Recovered Memory Therapy: How We Create False Memories

Memory is a slippery old fish. I don’t know how other peoples’ memories work but here’s a rough overview of mine. Commercial jingles and theme songs from 80s and 90s cartoons: in there for life.

How to do percentages and long division? Ejected as soon as maths GCSE was over. I recently had to study for the US citizenship test and was getting 100% of the questions correct after a few cramming sessions.

A week after the test, I could barely remember any of them. I could tell you if we ate at a restaurant in the past but probably not what we ate. I can recall bits and pieces from the ages of maybe 6 to 15 but you’d have to ask specific questions for me to be able to work out if I actually remembered anything useful.

Photos and other people are of a great help here because seeing yourself frozen in time can definitely unlock other memories of what was going on then. I’m often in awe of sports stars who can instantly recall games, dates and scores when I sometimes have to ask what year we’re in so I can work out how old I am.

I guess I have a knack for remembering embarrassing things about other people—just ask my friend Katrina—but in all, I think my memory is probably fairly standard. We all know that the human memory is, in all actuality, pretty crap when it comes to useful things like being an eyewitness at a crime scene. People get things totally wrong and contradict each other all the time and I’ve seen the phrase “one witness is no witness” mentioned when researching a recent case.

While I’m quietly confident in my own remembering of versions of events, when there is a clash with someone else’s version, it’s quite a weird feeling. There’s a short story by Ted Chiang called “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling” in which some people use a device that is basically recording at all times, meaning that they have access to perfect memories. There is a character who chooses not to use this thing and has had a strained relationship with his daughter for years because of a certain event that happened in the past.

I won’t go into any more detail but as the title suggests, the story tells of the experience of being a human and human memory played against technology and the ability that everyone now has to potentially be the most annoying pedant in the world. Ah, sounds like my dream.

At the moment we can obviously record things and some people do record large chunks of their lives but this is not the same as having your memory continually playing in the background, available for you to access at any point in time you want. I was a child for the appropriate length of time which was a good many years, but after my husband recently complained that he never got expensive gifts on his birthday like we’d just given our daughter, I realised that I had absolutely no recollection of any birthday gifts I had ever received from my parents, apart from when I was maybe 10 and got the Chronicles of Narnia book set and a stick of green apple Hubba Bubba bubble gum. That’s not to say that I’ve blocked out memories of horrible gifts, I just guess they weren’t amazing enough for me to remember, sorry, mum and dad.

Another way to forget things is to have some kind of head injury or, more likely, get really really drunk. This is when you may get flashbacks throughout the course of the next day or so of usually extremely cringe things you got up to the night before. You’re just sitting there feeling a bit fragile after a night out and trying to get on with your day when all of a sudden an image pops into your head of you passionately kissing your ex who up until that point you hadn’t even remembered had been there.

For example. And once you start remembering these things, the highlights of all the other embarrassing and stupid stuff you’ve ever said and done come back to haunt you in a rotating carousel of shame memories. Well, that’s what happens to me, anyway, thanks for bringing it up.

We might wish that these things would stay firmly in the depths of our minds but would that be mentally healthy for us? What if we were unknowingly hanging onto trauma so deeply that we do not remember the events yet the effects seep through to damage our behaviour and well-being years later? We might be going down some dark pathways of the soul here, so content warning for child abuse although not in any graphic detail. Or maybe there will be a little detail, I don’t know as I haven’t written it yet.

Recovered Memory Therapy: What It Is

We’re probably all familiar with phrases like “I must have blocked that out”. They usually refer to things in the past that we have no immediate recollection of or have even chosen to forget, whether consciously or subconsciously. Blocked memories are also usually related to something bad that happened and your brain, wishing to spare you the emotional pain, helpfully wiped it from your mind or put it behind some nice big walls. Or did it?

Don’t worry, we’ll come back to this later but for now, let’s talk about recovered memory therapy. Just a note that because it’s cumbersome to say “psychiatrist or psychologist” or even “psychotherapist” every time we talk about them, we’ll probably use the word “therapist” as a blanket term to cover these practitioners. If this isn’t accurate, sorry, but you’ll just have to get over it.

