psychology UNREDACTED

The bankruptcies of the BPS

12th Jul 2026 AdminBPSWatch

David Pilgrim posts…

I recently returned from an excellent conference at University College London (July 5^th and 6^th). ‘Rethinking Youth Gender Medicine’ was organised jointly by CAN-SG (Clinical Advisory Network on Sex & Gender) and the US organisation SEGM (Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine). Recently Pat Harvey posted on this blog the letter she had sent of complaint about The Psychologist, first accepting an advertisement for the conference and then withdrawing the agreement. The conference opened with an address from Baroness Hayter. She commended the organisers for their emphasis on evidence-based and ethical clinical practice and she criticised the BPS for its lack of commitment to this approach in its decision making.

At the conference I reflected on the overlapping ways in which the BPS is becoming a bankrupt organisation. The obvious and literal point is about money. The Society has sold its Leicester HQ and is considering selling its London offices. This has proceeded without open discussion and consultation with members, which is par for the course in an organisation which has long lost any claim to democracy and transparency. We must all feel for the poor BPS workforce in Leicester. For those not made redundant, presumably they are condemned now to home working and ad hoc meeting places in a COVID-style Groundhog Day. This has all the hallmarks of asset stripping rather than fostering organisational flourishing and the responsible stewardship of members’ assets.

The membership is depleting, with increasing numbers seeing little for their money. Students are not maintaining their memberships post-graduation and senior practitioners are resigning. The rearguard financial rescue plan to encourage mental health workers, who are not psychologists, to become fee-paying members may have been counterproductive retrenchment. One motive to depart we hear from longstanding members is that on learning the news of these professionally unqualified paying recruits, the name of the organisation has effectively been rendered meaningless. From their perspective, what is the point of being a member of today’s British Psychological Society?

The bottom line is that the organisation is on the brink of financial collapse; the uncollected fee for the advertisement for a topically important international conference came at a time when every penny was needed. Properties might now be sold off but the salaries of the senior management team roll on and ideologically driven decisions by the editor of The Psychologist remain unaltered. Thus, is not all about the money, even if the money may be the final determinant of the Society’s demise.

Any historian of this emerging end of empire scenario in the BPS would also have evidence of other forms of bankruptcy. I now set these out below. Culturally they all interweave in the ailing Society.

1 Strategic bankruptcy

The UCL conference was full of energy because of the interdisciplinarity of the audience and speakers. GPs, psychiatrists, nurses, physiotherapists, psychologists, social workers, paediatricians, psychotherapists, teachers, civil servants, surgeons, pathologists, pharmacologists, sociologists, and epidemiologists were all to be found. This reflected a political reality: today any research project or form of policy development worth its salt fosters an interdisciplinary exploration in which people can listen to one another, defer to rational authority and, if needs be, disagree civilly. Siloed single disciplines were fit for purpose in 1926 but are not in 2026. Interdisciplinary cooperation and the aspiration to produce trans-disciplinary knowledge were the emergent features of both research and policy development in the late 20^th century (Wilden, 1972; Gibbons, 1994). In that context of new knowledge production the BPS is now an organisation notably out of time and in a self-deluding loop. The emergence of neuroscience is one clear example of psychologists being part of a body of knowledge, while having no unilateral academic authority within the field of inquiry.

The postings on this blog have focused on two particular policy distortions that reflect an anachronistic organisation. Their common feature has been a failure to recognise grave child protection implications [see here as well as previous blog posts] have a self-regarding siloed discipline being the victim of two forms of captured tunnel vision. In the case of memory, it has been about the enmeshment of the false memory movement with the goals of the Society, feeding the society-wide culture of denial about the scale of child sexual abuse and its public policy consequences for mental health (Conway and Pilgrim, 2022, 2026). This has been a partisan capture by one group of experimentalists, so that a proper academic debate about the complexities of memory and the survival of sexual abuse in childhood has been pre-empted. In relation to gender, the policy has been under that direct influence of capture by transgender activism [see here as well as previous blog posts].

The implication of being strategically anachronistic is that when psychologists do commit themselves to interdisciplinary cooperation, as was the case in this conference, they stand up and speak knowing that their parent organisation is indifferent to them or that it actively undermines their work (Sadie, 2026). Similarly, those BPS members who have tried to pursue an alternative agenda about memory and law to protect victims, not favour those accused of sexual crimes, have all hit a roadblock of strategic inertia in the bureaucracy.

2 Intellectual bankruptcy

A challenge for a disciplinary body, which is so internally contested, is to be taken seriously in principle. Psychology (big P) is epistemologically confused and confusing (Richards and Stenner, 2022). Ask any psychology graduate to explain what the discipline is and then note the wide-ranging views expressed. It sits in the ambiguous space between natural and social science; there are advocates in the discipline pulling it one or other direction, with varying views about theory and methodology. This is not a challenge the BPS itself has created but is an inherent epistemological tendency in the discipline globally.

This lack of coherence should have created humility and caution, but the opposite seems to have occurred, with the BPS promoting its wares with no concession to its internal confusion. It over-claims the relevance of psychology in PR campaigns and argues for singular authority. The study of memory is a case in point, especially when there are competing disciplines which have equal claims to legitimacy. That overclaiming comes from pretending that epistemological coherence exists when it clearly does not. Psychologists cannot agree on theories or research rationales. The compromise has been to rely on a rhetoric of methodological rigour or ‘methodologism’, which disguises underlying incompatibilities about theory and practice (Gao, 2014). This methodological imperative seeks to disguise deep divisions in the discipline, allowing psychologists who are not in sympathy to retain the semblance of a common group identity.

The honest intellectual stance in face of this contestation would be for all psychological organisations (not just the BPS) to simply come clean about their failure to agree and on accepting that nearby human sciences (such as anthropology, sociology and economics) have as much right to explore human conduct and experience. One honest strategy would be to take history and the philosophy of science seriously in psychology degrees. However, attempts by those advocating this approach from within the History & Philosophy Section of the Society have, by and large, failed in shaping curriculum development.

New psychology graduates are unlikely to be enlightened about either the history of their discipline or its highly variegated philosophical underpinnings. Consequently, they lack the competence or confidence to reflect critically on their own body of knowledge. When history is ever alluded to, what we tend to find is a mixture of celebratory accounts about the purported great breakthroughs made by the discipline, or its converse when critical – i.e. there is a head-shaking distancing from earlier wrong-headed claims. For example, the enmeshment of psychometrics and behavioural statistics with 20^th century eugenics has proved to be a big target to hit.

This mixture of ignorance and ambivalence encourages presentism – i.e. what we have discovered recently is fetishised to discount historical errors and superstition. Hot of the press insights can then be funnelled into journalistic outlets (in the UK All in the Mindis favoured on BBC Radio 4, where the latest studies are proudly announced). This PR tactic is highly informed by British empiricism, even though alternatives, from French poststructuralism to psychoanalysis and from humanistic psychology to critical realism sit comfortably with many BPS members. This leaves us with the collective noun of a ‘disagreement of psychologists’. To be fair, this point could also be made of psychiatry, but the latter is a profession, whereas psychology, represented by the BPS purports to be an overarching academic discipline, with all of the raised scientific expectations that this assumption then creates.

To call this scenario a ‘broad church’, a favoured rhetorical trope from BPS managers, is to massively understate both epistemological complexity and the contradictions this generates for psychological theory and practice. Without honest reflection about this confused and confusing picture, and without a respect for both proper historical and philosophical inquiry to inform that process, the BPS will continue to be intellectually bankrupt.

3 Moral bankruptcy

The previous point was an ethical one (about honesty) but there is more. We have had the covered-up fraud and the lack of any accountability [see here]. We have had regular censorship in the editorial policies of The Psychologist, which supresses any form of expression from members who challenge the status quo about the policies or direction of the Society. As we have noted previously the magazine is little more than a propaganda front for the dominant factional interests operating in the Society at a point in time (both academic and managerial). It is like Pravda was to the Soviet Communist Party.

With reference to the unadvertised conference I attended, we can only surmise that editor Jon Sutton or his managers opted to refuse the very needed revenue for The Psychologist for ideological reasons. They have taken a position in a currently contested area of psychological theory and practice. Sutton has felt able to reject publications which debate that position by indicating that he prioritises submissions from transgender people or those who work directly with them [see here]. Moreover, when we and others have ever tried to challenge the censoring of worthy submissions to The Psychologist a clear pattern became evident. Jon Sutton tells people to refer their concerns upwards to his editorial committee or even the CEO. He does this very confidently in the knowledge that they will always support him – and they do. They, like him, are part of the BPS cabal. The deal is that they unconditionally support him and he loyally preserves the policy status quo in the Society. We know of no complaint about his decision making which has been upheld (but if we are missing examples, we would like to hear about them).

If the BPS is allegedly a scholarly Society, then one of its primary duties is to defend academic freedom and promote free debate. The decision to pull the agreement for the advertisement for the conference is another blatant example of the ethical failure of the BPS and its apparatchiks. At the gate of the conference, transgender activists were banging the drum (literally) and telling entrants that ‘trans rights are human rights’, that attenders were Nazis and that ‘in there they kill children’. Of course, the drum bangers wanted to stop the conference occurring as they made clear. I imagined that the editor of The Psychologist would have had more sympathy with the protesters than in supporting the freedom for sex realists to argue their case legitimately. If he respected that case then he would have respected, not pulled, the advertisement.

Thankfully UCL were happy to host a legitimate multi-disciplinary conference, but the suppression of academic freedom comes in many forms. One of them is when background decisions of bodies like the BPS seek to undermine scholastic autonomy. When that happens, they have lost their mandate to claim that they are a learned body. Their political capture by lobbyists for now is obvious and this overrides academic freedom.

If we put that bias into the wider context of financial and intellectual bankruptcy, then the Society’s current death spiral is now clear to see. Maybe that scenario is for the best. Members might then stop wasting their fees and a world of multi-disciplinary scholars may thrive more freely to teach and research. That sort of free exploration is currently under strain in higher education, and those running the BPS are not defending academic freedom – quite the reverse (Pilgrim, 2026). What seems like a trivial event, like the broken agreement over the advertisement for the conference, signals that the Society is falling into oblivion, with no insight.

Psychologists and the conference

Quite understandably, the organisers of the conference sent the advertisement to The Psychologist. Although gender confusion in young people requires a biopsychosocial sensibility from case to case from all relevant professionals, they are most frequently seen by psychological practitioners. For this reason, that broad constituency of practice (clinical psychologists, counselling psychologists and psychotherapists) might have welcomed conference attendance. They would have found that the quality of the papers was high, with international speakers presenting their research clearly to an engaged and appreciative audience.

Those potential attendees were lost and so their appreciation of the content went missing. This was precisely the intention of those in the BPS responsible for pulling the advertisement which they had agreed to originally. As one of the contributors to the conference outlined well, the suppression of gender critical viewpoints entails more than simply cancelling individuals; there are a range of other wilful organisational and publishing processes involved (Sullivan, 2026). In this case, Jon Sutton and his colleagues in the BPS have set out deliberately, as indicated above, over several years to ensure that only the views of transgender activists are represented in publications. This is ‘trans capture’ in practice, and the BPS offers the world an ideal case study in how identity politics has dangerously undermined academic freedom.

The blocking of the advertisement is part of a longer misguided policy position adopted by the publication gatekeepers at the BPS about suppressing gender critical viewpoints. This can be traced to the refusal of the editor of Clinical Psychology Forum to publish letters and articles I offered about the emerging crisis at GIDS in the Tavistock Clinic, before it was eventually shut down. (I subsequently found out that the Forum editor was instructed ‘from above’ to impose this censorship, it was not his personal wish.)[see here and here]. With hindsight, the end of empire at GIDS was obvious at the very time when my own censored critiques were displaced by a long letter of justification for the affirmative care philosophy being published instead. This was from the clinical psychologist Bernadette Wren, a previous service lead, who was in the thrall of an anti-realist postmodern turn (Wren, 2021). Retrospectively we now can see that dissenting voices at GIDS, such as Anna Hutchinson (cited at length in Barnes, 2023) and Kirsty Entwistle (2019), in advance of Cass, spotted and reported the Emperor’s New Clothes.

The GIDS regime lacked an evidence base and was a clinical scandal in the making with psychologists like Bernadette Wren and Polly Carmichael at the helm. Endocrinologists were certainly complicit in this scandal, but we cannot deny the clear fact that the regime was psychology led. This is the first time in Britain that a clinical scandal has not had medical malpractice at its centre but psychological malpractice. GIDS was dominated by transgender ideology from staff, augmented sometimes by parental homophobia and, of most importance, it was an evidence-free zone. So much for the vaunted ‘scientist-practitioner’ model boasted in applied psychology.

A suitably just outcome was that the clinical psychologist Anna Hutchinson could now stand up at this conference and lay out the case for a sensitive and sensible biopsychosocial appraisal of gender confused young people, with their highly variegated reasons for presenting, or being referred, to services (Hutchinson, 2026). Sanity is eventually prevailing in this arena of psychological practice, even if the absurd proposed conversion therapy legislation and the controversial puberty blocker trial remain battles to be fought by sex realists (Sodha, 2026; Pilgrim, 2023; Sex Matters, 2026).

In a clear and well received presentation, the clinical neuropsychologist Sallie Baxendale explained the developmental implications of biomedically interfering with puberty. Jon Sutton might may recall that in 2007 he received a letter from her, asking why an advertisement for ‘Soul Therapy’ had been placed in The Psychologist. He replied confident (as ever) in his editorial decision making [see here]. Professor Baxendale was no young hot head, making a mischievous complaint to the editor. She is a level-headed research-based senior neuroscientist par excellence. She was awarded the Distinguished Contribution Award in 2023 from the BPS for her outstanding contribution to clinical neuropsychology [see here].

