COLUMN ONE : Unlocking the Secrets of Memory : Recent tales of child abuse have a twist-- victims, now adults, say their memories of the horrors were repressed for decades. Critics speak of fantasy and distortion.

On “Geraldo” one afternoon last month, three women offered up horrific accounts of sexual and psychological torture inflicted upon them as young children--abuses they only recently began to recall.

The women spoke of monstrous acts against them almost as soon as they could walk and of later being forced to torture others. One woman claimed to have murdered 40 children in service of a satanic cult to which her family belonged. They claimed to have had no memory of these abuses until therapists helped to unearth them.

Theirs is no longer such an unusual tale. Remarkable accounts of repressed memory and childhood abuse are piling up. Court cases now turn on such recollections and support groups are cropping up for victims.

Just over a week ago, comedian Roseanne Barr Arnold received massive attention with her story. Both parents abused her, she told a group of incest survivors in Denver, but the memories stayed buried for three decades. Arnold’s parents have issued a denial and are considering suing the publication that printed a story about her comments.

Last May, former Miss America Marilyn Van Derbur Atler went public with long-repressed memories of sexual abuse by her father.

Carolivia Herron, a professor at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, announced upon publication of her latest novel, “Thereafter Johnny,” that its theme of incest and sexual torment was largely autobiographical. Writing the book triggered long-repressed memories of almost constant abuse between the ages of 3 and 5, Herron said, including a ghastly period as a child prostitute in a hometown brothel. Through therapy, Herron says, she has pieced together memories of 83 rapes.

Vivid as they are, are these memories accurate? Can people really suppress events so horrible? Can they recall them in remarkable detail so many years later?

Increasingly, scientists are urging caution: Seemingly long-buried memories sometimes can be pure fantasy or distortions of anything bad that happened to a child. They can contain elements of truth, but may not give the full picture. The harshest critics say repressed memory has become a fad diagnosis, used wrongly and sometimes harmfully to explain all manner of psychological suffering.

“This is a very soft area of science,” said Dr. Mark J. Mills, a specialist in psychiatry and law who is often called on to evaluate the reliability of witnesses. When frightful things happen, the problem for most people, according to Mills, “is that they remember too well, not that they can’t.”

That memories can be repressed is generally accepted. Scientists believe the phenomenon is one defense against trauma, though just how the mind buries memories and why some people are more prone to lapses remain big unknowns.

Researchers have collected accounts of fleeting memory loss in soldiers after battle, in accident and torture victims and in witnesses to disaster, as well as in victims of childhood abuse.

This sort of amnesia is part of a broad range of psychologically linked memory problems called “dissociative disorders.” Multiple personality disorder is an extreme form of dissociation, in which memories of traumatic experiences are thought to be locked away in one or several separate identities, unavailable for recall by the other personalities. In almost every multiple personality case studied, severe and often repeated trauma in childhood has been a factor.

But experts are troubled by a surge in newly remembered incidents that generate ample publicity but no corroboration.

New memories of satanic cult abuse have reached “epidemic” proportions while independent verification is in short supply, says Dr. George K. Ganaway, a specialist in psychiatric aberrations of memory.

Those claiming to have been victims are not necessarily lying. Rather, Ganaway says, they have been persuaded--by friend, therapist or something they have read or have seen on television--to adopt a plausible explanation for their emotional pain. For highly suggestible people--an estimated 5% to 10% of the population--it is a short step to vivid memories of things that never happened.

Yet flashbacks of long-forgotten events are being used to put people on trial. In the process, the very nature of memory is being vetted in the courtroom.

Last January, in what many consider the first criminal case to rest heavily on repressed memory, George T. Franklin was sentenced to life in prison for raping and murdering 8-year-old Susan Nason in Foster City in 1969.

The girl’s body was found shortly after she was killed, but the case went unsolved for 19 years until Franklin’s daughter came forward. Eileen Franklin-Lipsker testified persuasively to seeing her father commit the crimes, even though she did not recall it for nearly two decades.

A Washington state rape case also put memory on trial, but with a twist. Paul Ingram, a former Thurston County sheriff’s deputy, was charged with repeatedly raping two female relatives over a period of 15 years. Satanic rituals allegedly were involved.

