Did Freud Mislead Patients to Confabulate Memories of Abuse? A Reply to Gleaves and Hernandez (1999)

Gleaves and Hernandez have argued that skepticism about the validity of Freud's seduction theory, including by Powell and Boer, is largely unjustified. This paper contends that their analysis is in many ways both inaccurate and misleading. For example, we did not, as they implied, reject the possibility that some of Freud's early patients were victims of childhood sexual abuse. We also maintain that the weight of the available evidence indicates that false memories of traumatic events probably can be implanted, and that Freud's (1896/1962a) original evidence for the validity of his patients' recovered memories remains lacking in several respects—particularly in view of the extremely suggestive procedures he often used to elicit such memories.