When the subject came out of her trance, Ganaway asked what she recalled. She remembered only delivering the calf, which she knew didn’t happen. She was shocked when he showed her a video of herself producing these statements, but upon reflection she was able to describe the daily experiences that formed the raw material of these fantasies. For instance, in the trance the subject said that the aliens had taken a tissue sample that had left a cloverleaf scar. As it happened, the day before she had been wrapping a clover leaf as a present. The eighteenth-century British lady complained of having to “sew, sew, sew,” and the subject had just completed sewing a dress for her daughter.
Even stranger than these confabulated memories was the fact that during the next year the subject had repeated flashbacks of the images she had conjured up in the trance. Several days after the experiment, for instance, she was driving past a billboard advertising Bugle Boy jeans and suddenly had a vision of being in the alien spacecraft. These flashbacks happened despite the fact that she knew the images were fantasies and had been produced in an experiment; they still clung to her memory with the tenacity of real events.
Other experiments have demonstrated how unreliable memories are for things as trivial as whom people voted for in the last election or where they were when the shuttle
Challenger
exploded. After a sniper attack at an elementary school playground, children who were not at school when the attack occurred developed memories of witnessing the event. Loftus quotes one government study of 590 persons known to have been in an injury-producing automobile accident; approximately 14 percent had forgotten the event a year later. In another example, 1,500 people who had been discharged from a hospital during the preceding year were asked about the experience; more than a fourth did not remember being hospitalized.
The research that Loftus and others have been conducting on memory threatens many of the most deeply held convictions of psychology—most prominently, the concept of repression, “the cornerstone,” as Sigmund Freud wrote in 1914, “on which the whole structure of psychoanalysis rests.” The theory has it that, like denial—which pushes aside painful thoughts that are a part of the present—the act of repression blocks painful or conflictual memories of past events from gaining consciousness. These repressed memories, feelings, wishes, or desires lurk in the unconscious and may cause a person to act in an irrational and apparently self-defeating manner. If a child, for instance, is angry at his father but has repressed this feeling, he may express his rage by breaking the law. Thus, when Chad Ingram was caught clumsily trying to shoplift some Christmas candy when he was seventeen years old and went to jail in handcuffs, it was “the proudest moment of my life.” The whole point of psychoanalysis is to bring repressed material into conscious awareness, where it can be identified and disarmed.
According to the repression theory, patients may be expected to recover memories of childhood trauma in therapy, although on occasion such memories may simply pop into consciousness as a result of being cued by something in the surroundings. A woman named Eileen Franklin was playing with her five-year-old daughter in San Mateo, California, in 1989 when she suddenly recalled the expression on the face of a childhood friend who had been murdered twenty years before. In therapy, more fragments of that memory returned. She remembered having seen her father sexually assaulting her friend in the back of a Volkswagen van and later crushing her friend’s skull with a rock. This, at least, is the story she told on the witness stand. Franklin earlier had told her brother and mother that the memory had come to her while she was under hypnosis. The state of California does not admit hypnotically enhanced
recollections. By the time she got to court, she had changed her account several times. She said that she had retrieved the image in a dream, then that it had come to her in therapy, and finally that it had come in the flashback she had while looking at her daughter. That is the statement she later told the jury. Based primarily on Franklin’s description of the recovered memory, her father was convicted of murder in the first degree.
*
He is now serving a life sentence in San Quentin prison.
Similarly, when Frank Fitzpatrick, a thirty-eight-year-old insurance adjuster in Rhode Island, found himself in great mental pain and could not understand the cause of such anguish, he lay on his bed and began to remember the sound of heavy breathing. “Then I realized I had been sexually abused by someone I loved,” Fitzpatrick later told the
New York Times.
Eventually, he was able to put a name to his abuser: Father James Porter, who had been his priest in North Attleboro, Massachusetts, three decades before. “Remember Father Porter?” Fitzpatrick asked in an ad he placed in newspapers in 1989, as part of a search for other victims. More than a hundred people have since come forward. Most of them had never forgotten the abuse; for a small number of others, there was a sudden realization, when they heard about the case on the radio or on television, that it had happened to them.
†
Public awareness of recovered memories of abuse increased with the 1991 revelation by Roseanne Arnold that she remembered being sexually abused by her mother, from infancy to
age seven. The same year, Marilyn Van Derbur, a former Miss America, said she had repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse by her father until she was twenty-four years old. Loreli Thompson has never had the experience of having repressed memories suddenly surface in her own mind, but she gets calls all the time from people, mainly women, who do remember abuse and want to know whether they can prosecute. In most cases, the statute of limitations for criminal proceedings has expired; however, changes in legislation in several states, Washington among them, have adjusted the statute of limitations for civil litigation, so that suits can be brought within three years of the date the abuse is
remembered,
regardless of when it was committed. A number of survivor self-help books, such as
The Courage to Heal,
advocate bringing suits against perpetrators, who are usually the victim’s parents. Such actions can be very difficult to defend, given the passage of time, and terribly expensive, while the plaintiff can often obtain a lawyer on the promise of a contingency fee. Moreover, if the victim can’t afford therapy, the state will pay for it, and this has led critics to charge that both therapists and clients have an incentive to search for memories of abuse that may not have happened.
*
In any case, recently there has been a flood of accusations based on recovered memories. Many of these memories are of satanic-ritual abuse.
