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Debates about the psychology of memory are normally the stuff of arid
academic texts. But throw in accusations of child abuse, costly court cases
pitting children against parents and controversial psychotherapy techniques
aimed at ‘recovering’ supposedly long-repressed memories, and you have a
feast fit for the pages of colour supplements.

All this, however, has left the public scratching its head about whether
childhood memories recovered in adulthood are trustworthy. Meanwhile, psychologists
are locked in a loud and bitter debate over the scientific evidence. Therapists
contend that some memories are so traumatic that the mind acts to repress
them, and those memories can surface later if given the right trigger.
Sceptics – particularly research psychologists – point to the fallibility
of human memory. Each side can muster enough anecdotal case studies to suggest
that both true and false ‘recovered memories’ are at least possible.

Courts, however, need certainty, and a growing body of evidence now
shows that a significant proportion of recovered memories are likely to
be distorted or unreliable. Indeed, the American Medical Association adopted
a resolution at its annual convention last month stating that: ‘The use
of recovered memories is fraught with problems of potential misapplication.’
The latest findings in neurobiology about how the brain stores memory strengthen
the notion that the human mind has a remarkable ability to spin a web of
fantasy around a few scraps of remembered fact, or to seriously distort
an almost complete memory by inventing a few crucial details.

Contrary to popular belief, the brain does not store each memory as
a single package, like a videotape ready to be played back at the touch
of a button. Instead, each part of the memory is farmed out to a specialised
region of the brain – sounds in the auditory cortex, pictures in the visual
cortex, and so on. Part of the brain beneath the cortex, the limbic system,
then binds these dispersed fragments together as a single experience.

The component which records where a memory originated, the so-called
‘source memory’, is particularly prone to error. According to Morris Moscovitch,
a neuropsychologist at the University of Toronto, the source memory seems
to depend on the frontal lobes of the brain. At a meeting at Harvard University
in May, Moscovitch described how patients with damage to specific zones
of the frontal lobes tend to concoct stories to build up a context for fragments
of memory they retrieve.

But faulty source memory is not confined to people with neurological
problems. ‘One of the most vulnerable aspects of memory for an experience
is remembering the exact conditions in which an event occurred – remembering
where it occurred, remembering whether it actually occurred rather than
having (merely) heard about it,’ says Daniel Schacter, a psychologist at
Harvard University. ‘It’s very easy for people to retain some memory of
an event and forget the source.’ Defects in source memory can explain the
familiar sensation of recognising someone but being unable to place where
you know them from.

The confusion of fact and fiction is exacerbated by the fact that various
components of a memory are stored separately. Most psychologists accept
that one reliable way of lodging a new memory is through reiteration. But
by the same token, merely hearing or thinking repeatedly about a fictitious
event can lay down memory fragments which, as source memory fades, become
hard to distinguish from reality, says Schacter.

‘I’m stunned at how easy it is under laboratory conditions to induce
people to remember events that never happened to them,’ says Henry Roediger,
a researcher in psychology at Rice University in Houston, Texas. Even on
simple tests where subjects were read a list of 15 words and then asked
to write down as many as they could recall, Roediger was able to fool more
than half his subjects into ‘recalling’ a word not on the list. For example,
if a list included words such as ‘bed’, ‘rest’, ‘awake’, ‘tired’, ‘snore’,
and ‘pillow’, 60 per cent of subjects would mistakenly remember the word
‘sleep’ as part of the list. ‘Not only that,’ adds Roediger, ‘but most of
the time they also say they remember the moment it was presented. In fact
the rate of false recognition rivals the rate of true recognition (of items
actually on the list).’

Other studies, mostly performed on adolescents and children, show that
under repeated questioning people will readily construct false memories
of realistic events and believe that they actually happened. In one experiment,
for example, psychologist Stephen Ceci of Cornell University in Ithaca,
New York, and his colleagues simply asked young children at weekly intervals
whether each of five events had ever happened to them. Four of the events
were real, such as going to Disneyland, and the fifth was fictitious – getting
their finger caught in a mousetrap and having to go to the hospital.

Almost all the children correctly recognised the true events, but more
than a third also gradually became convinced over the course of the 11-week
experiment that one of their fingers had been caught in the mousetrap. By
the final week, some children ‘remembered’ elaborate details. ‘The hospital
gave me a little bandage, and it was right here (pointing to index finger).
. . The mousetrap is down in the basement, next to the firewood. . . I was
playing a game called Operation,’ said one child, who at the beginning had
correctly denied having had the experience. And many of the children seemed
convinced by their ‘memories’, insisting they were true even after their
parents and the researchers told them otherwise.

Experiments such as these involve memories of relatively trivial, non-threatening
events – for obvious reasons of experimental ethics. People who believe
in recovered memory are quick to point out that these experiments may not
cast much light on what happens to memories of traumatic events such as
childhood sexual abuse. However, other studies show that even shocking memories
may not be recalled accurately. Forty years after the fact, for example,
some Dutch survivors of concentration camps had forgotten that they had
been tortured, and others misidentified their torturers, according to a
study by William Wagenaar and Jop Groeneweg of Leiden University, published
in 1990 in Applied Cognitive Psychology.

AGGRESSIVE TECHNIQUES

These latest laboratory studies, together with the most recent interpretation
of how memory is stored, indicate that it is indeed possible for therapists
inadvertently to plant false memories of childhood sexual abuse in their
patients, says D. Stephen Lindsay, a cognitive psychologist at the University
of Victoria, Canada. Of particular concern, he says, are the minority of
therapists who use aggressive techniques to ferret out what they suspect
are repressed memories of sexual abuse.