When people talk to therapists, whether for a specific reason or just in general, it usually seems that the therapist wants to find out more about this person’s early childhood to see if there were any core experiences there that may have shaped the issues they are having in the present. That’s what it seems like on TV anyway but I’m pretty sure it’s a valid and well-trodden line of inquiry. The idea of the repressed memory is that it’s something so awful that the person has stuffed it down deep in the recesses of their mind so that it can no longer be accessed by them in normal life. Only a trained psychiatrist or psychologist with a very particular set of skills can help them unlock this repressed memory which can help them in their life going forward but can also potentially go on to have another set of devastating consequences.

Sigmund Freud had ideas about this way back at the end of the 19th century. He had been told of a patient who was seeking psychological treatment as she had suddenly started having a bunch of unexplainable symptoms. As a piece on Healthline.com by Crystal Raypole puts it:

During treatment for these symptoms, she started remembering upsetting events from the past she previously had no memory of. After regaining these memories and talking about them, her symptoms began to improve.

Freud believed that memory repression served as a defense mechanism against traumatic events. Symptoms that couldn’t be traced to a clear cause, he concluded, stemmed from repressed memories. You can’t remember what happened, but you feel it in your body, anyway.

This might remind you of the title of a very popular book called “The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma” by Bessel Van Der Kolk. This was born in part out of the boom in recovered memory therapy that sprung up in the US in particular in the early to mid-1990s although repressed memories are only a part of Van Der Kolk’s narrative.

So while the idea that repressed memories of traumatic events manifesting in strange symptoms had been around for decades, it was only fairly recently that the treatment of this issue started making waves and for more reason than one. Let’s start with the treatment part, though. According to a list in the Healthline article, some treatments to help people recover these memories are hypnosis, age regression, brainspotting, somatic transformation therapy and primal therapy.

There were a few more but these sounded the weirdest. Brainspotting is kind of like EMDR or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing but also not, as the eyes are supposed to stay fixed on one specific location that’s supposed to help trigger memories, rather than moving the eyes around as per EMDR.

According to the website Somatic transformation.com, “Somatic Transformation is a body-centered, relational methodology based in interpersonal neural psychology, ancient wisdom, and the somatic-emotional lived experience.” So there you go, I think we can all get a general idea of what that entails.

Primal therapy is a line of thinking that in order to overcome and heal from repressed trauma, you need to re-experience it in the present and expel the psychic pain from your body, whether by shouting, screaming or just talking about it.

Using one or a combination of these or similar techniques, some therapists who practice recovered memory therapy can successfully draw out the repressed memories from their patients and, as everyone expects, these memories are usually pretty horrific. In the boom in this process that happened in the 90s, a lot of the now unrepressed memories turned out to be related to early childhood sexual abuse, or CSA as we’ll refer to it from now on. Patients were realizing that in their past, people, family members or even their parents had abused them at least once, if not many times over the course of several years.

As adults, they had no memory of these events but had displayed symptoms pointing to the fact that they possibly had traumatic repressed memories. These symptoms could manifest as anything from being nauseated by specific foods to not being comfortable trusting your own intuition. During this 90s timeframe, it also became apparent that keeping these memories under psychic lock and key meant that many people had developed multiple personality disorders to cope with their past trauma.

These two aspects—the multiple personalities and the unlocking of the CSA—sent the recovered memory therapy business into overdrive. It seemed like if you were a therapist worth your salt, you were deep diving into your patient’s histories and digging out all sorts of hidden secrets. Clinics treating multiple personality disorders, as it was called back then, sprang up all over the place with tens of thousands of Americans being referred from the 80s to the early 90s.

It seemed like this repressed memory diagnosis was the hot new ticket in town but it didn’t evolve in a vacuum—we can trace the rise of it in the mainstream consciousness to a few popular books. One was called “Sybil: The Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities” by Flora Rheta Schreiber, first published in 1973. The next was “Michelle Remembers: The Shocking True Story of the Ultimate Evil - a Child’s Possession by the Devil!”

which was published in 1980 and sounds 100% like something I would have read as a kid had it crossed my radar. The third influential tome was “The Courage to Heal - A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse”, by Ellen Bass and Laura Davis and published in 1988. This one also cites “Michelle Remembers” as an example of surviving CSA.

Note that these are all true stories and therapists and the general public alike took cues from the books which all talk about repressed memories, CSA and/or what we now call Dissociative Identity Disorder or DID.