This is a classic example of BPS doublethink to retain its rhetoric as a scholarly organisation. It goes through the motions of honouring those like Professor Baxendale but then ensures that audiences are denied knowledge of her work. It legitimises its own pretence of being academically robust with one hand, while undermining academic freedom with the other. This is part of the wider picture we have explored on this blog about rhetoric from the top in the BPS. The management bullshit machine in the BPS just keeps on giving (Pilgrim, 2023b). To finish on another illustrative point, Jon Sutton is not merely the editor of The Psychologist he is also ‘Head of Science [sic] Communication’ for the Society. Here is one of his commendations for a piece he chose to publish for its clear rhetorical value:

As they say, ‘you couldn’t make this up’…..

References

Barnes, H. (2023) Time To Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock’s Gender Service for Children London: Swift Press.

Baxendale, S. (2026) Effects of puberty blockers on the adolescent brain. Presentation at CAN-SG/SEGM conference Rethinking Youth Gender Medicine University College London, July 6^th.

Conway, A. and Pilgrim, D. (2026) Witness for the Prosecution: Resisting the False Memory Movement Oxford: Karnac.

Conway, A. and Pilgrim, D. (2022) The policy alignment of the British False Memory Society and the British Psychological Society. Journal of Trauma & Dissociation. 23. 1-12.

Entwistle, K. (2019) https://medium.com/@kirstyentwistle/an-open-letter-to-dr-polly-carmichael-from-a-former-gids-clinician-53c541276b8d

Gibbons, M., C. Limoges, H. Nowotny, S. Schwartzmann, P. Scott, and M. Trow. (1994) The New Production of Knowledge. Social Studies of Science. London: SAGE.

Gao, Z. (2014) Methodologism/methodological imperative. In T. Teo (ed) Encyclopaedia of Critical Psychology New York: Springer.

Hutchinson, A. (2026) Psychotherapeutic work with gender distressed youth (part 1). Presentation at CAN-SG/SEGM conference Rethinking Youth Gender Medicine University College London, July 6^th.

Pilgrim, D. (2026) A critical realist understanding of cancel culture in academic settings. Journal of Critical Realism (in press).

Pilgrim, D. (2023a) British mental healthcare responses to adult homosexuality and gender non-conforming children at the turn of the twenty-first century History of Psychiatry 34, 4,

Pilgrim, D. (2023b) BPS bullshit. In D. Pilgrim (Ed.) British Psychology in Crisis: A Case Study in Organisational DysfunctionOxford: Phoenix.

Pilgrim, D. (2022) Critical Realism for Psychologists London: Routledge.

Richards, G. and Stenner, P. (eds) (2022) Putting Psychology in its Place: Critical Historical Perspectives London: Routledge.

Sadie, C. (2026) Psychotherapeutic work with gender distressed youth (part 2). Presentation at CAN-SG/SEGM conference Rethinking Youth Gender Medicine University College London, July 6^th.

Sex Matters (2026) https://sex-matters.org/posts/updates/the-puberty-blockers-trial-on-trial/

Sodha, S. (2026) The conversion practices bill: vibes-based legislating Substack July 6^th.

Sullivan, A. (2026) Barriers to research in gender medicine. Presentation at CAN-SG/SEGM conference Rethinking Youth Gender Medicine University College London, July 5^th.

Wilden, A. (1972) System and Structure: Essays in Communication and Exchange London: Tavistock.

Wren, B. (2021) Epistemic injustice. London Review of Books 42, 23, December 2^nd.

"The Psychologist", Academic freedom and censorship, Gender

IDEOLOGICAL CENSORSHIP AND THE ACCELERATING DEMISE OF THE BRITISH PSYCHOLOGICAL SOCIETY

2nd Jul 20262nd Jul 2026 AdminBPSWatch

Pat Harvey posts…

Further to previous blog posts (see, for example here) the letter below was sent to the BPS. It is entirely self-explanatory. As yet there has been no acknowledgement. The X account @psychsocwatchuk, which recounts this rejection of the advertisement, posted the following

BREAKING: CENSORSHIP SCANDAL at The Psychologist? International Conference on Youth Gender Medicine: speakers include notable clinical and academic psychologists. BPS cancel advert already placed by agents at last minute ‘without explanation’.

As of the time of writing it has had 13 500 impressions.

Credibility of the BPS is dying, alongside its sold off and not replaced Leicester HQ, its financial viability and its falling membership.

Dear Dr Cole, Baroness Hayter and Mr Bajwa,

Re Conference Rethinking Youth Gender Medicine https://www.tickettailor.com/events/clinicaladvisorynetworkforsexgender/2162461

I am writing to you on a matter of considerable gravity. This international conference is due to take place this weekend in London. The conference is highly topical and centrally relevant, in terms of policy and practice, to many UK psychologists.

It will be opened by Baroness Dianne Haytor, who has served as Shadow Deputy Leader of the House of Lords and as Chair of the Labour Party. She has led several NGOs, including Alcohol Concern, sat on the board of the National Patient Safety Agency, and was Director of Corporate Affairs at the Wellcome Trust.

Amongst approximately 28 speakers there are 4 well known and respected clinical psychologists who are HCPC registered and chartered psychologists, and a prominent research / academic developmental psychologist. Their backgrounds and current relevant work are detailed on the conference schedule.

You should particularly note that one of these psychologists, Professor Sallie Baxendale, is Professor of Clinical Neuropsychology at the UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology. She was awarded the International Neuropsychological Society Arthur Benton Prize in 2018 in recognition of her outstanding scientific contributions to the field of neuropsychology. You chose, in 2023, to bestow upon her the British Psychological Society’s Distinguished Contribution Award.

Your agents sent the following back to the conference organisers following an unexpected refusal by the BPS to proceed with an agreed advertisement.

I am coming to you with not great news I am afraid: unfortunately, we are not able to run your advert on the monthly email this week. As discussed I must get the BPS to sign off the content, and they have come back with thef ollowing: Under The Psychologist’s published advertising code of practice, The Editor of The Psychologist reserves the right to refuse or cancel any advertisement or part of any advertisement without reason, or notice. I will speak to accounts and cancel your invoice — if you have already made payment I will ensure this is refunded asap. Apologies once again and sorry for the inconvenience.

It would seem highly likely that the reasons for the editor’s action is his declared personal affiliation with a particular ideological viewpoint in relation to transgender issues. He has made this bias clear in communications with numerous members, in his censorship or outright rejection of publishing views different from his own, and by his suppression of open debate on the matter. The blog to which I contribute BPSWatch.com has numerous articles on the failure of the BPS via The Psychologist to promote or even allow discussion of diversity of ideological, professional and clinical views of gender issues. Members including myself have made representations and complaints to the BPS and to the editorial board. To no avail. Some highly contentious articles from his viewpoint have been published, however. I have made formal representations at least two with serious safeguarding concerns.

This latest occurrence constitutes an unacceptable slur on members of the BPS involved in this conference, a failure of duty to members and may bring the Society into further disrepute. In the light of dwindling advertising revenues, the rejection of a significant sum of money for a prestigious conference opened by a member of the House of Lords is simply perverse.

Yours sincerely,

Patricia Harvey,

CPsychol., AFBPS.

Gender, Identity Politics

Yet another captured professional body…

14th Apr 202614th Apr 2026 AdminBPSWatch

BPSWatch reprints from genderclinicnews.com, with his agreement, a post by Bernard Lane. Bernard is a Sydney-based journalist covering the international debate about gender clinics and trying to shed light on what appears to be an emerging medical scandal. The post below explains what looks like the cowardice and compromise on matters of gender of yet another captured organisation, the Australian Psychological Society. This repeats the same shoddy and misleading fudge of the British Psychological Society with regard to authoritative professional guidelines and the current data.

Inside job

The Australian Psychological Society took four years to produce a gender dysphoria statement that gaslights members by hiding the woeful state of the evidence base.

BERNARD LANE

APR 09, 2026

Thought within Thought — Photo by Hirzul Maulana on Unsplash

Comment

In its new statement on gender dysphoria, the Australian Psychological Society promises it will “inform members of relevant advancements in the field”.

But this is a document doctored to exclude the most significant development of recent times—the 2024 UK Cass report and a brace of gold-standard systematic reviews since 2018, all exposing the lack of good evidence for the “gender-affirming care” of minors.

And yet the society has the cheek to insist that members must keep “up to date with the latest knowledge and guidelines”.

A psychologist reading the new position statement—“Supporting the mental health and wellbeing of transgender and gender-diverse people”—will find little reason to hesitate before referring a child to a puberty blocker-driven gender clinic.

This statement has a backstory. In 2021, clinical psychologist Dr Sandra Pertot was confronted with a complaint, her first in 45 years’ practice. In a podcast, she had talked about gender dysphoria from a mainstream clinical perspective. She did not sound “affirming” enough, according to some trans listeners. The complaint was resolved with the society acknowledging the “multiple perspectives and views” on the topic.

But now the society was on notice. It had an uncritical affirmation-only policy and activists stood ready to enforce it. Back then, the policy stated: “As a professional organisation committed to evidence-based practice, the Australian Psychological Society (APS) therefore opposes any forms of mental health practice that are not affirming of transgender people—including children. Any psychologist involved in such practices is likely to be in breach of the APS Code of Ethics.”

But the APS also had some members well-informed about the risks and flaws of the gender-affirming model. So, in 2022, the APS commissioned a panel to review its affirmation-only policy. Two years later, it issued a new draft policy for consultation. Last year, members began to wonder why it had not been finalised and published.

The 2024 draft was a compromise. It was far from free of gender ideology, but it would have alerted psychologists to the sobering results of systematic evidence reviews in the UK, Sweden and Finland, and the more cautious approach in those countries to the gender medicalisation of minors.

The tension in the draft document showed in the “further reading list” for members. It included the Cass report, but it also recommended gender-affirming treatment guidelines from the Royal Children’s Hospital Melbourne and the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH).

Psychologists diligently working through the reading list could end up very confused. Those treatment guidelines were found to be of low-quality and not fit for use, according to a peer-reviewed study commissioned by paediatrician Dr Hilary Cass, the author of the 2024 report. Dr Cass was critical of a practice of circular referencing among low-quality guidelines which created a false impression of consensus favouring the gender-affirming model. Where should psychologists place their trust—in the Cass report or those guidelines?

Today we discovered how the APS has resolved the dilemma.

No mention of the Cass report in the 2026 position statement. No mention of the systematic reviews, undertaken independently in several countries, which showed no good evidence for the puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones given to gender-distressed minors. But the low-quality gender-affirming guidelines remain in the new statement. Gone is the draft’s warning that these guidelines “differ in terms of ideological standpoint and scientific rigour and the outcomes have been widely debated”.

This story has played out internationally. Small groups of activists capture the policymaking machinery of medical or mental health associations and resist attempts to restore balance. It’s easy to see now why such factional politics are necessary. Gender-affirming care for minors has such a weak evidence base that its clinical dominance must depend on authority—so-called eminence-based medicine—and the silencing of dissent.

The new APS statement makes no reference to the unprecedented spike in gender clinic caseloads since the 2010s, nor does it note the puzzling flip in patient profile from boys with early-onset gender dysphoria to teenage girls often with a range of psychiatric problems but no prior history of dysphoria.

The 2024 draft did not dodge this reality: “In recent years, there has been a marked increase in the number of young people being referred to specialist or medical gender clinics, the reasons for which are debated”.

The draft cited the work of the American researcher Dr Lisa Littman who coined the term “rapid-onset gender dysphoria” to suggest that social media and peer groups might be influencing the trans identities adopted by young people. This possibility is unacceptable to gender ideologues. And so, the Littman references are banished from the 2026 statement.

Even the WPATH guideline, much cited by the new APS statement, concedes that, “For a select subgroup of young people, susceptibility to social influence impacting gender may be an important differential to consider.”

Speaking of subgroups, the APS has an entity known as the Psychology of Diverse Bodies, Genders, and Sexualities Interest Group. They get a shout-out on the Acknowledgements page of the new position statement.

Thanks for reading Gender Clinic News! This post is public so feel free to share it.

"The Psychologist", 'False Memory Syndrome', Memory and the Law Group

More on Memory and the Law….

3rd Apr 202614th Apr 2026 AdminBPSWatch

Peter Harvey posts….,

David Pilgrim’s last two posts concerning the unwillingness of the Editor of The Psychologist, Jon Sutton, to publish an important article about the complex and contested matter of ‘false memory’ is no surprise Some of my first posts on BPSWatch were in response to the debacle that followed the failure of the BPS to produce a revision of the Guidelines on Memory and the Law (2008) (see here, here, here and here in date order).

The reason that I was so outraged then (a feeling that remains to this day) was nothing to do with my own career interests – I have never been an Expert Witness, my practice was in clinical health psychology, not forensic psychology or dealing with abuse – but was solely about what I saw as a massive dereliction of duty on the part of the BPS. The Guidelines were a very important resource, not only for psychologists who had to give evidence in court, but also for the courts themselves. The professional body that represents both academic and applied psychology in the UK should be in a position to provide authoritative guidance in matters that are of importance to society as a whole. Memory is one of the few aspects of human behaviour over which psychologists can claim to have more expertise than most and – to my mind at least – we have a responsibility to ensure that what evidence we have is presented in as clear and straightforward a way as possible. This is doubly important when such data are used to inform legal decision-making. At this interface psychological knowledge impacts directly on peoples’ lives and future.

In addition, where there is contested knowledge-base and the evidence may not be clear-cut and where there is legitimate scientific controversy it is crucial that these are acknowledged. In a court of law particularly, the ability to call on a neutral and authoritative guidance is essential. This does not have to have the status of some sort of revealed truth – it is there to act as a benchmark, a standard against which the court can assess the weight to give to the other evidential information that needs to be considered and balanced to achieve a just verdict.