Ingram pleaded guilty in 1989, but now says he was brainwashed by a police psychologist into believing he had repressed memories of the events. He claims his “recollections” of abusing the girls came only after the psychologist put him in a hypnotic trance. A court hearing is pending in Ingram’s fight to withdraw his guilty pleas.

An Orange County Superior Court jury struggled earlier this year with a lawsuit brought by two sisters who accused their 76-year-old mother of physically and sexually abusing them during satanic rituals. As in the Franklin-Lipsker case, the allegations were based on long-repressed memories.

The mother denied the charges, claiming the daughters simply were after her money. Jurors eventually returned a verdict for the daughters, but only to a point: They found the mother to have been negligent but not guilty of intentional emotional abuse. They were unwilling to rule on whether the mother had involved the daughters in satanic rituals.

Students of memory say that what we recall emerges from a filter of experience and learning, sometimes ending up substantially different from the facts. The mind is not a video camera.

Dr. Daniel Friedman, a professor of psychiatry at UCLA, equates the process of memory with the popular childhood game known as “telephone.” One child whispers a message to another, who passes it on to the next child and so on down the line. The last child almost invariably ends up with a garbled version.

“We can never recall purely,” says Friedman. Memory is a creative process in which events are overlain with interpretations taught by successive experiences. A memory at age 30 may be quite different from memory at 50 of the same event.

Jean Piaget, the renowned Swiss scientist whose work on memory in children is a cornerstone of modern child development theory, used an experience from his own childhood to illustrate the difficulty of separating fact from fantasy.

He recounted a memory of a man trying to kidnap him from a carriage when he was 2 years old.

“I was held in by the strap fastened round me while my nurse bravely tried to stand between me and the thief,” Piaget wrote in his seminal work, “Play, Dreams and Imitation in Childhood.”

“She received various scratches, and I can still see vaguely those on her face. Then a crowd gathered, a policeman with a short cloak and a white baton came up, and the man took to his heels. I can still see the whole scene, and can even place it near the tube station” on the Champs Elysees in Paris.

But years later, Piaget’s parents received a letter from the old nurse, who enclosed the watch given to her as a reward for foiling the kidnaping. The nurse wrote that it was all a lie. She had made up the story of the kidnaper to impress her employers, and scratched herself to support the tale.

“I therefore must have heard, as a child, the account of this story, which my parents believed, and projected it into the past in the form of a visual memory,” Piaget concluded.

Most people have experienced tricks of memory, along with bursts of memories long buried. When severe trauma is involved, and the people recalling the events are psychologically troubled, truth is even harder to determine.

In such cases, experts say a lot of damage can be done--and has been--by inept therapists.

Ganaway, a clinical assistant professor at Emory University, believes poorly trained therapists are partly responsible for the satanic sexual abuse scare, and may also have led patients to believe they were abused, sexually or otherwise, when they were not. False memories can be planted through tone of voice or the phrasing of a question, Ganaway and others say.

“I have seen families wrecked because therapists say to a patient, ‘You sound like the kind of patient who has been abused. Tell me what your father did to you,’ ” said Dr. David Spiegel, professor of psychiatry at Stanford University and the author of numerous articles on trauma and dissociative disorders. Patients suffering from memory lapse or multiple personality disorder have been shown to be extremely vulnerable to this type of suggestion.

They are “highly hypnotizable,” Spiegel said. “They can intensely fantasize about things that may or may not have happened.”

In a research paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Assn. in August, Ganaway described the case of Ann, a young mother referred to his dissociative disorders unit at the Ridgeview Institute, a psychiatric hospital in Smyrna, Ga.

Already diagnosed and successfully treated for multiple personality disorder stemming from abuse by her psychotic grandmother, a pregnant Ann sought help from another therapist to get her through the stress of childbirth. Putting Ann under hypnosis, the therapist began to question whether anyone besides the grandmother was involved.

The questions, according to Ganaway, included: Was there a group? Were they wearing robes? Were there babies present? Did you do anything to the babies?

