Just to be clear. I'm not a psychologist or psychoanalyst. I trained as a psychoanalyst (and not in the US) but don't practice. Also to note - the APA don't represent psychologists or psychoanalysts, but rather psychiatrists. Anyone discussing the motivations of any public figure is engaging in armchair psychoanalysis, and although I agree with the premise behind prohibiting professionals from doing so, psychiatrists often do in fact provide professional opinions to the media about people they have not examined (for example diagnosing certain political figures).

In any case, I don't think anyone is qualified to credit or discredit a claim in a medical or psychologically diagnostic sense without a clinical interview (something that few psychiatrists are qualified to perform by the way). That's not what I'm doing here. What I'm pointing out is the unreliability of recovered memory. Specifically someone claiming that they repressed sexual abuse at age 4, for decades, and then remembered it accurately. That's simply not how memory usually works.

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