It is, perhaps, worth reminding ourselves about what the duties of an expert witness actually are (at least in England and Wales). The Crown Prosecution Service is very clear in that it states:

The duty of an expert witness is to help the court to achieve the overriding objective by giving opinion which is objective and unbiased, in relation to matters within their expertise. This is a duty that is owed to the court and overrides any obligation to the party from whom the expert is receiving instructions…[see here]

Note the key point – the duty is to the court not to either the prosecution or the defence. That is a clear and obvious requirement which requires a proper, balanced and neutral assessment of the available evidence to allow the court to make an informed decision. This is particularly important when it comes to contested evidence and there is no obvious ‘right’ answer. It is the duty of any responsible professional body is to acknowledge those areas where there is controversy and provide at least some guidance to those who do not have ‘expert’ knowledge. One of the reasons given for the lack of a revision of the original guidelines was that it was not possible to achieve consensus. Surely that is not a reason to abandon revision but rather to acknowledge this, explain the nature of the contested data and provide some expert guidance as to how such uncertainty might be dealt with in the real-life setting of a court of law?

Despite considerable – and ultimately fruitless correspondence (detail in the previous posts) – the 2008 Guidelines were never revised and re-issued by the BPS. This lack of responsible action led – by default – to an outsourcing to psychologists who were members of the Psychology and Law Sections of the British Academy (see here). The fact that this group of eminent specialists (two academic psychologists, one clinical psychologist, one neuropsychiatrist, one lawyer were the primary authors plus seven additional contributors and 17 reviewers and commentator) did what the BPS singularly failed to do is a remarkable testament to the rank incompetence and lack of integrity on the part of the BPS.

And I, too, had a run-in with Jon Sutton when I attempted – again without success – to get a letter published in The Psychologist about this fiasco. He stated his reasons for rejection as these:

We’ve considered your letter and I’m afraid I don’t think publication would be warranted, given the length and its focus on aspects where you’ve already had a fairly full response. Of course, decisions and actions within the Society can always be questioned, and The Psychologist will often be the place to do that. But I’m also informed by Debra that ‘We have met with the former members of the Task and Finish Group and they are happy with the agreed way forward. We have not received any requests from legal professionals or any professional bodies or regulators of the legal profession for guidance regarding memory based evidence’.

I see you’ve got it ‘out there’ on the blog anyway, so perhaps if the response to that changes the situation we can revisit it.

Plus this addendum:

Apologies Peter, I somehow managed to send that before I was finished… anyway, was just going to add that if and when the planned journal coverage is published, that might be another opportunity to revisit the topic. It’s something we’ve covered quite a lot over the years so I’m sure this won’t be the end of the discussion.
Best,

Jon

My response is published in full here, but the final paragraph, I believe, still stands, some five years on:

I am unconvinced that The Psychologist actually functions, as you suggest, as the place to question the Society and its actions. One reason for starting the blog was that we have heard too many members’ experiences of the BPS and The Psychologist being unresponsive to their concerns and to healthy conflict and controversy. And we will continue to act as forum for questioning the society until it is seen to be acting in the open and transparent manner that it claims to do.

I used the phrase ‘lack of integrity’ earlier deliberately; we could also call it lack of moral fibre, cowardice or, as I have done previously, a dereliction of duty. But we a treading a well-worn path here. When it comes to pinning its colours to the mast, as David Pilgrim points out, the BPS is highly selective in its political choices – the transgender debate being another critically important example. The Society is not in the vanguard of the social warrior movement – and it shouldn’t pretend to be. There are plenty of other organisations and groups whose job it is to lobby and engage in special pleading. Likewise, individual psychologists are, and should be, free to campaign for causes in which they believe. But the role of a learned society, which the BPS purports to be, is different. It has a responsibility to stand above simplistic and sloganizing posturing and be guided by what is (at least for that moment) known and is uncertain or unknown. In this fractured post-modern world where ‘truth’ and ‘knowledge’ are seemingly malleable and contingent, there is a need for some organisations to take a more deliberative and dispassionate stance, not with truth-proclaiming grandiose certainty, but with a robust, rational, realistic and reasoned approach to what is – and isn’t – known. It is time that the BPS stopped jumping on bandwagons and causes, stops falling victim to fad and fashion, ensures that its policies are not the product of narrow and exclusive activist groups and starts doing what it is meant to be doing.

"The Psychologist", 'False Memory Syndrome', Academic freedom and censorship

Memory and the law – more suppression of debate at the BPS.

22nd Mar 202622nd Mar 2026 AdminBPSWatch

David Pilgrim and Ashley Conway post…

Recently we submitted an article to The Psychologist (appended below in full). Its title reflected a serious current political context in the wake of the release of the Epstein files. The argument we pursued was well referenced, reflecting the research we had completed for our book length critique of the false memory movement, about to appear this year and cited in the piece.

The decision to submit the article would have one of two outcomes. First, it might have been published, which we thought important given the contention of the false memory debate in psychology and its implications for the victims of crime, especially children. Second, and more likely it would be rejected, given that The Psychologist rarely allows articles which are critical of the BPS. In this case the existing policy position on memory and the law still reflects the cynical view about victim testimony, and jury decision making, in cases of contested claims of abuse from the past.

Not surprisingly then, the piece was rejected and so we pressed the editor Jon Sutton to tell us why, but he gave no detail except to say that he had had it reviewed and it would not ‘fit’ in The Psychologist. We pressed him for all the feedback offered by the reviewer or reviewers he had used (the norm in academic journals) but he refused saying this:

The Psychologist is a magazine. We [sic] state this clearly and repeatedly, and have done for many years. As editor, I make the final decisions on content, and I do so with consideration, consultation, and accountability (to a representative body of BPS members in the Psychologist and Digest Editorial Advisory Committee, and ultimately to the Trustees). We [sic] have publicly available policies and protocols.

I absolutely understand that rejection can hurt. I’m sorry if my handling of your submission did not adequately take into account your feelings. But I’m really keen to keep this professional. So I ask you, please, do not copy me into your own continued discussions and personal criticism of me. If you do so, I believe I would be justified, with my manager’s approval, in blocking your email addresses.

Best wishes

Jon

The allusion to criticism of him was to this from a message from DP to AC, which was copied deliberately to Sutton to be transparent about our disdain for his rejection. We were trying to model what the BPS and its apparatchiks clearly fail to do routinely: be open and complete about our thoughts about the decision. This is what DP said to AC about the editor and his decision, to his face rather than behind his back:

“First, he [Sutton] shows clear bias on this matter (we have the receipts about the lionisation of Loftus and his denial that the BPS was aligned with the British False Memory Society). Second, if that bias were not related to major public policy questions about child protection and our new post-Epstein context of reflection we could move on. However, we cannot move on because that external context embeds the views of both us and Sutton, and so we have a shared responsibility to engage in a serious discussion about, what we consider to be, the partisan faux-science of the false memory movement.

Sutton blocking that discussion unilaterally was not wise but he did it, because he could (a motif of power). It aligns with the adolescent ‘no debate’ position common now in immature identity politics, which in my view have infected the discourse now dominant in The Psychologist. Debates are never over they are only blocked or ignored for a while.”

The allusion from Sutton about our feelings was seemingly odd (we were not hurt but angry at Sutton fronting the inadequate policy on memory and the law in such a glib manner). However, he is an invidious position. He works for the BPS, so he has a conflict of interest, when and if submissions criticise the status quo in the Society, which implicitly our submission did. If he were to be replaced as editor, any newcomer would be in the same bind.

With regard to the current BPS position, the fact of the matter is that once the balanced stance on memory and the law from John Morton and others in the 1990s was superseded by a group led by Martin Conway, containing current or imminent members of the scientific advisory group of the British False Memory Society (BFMS), then everything changed. This was policy capture in the BPS, insinuating the campaigning position of the BFMS (no doubt to the glee of those in latter). All balancing arguments and evidence from clinicians working with trauma and in child protection work, as well as more wary experimentalist was now excluded in the BPS policy. As a result, it remains tunnel visioned and indifferent to wider questions about victims. We laid out our position about that alignment between the BFMS and the BPS in a previous publication (Conway, A. and Pilgrim,(2022). The policy alignment of the British False Memory Society and the British Psychological Society. Journal of Trauma & Dissociation. Mar-Apr;23(2):165-176.) In a prior email to us, which we can cite, Sutton flatly denied the truth of that alignment.

That is the political context of the tetchy exchange between us and Sutton. Readers of this blog are now given the rejected piece in full. They can make their own judgment about its academic worthiness and whether the readership of The Psychologist might have benefitted from its publication rather than its rejection:

THE EPSTEIN FILES: TIME TO RETHINK THE FALSE MEMORY DEFENCE?

David Pilgrim and Ashley Conway

False memories have been discussed previously in The Psychologist in a particular way, related to the plausibility of victimhood (Wright et al., 2006; French, 2018; Brewin and Andrews, 2017). In the recent context of the partially released ‘Epstein files’, a fresh controversy has arisen about the credibility of the recall of the rich and powerful, related to their past actions and inactions. The previous focus was promoted by a leading public intellectual, Elizabeth Loftus (Loftus and Ketcham, 1995; cf. Conway, A. and Pilgrim, 2026), who found loyal supporters within one part of British psychology (e.g. Blank et al., 2020; Conway, M. 2012). However, some other leading memory researchers, using a wider lens, were cautious about the narrow claims of this group (e.g. Baddley et al., 2025; Brewin, et al., 2020).

The loyal group, including Loftus herself, were longstanding members of the scientific advisory board of the British False Memory Society (BFMS) (Felstead and French, 2021). They and their equivalents in the US False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF) advanced three interlocking claims:

1 False memories can be implanted in unsuspecting clients during forms of psychological therapy that are trauma-preoccupied and technically biased towards hypnosis and guided imagery. This leads to the reporting of unfounded recovered memories, involving alleged past abuse or crimes. Accordingly, both accusers and the accused are shared victims of wrong-headed psychotherapeutic norms.

2 Recovered repressed memories are an unscientific myth. Genuine cases of abuse are not forgotten by their victims. ‘Recovered memory therapy’ thus creates miscarriages of justice.

3 In ‘recovered memory therapy’ the concept of dissociation is a sleight of hand to re-vindicate the discredited unscientific psychoanalytical notion of repression.

By contrast, clinical and survivor researchers have responded to those points thus:

1 People report recovered memories before entering therapy or they may have never even been in therapy (Cheit 2014, 2023; Goodman-Delahunty et al, 2017; Smith et al.2000).

2 Directive efforts to implant memories are at odds with the norms of mainstream models of psychotherapy (cognitive-behavioural, psychodynamic, existential or person-centred). Exploring historical trauma is good practice in mental health work and is not a form of covert persuasion, because childhood adversity is a strong predictor of adult mental health problems, independent of diagnosis (Hillberg et al 2011). There is no evidence that there exists a practicum of ‘recovered memory therapy’, nor does it have a recognised training institute; it is thus a ‘straw man’. Academic doubts about what happens in therapy are based on surveyed therapists’ beliefs in relation to the possibility of recovered memories in the wake of real trauma, implying a link to widespread manipulative ‘recovered memory therapy’ in practice (Otgaar et al 2022). However, those sceptical experimentalists have no clinical knowledge of relating to victims of trauma and its complexities. They unwisely reject clinical research for its assumed inferiority, compared to experimental psychology (cf. Barker et al, 2023).

3 Dissociation is accepted by a wide range of clinicians who have no commitment to a psychoanalytical approach to their work. Disrupted and delayed recall are common in trauma victims. Dissociative phenomena are now well established and part of the routine focus of mental health practitioners, as well as being part of standard psychiatric nomenclatures, such as ICD and DSM, whereas the putative ‘false memory syndrome’ is notably missing from them (Lowenstein, 2018; Ross, 2022; cf. Otgaar et al 2019).

Tunnel vision and the four scenarios of false memories

A feature of the false memory movement has been its tunnel vision about one scenario: a person recalls something that in fact did not happen. However, logically if human recall is inefficient generally in life, which common sense tells us that it can be, but not always, then surely all scenarios are worth addressing in an open-minded way. The fact that in the original ‘lost in the mall’ study, most of the subjects were not duped, shows that memory frailty implies caution but not nihilism (Brewin et al, 2020). This point is reinforced if we take a wider lens on false memories, when comparing the four cells Table 1, which all in their own way provide examples of false memories.

Table 1. Four scenarios of false memories

	Accuser	Accused
False Positive	“I was abused” but this is not true False memory	“I committed a crime” but this is not true (false confession) False memory
False Negative	“I was not abused” but this is not true False memory	“I did not commit a crime” but this is not true False memory

Those supporting the false memory movement were overwhelmingly preoccupied with the top left cell in Table 1. The top right cell is intriguing but not connected to claims about therapeutic manipulation (Gudjonsson, 2018). Moreover, in the spirit of scientific equipoise, interest should have been expressed for completeness in the bottom two cells. Indeed, prospective studies of medically recorded abuse in childhood have demonstrated that victims may have no later memory at all of what happened to them (Williams, 1994). We return later to the importance of the bottom right cell in a post-Epstein context.

Legitimation and de-legitimation of the false memory movement

Pope (1997) was an early critic of the rhetorical over-claiming from the false memory movement. Such doubts about the empirical credibility of the false memory defence were also rehearsed by Blizzard and Shaw (2019). Despite such appeals for critical self-reflection and restraint, from the 1990s onwards Elizabeth Loftus persisted in her public role in several high-profile cases, including her work for the defence teams of, amongst others, Ted Bundy, Bill Cosby, Michael Jackson, Robert Durst, O.J. Simpson, Harvey Weinstein and Ghislaine Maxwell (see later).

Three other factors are relevant in relation to that pattern of the ‘punching down’ role of the false memory defence (with the rich and powerful looking to it as a potential source of judicial exoneration). The first is that its success rate has been lacklustre; most of the accused were then found guilty of serious crimes entailing sexual or non-sexual violence or lost appeals when already convicted.

The second is that much of the work using the defence was not related to celebrities or notorious clergy (such as the paedophile priest Paul Shanley) but disputes about firms using asbestos. The defence was used to cast doubt on the temporal link between a person with industrial disease and those who employed them (Hoult, 2023).

