Memory is the retention and recollection of experience. A repressed memory is one said to be retained in the subconscious mind, where it can affect thought and action even though one has apparently forgotten the experience on which the memory is based. A false memory is a memory which is based upon hearsay or suggestion. False memories differ from erroneous memories. The latter are based upon actual experiences which are recalled incorrectly. False memories are memories of having experienced things one never really experienced.
How accurate and reliable is memory? We're often wrong in thinking we accurately remember things. Studies on memory have shown that we often construct our memories after the fact, that we are susceptible to suggestions from others that help us fill the gaps in our memories of certain events. That is why, for example, a police officer investigating a crime should not show a picture of a single individual to a victim and ask if the victim recognizes the assailant. If the victim is then presented with a line-up and picks out the individual whose picture the victim had been shown, there is no way of knowing whether the victim is remembering the assailant or the picture.
Another interesting fact about memory is that studies have shown that there is no significant correlation between the subjective feeling of certainty a person has about a memory and that memory being accurate. Also, contrary to what many people believe, hypnosis does not aid memory's accuracy. Because subjects are extremely suggestible while hypnotized, most states do not allow as evidence in a court of law testimony made while under hypnosis.1 It is possible to create false memories in people's minds by suggestion, even memories of previous lives which were never lived. Tavris summarizes current research on memory:
The mind does not record every detail of an event, but only a few features; we fill in the rest based on what "must have been." For an event to make it into long-term storage, a person has to perceive it, encode it and rehearse it--tell about it--or it decays. (This seems to be the major mechanism behind childhood amnesia, the fact that children do not develop long-term memory until roughly the age of 3.) Otherwise, research finds, even emotional experiences we are sure we will never forget--the Kennedy assassination, the Challenger explosion--will fade from memory, and errors will creep into the account that remains.2Tavris also recounts a story about Jean Piaget, the great child psychologist. Piaget claimed that his earliest memory was of nearly being kidnapped at the age of 2. He remembered details such as sitting in his baby carriage, watching the nurse defend herself against the kidnapper, scratches on the nurse's face, and a police officer with a short cloak and a white baton chasing the kidnapper away. The story was reinforced by the nurse and the family and others who had heard of the story. Piaget was convinced that he remembered the event. However, it never happened. Thirteen years after the alleged kidnapping attempt, Piaget's former nurse wrote to his parents to confess that she had made up the entire story. Piaget later wrote: "I therefore must have heard, as a child, the account of this story...and projected it into the past in the form of a visual memory, which was a memory of a memory, but false." Well said.
We do not know exactly how memory works, though there are many explanatory models for memory. Some of these models identify memory with brain functions. On this model, for example, memory diminishes with age because neurons die off as we get older. There are only three ways to overcome this fact of nature: 1. figure out a way to stop neurons from dying; 2. figure out a way to stimulate the growth of new neurons; or 3. figure out a way to get the remaining neurons to function more efficiently and pick up the slack. So far, it looks like options 2 and 3 are the most promising. Some positive results have been reported regarding the stimulation of the growth of new brain cells by fetal implants. Neurological research has also produced some success getting neurons to work better with ampakines, chemical compounds sometimes called "memory drugs." The first tests with humans showed excellent results, but the samples were too small to justify drawing any conclusion except that more studies are needed. For those who think that memory is a function of some non-physical reality, such results should cause some reflection, though I doubt that a non-physical model of the mind will lead to any significant research which will benefit humankind. For those who posit that memory is a brain function, there is not only a direction for research to follow, but hope of success for discovering something truly useful.
On the other hand, one of the most questionable models of memory is the one which assumes that every experience a person has is "recorded" in memory and that some of our memories are of traumatic events too terrible to want to remember. These terrible memories are locked away in the sub-conscious mind, i.e., repressed, only to be remembered in adulthood when some triggering event opens the door to the unconscious. Both before and after the repressed memory is recalled, it causes physical and mental disorders in a person.
