The Myth of Repressed Memory: False Memories and Allegations of Sexual Abuse
by Elizabeth F. Loftus and Katherine Ketchum
St. Martin's Press, Inc 1996

What is memory? How accurate are our memories, and how unreliable are they? What are the mechanisms of forgetting and recall? What is the relationship between memory and imagination? Counterfeit memory fabricated through imagination is called confabulation. A memory of this sort is not marked in any distinctive way as counterfeit; it seems as real as any other. Therefore, it is an insufficient authentication of memory to say that if it feels like a memory, it is. To what degree is confabulation susceptible to persuasion and its formation influenced by beliefs other than our own when presented to us under compelling circumstances? What is the status of memories seemingly recalled after years, perhaps decades, of being unknown or utterly forgotten? What is the status of memories we seem to always have had? (A memory comes with a memory of how long we have had it.) Are these memories trustworthy? Are they in fact true knowledge of the past, or are they false memories, confabulations, nothing more than wild imagination in the guise of recollection, or are they a mixture of truth and falsity? The possibility of confabulation shows that a memory can be entirely fictitious yet seem entirely real. How do we distinguish between what we seem to remember and what in fact occurred?

What if we begin to have memories of biographically significant experiences, and yet we have never had these memories (as far as we remember) before? What if we begin to recall a past we have never believed or even imagined we ever lived until the apparent recollection of these new, yet seemingly old, memories? If the past which these newfound memories seem to signify was tragic or frightful or ominous, and if powerful emotions arise within us as we begin to remember, is this evidence these memories are authentic, reliable and true? Why were they forgotten, if true, and what are the circumstances of their apparent recall? If they do not signify actual events, what do they signify, and why?

This book is not a general scientific or psychological study of memory, nor is it a philosophical inquiry into the nature of memory and the epistemological implications of confabulation or less extreme forms of inaccurate memory for our knowledge of the past. The purpose of the book is to evaluate so-called recovered memories of child abuse, more specifically child sexual abuse and other criminal violence with sexual components, such as ritual acts, which might include apparent recollections of rape, murder and cannibalism. The purported memories may occur not only in the alleged victim but in the accused. The question of authenticity arises and must be pursued tenaciously because of the lack of any evidence for the accuracy of these memories beyond the ostensible memories themselves, the lengthy period in which they were apparently forgotten, the circumstances and manner of their apparent recovery, the established affiliation between memory and imagination, and the terrible nature of the events seemingly recalled. If these memories are true, healing and retribution must follow; if they are false, the explanation for their appearance and dangerous deception must be found.

An explanation for their initial loss is that the extreme negative emotional intensity of the experience engaged a defense mechanism of the mind known as repression, through which the mind disallows, or hides from itself, any explicit recognition that the objectionable events ever occurred. The emotional consequence of allowing the experience in memory would be too severe and so it is forcefully forgotten. A repressed memory is a forgotten memory that is actively and persistently kept from the conscious mind by non-conscious mental processes controlling our ability to recall. It is a dynamic forgetting, and can only be counteracted by dynamic methods of recall. This is the essence of psychotherapy.

Even as the memories are eventually recalled, they must be re-associated, it is theorized, with their attendant emotions. It is only when the memories are conjoined once again with the emotions with which they originally occurred can the psychological healing begin. When a recalled memory is not acknowledged as reliable or true by someone revealed in the memory to be part of the experience, including whoever is having the apparent memory and doubts its veracity, that person is said to be in denial, which in effect is another form or result of repression. Anyone accused, therefore, of engaging in sexual abuse, who denies the charges brought by someone believing in a so-called recovered repressed memory, can be thought of as simply another individual with repressed memories, where this time the defense mechanism of repression is protecting the conscious self from recognizing its own intolerable guilt. If it is possible, through legal questioning, family pressure, or therapy, to bring the accused to the point of seeming to recover corroborating memories of the abusive acts, then guilt is said to be assured. But is it?

This is the challenge of the book. Loftus and Ketchum distrust the concept of repression and argue against it. They present cases of recovered memory and discuss memory experiments which suggest, if not prove, that it is possible to influence memory to the extent that an entire experience that never occurred can seem to be recalled with clarity and conviction. The book never delves deep into the nature of memory or confabulation, and avoids the complex issues arising from psychotherapy as a system concerned with memory, emotion, forgetting and recovery, but it introduces the debate of false memory syndrome versus recovered memories of abuse, and makes the need for the debate easy to appreciate.

It should be noted that so-called recovered memories have not only been of child abuse, Satanic rituals, or murder, but of alien abduction and of multiple past lives. Loftus herself makes a connection between false recovered memories of child abuse and the zealous testimonials during the witch hunts of past ages.

Elizabeth Loftus' website is here.