‘Almost every factor we know that increases susceptibility to suggestion
is typical of memory-recovery therapy,’ says Lindsay. Such factors include
repeated questioning in successive therapy sessions, visualisation exercises
during which patients are encouraged to let the images flow without evaluating
their truth, and the use of hypnosis. Under such circumstances, says Peter
Ornstein, a developmental psychologist at the University of North Carolina,
‘what emerges is often a kind of joint product of the client and the therapist.
I think memories emerging under those conditions are very suspect.’ A quarter
of therapists who replied to a recent survey by Lindsay said they and his
team used these practices.

Such criticisms are justified, says Christine Courtois, a counselling
psychologist in Washington DC, but they should be directed at a very small
subset of therapists. Many of the so-called risky therapeutic techniques,
if properly used, can also help patients recall and deal with true memories
of childhood trauma, she says. However, therapists must be careful not to
leap to the conclusion that sexual abuse has occurred and drag their patients
along with them. ‘You have to constantly balance false negatives against
false positives,’ says Drew Westen, an associate professor of psychiatry
at Harvard Medical School. ‘The more sensitive your instrument is to picking
up something that’s there, the greater the risk it’s going to pick up something
that’s not there.’

Indeed, there is strong evidence that adults who were abused as children
may repress such memories for many years. Burying these memories fits plausibly
with what psychologists know about the nature of memory. People who are
experiencing a traumatic event can fall spontaneously into an almost hypnotic
state in which they remember fewer details, says psychiatrist David Spiegel
of Stanford University. This means that later on in a normal state of consciousness,
it may be harder to remember what happened.

FORGOTTEN TRAUMA

The most convincing study, according to most experts, is one by Linda
Williams, a sociologist at the University of New Hampshire in Durham, to
be published later this year in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology.
Looking back at hospital records from the early 1970s, Williams identified
and reinterviewed more than a hundred adult women who had been treated for
sexual abuse as children 17 years earlier. Over a third of the women reported
no memory of the abuse Williams found on their hospital records, though
more than two thirds of this group said that they had experienced abuse
by some other person. ‘This to me indicates that their failure to tell us
(about the incident on record) wasn’t due to embarrassment, but to forgetting,’
says Williams.

More significantly, of the women in Williams’s study who did recall
the recorded abuse, 16 per cent said they had forgotten those memories for
at least part of the intervening period. Similar results come from other
studies of adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse – including one by
Elizabeth Loftus, a psychologist from the University of Washington, Seattle,
who is one of the most outspoken critics of the concept of recovered memories.
Loftus and other critics contend, however, that simply forgetting – or preferring
not to think about – an incident of abuse is very different, and much more
plausible, than completely blotting out all memory of years of ongoing abuse.

Courtois, who specialises in treating abuse survivors, suggests one
reason why memories of abuse may be forgotten. She says that children who
suffered sexual abuse – particularly incest victims – often say later that
they felt they had no one they could talk to about the experience. As Schacter
points out, experiments clearly show that discussing an experience helps
to fix it in your mind. It may be only a short hop from the unspeakable
to the unthinkable. ‘Those things that don’t get talked about and woven
into one’s life story get dropped by the wayside,’ he says. ‘One can imagine
the memory weakening over time, and only being accessible to a few specific
cues.’ Given a suitable trigger – a familiar location, a gesture, a tone
of voice – the memory can resurface, just as one can suddenly recall childhood
events in a conversation with a long-lost friend.

The argument over whether to believe recovered memories usually separates
the experimental psychologists from the clinical psychologists. The former
say, in effect, ‘look at my data – many of these memories are false.’ The
latter respond with, ‘look at my patients – many of these memories are true’.
On occasion, the debate can get acrimonious. ‘If you’re a (laboratory) researcher,
and you’ve never seen repressed memories, how would you know what you’re
refuting?’ asks Westen. ‘For all you know, you could be contributing to
the triumph of people who have abused children. Personally, I wouldn’t want
to be responsible for that if I were a laboratory researcher.’

Those who criticise the concept of recovered memory insist that their
scepticism is not part of a backlash against the victims of childhood sexual
abuse. Their disagreement, they stress, is with the methods used by some
clinical psychologists. ‘The problem of childhood sexual abuse is a more
important problem than risky psychotherapies,’ says Lindsay. ‘Real sexual
abuse has been going on for thousands of years, and it’s affected millions
of victims, whereas this crazy psychotherapy is only a few years old, has
affected far fewer people, and should he easier to change.’

SAFER COURSE

Indeed change appears to be coming. Both the American Psychological
Society and the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children have
appointed committees to study recovered memories. Each hopes to chart a
path for therapists between the twin hazards of overlooking real abuse by
not probing hard enough and planting false memories by being too aggressive.
‘Therapists need to be careful with the approach they use,’ says Lucy Berliner,
a Seattle therapist who serves on the APS task force. ‘They should not browbeat.
They should not make assumptions. On the other hand, I think asking people
(about childhood abuse) should be standard practice – if you don’t ask,
they won’t tell you. Just as getting good medical care involves taking a
history, I think victimisation history ought to be included (in mental health
³¦²¹°ù±ð).’

In the courts, too, the accuracy of recovered memories must remain up
in the air. What proportion are true? The experts’ hunches range from nearly
all to hardly any. But false memories are common enough that judges and
juries should be doubtful of trusting this sort of evidence without corroboration.
‘There are no Pinocchio tests,’ says Ceci.

Bob Holmes is a freelance writer based in Santa Cruz, California.