In one respect, this is a big step forward in the world of mental health, and seemingly many more people were repressing traumatic memories than anyone had realized. With the recovered memories being freed in their sessions, people remembered horrible things happening to them and who perpetrated the abuse. Patients could now use this knowledge to confront or accuse their abusers. They could choose to cut them out of their lives or to even press criminal charges.

But what if these so-called repressed memories weren’t actually repressed at all? What if they weren’t even actual memories? What if the patients had “remembered” things that hadn’t ever happened in the first place? Well, now we’re getting to the juicy bits.

False Memories

Before we get into this section properly, let’s have a disclaimer. We are not suggesting that all therapists did what they did consciously or with ill intent. We are also, of course, not suggesting that none of these patients had ever suffered from CSA or that nobody had Dissociative Identity Disorder. Unfortunately, these things are very real. What we’re doing is taking an overview of the explosion of cases and drilling down into what might really have been going on.

Here’s a little taster from Ethan Watters writing for the New York Times in a piece called “The Forgotten Lessons of the Recovered Memory Movement”:

The therapists’ writings from the period reveal their passion and zeal for the movement. This was a group of healers who believed that they not only had discovered the key to their patients’ suffering but also were exposing a hidden evil across society. The therapists, in short, were as caught up in the cultural currents as their patients.

While some people saw the huge surge in recovered memory therapy as finally solving many peoples’ problems, others were a little more sceptical. It wasn’t just about that particular place in time, either, it was the way the memories were being recovered and how the patients were expressing them that got some other professionals concerned. As we mentioned earlier, the techniques for recovering these repressed memories were quite varied and I think we should also point out that a lot of them are not considered scientifically effective, psychologically effective or, really, effective at all.

Things like primal therapy were huge fads for a while, then kind of dropped off when other psychologists started questioning the theories behind them and found out that barely any research had been done. That’s not to say people don’t still use and swear by these techniques, if it works for you, great. It’s just that there’s not much backing it up.

The patient’s experience was also something that registered on the sceptics’ radar as the way they recalled these apparent memories was not the same as how memory recall usually works. These recovered memories were being experienced by the patient in the moment, as though it was happening in real time in the present. Some would have strong physical reactions like fainting or vomiting, which only added to the conviction of both the patient and the therapist that these memories must be real. But were they?

Were all these people really finding out that they were victims of horrendous CSA with some also being told that they had created multiple personalities to cope with the trauma? Well, this really happened but it turns out that the majority of the memories recovered in these therapy sessions were actually false.

But how does this work? Surely you can’t just make something up because it neatly solves all the other issues you’ve been having. And therapists aren’t just forcing you to believe you were horribly abused for their own ends, right?

Well, to be honest, some might have done this but in most cases, this was sort of an unwitting collaborative effort on the part of both sides, although for the most part, the therapist was definitely the one in the driving seat. As we’ve mentioned, the time that this was really popular was in America in the early 90s, against a cultural backdrop of increasingly popular stories of multiple personalities, demonic possession and satanic ritual abuse. Remember the satanic panic that still pops up from time to time?

This recovered memory therapy was gaining popularity right in the same timeframe so it’s fair to say that many patients and therapists were already aware of some of these cultural touchstones before their repressed memories were eventually recovered.

Here’s how a false memory can knowingly or unknowingly be implanted into an adult patient. The patient is seeking therapy because they are experiencing mental distress, they are going through a difficult time or they are seeking answers as to why certain things are happening. The patient is put in a state of deep relaxation or hypnosis where they might be more suggestible to ideas.

Over the course of however many sessions, the therapist, who is excited about the idea that their patient might have repressed memories because it’s the in thing, continually asks leading questions about it. Eventually, the patient starts “remembering” things from the past that didn’t actually happen and experiences these as current events rather than normal continuous memory. Now sure that there’s something there, the therapist pushes the patient into “remembering” more and more detail about their abuse.

The patient and therapist now believe that the patient did indeed suffer from CSA.

If you don’t think this is very realistic, I was just listening to a podcast called “Dangerous Memories” from Tortoise which covers this very topic and the events are happening right now. A woman, who is named in the series but who we won’t name here, had several patients who believed they were victims of CSA. Let’s note that not every patient will go down this road and end up believing they were victims of childhood trauma but some do and they do so mistakenly.