The third is that the use of findings from the psychological laboratory to query any human testimony, based on historical recall in court, is not analogous to the use of say DNA laboratory testing, which is of shared interest to both defence and prosecution teams in a court context. A technique is applied to the circumstances and specifics of a case in focus. With the false memory test there is a different logic and role for an expert witness. All that is offered is a generic doubt, based upon distal closed systems findings, provided selectively in the interests of the defence case. This doubt-casting is dubious because it entails the ecological fallacy, creating a spurious scientific confidence and biased reasoning (Uher, 2021; Smedslund, 2016; Adolph, 2019). Accordingly, judges in both the UK and the USA have at times ruled out the views of false memory expert witnesses because of that diffuse and generic doubt-casting and its consequent lack of case-specific situated relevance.

Evidence of biased personal interest

The bias in the false memory movement, and the punching down effect it has created, mainly undermined its legitimacy. But there was more; in addition, the bias against those complaining of their victimisation came at times from some on the scientific advisory boards of the FMSF and BFMS, who were clearly self-interested. Four stand out cases exemplify this point. These are relevant, because when bias in scientific research is evident (as in this case) our routine caution about ad hominem reasoning can be bracketed quite legitimately (Walton, 1998).

The first was Ralph Underwager a developmental psychologist who defended ‘intergenerational sex’ as harmless and God given in an interview in the Dutch paedophile magazine Paidika (Geraci, 1993). He was an early authoritative member of the FMSF scientific advisory board. During the 1980s he had led the campaign group VOCAL (Victims of Child Abuse Legislation), which argued that left wing social workers routinely removed children from good Christian families. This anticipated the campaigning stance of the FMSF during 1990s and after that respectable parents claiming their innocence were self-evidently innocent.

The second was a cognitive psychologist Dan B. Wright, who sexually harassed junior female colleagues. He has been a central figure in researching dubious recovered memories (Wright et al., 2018) and was on the advisory board of the BFMS. He claimed no memory of the accusations against him from the testimonies of ten separate complainants, which was then reported by journalists in Florida and then Nevada when he moved employment (Hargrave, 2022; Longhi, 2022).

The third was Mike Pendergrast, a popular science writer whose daughters were to complain about his sexualised conduct towards them, and he blamed their absurd claims on ‘hysterical’ therapists. He was a regular contributor to the FMSF newsletter and though not a psychologist sat on its scientific advisory board.

The fourth was a public intellectual and psychology graduate, Karl Sabbagh, a BFMS advisory board member, who groomed a 14-year-old girl online. In 2019, the police intervened to prevent intended sexual contact. The married 77-year-old was prosecuted, imprisoned and placed on the sex offenders register for life (see ‘Paedophile Karl Sabbagh, author and film maker, jailed for grooming child’ Oxford Mail September 22^nd, 2019). Ten years prior to his fall from grace Sabbagh produced a book promoting the false memory argument (Sabbagh, 2009). With resonances of the Underwager position, Sabbagh argued that paedophilia was a moral panic, with evidence being lacking about its harm (see Pilgrim, 2018).

Sabbagh and Wright were removed from the advisory board of the BFMS by its Director, Kevin Felstead, after journalists informed him of their crimes or misdemeanours (Delahunty, 2023). Sabbagh was thus still on the board while in prison. Felstead denied any contact with Wright over his ten-year presence in the organisation, indicating its lack of meaningful functioning.

Past and recent uses of the false memory defence

The false memory movement began to accrue criticisms from its inception, (e.g. van der Kolk et al., 2001; Freyd, 1998, 1996; Cheit, 2023, 2014; Crook,2022; Hoult 2023, 1998). By the time Epstein’s rich and powerful network came into view (including politicians, rock stars, stellar academics and royalty), the false memory movement was in decline; hence the closure of the FMSF in 2019 and the BFMS in 2022, though the latter had been barely functioning for a decade.

Nonetheless, the high-profile defence role of Elizabeth Loftus persisted, now in relation to Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s partner in crime. This trial in 2021/22 was par for the course, the false memory defence cut no ice, and Maxwell is now serving a 20-year prison sentence for her role in the trafficking of female minors and their sexual victimisation by Epstein and his friends and contacts. At times she participated directly in the abuse of the girls, who were as young as 14 years.

A close friend of Epstein and Maxwell (the then Prince Andrew, Duke of York) was involved in a relevant negotiation. After his interview on Newsnight in 2019 (September 19^th), he reached an out of court settlement with Virginia Giuffre, one of many victims of Epstein’s and Maxwell’s sexual exploitation. He paid her a reported figure of £12 million in 2022. He said on camera, “I have no recollection of ever meeting this lady, none whatsoever.” Shown a photograph of him with her, when she was 17 years of age, accompanied by Ghislaine Maxwell, he denied any recollection still and lamented that his team of investigators had not been able to establish that it was a fake (his only explanation for his innocence).

However, despite his seeming perplexity about a non-event in his life, in February 2022 he paid ‘the lady’, Virginia Giuffre, millions of pounds, while continuing to claim innocence of any wrongdoing. Prior to his out of court settlement, his defence team were exploring the use of the false memory defence to undermine the credibility of Giuffre’s claims (Oppenheim, 2022). Giuffre went on to commit suicide in 2025.

This scenario was given more context when the Epstein files included photographs showing him on the floor crouched over an impassive young female. For legal reasons, news outlets continued to report his strenuous denial of any wrongdoing, but the mainstream mass media, the public, the King and parliamentarians were all to adopt their own criticisms and sanctions against him in advance of any police action or court prosecution. (His subsequent arrest was not in relation to alleged sexual misconduct but about exploring evidence of financial misconduct in a public office.)

The Mountbatten-Windsor case is an example to be placed in the bottom right cell of Table 1. The same is true in relation to the disgraced UK ambassador to the US, Peter Mandelson, another associate of Epstein, who found himself unable to recall frequent email contact with him, after his conviction for sexual offences. He also could not remember Epstein giving him the large sum of $75,000 in 2003/4. Mandelson was arrested in relation to financial misconduct in a public office within a week of his old friend and business colleague.

Another example to be considered in the bottom right cell of Table 1 is the sole suspect in the rape and murder of Martine Vik Magnussen in 2008. The Yemeni prince Farouk Abdulhak fled to his home country and awaits extradition to the UK. At first claiming his innocence, in 2023 he subsequently, admitted responsibility for the crime note as a recovered memory, emerging from the haze of a past affected by sexual and emotional arousal, drink and drugs (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-65033048).

These cases raise important ethical and psychological questions about the relationship, from context to context in open systems, between recall, self-deceit, motivated self-interest and interpersonal dissimulation. That complexity cannot be clarified by studying decontextualised trivial events, with duped subjects in the psychological laboratory. Such reductionism offers us no understanding of the complexities of what has come to light about the toxic mix of patriarchy, financial corruption and probable manipulations by the security services of more than one nation. At this point psychology has reached the limits of its disciplinary ‘skill set’ and might well need to look elsewhere for help to make sense of distorted recall. The discredited elite actors in Epstein’s network, two of whom created a political crisis in the UK in early 2026, highlight why an open-minded memory researcher should not limit their interest to the top left-hand cell of Table 1.

If psychologists are to regain any credibility for their contribution to memory science in judicial settings, then all four cells should surely be of interest. Journalistic and political interest now is less about accusers claiming that something happened when it did not (e.g. Abramsky 2004). Instead, the media storm and political fallout of the Epstein files have shifted the focus to how powerful figures can seemingly forget their central role in scurrilous events in the past. That shift from the plausibility of the victim to the plausibility of perpetrator began with the emergence of the #MeToo movement and was then amplified with the partial release of the Epstein files, with more implications in the offing at the time of writing.

Conclusion

The political ambiguity about the impact of the false memory movement on mainstream academic opinion invites our historical interest, to prompt proper research in a post-Epstein context. Science and justice are not only served within the domain of individual cases, with contested accounts of accused and accusers. They are also served by a serious examination of a partisan social movement, which has claimed an unwarranted pre-eminent scientific authority and queried, and even belittled, the judgments of ordinary people.

We have argued above that the false memory movement invites that critical attention. It may be best approached by an interdisciplinary investigation involving serious academic historians, philosophers, lawyers and sociologists. To date psychology, as a single siloed discipline, has failed to establish its own a consensus appraisal and has thus not resolved ‘the memory wars’, in its midst.

References

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Andrews, B. and Brewin, C. (2024). Lost in the mall?: Interrogating judgements of false memory. Applied Cognitive Psychology , 38, no. 6: e70012.

Baddley, A., Eysenck, M.W. and Anderson, M.C. (2025). Memory (4th Edition). London: Routledge

Barker, C., Taggart, D., Gonzalez, M., Quail, S., Eglinton, R., Ford, S. and Tantam, W. (2023). The truth project- paper two- using staff training and consultation to inculcate a testimonial sensibility in non-specialist staff teams working with survivors of child sexual abuse. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 14, 1177622-5.

Blank, H., Otgaar, H. Nash, R.A, Patihis, L. and Rubínová, E. (2020). Special issue to honour James Ost’s contribution to memory psychology. Memory, 28:1, 1.

Blizard, R. and Shaw, M (2019). Lost-in-the-mall: False memory or false defense? Journal of Child Custody, 16:1, 20-41.

Brewin, C. R., Andrews, B., and Mickes, L. (2020). Regaining consensus on the reliability of memory. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 29 (2), 121–125.

Brewin, C.R. and Andrews, B. (2017). False memories of childhood abuse. The Psychologist June 7^th.

Cheit, R. (2023). https://www.recoveredmemory.org/case-archive

Cheit, R. (2014). The Witch-Hunt Narrative: Politics, Psychology and the Sexual Abuse of Children. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Conway, A. and Pilgrim, D. (2026). Witness for the Prosecution: Resisting the False Memory Movement Oxford: Karnac.

Conway, M. (2012). Ten things the law and others should know about human memory. In L. Nadel and W.P. Sinnott-Armstrong (Eds.) Memory and Law Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Crook, L. (2022). False Memories: The Deception that Silenced Millions New York: TM Publishing: LLC.

Delahunty, S. (2021). Charity reports itself after Third Sector alerts it to sex-offender advisory panel member. Third SectorFebruary 3rd.

Felstead, K. and French, C (2021). Dr James Ost’s contributions to the work of the British False Memory Society. Memory, 30, 6, 669-677.

French, C. (2018). Reaching ‘Brenda from the chip shop’: scientific literacy. The Psychologist March, 45.

Freyd, J. J. (1998). Science in the memory debate. Ethics & Behavior, 8(2), 101–113.

Freyd, J.J. (1996). Betrayal Trauma: The Logic of Forgetting Childhood Abuse. Cambridge, MA: Harvard.

Geraci, J. (1993). Interview: Hollida Wakefield & Ralph Underwager Paidika # 9, 2-12.

Goodman-Delahunty, J, Nolan, M A and van Gijn-Grosvenor, E L. (2017). Empirical guidance on the effects of child sexual abuse on memory and complainants’ evidence. Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, Sydney: Australia.

Gudjonsson, G.H. (2018). The Psychology of False Confessions: Forty Years of Research and Practice London: Wiley.

Hargrave, R. (2023). Expert faces axe from charity advisory board over historical sexual harassment claims Third Sector May 23rd

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Hoult, J. (2023). Using experts’ casework demographics to evaluate expert witness credibility: An empirical case study of the 1970-2020 legal casework of Elizabeth F. Loftus, Ph.D. (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4502988, retrieved December 2nd 2024)

Hoult, J. (1998). Silencing the victim: The politics of discrediting child abuse survivors. Ethics & Behavior 8 (2):125 – 140.

Longhi, L. (2022). UNLV professor had prior investigation for sexual harassment Las Vegas Review Journal August 26th

Loftus, E. and Ketcham, K. (1995). The myth of repressed memory: False memories and allegations of sexual abuse. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin.

Loewenstein, R.J. (2018). Dissociation debates: everything you know is wrong. Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience 20, 3, 229-242

Oppenheim, M. (2022). The accusations of victim-blaming and gaslighting plaguing Prince Andrew | The Independent, January 18^th.

Otgaar, H., Mangiulli, I., Riesthuis, P., Dodier, O.and Patihis, L. (2022). Changing beliefs in repressed memory and dissociative amnesia. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 36(6), 1234–1250.

Otgaar, H, Howe ML, Patihis L, Merckelbach H, Lynn, S.J., Lilienfeld, S.O. and Loftus, E.F. (2019). The return of the repressed: the persistent and problematic claims of long-forgotten trauma. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 14(6), 1072-1095.

Pilgrim, D. (2018). Child Sexual Abuse: Moral Panic or State of Denial? London: Routledge.

Pope, K.S. (1997). Memory, abuse, and science: questioning claims about the False Memory Syndrome epidemic. American Psychologist. 51, 9, 957–74.

Ross, C. (2022). False memory researchers misunderstand repression, dissociation and Freud. Journal of Child Sexual Abuse, 31(4):488-502.

Sabbagh, K. (2009). Remembering Our Childhood: How Memory Betrays Us Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Smedslund, J. (2016). Why psychology cannot be an empirical science. Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science 50, 2, 185-95.

Smith D. W., Letourneau E. J., Saunders B. E., Kilpatrick D. G., Resnick H. S. and Best C. L. (2000). Delay in disclosure of childhood rape: Results from a national survey. Child Abuse & Neglect, 24, 273–287.

Uher, J. (2021). Psychology’s status as a science. Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, 55, 212-224

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Walton, D.H. (1998). Ad Hominem Arguments. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.

Whitfield, C.L. (2001). False memory defense: using disinformation and junk science in and out of court. Journal of Child Sexual Abuse 9, 3, 53-78.

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Wright, D., Ost, J. and French, C. (2006). Recovered and false memories The Psychologist June 18^th.

"The Psychologist", 'False Memory Syndrome', Academic freedom and censorship, Gender, Identity Politics, Memory and the Law Group

TWO TYPES OF IDEOLOGICAL CAPTURE IN THE BPS

11th Feb 2026 AdminBPSWatch

David Pilgrim posts…..

