False Memory Syndrome Foundation

[Magda Hassan]

A Brief Overview Of The Founding Members Of

The False Memory Syndrome Foundation

from MindControlForum Website

• F.M.S.F. EXECUTIVE DIRECTORS: Peter and Pamela Freyd (psychiatrists)
  The Freyds were publicly exposed by their own daughter – Jennifer Freyd (professor of psychology) of child abuse and rape.
  
• F.M.S.F. FOUNDER: Ralph Underwager (psychiatrist)
  The world’s foremost authority on false memory, but in the courtroom – is repeatedly exposed as a charlatan. He is a self confessed paedophile who quotes: It is "God’s Will" adults engage in sex with children.
  
• F.M.S.F. ORIGINAL BOARD MEMBERS: Martin Orn (psychiatrist)
  Senior CIA Mind Control Researcher: Experimenting in hypnotic programming, dissolving memory and other mind subduing techniques.
  
• F.M.S.F. BOARD MEMBER: Dr Harold Lief (psychiatrist)
  CIA Mind Control Researcher. Experimenting in behavioural modification and hypnotic programming.

REFERENCE FROM: The False Memory Hoax – Psychic Dictatorship in the USA By Alex Constantine

The CIA, the False Memory Syndrome Foundation & the Politics of Ritual Abuse

The Devil Denuded

The CIA, in fact, has several designates on the FMSF advisory board. They have in common backgrounds in mind control experimentation. Their very presence on the board, and their peculiar backgrounds, reveal some heavily obscured facts about ritual child abuse.

Martin T. Orne, a senior CIA researcher, is an original board members of the Foundation, and a psychiatrist at the University of Pennsylvania’s Experimental Psychiatry Lab in Philadelphia. In 1962 his forays into hypno-programming (the elicitation of "anti-social" behaviour, dissolving memory and other mind-subduing techniques) were financed by a CIA front at Cornell University. He was also funded by Boston’s Scientific Engineering Institute, another front, and a clearinghouse for the Agency’s investigation of the occult.

The CIA and Pentagon have formed a partnership in the creation of cults. To be sure, the Association of National Security Alumni, a public interest veterans group opposed to clandestine ops, considers it a "primary issue of concern" that the Department of Defense has a "perceived role in satanic cult activities, which qualify in and of themselves as very damaging exercises in mind control."

The smoothing over of the national security state’s cult connections is handled by academic "experts".

A forerunner of the Foundation is based in Buffalo, New York, the Committee for Scientific Examination of Religion, best known for the publication of Satanism in America: How the Devil Got More Than His Due, widely considered to be a legitimate study. The authors turn up their noses to ritual abuse, dismissing the hundreds of reports around the country as mass "hysteria". Cult researcher Carl Raschke reported in a March, 1991 article that he coincidentally met Hudson Frew, a Satanism in America co-author at a Berkeley bookstore.

"Frew was wearing a five-pointed star, or pentagram, the symbol of witchcraft and earth magic," Raschke says.

Shawn Carlson, a contributor to the book, is identified by the media as a "physicist". Yet he runs the Gaia Press in El Cerrito, California, a New Age publishing house with a and occult lore. Carlson is also a "scientific and technical consultant" to the Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (a promoter of the "false memory" theory of ritual abuse and UFO abductions), publisher of the Skeptical Inquirer.

The FMS Foundation is no less eccentric. Within two years of its founding, it was clear that the Foundation leadership was far from disinterested on witchcraft

On the workings of childhood memory, and concealed a secret sexual and political agenda.

FMSF Founder Ralph Underwager (left), director of the Institute of Psychological Therapies in Minnesota, was forced to resign in 1993. Underwager (a former Lutheran pastor) and his wife Hollida Wakefield publish a journal, Issues in Child Abuse Allegations, written by and for child abuse "skeptics".

His departure from the False Memory Syndrome Foundation was hastened by a remark in an interview, appearing in an Amsterdam journal for paedophiles, that it was "God’s Will" adults engage in sex with children.