The victims in the podcast were all well-off young women, mostly part of the art crowd, so it was speculated that their creative imaginations also made them more susceptible to believing what their therapist was saying. It’s also a window into the world of the upper class, with girls being named things like “Huey” and “Fipsi” which makes them sound like pet guinea pigs.

Going back to the 1990s storyline, when we look more closely at the sort of stuff that was being revealed, especially now with the distance of a couple of decades, it seems quite obvious that the vast majority of this stuff was utter fiction. What gave it the aura of truth, was the pop culture of the time, including the books we mentioned earlier. This should not have given it the aura of truth, though, as these alleged “true stories” were later debunked as not remotely true at all.

The book “Sybil” has a blurb on the website GoodReads which says: “Here is the unbelievable yet true story of Sybil Dorsett, a survivor of terrible childhood abuse who as an adult was a victim of sudden and mysterious blackouts. What happened during those blackouts has made Sybil’s experience one of the most famous psychological cases in the world.”

Sybil supposedly had 16 personalities, meaning she had Dissociative Identity Disorder or DID. This book was a major success and one of the main factors in the sharp rise in people being diagnosed with DID but all was not as it seemed. In 2011, a book called “Sybil Exposed” was published and it turns out that the three women involved in the original book all played their part in creating the fictional tale. The real Sybil admitted she had made up her many personalities to gain attention and emotional support from her therapist.

The therapist had a specific interest in multiple personality disorder as it was then known, so thought she’d hit the jackpot when Sybil came along and encouraged her fictions, even regularly injecting her with sodium pentothal, a barbiturate general anaesthetic, and hypnotizing her to get deeper into her stories.

The author of the original book, Flora Rheta Schrieber, also seemed to be aware that the whole case was hugely exaggerated at the very least but she had a deadline to meet and sensationalism sells.

Up until the publication of Sybil in the early 1970s, there had been a miniscule number of people diagnosed with Dissociative Identity Disorder, like, under 100, but suddenly the numbers shot up. According to Ethan Watters in the New York Times piece: “over 40,000 patients, by one estimate, had come out of therapy believing they had many individual personalities.” And that was only in America and only over the period of a few years. I’m not sure how many people are generally diagnosed with DID per year these days and the numbers vary quite widely from what I’ve seen to under 1% of the global population to up to 7% possibly having the disorder but this definitely represented a sharp rise in the numbers being treated up to that point.

The other influential book was “Michelle Remembers”, published in 1980 about a woman who, as an adult, used recovered memory therapy to discover she had been a victim of Satanic ritual abuse as a child. Except, she hadn’t. This was kind of unfortunate as it was one of the cornerstones of the various Satanic panic movements of the 80s and 90s where gullible Americans thought absolutely ridiculous things were happening when there was no evidence for them whatsoever.

A reviewer on Amazon called Jacky sums up what was really going on with Michelle quite nicely, including the smoking gun reveal that the other author of the book who was her therapist, actually ended up as her husband:

I don’t know how anyone ever believed this woman or her man. From the first page, it’s textbook BS. She’d grown dependent on her psychiatrist, when he felt she no longer needed his services and told her, she freaked out and created this whole account outta thin air, he ran with it. They got paid, they got married and the book was shut down…because it was BS!

She does give it 5 stars though and ends the review by saying: “BUT… it’s an excellent story, Like a bad road accident, I couldn’t tear myself away. I had to keep going no matter how horrible things were, no matter how full of crap I thought this couple was, I still had to read the story.” So, thank you, Jacky.

Basically, Michelle had been going to see Lawrence Pazder for at least 3 years before any of this started coming out. After she suddenly regressed to speaking like a child, they spent at least another 600 hours together over the next 14 months delving into this childhood abuse. They then divorced their spouses and married each other. Michelle remembered being forced to attend Satanic rituals by her mother when she was 5, held by the Church of Satan.

She witnessed things like human sacrifices and was locked in a cage and assaulted multiple times. Eventually, she saw Jesus, St. Michael and the Virgin Mary who told her they would block these traumatic memories “until the time was right”. The right time being when you were falling in love with your psychiatrist and wanted him to pay you more attention, I guess.

