Uppsala University Burns a Book on Recovered Memories
By Max Scharnberg,
Associate professor
|
Psychology researcher Max Scharnberg has
his PhD in Education. He has taught the Psychology of Lies at Stockholm School of
Economics, and Social Work at Örebro University. He
has been an expert in more than 25 incest cases. He has, for a number of
years, examined psychoanalysis and Sigmund Freud's work. This
article is published here with the kind consent of the author. |
It must be a unique occurrence that a university burns one of its own
research reports, for no other reason than the fact that its content is
incompatible with the views of one particular professor. Nevertheless, in May
2009 Uppsala University made the decision to burn all copies of Max
Scharnberg’s book Textual Analysis of a Recovered Memory Trial Assisted by
Computer Search for Keywords, which had been published two months earlier. The
issue at stake was whether researchers should be permitted to arrive at results
that contradict Professor Eva Lundgren’s primary claims. So it may be natural
to begin with listing these claims. First, each male is as inclined to use
physical violence against females as any other male; not even chronic alcohol
addicts are different. Second, ritual child murders are frequent in Sweden.
Third, memories of child murders are valid, even if they emerge during
recovered memory therapy and even if they were completely unknown to the
patient before the therapy. Fourth, the trial that is in Sweden known as the
Södertälje case has an excellent evidential power concerning the reality of
the child murders.
The reason why professor Lundgren does not report those murders she
knows about to the police is that she thinks that the police is somehow allied
with the murderers.
Many feminists admire Lundgren. But many others consider her a heavy
burden to feminism.
The context of the book burning decision is as follows.
In 2005 Uppsala University and professor Eva Lundgren were under heavy
attack by a number of scholars. One of the scholars was Stig Strömholm, who was
the rector of this university from 1989 to 1997. The scholars claimed that the
quality of Lundgren’s earlier research was too meagre to justify that she was
appointed to be a professor. They also attacked her research after the
appointment as not being scientific at all.
It was pointed out that she had not made different interviews of
the same persons over many years. Instead she had “recycled” each
interview, and after each recycling she had obtained quite different things.
One religious man felt that he was “God’s tool” when he beat his wife. But not
until after the last recycling did Lundgren attribute to him that he had got an
erection during these punishment scenes, although she had certainly asked him
about the same thing from the very beginning.
Anyway, in 2005 Uppsala University appointed two professors to examine
Lundgren’s research. It was not their task to decide if her research was good
or bad, but only if it contained deliberate distortion or fabrication of facts.
They agreed throughout most of the investigation and jointly signed the same
text, except that they decided to write separate formulations of their final
conclusions. Here is a selection of what one of them wrote:
“A serious problem is that we have not got
access to the sources [= the interviews] we have asked for. … The empirical
studies are few, and Lundgren recycles again and again a few edited interviews
as empirical examples that normalisation is a general phenomenon in relations
involving violence. … A necessary precondition for being in a position to
decide whether a researcher has fabricated the data is that the sources are
available. As can be seen from our study Lundgren has not handed out her source
data. For that reason it is impossible to make a decision as regards this
question. … Summing up, our scrutiny has revealed a number of serious problems
in Lundgren’s research. There are empirical assertions that are not backed by
any empirical basis, ambiguities as regards selection and number of persons
interviewed, absence of alternative interpretations, assertions that are
contradicted by her own data, generalisations based on too small ground. To me,
this means that the trustworthiness of Lundgren’s research must be questioned.”
I think that the final conclusion of the other
scrutiniser is even harder, except for one detail. He states that he dislikes
that this kind of assessment of a researcher is made at all.
However, the case got a noticeable epilogue. Lundgren requested damages
because her research had been examined. A settlement was negotiated, according
to which she got damages of 100 000 SwCr, together with one extra teacher
at her institution for six months. – She must have had strong feministic
support in order to obtain damages of that size.
I knew that Lundgren is a pseudo-scientist. But I did not know the
details of the conflict. In particular I was ignorant of the epilogue.
Neither had it occurred to me that someone at the department which had
handled my applications to the Council of Science throughout 25 years, would
have the conscience to destroy important scientific research results and
important methodological innovations, just for the purpose of saving Lundgren’s
reputation.