(His wife Hollida remained on the Foundation’s board after he left). As it happens, holy dispensation for paedophiles is the exact credo of the Children of God cult. It was fitting, then, when Underwager filed an affidavit on behalf of cult members tried in France in 1992, insisting that the accused were positively "not guilty of abuse upon children". In the interview, he prevailed upon paedophiles everywhere to shed stigmatization as "wicked and reprehensible" users of children.

In keeping with the Foundation’s creative use of statistics, Dr Underwager widely considered, or group of British reporters in 1994 that "scientific evidence" proved that 60% of all women molested as children believed the experience was "good for them".

Dr Underwager invariably sides with the defense. His grandiloquent orations have graced courtrooms around the world, often by satellite. Defense lawyers for Woody Allen turned to him, he boasts, when Mia Farrow accused her estranged husband of molesting their seven year-old daughter. Underwager is a virtual icon to the Irish Catholic lobby in Dublin, which raised its hoary hackles against a child abuse prevention program in the Irish Republic. He was, until his advocacy of paedophila tarnished an otherwise glittering reputation, widely quoted in the press, dismissing ritual child abuse as a hysterical aberration.

He is the world’s foremost authority on false memory, but I the courtroom he is repeatedly exposed as a charlatan. In 1988, a trial court decision in New York State held that Dr Underwager was,

"not qualified to render opinion as to where or not (the victim) was sexually molested".

In 1990 his testimony on memory was ruled improper,

"in the absence of any evidence that the results of Underwager’s work had been accepted in the scientific community".

And in Minnesota a judge ruled that Underwager’s theories on,

"learned memory" were the same as "having an expert tell the jury that (the victim) was not telling the truth".

Peter and Pamela Freyd, executive directors of the Foundation, joined forces with Underwager in 1991, and their story is equally wretched. Jennifer Freyd, their daughter, a professor or psychology at the University of Oregon, openly leveled accusations of abuse against her parents at an August 1993 mental health conference in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

"My family of origin was troubled in many observable ways," she said. "I refer to the things that were never ‘forgotten’ and ‘recovered’, but to things that we all knew about".

She gave her father’s alcoholism as an example.

"During my childhood, my father sometimes discussed his own experiences of being sexually abused as an 11 year-old boy, and called himself a ‘kept boy’".

Peter Freyd graduated to male prostitution as an adolescent. At the age of 13, Jennifer Freyd composed a poem about her father’s nocturnal visits:

I am caught in a web
A web of deep, deep terror

she wrote. The diaries of her youth chronicle the,

"reactions and feelings (guilt, shame and terror) of a troubled girl and young woman. My parents oscillated between denying these symptoms and feelings….. to using knowledge of these same symptoms and feelings to discredit me".

"My father," she says, "told various people that I was brain damaged".

The accusation was unlikely. At the time, Jennifer Freyd was a graduate student on a National Science Foundation fellowship. She has taught at Cornell and received numerous research awards. The "brain damage" apologia did not wash. Her mother suggested that Jennifer’s memories were "confabulations" and faulted therapeutic intervention. Pamela Freyd turned to her own psychiatrist, Dr Harold Lief, currently and advisory board member of the Foundation, to diagnose Jennifer.

"He explained to me that he did not believe I was abused," Jennifer recalls. Dr Lief’s diagnosis was based on his belief that Peter Freyd’s fantasies were strictly "homoerotic". Of course, his daughter furrows a brow at the assumption that homoerotic fantasies or a heterosexual marriage exclude the possibility of child molestation. Lief’s skewed logic is a trademark of the Foundation.

He is a close colleague of the CIA’s Martin Orne. Dr Lief, a former major in the Army medical corps, joined the University of Pennsylvania faculty in 1968, the peak of federally-funded behavioural modification experiments at Holmesburg Prison. Dr Orne consulted with him on several studies in hypnotic programming.