Recently, the social justice obsession of the BPS (especially promoted by the editor of The Psychologist) has been the focus of a piece in the conservative newspaper the Daily Telegraph. Several disaffected psychologists were quoted, including one from a co-founder of this blog, Pat Harvey. She made a point of noting her left leaning values, which the piece (February 4^th 2026) dutifully reported (https://archive.ph/owqF1) [Note: this link may not work if you are using a VPN].

As a case study in the mess that many organisations now encounter, the piece does a good job; the BPS is by no means unique. This mess deserves proper analysis. There is no point in replicating the infantile binary reasoning of identity politics (IP) (‘you are either for or against us’), when making sense of them (Dutton, 2020). Calling it all left wing ‘wokery’ (which you subscribe to or resist) is understandable but a simplification.

This is a complex scenario for two reasons. First, at the turn of this century, the Western left had to face its major strategic failures. The Soviet Union collapsed, demonstrating that authoritarian vanguardism did not deliver either political equality or personal freedom. Moreover, its alternative, social democracy, by and large was incorporated into neoliberalism (with some push back in Scandinavia and Scotland). For example, Blairism in the UK went further in its public policies than Margaret Thatcher ever dreamed of. IP and neoliberalism then ensured that radical individualism was valorised and fetishised.

The second point follows. Given the new individualism and strategic failure of political progressiveness, the left adopted an alternative tactic by focusing on the politics of recognition, as structuralist accounts were displaced by poststructuralism (Honneth, 1995; Butler, 1999). Some on the left spotted a weakness immediately. This shift to poststructuralist accounts would (a) focus on individual rather than collective grievances and (b) partisan identities would be divisive, setting sub-groups in society against one another. In my book Identity Politics: Where Did It All Go Wrong?, I draw attention to such wise warnings from old lefties like Eric Hobsbawn in Britain and Nancy Fraser in the USA (Fraser, 1999). IP has become a lazy strategic shortcut for the left and for the reasons these two writers predicted, they have failed. The right spotted an open goal, and IP has become a large target, difficult to miss for, say, the columnists and reporters of the Daily Telegraph or Daily Mail.

Decolonisation as a restricted form of historiography?

IP has not been just about this lazy short cut on the left. It has also played into the hands of authoritarian traditionalism on the right. For example, religious conservatism dwells on arrogant identitarianism (Fekete, 2016; François and Godwin, 2008) (the latter term as a synonym for identity politics is used by some academic analysts). The religious right in the USA is a clear example, as are the feudal norms of radical Islam (Hochschild, 2016; Diamond, 1998; Allen, 1996). The Brexit debacle reflected the rise of right-wing identity-focused concerns (culminating quite probably in Reform becoming our next government) (Sobolewska and Ford, 2020).

Right- and left-wing forms of IP have shared the tactic of the self-righteous suppression of free speech. Critics of organised religion are met with death threats or accusations of ‘Islamophobia’ leading to deplatforming at academic events. Ditto for those of us who are gender critical, with the heckler’s veto shutting down who can say what in conferences or teaching. Once unpopular speech is conflated with actual violence, then the Enlightenment has been betrayed – and the BPS has played its part.

This scenario of a violation of a key Enlightenment value (freedom of expression for all) has favoured the professional classes (Nossel, 2020). The latter rely for their legitimacy on their graduate status and special claims of epistemological authority derived from unfettered academic research. In the case of psychology, this has led hypocritically to an approach to knowledge which is both restrictive and prescriptive. That is, only this sort of exploration in the academy or the clinic is permitted and psychologists cannot reflect on complexity but must become political activists, where one value position only is prescribed. The piece in the Daily Telegraph, quite understandably, dwelt on these restrictive and prescriptive aspects of the BPS discourse.

If social justice activism was a lazy short cut for the left in wider politicking, then decolonising the curriculum was its glib virtue signalling rallying cry and partner in the academy. Again, this is a half-baked approach to history because it too is restrictive and prescriptive. A great irony here in the British cultural context is that while psychology has relied on its eugenic history, this was not much about race but a lot about class (Pearson, 1905; Pilgrim, 2022a and b; Pilgrim, 2008, Benn Michaels, 2006). Karl Pearson was certainly a racist but subsequently the main concerns in British social policy were about the fecundity of the poor and their inherited inadequacies, discussed by Cyril Burt in his advice about educational policy (Mazumdar, 2004). Today’s racial focus misses the point, not because it is irrelevant but because the history of class in the UK, at home not abroad, is more relevant. Locale, ethnicity and poverty are a better intersecting account of predicted disadvantage than skin colour (Wacquant, 2022).

Another irony is that while the most recent social justice preoccupation (such as race or transgender) might drive some historical interest, the BPS has failed palpably to ensure that the history of psychology is taught more generally and with rigour in higher education. Many in the History and Philosophy Section tried and failed to reverse that failure. British empiricism and its self-deception about disinterestedness and objectivity are still the tactical lever for worthies in the BPS to promote this narrative, on programmes like All In The Mind on Radio 4. An understanding of the history of British psychology is needed to understand that current self-satisfied norm in the discipline.

This leaves the Society having its cake and eating it – i.e. psychologists claiming to be impartial scientific incrementalists on the one hand but picking up the latest opportunity for value-led virtue signalling within modish IP, on the other. Look no further than the content of The Psychologist every month to prove this point. British psychology suffers twice over from the error of presentism. It both fetishises the most recent empirical research and the most recent social justice campaign to promote. History, properly applied, exposes that error of presentism, and its agenda should not be set pre-emptively as being only about ‘decolonising the curriculum’.

And there is more….

Critiques of IP and its corrosive impact on academic freedom are now relevant to the rhetorical weakness of the BPS as a charity and an allegedly learned body. The notion of ideological capture is part of that discourse about the degradation more generally of academic culture. IP has quite correctly drawn such critical interest across the political spectrum.

In the case of the BPS the naïve realism spawned by British empiricism has enabled a different sort of policy capture. That is evident in my previous posting on memory and the law. When John Morton chaired the memory and law group in the 1990s, a sensible balance was rehearsed about the frailties of human memory. More recently that sensible balance has had to be retained outside of the BPS, as Adrian Skinner helpfully clarified (see Comment at the end of this post). The report produced for the British Academy (Baddeley et al, 2023) eschewed the tunnel vision of Martin Conway and his acolytes. The wide lens and balanced approach, started by Morton and continued by Baddeley et al., has gone absent without leave from BPS officialdom.

In the case of the sub-culture of false memory fundamentalism, mainly situated across the psychology departments of Leeds, City University and Portsmouth, the displacement of Morton by Martin Conway ensured a blocked dialectic. Those psychologists concerned with child protection and working with traumatised clients were denied a voice to challenge that sub-cultural obsession with defending those accused. (See my previous post.)

My point of emphasis here is that current IP compliant messages in The Psychologist, ensured by its editor Jon Sutton, live cheek by jowl with a slavish adherence to the positivist legacy exemplified by Elizabeth Loftus in the 1990s. The academic champions of the false memory movement inside the BPS gave legitimacy to the now defunct British False Memory Society, just as Sutton’s editorial policy on defending a pre-Cass position about gender-confused children has ensured the exclusion of legitimate concerns from gender critics. When the latter speak out they are either ignored or slapped down.

Returning to doing proper history, before an allegedly learned body like the BPS nails its colours to an ideological line about gender, race or memory and the law, then a calm and rigorous look back at the contradictions set in train at the turn of the 20^thcentury, when the BPS was set up, should be reflected on. That look back would reveal that policy capture has come in two guises. The first is about cultural compliance with current virtue signalling norms since the turn of this century. Accordingly, The Psychologist has acted as a barely veiled front for transgender activists. The second is about aggrandising one version of experimental psychology by pushing the narrow line of reasoning that casts doubt upon all testimony in courts, leaving the accused protected and the accuser disbelieved. This seemingly demonstrates how clever psychologists are and how ordinary people are scientifically illiterate.

What these two forms of policy capture have in common is that they have both betrayed children. In the case of paediatric transition, we are just waking up to a major medical scandal of iatrogenesis led, note, by psychologists (the case of GIDS at the Tavistock Clinic) (Abassi, 2024). In the case of memory and the law, a handful of accused parents of children, now grown up, have insinuated their campaigning aims into the BPS, via a sub-culture of academic allies. By contrast, John Morton, in the 1990s using a wider lens, emphasised that victims of child abuse needed more consideration because they outnumbered those campaigning parents many-fold.

This is the sort of mess we get into when leaders in the BPS try to mix virtue signalling IP with aloof and philosophically implausible claims of scientific disinterestedness. The special pleading of the first goes on and on because ‘the battle can never be won’ (Reed, 2018) as one after another splintered partisan interest group encourages reports of individual victimhood from within their midst.

The second, which is a more circumscribed version of policy capture, might be rectified. However, that would require that the outsourcing of proper academic consideration (the Baddeley report noted above) is now abandoned. This implies pressing the reset button for the memory and law group, which would have to include the very people previously excluded. This refers to clinical researchers, memory researchers and child protection experts who have a wider interest in their topic than just the false positive reasoning favouring the rich and famous. In the meantime, the BPS will continue to betray children twice over.

References

Abassi, K. (2024). The Cass review: An opportunity to unite behind evidence informed care in gender medicine. BMJ, 385: q837.

Allen, E. (1996). Religious heterodoxy and nationalist tradition: the continuing evolution of the Nation of Islam. The BlackScholar, 26 , 2–34.

Baddeley, A., Brewin, C. et al. (2023). Legal aspects of memory: A report issued by the Psychology and Law Sections of the British Academy. Journal of the British Academy, 11, 95-97 with annex).

Benn Michaels, W. (2006). The trouble with diversity: How we learned to love identity and ignore inequality Holt.

Butler, J. (1999). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. Routledge

Diamond, S. (1998). Not by politics alone: The enduring influence of the Christian right. Guilford Press.

Dutton, K. (2020). Black and white thinking: The burden of a binary brain in a complex world Bantam.

Fekete, L. (2016). Hungary: Power, punishment and the ‘Christian-national ideal’. Race & Class, 57(4), 39–53.

François, S., & Godwin, A. (2008). The Euro-Pagan scene: Between paganism and radical right. Journal for the Study of Radicalism, 1(2), 35–54.

Fraser, N. (1999). Social justice in an age of identity politics: Redistribution, recognition and participation. In Ray, L. & Sayer, A. (eds) Culture and economy after the cultural turn (pp25-52) Sage.

Hochschild, A. R. (2016). Strangers in their own land: Anger and mourning on the American right. New Press.

Honneth, A. (1995). The struggle for recognition: The moral grammar of social conflicts Polity Press.

Mazumdar, P.M.H. (2004). ‘Burt, Cyril Lodowic’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Nossel, S. (2020). Dare to speak: Defending free speech for all. HarperCollins.

Pearson, K. (1905). National life from the standpoint of science. A&C Publications.

Pilgrim, D. (2022a) Race, ethnicity and the limitations of identity politics. Journal of Critical Realism. 22. 1-16.

Pilgrim, D. (2022b). Identity politics: Where did it all go wrong? Phoenix Books.

Pilgrim, D. (2008) The eugenic legacy in psychology and psychiatry. International Journal of Social Psychiatry 54, 3, 272-284.

Reed, A. (2018). Antiracism: A neoliberal alternative to a left. Dialectical Anthropology, 42, 105-115.

Sobolewska, M., & Ford, R. (2020). Brexitland. Cambridge University Press.

Wacquant, L. (2022). Resolving the trouble with ‘race’. New Left Review, 133/4.

'False Memory Syndrome', Memory and the Law Group

BPS long term pro-FMS stance.

3rd Feb 2026 AdminBPSWatch

Ashley Conway* posts…

David Pilgrim’s post (and Adrian Skinner in the comments) notes the failures of the BPS in their dismal approach to addressing the False Memory Syndrome disinformation campaign. This is not new. I have been at this topic for 30 years, during which time the BPS has not just been useless, it has been worse than that by directly or indirectly promoting the FMS line to the detriment of many thousands of victims of abuse.

John Morton chaired the original BPS group on tackling this issue back in the 1990’s and he did it well. I extract here some of his comments from a brief piece in The Psychologist in 1998.

“ …While we all agree that memory has constructive and reconstructive aspects, there is a grave danger of creating the image of us all apart from accused parents [emphasis added] living in a world of fantasy about our past. I would like to quote the conclusions of Alan Baddeley on this topic, from his book Human Memory (Baddeley, 1990): Much of our autobiographical recollection of the past is reasonably free of error, provided we stick to remembering the broad outline of events. Errors begin to occur once we try to force ourselves to come up with detailed information from an inadequate base. While one falsely accused parent is one too many, there are at most a few hundred in this country. Meanwhile, ChildLine alone deals with 3,000 calls a day, and cannot handle thousands more. The number of abused people needing help is in the hundreds of thousands. Alas, there is some anecdotal evidence that women asking for treatment, reporting a history of sexual abuse, are currently being refused because therapists fear being taken to court under the false memory banner. This trend must be resisted.” [John Morton, Director of the Medical Research Council Cognitive Development Unit, London. Personal Space. The Psychologist, August 1998, p 408.]

Some years later the BPS chose to have its Memory and Law Guidelines group chaired by Martin Conway, who soon afterwards joined the scientific advisory board of the British False Memory Society and acted as an expert witness for the defence on a number of occasions using an FMS line. The BPS Guidelines came out in 2010. In 2012 I sent him an email:

Dear Martin,

I am currently writing a short book for victims of child sexual abuse, and want to get a fair and balanced message across, including something about the dangers of false memory induction. I was planning to include a recommendation to the BFMS website. So I had a look at the site, and was shocked at the mis-information that I found there. I will not be recommending it.

You are listed as a Scientific Advisor to the BFMS.

The BFMS has a number of untrue and misleading statements on its website. 3 examples:

(1) “Most genuine sexual offenders confess”. Not true.

(2) “Before recovered memory became fashionable, sexual offence suspects had the highest rate of admission amongst crime suspects at 89.3 per cent.” I have checked the source of this claim (34 year old data), and this representation of what was actually said in the source paper is grossly misleading.

