Made-Up Memories

September 29, 2022 10:36 AM

The Forgotten Lessons of the Recovered Memory Movement. "Unfortunately, many of the mistaken assumptions about memory and trauma remain part of popular culture. Among clinical psychologists, the belief that the unconscious mind can block out memories of trauma is commonplace. Memory researchers and scientists, for the most part, remain highly skeptical. In 2019 a group of seven memory scientists, including Dr. Loftus, concluded that therapists were still using techniques that had the potential for creating false memories and that the practice continued to pose a substantial risk, “potentially leading to false accusations and associated miscarriages of justice,” they wrote. While the so-called memory wars rage on over the issue of repression, clinicians and their professional organizations have largely “feigned forgetfulness” of the recovered memory movement’s excesses, as the author and psychology professor Richard Noll once wrote."
posted by storybored (22 comments total)

Previously and previouslier.
posted by Halloween Jack at 11:28 AM on September 29, 2022 [1 favorite]

I recommend _Betrayal Trauma_ by Jennifer Freyd. People do forget trauma, especially if it's imposed by people they're dependent on. And sometimes it can be recovered.

It's also true that false memories can be created by inappropriate therapy.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 11:48 AM on September 29, 2022 [10 favorites]

Super excited to have the Satanic Panic back these last couple of years, let me tell you. It brushed its skirts past me when I was a kid in school -- for being weird with historical interests, I was a witch, I used Satanic symbols, and I got rocks thrown at me. (Eventually I tried to go ahead and be a witch, but it didn't take.)

I studied instances of the Panic for a paper in law school, and came away feeling that the social worker Kee MacFarlane was the villain (although now I would say it was the cops and prosecutors who entertained these delusions) and Elizabeth Loftus a hero. I once read someone remarking that Loftus was in the pay of wealthy fathers and other malefactors who could afford an expert witness for a cover-up. That's not what happened, of course, but I recognized that as an ad hominem, it had a gut appeal and an unfalsifiability that would be hard to overcome. I didn't realize that this drama would play out over again on the national stage.
posted by Countess Elena at 11:49 AM on September 29, 2022 [19 favorites]

“Among clinical psychologists, the belief that the unconscious mind can block out memories of trauma is commonplace. Memory researchers and scientists, for the most part, remain highly skeptical. ”

I turned eight years-old in 1972 and I have probably five to ten different memories of things that I experienced that year. But I have zero memories whatsoever of my mom leaving my dad and taking me with her to live with her parents for a month (after which we returned home). I do remember the inciting event. But I've been weirded out about forgetting such an impactful event (going with my mom on the bus to stay with my grandparents in another city for a month) ever since I learned it happened. With all the other things I remember from that year, that one thing just doesn't exist in my memory.

Of course, I don't have some other fabricated memory in its place, either.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 11:59 AM on September 29, 2022 [13 favorites]

I think this is a super important discussion, but it always takes a nervous-making time before the discussion starts drilling into the actual problem of the terrible therapeutic methodology - abuse, really - that underlies that kind of "memory" finaglement.

It is unfortunate that many of these articles start by propping up the idea that memories that may have been previously unattainable because of physical/chemical/neurochemical intervention must be fake when recalled, effectively implying to a skimming public that disassociation is fake and that situations like chemically-induced amnesia are fake. It's not that the experts and proponents are deliberately saying that, but it does seem like they avoid prophylactic call-outs and I wish there was a higher standard of specification for that among the big players in this space currently.

It is possible to not remember something until you later do, without it being a fake memory installed by an evil therapist. It's also possible for someone to remember but refuse to recall/explore until they feel safe to do so, and that does often involve the support of a counselor or other support system, and that does not automatically mean those memories are fake.
posted by Lyn Never at 12:01 PM on September 29, 2022 [27 favorites]

excellent video about the Satanic Panic
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 12:06 PM on September 29, 2022 [3 favorites]

As a separate comment, this post is extremely timely and relevant in my life, as — also concerning my mother — Tuesday we discovered that $26k was wired from her bank account and in discovering this Tuesday she came to believe, from a memory, that last week she herself had requested this transfer when she opened an account at the bank here. She did transfer money to open that account, but by depositing a check written from her other account. But you can see how — at age 76 with some increasing memory problems — in trying to reconstruct the events she could have conflated the deposited check (of a comparable amount) with requesting a wire transfer and then, as she tried to remember what happened and in talking to her older bank she elaborated a false memory.

The wire transfer went to someone in California. The authorization letter looks forged.

But she, by Tuesday afternoon, had come to believe she remembered a whole sequence of events involving two people at the bank here wherein she asked that a wire transfer be made, and they did it for her.

Yesterday, upon going to the bank here and relating this memory to them, they said it didn't happen and actually showed her video of herself where that other person she remembered never appears. The person she did talk to, doesn't remember the events as she described them. Mom described another room "the guy" went in, and they showed her the room and it didn't look like what she remembered.

