The Myth of Repressed Memory by Elizabeth Loftus

Author:Elizabeth Loftus
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

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ALL I EVER WANTED

When someone asks you, “Were you sexually abused as a child?” there are only two answers: One of them is “Yes,” and one of them is “I don’t know.” You can’t say “No.”

—Roseanne Arnold, on “Oprah”

Toward the end of March 1992 I got a phone call from a man named Mike Patterson in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. His daughter, he began, had accused him of heinous acts of sexual abuse on the basis of repressed memories recently recovered in therapy.

“Heinous,” he repeated. “I’ve talked to lots of experts in the last six months, and I keep hearing that word. So I looked it up in the dictionary. It means ‘grossly wicked, deserving strong condemnation.’ Well, sexual abuse is heinous and false accusations are heinous, and we’ve got to put an end to both.”

He explained that he was contacting everyone he could find who might have something to tell him about the workings of memory, the nature and reality of this “thing called repression,” and what parents could do to defend themselves when they were falsely accused. “Dr. Loftus,” he said earnestly, the sharp Midwestern twang carrying his words loud and clear across the telephone lines, “how can you prove a negative? How can I prove that I didn’t do something?

“Well, I can’t,” he said, answering his own question, “so I decided to do something else. Things began to go downhill for my daughter—her name is Megan—when she started seeing a therapist who specializes in such things as psychospiritual concerns, victimization recovery, and dysfunctional families. I figured I’d better find out what exactly was happening in these therapy sessions, so I hired a private investigator to pretend she was a patient with problems similar to my daughter’s. She was wired, and I have audiotapes of her therapy sessions. I understand you’ve done some experiments with suggestion and the creation of false memories, and I thought you might be interested in listening to those tapes.”

“You have tapes of the therapy sessions?” I asked. This was exciting news. If Mike Patterson had tapes of therapy sessions in which the therapist was unaware that the conversation was being recorded, then he had something no one else had. While critics of repressed-memory therapy suspected that therapists’ suggestions, expectations, and pressure to remember might be influencing the memory-retrieval process, they had no proof. All they had were therapists’ and patients’ subjective recollections of what went on in therapy, and these reports are subject to what psychologists call “retrospective bias.” Retrospective bias occurs when we think back to the past and change certain facts or fill in the gaps in our memories with exaggeration, speculation, or plain wishful thinking. We are inclined to recall details that make us look “good” (happy, intelligent, generous, compassionate, tolerant, forgiving, and so on) and ignore those behaviors, thoughts, or emotions that might make us look “bad” (uncaring, thoughtless, manipulative, rude, sad, stubborn, selfish, etc.).

This lack of objective reporting is one reason memory research is so difficult. When people recall

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