(3) Vast tracts of text under the tab and banner “The Royal College of Psychiatrists Working Party Report on Recovered Memories – Extracts”, are not extracts from that report at all. They appear nowhere in the Royal College Report. So again this is completely untrue.

Under the BPS Code of Ethics, BPS Member Conduct Rules, and HCPC Standards of Conduct, Performance and Ethics, you are obliged to ensure the accuracy of information that goes out in your name. You carry the good name of these organisations with you.

Would you therefore ensure that the BFMS corrects these points, and ensure that only honest and accurate information is provided on its website, with immediate effect.

If for some reason the BFMS does not want to do this, then I presume that you will want to consider your position as a Scientific Advisor.

I would be grateful if you would e-mail me back and confirm your action.

I am writing to you personally in the hope that this correction can be achieved with discretion and with the minimum stress to all concerned. If you want to talk to me about this, I would be happy to do so.

His response (slightly edited to make sense to the reader here):

Dear Dr. Conway,

I have passed on your letters to the BFMS. I do not expect these assertions will upon examination turn out to be correct. If, however, they do the appropriate corrections to the web site will be made in due course.

I very much object to the underlying bullying tone of your communication and do not expect to hear from you again. If you have problems with the BFMS web site then please contact them directly.

In order to help your attempt to be ‘fair and balanced’ I attach a copy of the Memory & The Law Report and refer you to a recent edited volume by Nadel & Sinnott-Armstrong, Memory and Law, Oxford University Press, 2012.

For emphasis, this is from the Chair of the official BPS Memory and Law Guidelines group. To this day, as far as I know, these Guidelines remain the most up-to-date ones that the BPS itself has published. And, for clarity, the three points that I raised with him are all indisputably correct.

*To repeat the note from the previous post, Ashley Conway is not related to Martin Conway.

'False Memory Syndrome', Memory and the Law Group

Is the false memory movement now a Dodo?

1st Feb 20263rd Feb 2026 AdminBPSWatch

David Pilgrim posts…

Later this year the book Witness for the Prosecution I have written with Ashley Conway* will appear from Karnac Books. Below is a taster of some the arguments it contains, focusing on implications for British psychologists and the BPS.

The ‘memory wars’ (Crews, 1995) seemed to splutter to an end in the BPS in 2021 when Daryl O’Connor, the Chair of the BPS Research Board, pulled the plug on a working group on memory and the law. He argued that a consensus could not be established about producing a revised report. (Those on the group, despite their disagreements, were not happy with this arbitrary decision.). O’Connor was embedded in a partisan sub-culture supporting one side of the ‘memory wars’, which had begun in Britain at Leeds University when Martin Conway was Head of Psychology.

Homophily (the ‘birds of a feather’ effect in professional networks) is well known in sociology (McPherson et al 2007). In the case of the false memory movement in Britain the academic departments in Leeds, City University (where Conway moved to) and Portsmouth became its nodes of flourishing. Conway’s leadership role is noteworthy. He chaired the BPS guidance group in 2008 (four of its ten members were from his department in Leeds). By 2011 he had joined the Scientific Advisory Board of the British False Memory Society (BFMS) and went on to archive their records at City University. Their fate became unclear. Some, or all, were shredded after the Society collapsed in 2024 for lack of funding.

Mystery shrouds these events but deceit, in one way or another, is central to the history of the false memory movement. Its roots were in clandestine CIA-funded work, and it fetishised the denial of personal experience when challenging those recounting histories of abuse. Cynicism about complainants was turned into scientific rhetoric and trauma-obsessed therapists were the cause, meaning that both accused and accuser were simply the victims of psychotherapeutic norms. This tells a good story but is it an honest and plausible one?

Martin Conway remained key player in the false memory movement until his death in 2022. In one particularly irritable meeting I attended about exploring a new memory and law report, prior to the O’Connor decision, Conway fumed out prematurely, muttering angrily ‘we have to follow the science’. His published guidance on this had been set out in Conway (2012). To his annoyance, some in the meeting were pointing out, quite properly, that the ecological validity problem in psychology raised a question about what exactly science meant in the case of our discipline.

Some of us with a clinical background were particularly cautious, given what we knew about the understated prevalence of child sexual abuse, the culture of denial about it in society and the proven impact of childhood adversity on mental health. Those doubts were to be a sticking point in the failed consensus adjudicated on by O’Connor by declaring the group now defunct. Had it continued, dirty washing about the false memory movement and the over-claiming of experimental psychologists about the open system of everyday life might have been washed in public.

Early in the meeting that I attended Conway declared that he was on the Scientific Advisory Board of the BFMS. At the very moment of his swansong, that Board was encountering significant problems. Two of its members were exposed in the press for their sexual misconduct. The first was Karl Sabbagh and the second Dan B. Wright. This is pertinent given the skewed obsession the false memory movement had had, since the early 1990s, with false positives. For them only the accusers’ accounts should be a matter of scientific focus and memory frailty though ubiquitous (as commonsense does tell us) can be ignored when it comes to those accused.

I return to Andrew Mountbatten below but will look first at Sabbagh and Wright to illustrate that the false memory scientists clearly had their a priori biases. This matters because the normal caution we have, quite rightly, to discount ad hominem reasoning can be challenged, when and if bias is clearly present in scientific work. Where bias is demonstrable then legitimate attention can be paid to the personal motives of the researchers involved (Coady, 1992, Walton, 1998).

The cases of Sabbagh and Wright

In September 2019 Karl Sabbagh was sentenced at Oxford Crown Court for grooming a 14-year-old girl online for sexual contact. He received a 45-month sentence and was placed for life on the sex offenders register. The 77-year-old was married with four children and during his time of imprisonment he remained as a named member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the BFMS.

His offending was intercepted by the police in a Dublin hotel, where he was on the brink of assaulting his victim. Prior to this he had sent her money, jewellery, a vibrator and footage of himself masturbating. He had asked her to stop shaving her pubic hair and to send him lewd pictures of herself. The court heard that these indecent images were classed in the British system as ‘category A’, which is the most serious grade (involving penetration, sexual activity with an animal or sadism). The Communications Director of the BFMS, Kevin Felstead, removed him and his name but after quite a while. Felstead admitted that he only knew of the conviction because a journalist from Third Sector had emailed him with the story in 2021. Sabbagh would have probably remained on the Board until the closure of the Society, had the journalist not intervened (Delahunty, 2021).

In 2009 Sabbagh published Remembering Our Childhood: How Memory Betrays Us. On its cover was a fulsome endorsement from Elizabeth Loftus, the doyen of the experimental wing of the false memory movement in the USA viz:

Hiding in plain sight in the book is Sabbagh’s argument that paedophilia is harmless and a moral panic. The book was a megaphone for the false memory movement. It had been written with the encouragement of not just Loftus but also another fellow British FMS Board member Lawrence Weiskrantz, Emeritus Professor of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford.

Sabbagh was an experienced and well recognised writer, but he had no specialist research knowledge about ‘memory science’, and so the endorsement of Loftus and Weiscrantz gave his ersatz writing gravitas. The false memory movement has contained many dilettante experts who had their reasons to offer their services to enlighten the public. In the USA these included Mark Pendergrast, Pamela and Peter Freyd and Eleanor Goldstein. During the 1990s all of them faced accusations of abuse from their daughters, now grown up. Together they demonstrate what happens when the interest work of careerist experimental psychologists and partisan campaigners comes to together in a synergistic PR campaign.

If Sabbagh was a dilettante memory expert that was not the case with Dan B. Wright, who was a professor and well published in the field. Two years after Kevin Felstead had to remove Sabbagh from the BFMS Scientific Advisory Board, he was obliged to repeat the exercise (Hargrave, 2023). This was in May 2023 and yet again Felstead faced the public embarrassment of his ethically dubious advisors, after contact from a journalist. The case stretched back to 2012 in Florida and was then reported in the press in 2022 in Nevada (Longhi, 2022). At the time of the investigations against him for sexual misconduct, Wright was already on the Scientific Advisory Board of the BFMS.

Felstead seemed to be perplexed by his presence in the organisation, saying to the Hargrave (ibid) that “I have never had any contact with Dan Wright whatsoever. No email, no verbal contact, nothing at all.” Given Wright had been on the Board for over a decade the latter seemingly was not functioning. Maybe Felstead had forgotten about him (our memories do play tricks). Maybe the Board had recently become moribund, or it had always been a fig leaf of legitimacy for Felstead and his aims. Did academics on the Board in Britain not know of the Florida scandal? We probably will never know, though we do know that deceit has been a leitmotif of the false memory movement.

This is the Wright story in summary. In 2021 he had recently been appointed to an endowed Chair at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. A reporter on the Las Vegas Review-Journal summarised a serious case of sexual harassment that had occurred ten years previously, when Wright worked at the Florida International University (FIU). Wright had been the director of the legal psychology program at FIU. There, in 2012, he was investigated for making sexually inappropriate comments, stalking women in his department and ‘creating an intimidating work environment for women’. The original report from FIU revealed “a level of inappropriate behavior and lack of professional judgment, involving women, that rises to the level of harassment based on their gender,”. When the reporter in Nevada asked Wright for his reflections he said, conveniently: “That was a number of years ago…I’m trying to get on with my life.”.

The investigation and report revealed that Wright:

1 Would make comments about his penis to women in public.

2 Made comments about two students being together sexually. He told one student about a sexual dream he had had about her and another that he had imagined her in a lingerie pillow fight.

3. Texted women for inappropriate and non-work-related reasons, telling them that he was thinking of them.

4 Constantly interrupted women while they were working and repeatedly asked them out (witnesses said that Wright “does not take ‘no’ for an answer.”)

5 Touched women without their permission, including by putting his hand on their waists or the smalls of their backs, or by putting his arm around their shoulders.

6 Try to get female students to be alone with him, earning the label from peers as the “Dirty Dan Trick”.

Wright flatly denied all these accusations, so was he suffering from a false memory (i.e. had he forgotten a pattern of events implicating several women that had really happened?) Was he implying that the ten complainants were suffering a false memory (i.e. remembering things that had never happened to them?). These two questions put together highlight why the false memory movement has been biased and tunnel visioned in its interest. It wants to focus on the second question and point up that those reporting sexual abuse in court were suffering from a memory implantation at the hands of trauma obsessed therapists. This lop-sided attention is why the ad hominem caution can be parked on reasonable grounds, when we appraise those in the false memory movement.

The credibility problem for the false memory movement

Just because the US False Memory Syndrome Foundation and the British FMS have now closed (in 2019 and 2024 respectively) it does not necessarily mark the permanent demise of the false memory movement. Both the family activist wing and the experimentalist wing of the movement have to some extent been re-configured in new or existing organisations, such as the ‘innocence projects’. These singularly define rough justice as being about those falsely accused. A challenge to that position has been increasingly evident in the past ten years.

Sabbagh wrote his book before Jimmy Savile went from hero to zero overnight at the end of 2011. The #MeToo movement meant that the journalistic fawning over Elizabeth Loftus was subsequently tempered considerably (cf. Abramsky, 2004). Journalists have had to weigh up how to approach accounts of historical abuse (continue to fete a female public intellectual or stand by female survivors of abuse?). The false memory defence has been used mainly against women on behalf of men accused. Maybe the false memory movement has had a feminist by-pass. This point applies not just to Loftus but to the mothers of abused victims opting to support their husbands and instead disparage their daughters (e.g. Goldstein and Farmer, 1992; Freyd and Goldstein, 1997). After Goldstein died, her daughter reporting abuse offered a view of her mother in an open letter online attacking the leadership of the FMSF (Sharlet Stacy (2021, December 3). Open letter to Freyd, Loftus and the FMSF. Open Letter Posted To “DISSOC” Email Listserv).

Some women had responded robustly about the bias against victims in the 1990s. Jennifer Freyd, in the wake of abuse by her own father went on to become a Professor of Psychology at the University of Oregon in 1992. She pointed up ‘betrayal trauma’ and ‘DARVO’ (Deny Attack and Reverse Victim and Offender) and queried ecological validity but her arguments did not dent the false memory movement (Freyd, 1996) Another woman, the clinical psychologist Anna Salter, was sued in the courts for complaining of the damage being done by the false memory defence and the lack of evidence that therapists routinely implanted memories (Salter, 1998). The latter litigation, which failed, was from Hollida Wakefield and Ralph Underwager (1992). Underwager (resonating here with the Sabbagh case) had argued in an interview in a Dutch paedophile magazine Paidika that paedophilia was a God-given blessing and should be celebrated. Wakefield was more cautious in the same interview – she stayed on as advisor to the FMSF, but Underwager resigned to ward off a PR disaster, once news of the Dutch confession crossed the Atlantic (Geraci, 1993).

Prior to the formation of the FMSF during the 1980s, Underwager had headed up VOCAL (‘Victims of Child Abuse Allegations’) and defended hundreds of parents accused of child sexual abuse. He argued that communist inspired social workers were removing children from good American Christian families. He lobbied to abolish child protection legislation. Much of the VOCAL ideology about taken for granted false accusations spilled over in the 1990s into the false memory movement. If an accused parents said that they had been falsely accused, then they were clearly telling the truth.

Today is not the 1980s and 90s

More recently the cultural landscape is different. The fall out of the Epstein scandal has resonances everywhere. The amused fascination that Elizabeth Loftus had offered to journalists and her fawning acolytes in psychology either side of the Atlantic has been disrupted by a fundamental question about her credibility. (On the fawning point see for example One on one – with Elizabeth Loftus | BPS).)

Two publicly filmed scenarios point to the declining credibility of the false memory defence. In 2020 Loftus acted as a defence witness for Harvey Weinstein. The prosecutor and Assistant District Attorney, Joan Illuzi-Orbon, asked this question: “Have you ever written a book called ‘Witness for the Prosecution?’” Impassively she replied ‘No’. Many in the courtroom laughed loudly knowing that she was famous for being the lead author of a book called ‘Witness for the Defense’ and that she had no interest in offering help to accusers (Loftus and Ketcham, 1991). The glee in the audience offered a new public cultural marker about the credibility of the false memory movement.