Although Ann initially answered no, over the course of several weeks, she experienced a full range of dreams and memories of satanic ritual abuse. Brought to the Ridgeview Institute by her husband, Ann lost all of these “extra” memories after a week of psychotherapy that scrupulously avoided encouraging one sort of recollection over another, Ganaway reported.

Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis and an early investigator of memory repression, developed his own doubts about adult memories of childhood experiences. Freud initially believed the accounts of adult hysteria patients that they had been sexually abused as children. But he changed his mind in the late 1890s, writing that he could not accept such abuse as widespread. Instead, he said the patients’ stories were fantasies, stemming from their own taboo desires.

For the next 60 years, psychiatrists and psychoanalysts gave short shrift to accounts of childhood trauma, writing virtually all of it off as fantasy, according to Dr. Lenore Terr, a noted child and adolescent psychiatrist and author of a book on childhood psychic trauma, “Too Scared to Cry.”

Not so today. Studies have shown sexual abuse of children and adolescents to be far more prevalent than acknowledged in Freud’s day. The most commonly used estimates by behavioral scientists put the number of girls who have had sex forced upon them--by a relative or other adult--as high as 1 in 3. For boys, the estimate is 1 in 10. A Los Angeles Times poll of 2,627 adults in 1985 found that 27% of women and 16% of men said they had suffered sexual abuse in childhood. The vast majority of victims never forget what happened to them, experts say, even if they may choose not to talk about it.

Terr generally believes accounts of such trauma--even those that have been long repressed, provided there is psychological evidence such as depression, phobias or other symptoms to back them up.

“There are a few liars out there with bad motives,” she said, but hundreds more who truly have suffered.

Terr conducted one of the first systematic studies of traumatized children, tracking over several years child victims in the Chowchilla kidnaping case in central California. None of the Chowchilla children “forgot” that terrifying day in 1976 when they were kidnaped from their school bus and imprisoned in a buried truck for 19 hours. Nevertheless, their behavior and emotions showed the indelible effects years later, Terr demonstrated.

“If you go through a terrible event as a child, it will change you,” Terr said, with evidence cemented in behavior even if memory of the experience is repressed.

Terr, who testified for the prosecution in the Franklin case, said Eileen Franklin-Lipsker showed such behavioral evidence of seeing her father rape and murder her best friend.

“She withdrew from all friends,” Terr said of young Franklin-Lipsker. “She did not have girlfriends after that--it was too dangerous. When she became a mother, she became the neighborhood vigilante. She would not allow her children in the street because she was extremely overprotective and terrified that something could happen to them.”

Franklin-Lipsker’s repressed memory surfaced in classic fashion, prodded by a visual cue. The memory, she testified, flashed into her mind as she watched her daughter playing. The child’s head was turned exactly as Susan Nason’s a moment before Franklin smashed it with a rock. Franklin-Lipsker was able to come up with sufficient detail matching physical evidence found on and around Nason’s body to back up her recollections. This is what Assistant Dist. Atty. Elaine M. Tipton said she relied upon to prosecute the case.

Tipton also was persuaded by the “rich detail” of Franklin-Lipsker’s account that was full of “sights, smells, sounds.”

Memory scientists, however, say a vivid imagination can explain such details. Physical evidence also does not prove truth, merely that the memory has elements of reality just as a dream might include bits of a conversation from work, a car passed on the freeway or recognizable characters from one’s life.

“The fact that the structure looks compelling--that there are all of these details--doesn’t necessarily mean it is factual,” said Spiegel, who also testified in the Franklin case but for the defense.

Spiegel did not believe Franklin-Lipsker showed sufficient psychological evidence of what she said she witnessed. Nor, he argues, did her factual details go beyond what anyone could have picked up from newspaper accounts of the murder.

Like most psychoanalytic theories, those about memory and trauma were developed to alleviate symptoms in people suffering from depression, phobias or other conditions. But theories can’t determine whether memories are accurate.

They cannot prove whether the woman on the Geraldo show did indeed murder 40 children. And they can’t prove whether Roseanne Barr Arnold was truly abused as a child. If her parents sue her, that will be for a court to decide.