She was humiliated and devastated.

So not only — apparently — did someone unconnected with her visit to the bank here the same day steal money from her account in another city via fraudulent wire transfer, she also has had to confront someone seemingly proving that the memories she has of her bank visit last week, where she remembers asking for a wire transfer, never happened.

The trauma of this is compounded. She's having trouble believing me that all of us make up and fill in gaps in our memories all the time in order to make sense of events. And because she is probably in the early stages of dementia, this is a frightening experience of something she doesn't want to think is happening, in addition to someone stealing from her.

This is a gigantic mess that we're trying to work through, and the whole memory unreliability thing just makes it all so much worse.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 12:23 PM on September 29, 2022 [49 favorites]

I studied instances of the Panic for a paper in law school, and came away feeling that the social worker Kee MacFarlane was the villain

Let's not forget Lawrence Pazder, the patient-marrying monster who wrote Michelle Remembers and introduced the concept of repressed memories of Satanic abuse to the public.
posted by Pope Guilty at 12:24 PM on September 29, 2022 [12 favorites]

Ivan, I'm so sorry, that sounds devastating for your mother.
posted by joannemerriam at 12:42 PM on September 29, 2022 [9 favorites]

It's scary to think that our memories, the fundamental building blocks of our identity, our sense of being a persistent "I," are not nearly as firm as we need them to be to fulfill the function we require of them.
posted by rikschell at 1:01 PM on September 29, 2022 [12 favorites]

I've struggled with these issues my whole life. Especially if you truly come from a life of bad parenting, invasive and vaguely sexualized relationships with adults (which many children especially girls do experience) and the crazy making experience of having the world around you invalidate what was weird or hard about your child-life, it's easy to sort of extrapolate that into more specific sexual abuse. In the 70s through 90s as outlined in this article there were also some really irresponsible actions by therapists and cops - in collaboration with each other in many cases, to basically tell people what they experienced.

My conclusion is that we are often tapping into real and true feelings when we imagine the past, but that we don't have capacity to remember highly specific details, especially the earlier they happened, yet we have a strong human drive to create meaning and narrative. This opens us up to potentially projecting feelings onto the wrong people, or imagining specific scenarios that may not have happened.

I've read a lot about this and got some great recommendations from metafilter folks. We Believe The Children contextualizes the recovered memory idea at it's most extreme - the Satanic Panic - within the anti-feminist backlash that it was situated in (ironically - because feminists were at times its champion). My Lie is a very readable first person portrayal of how someone can become convinced of a very specific story that ultimately they have no evidence for.

On the other hand, I find Elizabeth Loftus a sort of haunting figure - kind of a ghoul who takes money to discredit people who in many cases have experienced real sexual abuse and violence. She testified for the defense in Harvey Weinstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, for a couple examples.

Therapists should use caution in supporting their clients to explore the distant past, and for the most part, they now do. As mentioned in the article, The Courage to Heal got an edit in later editions to tone down the assumption of historical abuse when evidence is lacking. But therapists operate with a huge amount of discretion and independence and of course there is a wide range in what they do.
posted by latkes at 1:26 PM on September 29, 2022 [19 favorites]

Thanks, joannemerriam. We've just now been talking and although she's really stressed, she seems in a little better spirits than yesterday.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 1:41 PM on September 29, 2022 [10 favorites]

I'm glad, Ivan. It's rather disquieting.
posted by joannemerriam at 2:14 PM on September 29, 2022 [7 favorites]

So in one of the previouslys, I posted this:

I have a distinct memory of standing at glass balcony doors with my older sister and my parents, when I was three or four, watching a squirrel eat the head of a Lego shopkeeper. I used that image as a metaphor in a poem I wrote, and when my book came out, my mother mentioned that she thought it was neat how I'd condensed a bunch of separate events into something simple for my readers. Come to find out that I never saw the squirrel chew on the Lego shopkeep's head; we found the gnawed toy after the fact. We used to watch squirrels eat nuts though. Also, it wasn't a Lego shopkeeper; it was some other children's brand, and he was just some guy, he didn't have a specific occupation. Also, the balcony I was remembering belonged to the house we moved to when I was five. I still remember it happening just as clearly as if it actually had.

This is wild because the way I remember it now, I wrote a poem about the unreliability of memory (I have not reread my own book for probably 5 years).
posted by joannemerriam at 2:15 PM on September 29, 2022 [24 favorites]

In my twenties I had what I thought must be a false memory of a severe childhood trauma, but it was so vivid that I felt like I had to ask my mother about it, and it turned out to be perfectly true. It was one of those things where the experts at the time told her never to talk about it and I'd just "get over it." Instead, I developed a whole series of maladaptive behaviors I'm still struggling with, and I actually did repress the memory for decades.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 2:39 PM on September 29, 2022 [24 favorites]

The trauma of this is compounded. She's having trouble believing me that all of us make up and fill in gaps in our memories all the time in order to make sense of events. And because she is probably in the early stages of dementia, this is a frightening experience of something she doesn't want to think is happening, in addition to someone stealing from her.

