Date:   Sat Nov 13 1993  03:10:44
From:   Dale Anderson
Subj:   Memory Myths
UFO                            -------------------------------

Gannett News Service
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RESEARCHER: THERAPISTS USE MYTHS ABOUT MEMORY

Anaheim, Calif.

   Thirty-one percent of therapists in a new study think they can help patients
recover memories from past lives.  And 40 percent believe - incorrectly says a
researcher - that memories can be recovered even from infancy.

   "I am astonished that therapists would talk about past lives and then
believe you can use them in therapy," says Michael Yapko, a San Diego
psychologist who has taught hypnosis to therapists worldwide.  He is concerned
that mental health practitioners believe "dangerous myths" about memory and the
use of hypnosis in therapy.

   One out of three surveyed believe the mind stores everything; it's just a
matter of retrieving the "facts."  Such findings, Yapko says, "frankly scare
the hell out of me."

   Yapko surveyed more than 860 colleagues on 25 areas of memory and hypnosis.
The average therapist was 44, had 11 years of experience and one year of
post-masters education.  "I found therapists at all levels operate on the basis
of their own beliefs, not facts."

   Yapko is author of "Suggestions of Abuse: Real and Imagined Memories," due
from Simon & Schuster in April [1994].

   Study findings - to be reported Friday at the conference of the American
Association for Marriage and Family Therapy - are sure to fuel the debate about
repressed memories of childhood abuse.

   "It really bothers me how many therapists don't know that memory is
responsive to suggestion," Yapko says.

   But Karen Olio, a Norwalk, Conn., psychotherapist specializing in childhood
abuse, says Yapko overstates therapists' influence: "A therapist cannot
recreate a person's history."


