Telling stories - Psychologists, children and the production of 'false memories'

This paper analyses the rhetorical structure of psychological experiments investigating children's suggestibility, the wider context of debates that these inform, and the cultural-political status of psychological expertise that such claims bolster. It draws on the debates around childhood accounting to reverse the specular apparatus of the psychological gaze and so to inspect its practitioners according to those discourses and rhetorical devices by which it accounts for children. The stories psychologists tell about children are analysed as not only indicative of the contemporary legitimizing practices of the discipline, but also as suggesting a motivated forgetting or recasting of psychology's past approaches to the topics of children's beliefs, knowledge and memories. Thus, by turning the focus from the stories (we make) children tell, to our own storytelling practices as psychologists, this paper engages in a practice of critical relativism that opens the terms of developmental psychological inquiry up for critical scrutiny, and thereby both limits and secures the grounds for its claims.