Unsolicited advice from someone who has a father in LTC with full blown dementia - Get someone responsible and moral Power of Attorney over her finances and healthcare before the state is involved. Also while she is still competent get the will and any end of life directives sorted out. Otherwise it can become a crazy shitshow for everyone involved.
posted by srboisvert at 2:58 PM on September 29, 2022 [11 favorites]

You can see the modern genesis of False Memory Syndrome and Satanic Panic right here, 1980-10-20, around 00:57:
Dr. Lawrence Pazder and Michelle Smith talk about their book “Michelle Remembers” on "Webster."

Pazder was a terrible psychiatrist.
posted by meehawl at 3:06 PM on September 29, 2022 [2 favorites]

On the other hand, I find Elizabeth Loftus a sort of haunting figure

I hadn't meant to read that link before the main piece in the FPP, but the minute I started reading it, I couldn't get away from it. I've had Lotfus' Witness for the Defense and Eyewitness Testimony on my shelf for ages now, and I do think her work is important, but wow, that interview, especially the section where her entire family is on the Zoom call...there is something really unsettling about the sort of academic distance and almost grinding over-analysis they bring to the death of their mother--or rather to a cousin's memory of it. She really seems to have internalized her theories to the point that memory is entirely unreliable and entirely a social and technological endeavor, just something to nudge around with your finger. It's not entirely wrong--we know memory simply isn't what we think it is, it's not what it feels like it is--but the intensity she brings to it feels unrealistic, or rather, feels like its intent is to dismantle the sense of reality. Wow!
posted by mittens at 3:09 PM on September 29, 2022 [6 favorites]

One controversial edge to this story is hinted at the end.

"Across history, patients have shown themselves willing to adopt their healers’ beliefs and manifest expected symptoms accordingly. Doctors and other health professionals can unwittingly engage in what’s been called symptom amplification by focusing on and legitimizing certain symptoms and ideas and ignoring others. Through this process, cultures develop what the historian Edward Shorter calls “symptom pools” — behaviors that healers at a given time and place understand to be a legitimate communication of suffering."

and then,

"The internet as we know it didn’t exist during the rise of recovered memory therapy, but it is a powerful cultural force now and may be ground zero for the creation of new symptom pools, new looping effects and new ways of being.

What takes place on social media will, no doubt, influence what develops during private therapy sessions. Effectively treating this new generation will require an understanding of how culture is once again shaping the symptoms of patients and the certainties of healers. Without that knowledge, mental health professionals will risk engendering new hysterias that they can neither control nor cure."

We know that anxiety and depression is at much higher levels in recent years than they used to be. Is this partly a sign of a symptom pool?
posted by storybored at 6:41 PM on September 29, 2022 [10 favorites]

Thank you so much for posting this. I find the tricks of memory fascinating and disquieting.

Someone I am connected to was the key witness in a trial that sent a man to his death. I thought of the story this spring when reading Daniel Schachter's Seven Sins of Memory and from his account, which I accept, it now seems utterly clear that the witness's testimony is worthless.

The idea of symptom pools and the charismatic power of healers to suggest and encourage symptoms rings absolutely true what I believe about the history of medicine and of human behavior more generally, including religious and other cultural movements.

In middle age, I also am realizing that my parents don't remember my childhood much better than I do--it would be fruitless to ask them now, in their seventies, if things I remember really happened, and expect a definitive answer. When we venture beyond what's in the archive we're all on unstable ground.
posted by sy at 9:50 AM on September 30, 2022 [3 favorites]

From the article

Beginning around 1994, criticism of recovered memory therapy slowed the movement for a time. With a few notable exceptions, skeptics came from outside the mental health field. Critically, several feminist writers — including Carol Tavris, Wendy Kaminer, Elaine Showalter and Debbie Nathan — began questioning the satanic cult stories and the coercive techniques of recovered memory therapy. They all faced angry accusations that they were revictimizing abused women. When Dr. Tavris challenged some of the movement’s tenets in the pages of The New York Times Book Review, Ms. Blume, the author of “Secret Survivors,” responded that Dr. Tavris had taken the side of those who support molesters, rapists and pedophiles.

Calling Democratic opponents pedophile groomers is still at the top of the Republican fake news toolbox.

State Senator Mallory McMorrow for example.

Comet Ping Pong comes to mind as well.
posted by y2karl at 2:35 PM on September 30, 2022 [3 favorites]

Also, previously
posted by y2karl at 8:08 PM on October 3, 2022 [1 favorite]