In the second example, a year later (22nd November 2021) District Judge Alison Nathan granted Ghislaine Maxwell permission to call Elizabeth Loftus as an expert witness. Loftus repeated the stereotypical position of false memory findings, thereby casting doubt on the testimony of (any) complainant. Loftus simply introduces doubt from a distal body of knowledge in the academy, pouring a jug of cynical cold water over any human testimony. This really is not like DNA testing case by specific case. Maxwell was found guilty, which was par for the course. She is now spending 20 years in jail for trafficking female minors.

The false memory defence has proved to be fairly useless in practice for defence teams; most of Loftus’ innumerable criminal¹cases have still culminated in guilty outcomes (Hoult, 2023). Judges and juries come to reasonable decisions despite those in the false memory movement bemoaning their scientific illiteracy (French, 2018). The condescension from the movement is premised on the notion that only the false memory experimentalists are offering the world science in the public interest. The problem for those like Loftus and French is that their self-confident and patronising stance has not won the memory wars for good reason.

An example about judicial norms changing is the experience of another false memory expert Lawrence Patihis, from Portsmouth and ex-colleague and admirer of Loftus. Recently (September 2025) he was asked by the defence to “help educate” the jury on how memories work. However, he had his expert witness testimony rejected by a court in Michigan USA, because the judge said it would “open the door to jury confusion”. The point here is not whether it would have led to confusion (who knows?); it is that judges no longer uncritically treat false memory proponents as they would any other expert witness. Similar rejections by judges were emerging about Martin Conway’s expertise in court prior to his death.

Given the closure of both the FMSF and the BFMS, one remaining option now for those experimental psychologists peddling the false memory defence is freelance lobbying to be an expert witness (see for example https://lpatihis.wixsite.com/lawrencepatihis). For campaigners like ex-BFMS boss Kevin Felstead other options are to set up a consultancy with sympathetic defence lawyers (see https://memoryandinjustice.co.uk/.) Both have also joined forces with FACT (https://factuk.org/) a generic home for those claiming to be falsely accused or victims of past miscarriages of justice, set up by the ex-MP Harvey Proctor.

Thus, for now at least, both campaigners like Felstead and academics in the Loftus tradition are carrying on their work in new organisational forms. However, their opponents also show no sign of going away. Not only has survivor-based research challenged the false memory movement (Cheit, 2014; Crook, 2022; Hoult, 2023), some more sanguine experimentalists have urged caution when partisan claims become entangled with empirical findings. The original ‘lost in the mall’ study was disavowed by its originator (James Coan) and other memory experimentalists have rehearsed cautionary evidence (Brewin et al, 2020; Andrews and Brewin, 2024). Coan is important for his innovative ‘lost in the mall’ study. He went on to be Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia and remained angst ridden about his creative youthfulness, as he explained here to a journalist:

I’m slow enough on the uptake that it took me a while to realize that the study I was doing was making people who had been sexually abused feel like I was their enemy,” he tells me. “That was completely devastating to me.” Although he has been asked to testify about false memory in countless court cases, Coan has always refused. He just doesn’t think the mall study is sufficiently relevant. In her excitement, he thinks, Loftus may [subsequently] have ‘mischaracterized’ what started out as an undergraduate assignment for extra credit. “I got five points,” Coan says. “Five points and decades of grief.” (Heaney, 2021 (emphasis added); https://www.thecut.com/article/false-memory-syndrome-controversy.html)

And it is not just Coan who exercises restraint in the face of the dangers of overclaiming about false memories. Take the encyclopaedic tome Memory now in its fourth edition (Baddeley, et al, 2025). The authors mention Elizabeth Loftus about witness statements and Martin Conway about autobiographical memory but many key names and their published work, from the sub-culture of memory experimentalists I mentioned at the outset, are simply missing from the book. Maybe Baddeley et al do not get involved with discussing the ‘memory wars’, because they know that they are dirty wars and might toxify the brand of mainstream experimental psychology. More than that, they engage respectfully with clinical research and weigh up the evidence on recovered memories. That respect has been pointedly missing from the discourse of the false memory movement. The latter disparaged clinical research. A lack of engagement with it means that the false memory experimentalists literally do not know what they are talking about. None of them are mental health workers but are very certain about what happens in the clinic.

For example, they deny that dissociation can account for delayed memories – when it can. They argue that dissociation is simply a conceptual smokescreen to re-insinuate the psychoanalytical concept of repression, when it is nothing of the sort. Dissociative phenomena, including dissociative amnesia, are conceded by therapists who are out with the psychodynamic tradition or even hostile to it. They generalise about the use of hypnosis and guided imagery as being commonplace with no empirical evidence to defend that claim of high prevalence. The dominant models of psychological therapy do not deploy these techniques. They talk of ‘repressed memory therapy’ as a given, even though the latter’s existence has no evidential basis – where is the published practicum or its training institute? They confuse the legitimate exploration of childhood adversity, which is good practice in mental health work, with evidence of false memory implantation. This a catalogue of misunderstanding, wilful or otherwise, and blind ignorance.

Moreover, were hypnosis that effective at radically altering our view of the world, then most mental health problems could be erased in a few sessions. Ironically the progenitor of the false memory position, Martin Orne, could not deliver evidence to his CIA paymasters that such major erasures and replacements were feasible (i.e. the scenario of The Manchurian Candidate). Although he became the recruiter in chief for the FMSF he was always ambivalent about what could be said case by case. Within a few years he was pulling back from the more strident totalising claims of the FMSF and its new public intellectual Elizabeth Loftus (Orne, 1995; Ceci and Bruck, 1995). Despite that, he remained on the Advisory Board of the Foundation until his death in 2000.

But probably the most important weakness in the false memory movement is not its failure to win the scientific argument, but a cultural turn against those who trivialise sexual crimes or undermine their fair-minded appraisal. The false memory movement for a long while helped to feed a culture of denial alongside claims about the ‘parental alienation syndrome’ and the moral panic thesis about the scale of child sexual abuse. In the latter regard its seminal leader Stanley Cohen pointed out that the problem with child abuse was not moral panic but ‘moral stupor’ or ‘chilling denial’ (Pilgrim, 2018).

More widely, critics have been concerned with the moral role of evidence or ‘epistemic injustice’ (Fricker, 2007). The false memory movement by only obsessing about one form of injustice (for those accused of crimes) has lost any credibility – what about the injustice for legions of victims who find no redress? The false positive message has drowned out the false negative one. This has culminated in a ‘punching down’ effect. Psychological knowledge has been used for the powerful not the powerless. If this is in doubt look at who has employed Loftus: Robert Durst, Harvey Weinstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, O.J. Simpson and Michael Jackson. Under the radar other rich financial interests were evident, when Loftus worked for the defence of employers being sued for asbestos related disease by ex-employees (Hoult, 2023; Durst v. 3M Co., No. 20-C-74 KAN, Initial Designation of Experts and General Objections to Designations for Oct. 2020 Trial by Bechtel Corp., 23 (W.Va. Cir. Ct. July 21, 2020).

Returning to recent newsworthy elite interests, special pleading by Epstein’s associates includes their own lack of memory about the facts. Peter Mandelson could not remember his email exchanges with Epstein and argued that he was conned by a narcissist (possibly it takes one to know one in this case), so he was a victim just like the trafficked girls were. He knew nothing of the latter because he was a gay man and Epstein would thus not involve him in knowledge of his crimes – really? He supported Epstein when the latter was arrested sending supportive messages in 2008. Why?

But the best story implicating hazy memory from this group of elite mutual backscratchers has been left to a royal: the very public undoing of the former Prince Andrew. In his BBC Newsnight interview with Emily Maitlis (September 19^th, 2019) he stated that “I have no recollection of ever meeting this lady, none whatsoever.”. Shown a photograph of him with her, when she was 17 years of age, accompanied by Ghislaine Maxwell, he denied any recollection still. In February 2022 he paid ‘the lady’, Virginia Giuffre, an estimated £12 million pounds, while continuing to claim innocence of any wrongdoing. On July 25th, 2025, Virginia Giuffre committed suicide. After being banished by the royal family and stripped of his titles, the police removed Andrew’s gun licence, probably on sensible grounds.

Dirty wars and dirty history

The memory wars, like all dirty wars have led to dire consequences and many unanswered questions. Andrew’s ostracization will probably not be the last story we will hear about the Epstein scandal. Will a verdict on Epstein’s purported suicide in prison become clearer? Will Andrew keep telling us stories about untraceable bookings in pizza restaurants? Why did he pay millions to a woman he had never met? For our purposes here though, will Elizabth Loftus and her acolytes any longer have any utility for defence teams? Will her appearance in support of Ghislaine Maxwell be her swansong?

Apart from the punching down image and the matter of epistemic injustice, ‘memory science’ has been saturated with deceit from its early days in the Cold War. Orne, and others like Ewan Cameron in Canada working for the CIA deceived and abused their subjects who were children (Ross, 2006, Torbay 2023). Social psychology experimentalists went on to normalise deceit (Milgram is the best known to psychology undergraduates). James Coan quickly worried about what he had unleashed and quite understandably backed away.

When the experimentalists in the false memory movement insisted on reducing the memory wars to an epistemic matter, they evaded their own moral and political context (Pope, 1997). This reflected a form of naïve realism dating back to the turn of the 20^th century, when positivists genuinely believed that they offered disinterested knowledge, which would create verifiable covering laws applicable across time and space. They were wrong and Karl Popper dissenting from his elders in the Vienna Circle to produce his critical rationalism pointed out why. He also noted that science was a social activity requiring reflexivity and humility. Arrogant ‘disinterestedness’ was thus removed as an option but those on one side of the memory wars did not get the memo.

At the turn of this century post-Popperian philosophers have refined and extended that attack on positivism (Pilgrim, 2022). The memory experimentalists with their tunnel vision about false positives advance a form of scientism that is a hundred years out of date. It appeals to the idea that psychology as a single discipline can claim optimistic scientific incrementalism, by simply repeating the closed system logic of the experiment over and over again. However, to use a phrase from Don Bannister (1968), unfortunately for experimental psychologists, the ‘test tube talks back’. The survivor researchers noted earlier have made that point clearly.

Moreover, Viennese contemporaries from the early 1930s, Paul Weiss and Ludwick von Bertalanffy who were experimental biologists, spawned General Systems Theory. This had two impacts. First, it pinpointed the error of transferring the findings from closed systems to open systems, offering the serious caution for psychologists about ecological validity (Adolph, 2019; Smedslund, 2016; Uher, 2021). Second, it required that we review whether human science should rely on case specific retroduction not deduction from experiments (Bateson, 1972; Pilgrim, 2022). That second point gets to the heart of why judges and juries do not give the false memory defence credibility. It is not, as French and Conway claim because they are scientifically ignorant, it is because they exercise good judgment, when faced with competing accounts from complainants and those they accuse in very specific circumstances.

Finally, in its official policies the BPS has swallowed the story of scientific incrementalism, mainly because those favouring one side in the memory wars captured the policy apparatus (the homophily across Leeds, City University and Portsmouth) (Conway, A. and Pilgrim, 2022). Loftus was lionised and the law and memory group, dominated by the experimentalists, shut out the concerns of clinicians.

With time, this may not be a ‘good look’ for the Society. To cite Faulkner (1951), ‘the past is not dead, it’s not even past’. Epstein and his narcissistic elite friends have set many hares running to still be caught. Moreover, the official inquiries into child sexual abuse in this country and Australia have jeopardised the prospects of the false memory movement having any abiding credibility (Goodman-Delahunty et al, 2017).

There is more in the offing, and the BPS is not likely to come up smelling of roses when the history of the false memory movement is told in all its gory details.

* Please note, that to avoid any confusion, Ashley Conway is not related to Martin Conway. All references to Ashley Conway are indicated by the use of his initial.

Blog Administrator notes:

We have covered the debacle of the Memory and Law group on the blog previously (see here, here, here and here); clicking on “False Memory Syndrome” and Memory and the Law Group in the list of categories to the right of the screen will also give access to other posts.

Blog Administrator notes:

2 February 2026. Minor typographical changes made and the distinction between Ashley and Martin Conway clarified.

Footnote 1 Edit added 3 February 2026.

References

Abramsky, S. (2004). Memory and manipulation: the trials of Elizabeth Loftus, defender of the wrongly accused. Orange County Weekly September 9^th. hhtp://doi.org/10.1177/21582440231173915eekly.com/features/features/memory-

Adolph, K. E. (2019). Ecological validity: mistaking the lab for real life. In R. Sternberg (ed) My Biggest Research Mistake: Adventures and Misadventures in Psychological Research pp 187–190. New York: Sage.

Andrews, B. and Brewin, C. (2024). Lost in the mall? Interrogating judgements of false memory. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 38, no. 6: e70012.

Bannister, D. (1966). Psychology as an exercise in paradox. Bulletin of the British Psychological Society 21, 229-231.

Baddley, A., Eysenck, M.W. and Anderson, M.C. (2025). Memory (4th Edition). London: Routledge

Bateson, G. (1972). Steps to an Ecology of Mind. New York: Chandler.

Brewin, C.R., Andrews, B. and Mickes, L. (2020). Regaining consensus on the reliability of memory. Current Directions in Psychological Science 29, 2, 121-26.

Ceci, S.J. and Bruck, M. (1995). Jeopardy in the Courtroom. Washington DC: American Psychological Association.

Cheit, R. (2014). The Witch-Hunt Narrative: Politics, Psychology and the Sexual Abuse of Children. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Coady C.A.J. (1992). Testimony: A Philosophical Study. Oxford University Press.

Coan, J. (1997). Lost in a shopping mall: An experience with controversial research. Ethics & Behavior, 7. 271-84.

