms, she has come across many instances of this kind of thing: false memories of ritual abuse, false memories of incest, false memories of rape. They have led to untold numbers of miscarriages of justice; shattered countless families and friendships. And they come about by surprisingly easy means. They don’t even require a therapist. Any trusted source – a book, a friend, a TV personality – can suggest the possibility of abuse. Your mind might then produce a fragment – an image of something bad happening. What was that? You recall it again. You fill in the details. ‘Repetition makes it more vivid and familiar,’ Kimberley Wade, Associate Professor of Psychology at Warwick University, tells me. ‘It’ll start to feel like a memory.’

  I mention to Professor Wade the suggestion in Carole’s medical notes that she had been treated by therapists known to have a belief in satanic cults, and who practised various relaxation techniques. ‘Using hypnotherapy encourages you to imagine,’ she says. ‘And did her therapist encourage her to not have contact with her family?’

  ‘It’s impossible to say,’ I tell her. ‘But she did cut them off almost entirely, at around the same time that she was being treated.’

  ‘That’s interesting,’ she says. ‘When we do studies implanting false memories, we tell our participants they can’t talk to family members about their past. We think it contributes to the process if they’ve got no one to counter the suggestions.’

  In conversation with these academics, I am struck by the understanding that everybody, to some extent, has untrustworthy memories. ‘Every time you recall something from your past, it’s reconstructed,’ explains Wade. Just as the schizophrenia expert Dr Trevor Turner implied, the people studied by these scientists are not ‘crazy’. ‘These are healthy people without any mental impairments or psychological issues,’ she says. But Dr Turner seemed to make an interesting mistake with his numbers. Professor Wade is famous in academic circles for generating false memories by giving people childhood photos that have been doctored, so that they show them in a hot-air balloon that they never rode in, for example. When asked to describe the memory in her fake pictures, she has found that ‘On average 35 per cent of participants develop a rich memory of their fake event. They describe how it happened, where they were, how they were feeling.’

  This, it seems to me, is the most likely source of the number that Dr Turner was referring to when we spoke. But I think he made a subtle error – not a third of our memories are false, as he had claimed, but a third of the population are susceptible to easily developing rich false memories. Although I have no doubt that Dr Turner made this apparent mistake in all innocence, it is interesting to note how it tended in the direction of the argument he was seeking to make – that people who hear voices may be recovering false memories of abuse during therapy. Having learned what I have about the sly operations of the brain and its treatment of evidence that might bolster or threaten our beliefs, I wonder if some unconscious mechanism might have fooled him.

  To accept that a true recollection of satanic abuse could emerge during RMT, we would first have to know whether or not it is possible for memories to be ‘repressed’ at all. Professor Chris French – the Head of the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit at the University of London, and the former editor of The Skeptic magazine that I last met at the Manchester conference – tells me that this idea is extremely controversial. ‘There’s quite a schism on this in psychology,’ he says. ‘Experimentalists and the neuro people tend to be quite sceptical, while the clinicians are more accepting of it. There’s quite a clear divide. The people who appear to recover these memories relive the traumatic experiences, and the emotion that they go through is very, very real. And that can be extremely compelling. The typical human reaction would be to think that this is true. But the same methods are used in the context of alien-abduction claims and past-life regression. So, logically, if you’re going to accept that these recovered memories of childhood abuse are true then you should also accept the alien claims.’

  French goes on to tell me that the British False Memory Society’s files are ‘full of cases’ in which people have been wrongly accused of rape or abuse. ‘A lot of people will go to their graves never being reconciled with their friends or family members,’ he says. ‘I think it’s tragic.’

  When I mention one of the therapists that appears in Carole’s medical records, his reaction surprises me.

  ‘Valerie Sinason?’ he says.

  ‘That’s right,’ I say. ‘Do you know her?’

  He lets out a deep sigh.

  ‘Oh, God,’ he says. ‘She’s got such a huge influence. Valerie Sinason is a dangerous woman.’

  *

  If the Felsteads’ theory is correct, Carole must have received recovered-memory therapy in the mid-1980s, around the time that her relationship with her family began to pall. One letter in their cache comes tantalisingly close, noting that in 1985 ‘she was unable to describe the abuse in anything other than superficial terms’ and that she subsequently underwent ‘a number of sessions concentrating on relaxation training and thought stopping procedures …’ But the only person I know who might have witnessed, first hand, what happened back then is Dr Fisher. But since our last conversation, she has vanished. She has changed her mobile number and has ignored several emails. Instead, I arrange an interview with Valerie Sinason, who, according to the records, saw Carole for psychotherapy every two weeks for eight months in 1992. I want to know if she will fit the description that Professor Loftus gave of the therapists she has come across in legal cases – that of an individual who is highly credulous of satanic abuse and has a tendency to believe ritual damage in patients. I am curious to know, do the individuals that she treats come t
o her with all their memories firmly in place? Or do their recollections arrive suddenly – suspiciously – during the therapeutic process? Will she see ‘warning signs’ of satanism everywhere? Or will she turn out to be soberly minded and rigorously sceptical, conceding that it happens only when there is evidence that compels it, and even then in rare, isolated cases?

  *

  There are two glass heads wearing sunglasses in Dr Valerie Sinason’s lobby, and a basking lizard, and a statue of Sigmund Freud, a geisha, a large wooden eagle flexing its wings and a single bongo, on the floor, next to a tribal carving. On the wall, framed in wood, a topless woman arcs her back in lascivious, fleshy pastels. The consulting room contains two deep and squashily inviting sofas and many hundreds of books – a confusing library that ranges over a vast coven of subjects, including mind, language, conspiracy, reality, radar: Steven Pinker, Opus Dei, cybernetics, social cognition, Understanding Radar, Radar Principles. There is a small television with a selection of children’s DVDs, steel bowls filled with plastic toy figures and a chaise-longue with a crowd of teddies resting in its crook. On the floor, shoved beneath a table, a large cloth boy gazes sadly into space.

  This is Dr Sinason’s NHS-funded ‘Clinic for Dissociative Studies’, which she runs from a large house in Golders Green, North London. Dr Sinason is well known in mental health circles: she has written and edited books, is an in-demand speaker at international conferences, has co-authored a study about abuse for the Department of Health and is a frequently cited spokesperson in the broadsheet newspapers on issues as wide-ranging as the Bulger killings, Chris Langham and, of course, the controversial condition known as multiple-personality disorder or ‘DID’.

  She arrives tanned and relaxed in a loose smock, dark leggings and light trainers. We are joined by her husband David, who takes notes throughout our talk and interjects every now and then. I will discover later that she has brought him in for backup, as she is suspicious of my motives. This might be because I have been deliberately vague about my reasons for being here. Concerned that mention of Carole’s name might cause Dr Sinason to become guarded, I have told her only that I am investigating allegations of ritual abuse in the north of England.