Response to The New Yorker

by PEM

A number of mechanisms have been proposed by which false memories might be created. I want to examine each of those and consider whether there is reason to believe that they are common.

It is certainly possible that an unprofessional therapist could suggest something to a vulnerable person, so strongly, that they would begin to remember it. People are suggestible (consider the tendency of medical students to diagnose themselves with the diseases they read about) and people in pain may be so desperate for an explanation that they are ready to grasp at straws. However, most therapists know better, and so that is going to affect a very small percentage of survivors. Even before the current fuss, I never had a therapist suggest anything to me, and in the current situation, the vast majority of therapists are unwilling to say anything about memories.

It is also possible that the client could be making the memory up to get attention and care. It seems like an odd thing to do. I can't imagine that very many people would choose all this pain--but it clearly happens occasionally. It would probably be a form of Munchausen Syndrome, which is fairly rare (1% of illnesses is one figure I found). I assume that over time, therapists are likely to see a pattern if they work closely with a person who is making up memories.

More significant is the issue of whether reading books and articles about incest survivors plants the seeds of false memories. Books and articles can trigger related memories. That is why some authors write that if it particularly bothers you to read an account of abuse, then something similar may have happened to you. I was quite cautious of possible influence at first, limiting what I read and watching my memories carefully for similarities to what I had read. I found it very rare that reading directly triggered a memory, and that if it did the memory was distinctly different from what I had read.

A great deal of what I read triggered no memories at all. Books like Sybil and When Rabbit Howls were bestsellers, and very large numbers of people read them without deciding that something similar had happened to them. Sybil was the best known, but it certainly did not create a rash of people who remembered bizarre abuse by their mothers. Instead, people started to tell of rape by their fathers and stepfathers.

Common experience says that most people are not influenced so strongly by what they read; influence cannot explain the majority of recovered memories unless the false memory people want to argue that the people who claim to be survivors of abuse are somehow especially vulnerable (and then I want to know what happened to us to make us so vulnerable and why what we remember tends to be so distinctly different from what we read).

What about the possibility of people mistaking the workings of their unconscious for memories? Some survivors get memories in dreams. I assume that many dreams of abuse are not memories, but symbolic representations of some other issue. At one point, I had a very strong image that the only way to clean myself was to pour out my blood on an altar. I believe that was a symbol, not a ritual abuse memory.

My experience is that symbols are quite different from memories. I started talking in therapy one day about being trapped in a deep hole in the ground, but that had absolutely none of the time and place associations that memories have. So I concluded that it was either a symbol or my memory of a vivid threat. Again, a therapist who assumed that everything was a memory could do harm here, but my experience (and I have heard this reported by other survivors) is that memories and symbols feel different. In any case, if the unconscious is creating vivid images of abuse, those have some meaning, and so it is likely that in many cases the person did experience some kind of abuse whether the particular image is a memory or not.

What about the other side? What reasons do we have to believe the memories of survivors? The usual answer is first that the truth of the memory is the most likely explanation because the person had a long history of symptoms that the memory now explains. Second, the memory is usually not just told in therapy (or in flashbacks at other times), but relived. The re-experiencing is vivid in the extreme, often including bodily pain. My impression is that therapists tend to believe memories because the experience of their clients reliving memories is so vivid.

If my grandparents were still alive, they would probably deny the abuse I remember. If a memory is accurate (with the understanding that it is my memory of my subjective experience, not what would be shown by a video camera in the sky), then what are the possibilities to explain this? My grandparents might be lying to protect themselves. After all, they had much experience that they would be believed and I would not be believed. Or, my grandparents might truly not remember something that actually happened. This could be because they felt such shame about it that they has repressed the memory or because they were drunk enough to affect memory or perhaps they were dissociative themselves and did things that they didn't remember.

In this situation, we are unlikely ever to be able to prove who is right. The relevant question, then, is whether it is more likely that the average recovered memory of sexual abuse is true or false, and on the other side whether the average perpetrator who denies that the abuse happened is correct or not. I could argue that the perpetrator is more likely to lie than the survivor is to invent a memory, but that doesn't get to the core of the issue.

The core of the issue is whether it is common behavior for the human mind to construct such stories and represent them as memories. Certainly it is not typical in the experience of average people to suddenly remember things that do not appear to be true. Is it typical for people with certain kinds of mental instabilities to do so? You could explain it that way, but then you would have to explain why I am mentally ill. If you took away my abuse history, I think that would be hard to explain, unless you just want to say that I have a random defect in my brain.

Why, then, is society so unwilling to accept recovered memories? Not because people have any substantial reason to believe that such memories are likely to be false, but because they find the memories hard to believe. Most people have trouble accepting the image of a seven year old being anally raped, or a five year old performing oral sex on an adult, much less the sexual abuse of infants and the sort of thing reported by Sybil. Society says: "It can't be true," despite the cases of real children with real physical evidence of sexual abuse. The wish to believe that such things don't happen is why the idea of false memory is so popular, not because it stands on any firm ground in the basis of our ordinary experience.

The issue of "it can't be true" gets even worse when people start to come up with memories of satanic ritual abuse. As I have listened to survivors talk about such memories, I have come to believe that they are mostly true in the majority of cases (understanding, of course, that the child may be purposefully misled in order to terrorize her or may have experienced things as worse than they were). I can understand, however, how people who have little experience might simply find such things unbelievable. I still feel that way about memories of alien abductions. However, I would say, at the very least, that something very traumatic happened and the person has made sense of the material in a way that may be a mixture of symbol and memory.

In conclusion, it seems to me that while not all memories are true, there is no possible explanation based on ordinary experience that would lead one to believe that the central majority of recovered memories are false. I started out being fairly cautious about my memories, partly because I found them hard to believe and partly because I believed that memories were not always true. My memories have actually turned out to be more stable than I expected. I have had a few memories (for example, a vague memory of a first rape that came up early in the memory recovery process) that don't seem to fit into my current pattern of memories. However, most of my memories have stayed stable. More importantly, they have explained things I never understood and they have made me feel more whole and helped me heal. In the end the experience of many survivors is that if we believe our memories we get better and if we deny them we get worse.

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