One of Lundgren’s best proofs of ritual child murders is the legal
Södertälje case, so called after the town 31 km south of Stockholm in which the
main persons lived. A 15-year-old girl, here called “Elvira”, accused both her
parents of having sexually abused herself and her one-year-younger sister
“Ingrid” since they were 6. The parents had also hired out both daughters as
prostitutes at ordinary sex clubs, likewise since they were 6. In addition, the
parents were members of a Satanist sect concerned with ritual murders of
children. Elvira had followed her father to Poland where they had bought
children that would be murdered in Stockholm. Moreover, the murder sect held
under-age girls in cages and made them pregnant. They cut out the foetuses
while the girls were still alive, and ate them. Among the murderers Elvira
pointed out a judge at the court of appeal in Stockholm, and his daughter. The
daughter had been Elvira’s closest friend since preschool. But their friendship
ended abruptly when Elvira accused her of murder.
Elvira also pointed out the places in the wood where the bones of the
slaughtered children had been buried. Unfortunately, highly competent experts
from KTH Royal Institute of Technology could prove that no one had dug
at these places since the ice age (this is their own expression).
The police drove Elvira around in Stockholm in the hope that she would recognise
the murder places and the sex clubs. She pointed out Odengatan 104 as a murder
place. But this is a quite normal house with ordinary apartments. At
Danderydsgatan 20 she recognised the entrance of one of the sex clubs. But
behind the entrance there was a bicycle cellar.
None of the parents were tried for the murders. But both were convicted
of sexual abuse and pimping activity. The father got the maximum punishment for
these crimes, and the mother half as much.
The Södertälje trial is probably the largest recovered memory case ever
handled by a Swedish court. There are 40 police interrogations of Elvira, and
28 are video-recorded dialogue interrogations which have been written out
word-by-word by the police. It goes without saying that it is impossible for
human beings to perceive and evaluate such gigantic amounts of information. And
it is frightening when judges believe that they can do so by listening through
60 hours of videos one single time.
Being aware of my own limitation, I took help of a computer. I scanned
all information into one immense document of 245 000 words. In this
document I could speedily find all instances of any particular event. Who was
the first to tell this or that event? At what time did another person not yet know
about it? Etc.
Among my many interesting results four are so fundamental that I have
called them cardinal results. They will be presented first.
(1) Elvira’s foster mother knows literally everything Elvira had
experienced weeks or months before Elvira knows it herself. One pattern
will occur again and again. The foster mother calls the police and tells what
Elvira had (allegedly) told her on the preceding evening under much crying and
shaking. But when Elvira sees her psychotherapist two days later, and when she
is interrogated by the police three days later, she has no idea of having ever
experienced such things.
The foster
mother’s “precognition” proves that she is deliberately lying about what Elvira
had told her. But it also proves that she is the one who fabricated all the
abuse and murder stories, and who indoctrinated them into Elvira.
(2) When I try to count the events it seems that Elvira had experienced
around 250 acts of sexual intercourse. However, Elvira has only supplied concrete
descriptions of 12 assaults. This number would not have been important, if it
had not been tied up with another circumstance: Elvira claims that Ingrid
was an eyewitness of 11 of the 12 concretely described assaults. At 7 assaults
there were additional eyewitnesses. Thus, the mother’s lover had raped
Elvira in Ingrid’s presence, and had raped Ingrid in Elvira’s presence. And at
a sex club she had seen Ingrid being raped.
On one occasion Elvira was watching Ingrid painting her father’s anus
with nail polish. But she also recounts a subsequent conversation in which
Ingrid had said that Elvira’s recollection was erroneous: it was Elvira who
painted the father’s anus while Ingrid was merely an onlooker. Anyway, Elvira
states that this recollection emerged soon after she had painted the Ken doll
between his legs with nail polish during a psychotherapeutic session.
The Lucia day (13th December) is a great festival in Sweden.
We are not told what year the following event happened. But both girls awakened
their parents with coffee and ginger bread, singing “Santa Lucia”. Ingrid was
Lucia with a crown of burning candles on her head, while Elvira was here maid.
But instead of being grateful for this nicety, the parents caught hold
of one daughter each, so that all china and ginger bread fell to the floor. In
the double bed next to each other the father performed normal intercourse on
Ingrid, while the mother performed lesbian intercourse on Elvira.
Not only Ingrid but all “eyewitnesses” deny that they have seen,
participated in, or performed any indecent act. And the mother’s lover was
never prosecuted.
One or both
parents participated in a total of five trials; two in the district court and
three in the court of appeal. The last team of five judges of the court of
appeal deemed it proved beyond reasonable doubt that the Lucia assault had
taken place in the form recounted by Elvira. – But since the judges knew that
Ingrid denied this event, they must have applied a kind of surrealistic logic
for cutting away Ingrid from the Lucia assault but nevertheless convicting the
father of his contribution to the same rape.
(3) During the three months preceding the first police interrogation
various people arranged four group meetings. The father was not asked to attend
any of them. But Elvira unambiguously said at all four meetings that she had
no memory of any sexual assault. She repeated this during the first police
interrogation. But there she added that she was absolutely sure that no abuse
had occurred during the last 5½ years (viz. after the movement to a villa).