Conway, A. and Pilgrim, D. (2022). The policy alignment of the British False Memory Society and the British Psychological Society. Journal of Trauma & Dissociation 23(2):165-176

Conway, M. (2012). Ten things the law and others should know about human memory. In L. Nadel and W.P. Sinnott-Armstrong (eds) Memory and Law Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Crews F. (1995). The Memory Wars: Freud’s Legacy in Dispute. London: Granta Books.

Crook, L. (2022). False Memories: The Deception that Silenced Millions. New York: TM Publishing: LLC.

Delahunty, S. (2021). Charity reports itself after Third Sector alerts it to sex-offender advisory panel member. Third Sector February 3^rd.

Faulkner, W. (1951). Requiem for a Nun. New York: Random House.

French, C. (2018). Reaching ‘Brenda from the chip shop’: scientific literacy. The Psychologist March, 45.

Freyd, J.J. (1996). Betrayal Trauma: The Logic of Forgetting Childhood Abuse. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Freyd, P. and Goldstein, E. (1997). Surviving Through Tears: Surviving False Memory Syndrome. Bocata Raton: Upton.

Fricker, M. (2007). Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Geraci, J. (1993) Interview: Hollida Wakefield & Ralph Underwager Paidika 9, pp 2-12,

Hargrave, R. (2023). Expert faces axe from charity advisory board over historical sexual harassment claims | Third Sector May 23^rd

Loftus, E. and Ketcham, K. (1991). Witness for the Defense. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Longhi, L. (2022). UNLV professor had prior investigation for sexual harassment Las Vegas Review Journal August 26th

McPherson, M., Smith-Lovin, L. and Cook, J. M. (2001). Birds of a feather: homophily in social networks. Annual Review of Sociology. 27: 415–444

Pilgrim, D. (2022). Critical Realism for Psychologists. London: Routledge

Pilgrim, D. (2018). Child Sexual Abuse: Moral Panic or State of Denial? London: Routledge

Pope, K. (1997). Memory, abuse, and science: questioning claims about the False Memory Syndrome epidemic. American Psychologist. 51, 9, 957–74.

Ross, C. (2006). The CIA doctors: Human rights violations by American psychiatrists. New York: Manitou Publications.

Sabbagh, K. (2009). Remembering Our Childhood: How Memory Betrays Us Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Salter, A. (1998). Confessions of whistle-blower: lessons learnt. Ethics & Behavior. 8 (2): 115–124.

Smedslund, J. (2016). Why psychology cannot be an empirical science. Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science 50, 2, 185-95.

Torbay, J. (2023). The work of Donald Ewen Cameron: from psychic driving to MK Ultra. History of Psychiatry 34, 3, 320-330.

Uher, J. (2021). Psychology’s status as a science. Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, 55, 212-224

Wakefield, H. and Underwager, R. (1992). Recovered memories of sexual abuse: lawsuits against parents. Behavioral Sciences & the Law 7,2 541-50.

Walton, D.H. (1998). Ad Hominem Arguments. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.

EDI, Ethics, Identity Politics

On performative diversity and virtue signalling.

19th Jan 2026 AdminBPSWatch

Peter Harvey posts…

Below is a screen shot from an email I received recently from Clinical Psychology Forum (CPF) which outlines its revised guidance for submission of articles:

You will have your own opinions, thoughts and raised eyebrows about this but here are some of my observations.

My first impression is that this is incredibly patronising. Understanding sample selection and generalisability is a fundamental element of research design. Are the editors seriously suggesting that doctoral level graduates and trainees do not have this knowledge? Likewise the comment on ‘positionality’ in qualitative work. When I was examining some 25 or more years ago and these methodologies were becoming more common, it was a sine qua non that the investigator engaged in multiple and frequent reflections on the material and their interaction with it. Why do people need reminding of this? Perhaps I am missing something here. Is it that CPF is actually getting submissions that have to be rejected for such basic errors? If so, it suggests a more serious problem – that research design and methodology are not being properly taught and supervised either at an undergraduate level or during clinical training. I am far too distant from it all to know the answer to that so it would be interesting to get a view from those currently involved.

There are two words, however, that (in the modern parlance) are triggers for me – ‘diversity’ and ‘colonial’. Starting with diversity I am absolutely not arguing with a principle that treats all humans as equal and that discrimination on the grounds of, for example, race or sex is fundamentally and morally wrong. Nor am I disputing that people are excluded and discriminated against historically and currently both in society at large and in the psychological research literature. Nor do I deny that much of the history of European colonialism is shameful. These are moral positions supported (in my case) by a strong humanist philosophy. But if I am engaged in a research exercise then what needs to guide my thinking is “What method or procedure do I need to employ that will give me at least an approximate answer to the research question that I am asking?”. This is not an ethically neutral question, of course, as a flawed design will produce flawed results which, if inappropriately applied, may cause harm. As participant characteristics and sample selection are an integral part of that process then it should go without saying that this is guided by the same ethical and moral principles as the rest of the project. In fact, the BPS’s Code of Human Research Ethics (2021) is explicit:

Section 2.1, Respect for the autonomy, privacy and dignity of individuals, groups and communities

Psychologists have and show respect for the autonomy and dignity of persons. In the research context this means that there is a clear duty to participants. For example, psychologists respect the knowledge, insight, experience and expertise of participants and potential participants. They respect individual, cultural and role differences, including those involving age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity race (including colour, nationality, ethnic or national origin), religion and belief, sex, sexual orientation, education, language and socio-economic status.

That seems pretty clear to me, so what does emphasising “diversity” add? All the editors of CPF need to do is to require that all submissions follow the BPS Code – job done.

Once the research is completed it is always incumbent on an investigator to highlight the limits to their data and for the reader to be equally alert to the dangers of over-generalisation. This is no more than good practice.

There is a further question which relates to the diversity of the population from which you are sampling. When I was part of a selection team for a clinical training course we, along with others in the profession as a whole, were concerned about the ethnic diversity of trainees. The problem for us was that the ethnic diversity of psychology graduates was (at that time at least) poor. However much one wants to strive for diversity (however defined) there are factors that are beyond our control.

Apart from that, we need to ask the question – how diverse is diverse? Do we select from the ever-expanding categories on a random basis or just pick the one that happens to be most fashionable at the current time? Do we pick one of each? Will we need a sort of diversity quotient threshold that all published work has to reach? Or do we do what seems to happen with monotonous regularity – have some token representation that simply ticks the box so we can get on with our lives comfortable that we have assuaged at least some of our guilt? Surely the diversity to be aimed for is the one that is most representative of the group to which we want to generalise rather than engaging in a performative exercise?

But it is the phrase “…mindful of colonial influence…” that really got me scratching my head. What does that mean in operational and behavioural terms? What would I, a researcher, have to do in actual practice, to demonstrate that I am mindful of colonial influence? Is this a test of my knowledge of British and European history? And what exactly does the phrase “…mindful of…” mean? And, whose colonial influence do we include? The exhortation assumes that all clinical psychologists share the same colonial history. Whilst the profession may not be as diverse as the general population of the UK I know that not everyone shares the same background as me. So would a psychologist from a different ethnic or cultural background to me (perhaps someone from one of the historic colonies) have a waiver? Or would a clinical psychologist qualified in Holland need to be mindful of the actions of the Dutch East India Company? Should a Christian psychologist be mindful of the Crusades? Perhaps all submissions need to be accompanied by statement from an independent asssessor to the effect that they have witnessed and can attest to the fact that the experimenter did in fact, reflect mindfully on colonial influence for the prescribed 30 minute period ( I am happy that CPF use this freely and without authorial credit).

But perhaps I am being too literal here and a more nuanced and sophisticated reading of colonial influence is required. In his endlessly entertaining and intellectually sparkling book After Theory, Terry Eagleton argues that post-colonial studies have “… been one of the most precious achievements of cultural theory…” despite his observation that

… some students of culture are blind to the Western narcissism involved in working on the history of pubic hair while half the world’s population lacks adequate sanitation and survives on less than two dollars a day. [page 6]

He goes on to be much more critical and places this particular approach within a wider critique of post-modernism generally (in my view the book should be required reading on training courses). But his phrase Western narcissism is perhaps key here and is what the editors are trying to address. I interpret that as questioning the assumptions that we make as post-Renaissance liberal Europeans about our shared culture and heritage which usually lead to a sense of intellectual, moral and ethical superiority. This stance, of course, devalues other cultural norms and values.

Cultural relativism is a key element of of post-modernism, a definition of which is provided by Eagleton…

By ‘postmodern’ I mean, roughly speaking , the contemporary movement of thought which rejects totalities, universal values, grand historical narratives, solid foundations to human existence and the possibility of objective knowledge. Postmodernism is sceptical of truth, unity and progress, opposes what it sees as elitism in culture, tends towards cultural relativism, and celebrates pluralism, discontinuity and heterogeneity. [footnote, page 13]

This is not the place to engage in a critique of post-modernism (particularly as Eagleton does it so much better and with far greater wit and panache than I) but I do have some problems. In particular, this approach is often applied uncritically (an irony for so-called critical theory) and presents us with contradictory positions and yet further confusions. The Editors’ injunction demonstrates just such a problem.

Are they asking us to be aware of our colonial history or is it a more general reminder to be aware of our particular cultural values, of which colonialism may be a part? This certainly makes more sense to me. Taking a critical and questioning stance about making ‘cultural’ assumptions and decrying a position that assumes it is superior to others is not the problem. Where I struggle is in knowing how to deal with that in the real world out here. I suppose that part of it is (to my mind anyway) oversimplification – it’s almost as if it is “My culture bad, your culture good. I was the oppressor, you were the oppressed.”. There is no nuance, no ability to take a stance that says that there are both good and bad aspects of my culture as there are of yours. I suppose that some would argue that there is no equality or balance to be had as, historically, the balance has always been in favour of the colonialists and cultural supremacists. I am not going to take issue with that. But I still struggle when a particular culture espouses values and principles that I cannot support. So within our “English” culture (now there’s a concept freighted with conflict) there are beliefs I certainly don’t share and people whose behaviour I don’t support because they conflict with my ethical and moral system. In the same way there are values and beliefs in other cultures that I cannot support (where women are systematically oppressed, for example or where homosexuality is punished by death). I cannot ignore or defend the idea of so-called ‘honour killing’. An example of how this plays out in practice is shown in recent paper on female genital mutilation in the Journal of Medical Ethics (see here for the full version)

…we highlight a troubling double standard that legitimises comparable genital surgeries in Western contexts while condemning similar procedures in others…

There can be little doubt that we are all struggling with how to manage our personal and cultural backgrounds in a humane and honest way. As psychologists we should, more than most, be aware of these and have the tools to deal with them. But is this self-awareness and self-knowledge enough? In my own case I am more than conscious of the privilege that my sex, ethnicity, education and class give me as I tick all the wrong boxes when it comes to diversity. I cannot change these things nor can atone for them – they are an integral part of me. I can, however, try to apply this self-awareness to ensure that I do not abuse those characteristics to take unfair advantage of anyone. But in our post-modern Zeitgeist that is not enough it seems. We have been told that we need gatekeepers, monitors of language, taste and public presentation, people to guide our thoughts, feelings and behaviours. This is well articulated by Rosanne McLaughlin when discussing how critics and curators are reframing great artists to fit with modern ethical narratives in the visual arts.

Now I am not going all Andrew Tate or Jordan Peterson here. I am well aware that people like me are disproportionately represented in most organisations and professions (although, it should be noted not in clinical psychology in which 80% of the workforce is female – see here). I am also aware that we wield a disproportionate amount of power and influence and that, both historically and currently, people have suffered at the hands of those who abuse their power and position.

So what can I do? If I were in practice and wanted to submit paper to CPF how will they assess (and, just as importantly, how do I assess) whether I have been culturally mindful or not? And this is what is wrong with the editors’ injunction. Unless these statements are operationalised and clarified in behavioural terms they are little other than vacuous feel-good phrases. They are no more than a pious posturing in order to placate our own feelings. It is also dangerous. Such superficial poses feed the reactionary forces that wish to pursue a frankly racist agenda. And this is what really, really gets me angry. That there are serious failings in both society at large and psychology, both historic and current, which need addressing when it comes to matters of equality, fairness and justice is beyond dispute. It is right that we should know about and reflect on the lengths to which our predecessors went (and the depths to which they sank) to exploit people and cultures to feed their (and now, our) appetites and desires (see, for example, the history of nutmeg (Ghosh, 2021)). It is also right that we are aware of the exploitation that goes on to this very day, although rare earths for our electronics have replaced aromatic spices (see, for example, Sebastião Salgado’s photographs and Niarchos (2025)). We need to take a critical stance when we assess past psychological research and ensure that we are not over-interpreting data from limited samples (such as US psychology undergraduates earning course credits for participating). We need to remind ourselves that the world within both our and our clients’ heads is not just a function of internal psychic forces but is influenced by the outside world of society and culture (perhaps all psychology degrees should have mandatory sociology and anthropology modules).

Knowing this stuff is uncomfortable – as it should be. Feeling upset and some sort of empathy for those who have suffered is an understandable humanitarian response to exploitation, pain and distress. We have to be grown-up enough to live with and deal with that discomfort. A mere recitation of fashionable diversity mantras changes nothing. We cannot alter what has happened. Our timeframe in the now and the future. Let us learn from the past and do our level best to ensure that our actions and behaviours do not repeat the exploitative oppression of our forebears.

References

Ahmadu, F.S.N., Bader, D., Boddy, J., et al (2025).Harms of the current global anti-FGM campaign. Journal of Medical Ethics . Published Online First: 14 September 2025. doi: 10.1136/jme-2025-110961

British Psychological Society. (2021). BPS Code of Human Research Ethics. British Psychological Society.

Eagleton, T. (2003). After Theory. Allen Lane.

Ghosh, A. (2021). The Nutmeg’s Curse; Parables for a Planet in Crisis. University of Chicago Press.

Niarchos, N. (2026). The Elements of Power. William Collins.

Salgado, S. (2024). Workers. An Archaeology of the Industrial Age. Taschen.

Salgado, S. (2026). Gold. Taschen.