Somewhat hilariously, the founder of the Church of Satan, Anton LaVey, threatened to sue Pazder for using his church’s name as the alleged abuse was supposed to have taken place in the mid-1950s and LaVey didn’t found the Church of Satan until 1966. The name was subsequently withdrawn but didn’t seem to clue anyone into the fact that if that was clearly wrong, how much else of the book could be believed? As our reviewer Jacky says, though, she still read it anyway.

There were also reports of another ritual lasting for over 80 days and involving hundreds of people, with deaths and self-mutilations occurring but this was in a not particularly remote location. Unless the entire town was in the same Satanic cult, nobody mentioned anything at the time. Michelle also appeared to attend school without anyone noticing the physical injuries she allegedly suffered or that she might have missed an 80-day chunk.

Basically, the whole thing was made up but again, it touched a nerve in society at the time and it didn’t matter much to the public if the things described in the book were more than a little hinky. It’s much easier to see now how other patients were also recovering false memories of Satanic Ritual Abuse or SRA, as it was there in popular books and on TV, with Michelle going on Oprah years after “Michelle Remembers” came out and nobody questioning her on the validity of her story at all. As we’ve already found out, this latest therapy technique was good for business.

As Ethan Watters says: “Promoters of recovered memory therapy held regional and national conferences; states changed their statute of limitation laws to allow for criminal prosecutions based on repressed memories. The movement rode a tide of public belief that therapists helped create.”

The other book we mentioned was the bestselling “The Courage to Heal”, written by poet Ellen Bass and abuse survivor Laura Davis. Note how the title of “psychologist” or “psychiatrist” is absent from either of their resumés. The first edition of their book included examples of Satanic ritual abuse coming from “Michelle Remembers” and other sources, all of which have been subsequently debunked but it’s that echo chamber effect of repeating the same misinformation until people start to believe that it must be true because they’ve seen it in more than one place.

And if you don’t think this moment in time was particularly influential, check this out. Ethan Watters also states: “One survey of clinicians taken in 1994 revealed that 13 percent reported seeing at least one case of a patient remembering ritualistic abuse. Thousands of patients described truly incredible scenes of ritual murders, cannibalization, gang rapes and forced pregnancies.”

The flip side to this coin, though, is what happens to the people around the patient—the parents and relatives who they believed had abused them in the past. Well, everyone has a different story here. Some patients kept it to themselves. Some cut off all ties with specific family members and would not believe that the memories they had recovered were, in fact, false.

And think about how difficult that would be. If you’ve come to believe that a traumatic chapter has been suppressed from your conscious mind but you can now access it, and then you’re being told that specific chapter is false? Isn’t that exactly what an abuser would tell you? Some people are able to come to terms with the fact that their recovered memories were not real and others are not.

This therapy has destroyed relationships and left people somewhat adrift in their own lives.

Unfortunately, lots of people have experienced CSA but what we’re talking about only applies specifically to false memories created during recovered memory therapy. This is a minority of these CSA cases and there’s a good chance that a high percentage of them did not, in fact, happen. As a piece from the British Psychological Society called “Recovered and False Memories” puts it: “Child sexual abuse is a large societal problem, and children often do not disclose abuse unless specifically asked (…).

The debate about recovered memories should not be used to deny these facts. What is important for the discipline is how it has used science to inform this debate.”

Earlier, we mentioned a couple of the symptoms of potential repressed memories being things like not being able to trust your own intuition and feeling nauseated by certain foods. Well, according to a book called “Secret Survivors” by E. Sue Blume, there are actually many pointers that you might be a victim of CSA which are extremely general and seem to run the gamut of everything you can think of, from “phobias, panic, anxiety”, to “guilt, shame, low self-esteem”, to “fear of being alone in the dark.”

There’s also one extremely specific example which is both hilarious and horrifying: “Food sensitivities/avoidance based on texture (mayonnaise) or appearance (hot dogs)”. There are so many examples of the after-effects of trauma in this book that you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who can’t check off at least a few boxes.

Let’s get back to the Satanic Panic aspect of this episode. One of the most famous things to come out of this era is the McMartin Preschool Trial where the parents of a load of kids accused the owners of a preschool of not only sexually abusing their children, but of all kinds of bizarre stuff that their kids had apparently said. This included things like seeing witches flying around, being forced to drink rabbit’s blood and being taken to a cemetery to see corpses being dug up and mutilated.