This model of memory is questionable because it assumes that one is having problems functioning as a healthy adult human being because of repressed childhood traumas, and it assumes that if one suddenly remembers a trauma from childhood, it must be accurate. The reason this model is questionable is not because people don't have unpleasant and painful experiences they would rather forget. Nor is it wrong to claim that children often experience both wonderful and brutal things for which they have no conceptual or linguistic framework. As children they are often incapable of understanding what they have experienced. As adults, they may come to understand what happened to them as children. Children are often abused; they repress the experience and in later life they remember it. There is no myth about that.
However, there is no evidence to support the claim that we remember everything we experience. In fact, there is plenty of evidence to support the claim that it is impossible for us to even attend to all the perceptual elements of any given experience much less to recall them all. There is no evidence to support the claim that all memories of events happened as they are remembered to have happened or that they happened at all. And there is no evidence to support the claim that subjective certainty about the accuracy of memories or the vividness of memories significantly correlates with accuracy. Finally, the claim of a causal connection between abuse and health or behavior does not warrant concluding that ill health, mental or physical, is a "sign" of having been abused.
The greatest promulgator of this myth of memory was Sigmund Freud, who apparently knew it was a myth. The myth was extended in Dianetics by L. Ron Hubbard, who apparently didn't care whether it was a myth or not but who blamed all physical and mental disorders on pre-natal and early childhood experiences,experiences which could not possibly be "recorded" by the conscious mind since most of them occur before the brain or mind or language even exists in a person.
The myth is the basis for a number of pseudoscientific works on child abuse by self-proclaimed experts such as Ellen Bass, Laura Davis, Wendy Maltz, Beverly Holman, Beverly Engel, Mary Jane Williams and E. Sue Blume.3 Through communal reinforcement many empirically unsupported notions, including the claim that about half of all women have been sexually abused, get treated as a `fact' by many people. Psychologist Carol Tavris writes
In what can only be called an incestuous arrangement, the authors of these books all rely on one another's work as supporting evidence for their own; they all endorse and recommend one another's books to their readers. If one of them comes up with a concocted statistic--such as "more than half of all women are survivors of childhood sexual trauma"--the numbers are traded like baseball cards, reprinted in every book and eventually enshrined as fact. Thus the cycle of misinformation, faulty statistics and invalidated assertions maintains itself.4One significant difference between this group of experts and,say, a group of physicists is that the child abuse experts have achieved their status as authorities not by scientific training but by either (a) experience [they were victims of child abuse or they treat victims of child abuse in their capacity as social workers], or (b) they wrote a book on child abuse. The child abuse experts aren't trained in scientific research, which, notes Tavris, "is not a comment on their ability to write or to do therapy, but which does seem to be one reason for their scientific illiteracy."
Here are a few of the unproved, unscientifically researched notions that are being bandied around by these child abuse experts: (1)If you doubt that you were abused as a child or think that it might be your imagination, this is a sign of "post-incest syndrome" [Blume]. (2) If you can't remember any specific instances of being abused, but still have a feeling that something abusive happened to you, "it probably did" [Bass and Davis]. (3) When a person can't remember his or her childhood or have very fuzzy memories "incest must always be considered a possibility" [Maltz and Holman]. And, (4) "If you have any suspicion at all, if you have any memory, no matter how vague, it probably really happened. It is far more likely that you are blocking the memories, denying it happened." [Engel]
Whole industries have been built up out the hysteria that inevitably accompanies charges of the sexual abuse of children. Overzealous prosecutors hire overzealous therapists to document the abuse. Therapists who usually work with abused children to help them recover from the trauma of child abuse are hired to interrogate children to find out if they've been abused. It seems to matter little to prosecutors that the therapist may assume the child has been abused. But all too often the therapist or prosecutor suggests the abuse to the child and the child not only begins to "remember" the abuse, the child begins to fantasize and confabulate to please the interrogator. The child may not believe any of the events he or she testifies to actually happened, but he or she willingly testifies to the most horrible scenes of abuse involving parents, grandparents, teachers, neighbors, friends, and even total strangers who are pointed out to them for the first time. If a child comes to believe he or she actually experienced the events testified to but planted in the child's mind by the suggestions and prodding of therapists and prosecutors, then the child possess a false memory. No fair-minded person should find a parent or caretaker guilty on the basis of such tainted testimony.5
Not only have therapists working with children been accused of planting false memories of abuse, so have therapists working with adults. Therapists who use hypnotherapy to encourage their patients to "remember" childhood (or even past life) events are especially vulnerable to the charge of suggesting false memories to their clients.