This is particularly significant because the father was exclusively convicted
of assaults during this period. Her psychotherapist also confirms that she told
neither any recollections nor any “images” until after the first police
interrogation.
Furthermore, in the
first four police interrogations, comprising about six hours in toto, there is
no trace of any of those crimes for which the father was convicted a few weeks
later.
(4) Both in a police interrogation and in the last trial by the court of
appeal the mother recounted that the father and Elvira would sometimes go into
her room and close the door. When they came out Elvira had a strange facial
expression as if the father had been angry. This recount is correctly
described on p. 22 in the judgement. Since the mother is deaf, she would not be
able to hear it if the father had given Elvira a thorough scolding.
However, when
the five judges justify the verdict and the sentence on pp. 42 and 44 in the
very same judgement, they have false recollections of what the mother told the
police, and what she said in front of them, and even of their own account in
the very same judgement. The words in bold types are omitted, and Elvira’s
“strange facial expression” is taken to prove that the couple had sexual
intercourse. The judges go on to state that since the father did not attempt to
conceal the assaults from the mother, the number of intercourses must have been
considerable.
But the true
fact is that Elvira has never accused her father of sexual assaults in her room
at such times when other family members were at home and awake. She cannot even
recall that they have ever been together there without any criminal activity
being performed. Neither can the father recall it. He said that if it had
happened, they might have watched TV or listened to music. The door might have
been closed to prevent the family’s dog from dropping hairs over the entire
house.
Twenty-seven judges have made verdicts in this case. None of them has
detected any of my four cardinal facts. Nor did any of them perceive any need
to ask Ingrid about those events in which she had allegedly participated.
What is presented above are only my four cardinal results. I obtained
enough results to fill a book of 205 pages, with the title Textual Analysis
of a Recovered Memory Trial Assisted by Computer Search for Keywords. In
early March 2009 this book was published in the series Uppsala Studies in
Education. It was also sent out on Internet for free down-loading.
However, a few weeks later it was withdrawn, and on 5:e May lecturer
Lennart Wikander at the department of education decided that the entire edition
should be burnt. He demanded me to return all copies I still had. – Due to
unplanned and purely accidental circumstances I had saved 40 % of the edition
from destruction.
Wikander took one further step that could be perceived as a joke. I was
ordered to get back all those copies I had sent to researchers in more than 15
countries in three continents.
Wikander had filled two A4 pages with justifications for the book
burning. All justifications are about purely formal errors, which I am supposed
to have made.
Now, I have previously published five volumes in the acta-series, and among
all of them I have committed the very same “errors” which Wikander has listed.
There is no more than one thing I have done in a different way this
time. And if it is considered an error, it is a trifling error. It could be
argued, in addition, that Wikander would not have invented so many false
justifications, if he had really thought that the single real error could
justify the destruction of very important research results.
In Sweden a large debate on the book burning arose. Apart from very few
personal friends of Eva Lundgren no one believed Wikander’s claim that the book
burning was exclusively motivated by some formal errors. All understood
directly that Eva Lundgren was at stake, and that my research had ripped open
the embarrassing conflict of 2005.
Lundgren’s description of the Södertälje case is found in a book
published in Norwegian in 1994. Its title means “Let the little children come
to me”. The girl is given the pseudonym “Mathilde”. Lundgren’s own account is
now and then interrupted by brief excerpts from interviews of Elvira and by
Elvira’s drawings of the murder places. All the girl’s statements are taken at
face value. Lundgren has not even checked whether Elvira had told the same
thing to her and to the police (which she definitely had not). Moreover,
Lundgren and Elvira’s foster mother are friends and share the same belief
systems.
In other words, Scharnberg’s book had landed in a wasps’ nest. The
proofs that Elvira’s narratives were neither experienced nor invented by
herself but indoctrinated by her foster mother, deprived Lundgren of her
strongest proof of ritual child murders in Sweden. The sequence of events also
revealed how far the university was willing to go. A book that was the outcome
of full-time labour during more than three years, and which presented important
scientific results and significant methodological innovations, had to be
destroyed in order to conceal the pseudo-scientific nature of Lundgren’s
so-called research.
The decision to burn Scharnberg’s book could also be conceived of as a
signal to other scholars: Do not publish results that may throw doubt on
recovered memory therapy or on other ideas of Eva Lundgren.
Stockholm, 5 October 2009.
Textual
Analysis of a Recovered Memory Trial Assisted by Computer Search for Keywords
Max Scharnberg
Back to Articles
Back to English Section