Some of these children were probably knowingly lying for fun or getting carried away with the attention the case was receiving, which was huge. Others were 100% pushed into this Satanic direction by their parents and investigators, maybe unwittingly, but with leading questions and encouragement to come up with more and more lurid details.

In a piece for the LA Times, Christopher Goffard writes: “Asked to ID his supposed abusers, one child picked two men—the city attorney and action star Chuck Norris—out of a photo lineup.” Oh dear.

Glenn Stevens was a prosecutor on the case and even he knew it was all made up. In the LA Times, he says of watching videotaped interviews with the children: “When you start watching about 20 or 30 of these things, you really see what’s happening—they’re pulling information from particular victims and asking that stuff to subsequent victims. (The case) just ballooned, monstrously so.”

Unfortunately, with “believe the children” becoming the rallying cry for the case, people were convinced that the kids were telling the truth. One child abuse prosecutor said: “No amount of questioning can make a child believe what he doesn’t believe.”

Au contraire, my friend. Eventually, after what became the longest and most expensive trial in US history, all charges were dropped against the McMartins as there was zero evidence of SRA having occurred. Ira Reiner was the District Attorney who took over at the end and dismissed the charges saying: “They operated on a single principle, which was a fallacy: No child can make up such stories, therefore it was OK to lead them and push them. These kids believed what they said because it had been planted in their heads.”

There have been various studies about implanting false memories in people, usually children. Luckily these controlled tests have been very banal, trying to see if children would remember things as fact after a few weeks of bringing up fictitious events. They weren’t trying to get the kids to believe they’d witnessed SRA, for example.

The most quoted examples are the “Lost in the Mall” study and the “Mousetrap” study. In the 1994 Mousetrap study, psychologist Stephen Ceci used a team of interviewers to speak to children aged 3 to 4 and to repeatedly ask if they’d ever got their hand caught in a mousetrap and had to go to the hospital to have it removed. This had never happened to any of the children, but after several weeks of being repeatedly asked this question, over half of the children started adding their own details to the story.

At the end of the study, when it was revealed that this had been a fake scenario, a quarter of the children still stuck to the story that it had happened and couldn’t be convinced otherwise.

A 1997 paper from Cornell University also states: “Furthermore, professionals who specialize in interviewing children could not distinguish between children telling false or true accounts when they were shown videotapes of the children’s ‘recollections.’”

You can now see how therapists can start tugging on a non-existent piece of thread and end up with a whole ball of wool. You may wonder why the children were being interviewed so many times but the technique is similar to how someone might be interviewed multiple times by the police, say. Stories change and details get added and if the interviewee is more impressionable, they may be inadvertently coerced into believing something happened when it didn’t.

The Cornell paper says: “These findings have important implications for cases involving young children, including those related to child abuse and sexual child abuse because, in some of these trials, children are interviewed many times over weeks, months, or even years. In fact, the average child in the courtroom is interviewed formally 3.5 to 11 times before a court appearance and many more times informally.” The paper was from 1997 though, so I’m not sure if procedures have changed much since then or not.

This issue may be similar to false confessions but usually in those cases the people of interest are badgered and harangued into their false statements and usually know in their own minds what actually happened.

So now we can see how this can happen and to carry the conclusions of those studies on: if the child or patient believes something to be real, a therapist would also therefore believe it had happened.

The Lost in the Mall Study was conducted by psychology professor Elizabeth Loftus who was also one of the first people to sound the alarm during the boom in DID and recovered memory therapy diagnoses. In this study, a small sample group of about 25 people were given four events from their past and were asked to write about them. One of these stories involved someone getting lost in a mall and people having to search for them.

About a quarter of the group wrote in some detail about this false event and even when they were told one of the events was false, 5 people picked a real event instead of the false one. Studies like this show how easy it can be to implant false memories or the seeds of false memories and helped instigate some pushback over the recovered memory therapy hype.

As this is an investigation into the unknown, we’ve got a little bit more investigating to do. Surely there must be some cases where recovered memory therapy actually worked and managed to unlock some real repressed memories of CSA, right? Let’s talk about the Jane Doe case.