Since March 1992, the False Memory Syndrome (FMS) Foundation in Philadelphia has collected more than 2,700 cases of parents who report false accusations that were the result of "memories" recovered in therapy.6 The FMS Foundation claims that these cases include about 400 families who have been sued or threatened with suits for child abuse.7 Victims of delusional adult children who falsely accuse their parents or others of having sexually abused them many years earlier are fighting back. Laura Pasley, who works for the Dallas police department, went to a therapist in 1985 for treatment of bulimia. She's now suing the therapist who persuaded her that she had been abused as a child. The therapist would tell her that she had been abused and then, when she refused to believe it, would tell her that she didn't really want to get well. She says she wanted to be well "more than anything" and so went along with the therapist. Eventually, though, she says she "totally junked everything from my therapy."8 Ms. Pasley's story is being repeated in courtrooms around the country.
The dangers of this myth of memory are apparent: not only are false memories treated as real memories, but real memories of real abuse may be treated as false memories and may provide real abusers with a believable defense. In the end, no one benefits from encouraging a belief in memory which is false. Whatever theory of memory one advocates, if it does not entail examining corroborating evidence and attempting to independently verify claims of recollected abuse, it is a theory in danger of causing more harm than good.
A variant of the memory of non-experiences is the notion that a person can remember experiences from past lives. This myth has been perpetuated primarily by accounts of people who, in dreams or under hypnosis, recall experiences of people who lived in earlier times. A typical case of past life regression is that of Bridie Murphy, of which we've said enough elsewhere.
So, should accounts of repressed memories be dismissed out-of-hand? Of course not! But there should be an attempt to corroborate such memories with independent evidence and testimony before drawing conclusions about actual experiences, especially of abuses or crimes. Such accounts should be taken very seriously and should be critically examined, giving them all the attention and investigative analysis we would give to any allegation of crime. But we should not rush to judgment, either about the accuracy of the memories or about the causal connection between past experiences and present problems. Memories repressed for years which are suddenly recollected should not be rejected automatically as false. Nor should such memories be accepted automatically as true. In terms of verification of their accuracy, these memories should not be treated any differently than any other type of memory.
See other related entries: Bridie Murphy, dianetics, hypnosis, mind, reincarnation, and trauma-search therapy.
suggested reading
Baker, Robert A. Hidden Memories: Voices and Visions From Within (Buffalo, N.Y. : Prometheus Books, 1992.)
Loftus, Elizabeth F. Memory, Surprising New Insights Into How We Remember and Why We Forget (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley Pub. Co., 1980).
Loftus, Elizabeth F. Eyewitness Testimony (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979).
Loftus, Elizabeth F. and James M.Doyle. Eyewitness Testimony: Civil and Criminal (New York, N.Y.: Kluwer Law Book Publishers, 1987).
Loftus, Elizabeth and Katherine Ketcham. Witness for the Defense : The Accused, the Eyewitness, and the Expert Who Puts Memory on Trial (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991).
Loftus, Elizabeth. The Myth of Repressed Memory (New York: St. Martin's, 1994).
Ofshe, Richard and Ethan Watters. Making Monsters: False Memories, Psychotherapy, and Sexual Hysteria (New York: Scribner's, 1994).
Wakefield, Hollida and Ralph Underwager. Return of the Furies - An Investigation into Recovered Memory Therapy (Peru, Illinois: Open Court Publishing Co., 1994).