The concept of repression is so deeply fixed in the culture that few question its factual basis. “Remembering Incest &
Childhood Abuse Is the First Step to Healing,” said a 1992 ad from Adult Survivors of Child Abuse, a California treatment center, and that statement fairly characterizes the premise of the survivor movement. Along with an 800 number for counseling, the ad lists symptoms of repressed, as-yet-unrecovered memories of abuse: “mood swings, panic disorder, substance abuse, rage, flashbacks, depression, hopelessness, anxiety, paranoia, low self-esteem, relapse, relationship problems, sexual fear, sexual compulsion, self-mutilation, borderline personality, irritable bowel, migraine, P.M.S., post-traumatic stress, bulimia, anorexia, A.C.O.A. [adult child of an alcoholic], obesity, multiple personality, hallucinations, religious addiction, parenting problems, and suicidal feelings.” This broad list parallels other checklists, in survivor books and workshops, where people are often told that the absence of memories of abuse is no indication that the abuse did not take place.
“Children often cope with abuse by forgetting it ever happened,” write Bass and Davis in
The Courage to Heal:
As a result, you may have no conscious memory of being abused. You may have forgotten large chunks of your childhood. Yet there are things you do remember. When you are touched in a certain way, you feel nauseated. Certain words or facial expressions scare you. You know you never liked your mother to touch you. You slept with your clothes on in junior high school. You were taken to the doctor repeatedly for vaginal infections.
You may think you don’t have memories, but often as you begin to talk about what you do remember, there emerges a constellation of feelings, reactions, and recollections that add up to substantial information. To say “I was abused,” you don’t need the kind of recall that would stand up in a court of law.
Often, the knowledge that you were abused starts with a tiny feeling, an intuition. It’s important to trust that inner voice and work from there. Assume your feelings are valid. So far, no one we’ve talked to thought she might have been abused, and then later discovered that she hadn’t been. The progression always goes the other way, from suspicion to confirmation. If you think you were abused and your life shows the symptoms, then you were.
This argument is strikingly similar to the one advanced by Sigmund Freud in his paper “The Etiology of Hysteria,” which he read to the Society for Psychiatry and Neurology in Vienna in the spring of 1896. At the beginning of his practice, Freud saw a number of patients, mostly women, who manifested the neurotic behavior of a then-popular diagnosis, hysteria. Bodily symptoms ranged from paralysis, tremors, hallucinations, blindness, deafness, chills, choking, vomiting, hiccuping, and a painful need to urinate, to name but a few. Linking this bewildering variety of symptoms was the fact that they were psychological in origin, although they masqueraded as physical disease. An example is a patient whose hand has gone numb. As a mental concept, the hand is a distinct entity, but from a neurological perspective it is a complex of nerves running from the fingers through the wrist and arm. There is not a single nerve that controls the hand, nor can the hand be divorced from other portions of the anatomy. Therefore the cause of the numbness must be psychological.
In this early paper, Freud postulated that hysteria was a reaction to traumatic events in childhood, which have been repressed: “Hysterical symptoms can be resolved if, starting from them, we are able to find the path back to the memory of a traumatic experience. If the memory which we have uncovered does not answer our expectations, it may be that we ought to pursue the same path a little further; perhaps behind the first traumatic scene there may be concealed the memory of a second, which satisfies our requirements better.” What
did he mean by that? Obviously Freud had an object in mind, a childhood event that was not only powerful enough to supply what he called the “traumatic force” that would give rise to hysterical symptoms in later life, but also sufficiently universal to account for the syndrome in each of his patients—the psychological virus, in other words, that would generate this neurotic disease.
Freud saw memory as a chain of associations; each symptom was attached to a particular chain, which would then call up another chain. For example, the symptom of hysterical vomiting may be associated with a memory of eating a rotten apple, and that memory itself may be linked to an earlier scene in which the patient discovered a putrid animal corpse while gathering windfalls in an orchard; that scene calls up another chain of memories, connected to another symptom, such as a headache. The task of the analyst is to retrace the pathways of memory through this converging chain of associations until arriving at what seems to be the traumatic source. Eventually, said Freud, “we come to the field of sexuality and to a small number of experiences which occur for the most part at the same period of life—namely, at puberty.” At this point, however, there is a new disappointment for the analyst, because many of these experiences are “astonishingly trivial.” He gave examples of one of his women patients whose neurosis seemed to be based on the experience of a boy who stroked her hand and, on a different occasion pressed his knee against her dress; for another patient, the traumatic event was an obscene riddle that had brought on an anxiety attack. Were they really such delicate flowers that they wilted under such tepid advances?
No, Freud reasoned; there must be yet another cause, further back in the chain of memories. “If we have the perseverance to press on with analysis into early childhood, as far back as a human memory is capable of reaching, we invariably bring the patient to reproduce experiences which, on account
both of their peculiar features and of their relations to the symptoms of his later illness, must be regarded as the etiology of his neurosis for which we have been looking.” To the dismay of his eminent colleagues in Vienna that day, Freud proposed that “at the bottom of every case of hysteria there are
one or more occurrences of premature sexual experience
[Freud’s emphasis].”
Anticipating the objections that would arise from the suggestion that childhood sexual abuse was the “source of the Nile” in neuropathology, as he then believed, Freud defended himself by saying that doubts about the genuineness of these memories can be erased because of the anguish on the part of the patients as they remember scenes of seduction in childhood and their own resistance to believing in them once they have been produced. “While they are recalling these infantile experiences to consciousness, they suffer under the most violent sensations, of which they are ashamed and which they try to conceal; and, even after they have gone through them once more in such a convincing manner, they still attempt to withhold belief from them, by emphasizing the fact that, unlike what happens in the case of other forgotten material, they have no feeling of remembering the scenes.” To Freud, the patients’ distrust of their own memories was conclusive proof that they had not made them up. He was struck by the similarity in details that his patients reported. Either there was a conspiracy among the patients, or else they were suffering from nearly identical traumas. As for the obvious argument that the doctor himself had forced these memories onto his patients, through suggestion, that also seemed unlikely to Freud: “I have never yet succeeded in forcing on a patient a scene I was expecting to find.”