His academic writing reveals a peculiar range of professional interests, including "Orgasm in the Postoperative Transsexual" for Archives of Sexual Behaviour, and an exploration of the possibility of life after death for a journal on mental diseased edited by Foundation fellow Paul McHugh. Lief is a director of the Centre for Sexuality and Religion, past president of the Sex Information and Education Council.

And an original board member of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation. Two others, Jon Baron from Penn U. and Ray Hyman (an executive editor of the aforementioned Sceptical Inquirer), a professor of psychology at the University of Oregon, resigned from the board after Jennifer Freyd went public with her account of childhood abuse and the facetious attempts of her parents and their therapist to discredit her. They were replaced by David Dinges, co-director – with the ubiquitous Martin Orne – of the Unit for Experimental Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania.

"At times I am flabbergasted that my memory is considered ‘false’", Jennifer says, "and my alcoholic father’s memory is considered rational and sane". She does not, after all, remember impossible abuses: "I was at home a few hours after my second session with my therapist, a licensed clinical psychologist working within an established group in a large and respected medical clinic.

"During that second visit to my therapist’s office, I expressed great anxiety about the upcoming holiday visit with my parents. My therapist asked about half way into the session, whether I had ever been sexually abused. I was immediately thrown into a strange state. No one had ever asked me such a question. I responded, ‘no, but….’ I went home and within a few hours I was shaking uncontrollably, overwhelmed with intense and terrible flashbacks". Jennifer asks herself why her parents are believed. "In the end, is it precisely because I was abused that I am to be discredited despite my personal and professional success?"

Pamela Freyd published an open letter defending her husband in Ralph Underwager’s Issues in Child Abuse Accusations in 1991. It was reprinted in Confabulations, a book published a year later. Laced with lubricious sentiment, the book bemoans the "destruction of families" brought on by false child abuse accusations, and maligns "cult-like" support groups and feminists, or "lesbian cults". Executive director Freyd often refers to the feminist groups that have taken up the cause of child abuse survivors as "lesbians", after the bizarre Dr Underwager, who claims,

"these women may be jealous that males are able to love each other, be comrades, friends, be close, intimate".

Pamela Freyd’s account of the family history, Jennifer insists, is patently false. In an electronic message from her father, he openly acknowledges that in his version of the story "fictional elements were deliberately inserted".

"Fictional is rather an astounding choice of words," Jennifer observed at the Ann Arbor Conference. The article written by her parents contends that Jennifer was denied tenure at another university due to a lack of published research. "In fact," Jennifer counters, "I moved to the University of Oregon in 1987, just four years after receiving my Ph.D. to accept a tenured position as associate professor in the psychology department, one of the world’s best psychology departments…. My mother sent the Jane Doe article to my colleagues during my promotion year – that is, the year my case for promotion to full professor was being considered. I was absolutely mortified to learn of this violation of my privacy and this violation of the truth".

Manipulative tactics are another Foundation imprimatur. Lana Alexander, editor of a newsletter for survivors of child sexual abuse, observes that,

"many people view the false memory syndrome theory as a calculated defence strategy developed by perpetrators and the lawyers and expert witnesses who defend them".

A legitimizing barrage of stories in the press has shaped public opinion and warmed the clime for defence attorneys. The concept of false memory serves the same purpose as Holocaust denial. It shapes opinion. Unconscionable crimes are obstructed, the accused is endowed with the status of martyr, the victim is reviled.

The emphasis on image is obvious in "How Do We Know We are Not Representing Paedophiles", an article written for the February 29, 1992 FMS Foundation Newsletter, by Pamela Freyd. In it, she derides the suggestion that many members of the group could be molesters because,

"we are a good-looking bunch of people, greying hair, well dressed, healthy, smiling; just about every person who has attended is someone you would surely find interesting and want to count as a friend".

People forget things. Horrible things. Here at the Foundation someone had a repressed memory, or what would be called a repressed memory, that she had been sexually abused.

– Pamela Freyd, FMS Foundation Founder