That’s obviously not her real name although it would be quite funny if it was. This is a case from 1997 published by psychiatrists David Corwin and Erna Olafson. It was very influential and has been used as an example of recovered memories of traumatic childhood abuse in numerous law cases as well as being extensively used for education and research purposes.

Corwin first interviewed Jane Doe when she was six, as part of a custody battle between her biological mother and father. The father stated that Jane’s mother had been abusing her and Jane corroborated this during her interviews, going into detail about all the things her mother had done. Corwin came down on the side of the father and Jane’s mother lost custody and visitation rights.

These interviews were all videoed and transcribed, giving lots of information for further study.

Eleven years later, Corwin interviewed a now 17-year-old Jane again. Her father had died and she had rebuilt something of a relationship with her mother but wanted to see the videos as she was having trouble remembering what had happened to her in the past. When she saw herself talking about the abuse she’d suffered, while she remembered telling Corwin about it, she didn’t remember the incidents themselves.

She was questioned some more and did start to recall vivid memories of being hurt in the bathroom and also of her mother taking naked pictures of Jane and her brother. At the end of this meeting, Jane decided that her mother must have abused her as she didn’t think she would have lied about it at age 6.

Elizabeth Loftus and Melvin Guyer were extremely suspicious of these claims and ended up publishing a paper in the Skeptical Inquirer debunking the repressed memory part as having been suggested by Jane’s father and stepmother when she was a child. Supposed marks from Jane’s mother burning her could be put down to a simple skin condition. The naked photos information was entirely new. They also found much more evidence of her dysfunctional family life than Corwin had mentioned which suggested that the biological mother had likely never abused Jane at all.

Jane Doe sued Loftus and Guyer for defamation and invasion of privacy but they had never exposed her real name, she did so herself when filing the lawsuit. Out of the 21 counts on the lawsuit, 20 were dismissed and Jane Doe settled with Loftus over the last one as if she’d lost that she would have had to pay nearly half a million dollars in litigation fees. That was in 2007 so would have been over $680,000 today. Basically, with the thorough takedown of the Jane Doe case, the whole recovered memory therapy sector didn’t really have a leg left to stand on.

Are Repressed Memories Even Real?

I know some of you have been listening to this getting more and more annoyed and shouting out that repressed memories are real, damn you! But it turns out that this is not exactly how memory works. Yes, we know that traumatic events can be blocked off to an extent in the mind but they are not repressed to an extent that they are totally forgotten but still available for later specialist retrieval. We can choose not to think about things but we know they are there.

The way the so-called repressed memories were being recovered didn’t make sense to some psychologists such as Elizabeth Loftus, yes again, who is an expert on memory. Here’s another quote from The New York Times piece by Ethan Watters:

For memory experts like the psychology professor Elizabeth Loftus, the type of recall being described by recovered memory therapists seemed wholly new. Researchers had documented how people experiencing fear or panic will often have diminished or imperfect recall of a disturbing event. They also knew that people can be motivated not to think about a distressing memory and that they could recall an incident from childhood and realize, as an adult, it was sexual abuse.

But these and many other forms of memory distortions were nothing like the repression being described. Therapists across the country were suddenly certain that horrendous and repeated abuse could instantaneously be walled away in the unconscious, where it would remain inaccessible for decades, until unlocked in therapy and re-experienced with perfect clarity. For Dr. Loftus and others, there was simply no support in the scientific literature or in all the historical stories of human suffering that supported this type of repression and retrieval.

The fact is, though, like we said at the beginning, memory is a slippery fish. It’s not really possible to run trials on the subject of repression, as, like Crystal Raypole puts it on Healthline.com: “To run an objective, high-quality study, you’d need to expose participants to trauma, which is unethical.”

We can sometimes tell if a memory is false if there is evidence to the contrary like contradicting facts or some sort of physical evidence or if it’s something obviously untrue like being beamed up by aliens. The piece from the British Psychological Society elaborates on this by saying: “For methodological reasons, case studies demonstrating recovered memories of real events are more difficult to find. While a memory for space abduction can be taken as prima facie evidence of a false memory, to show a true recovered memory it is necessary to show that (a) the event occurred, (b) the person could not remember the event for a period subsequently, and (c) the information recovered could not have been gained from other sources.”

So as we can see, it’s pretty much impossible to prove a true recovered memory is exactly that.

Other things that could be at play are dissociating from the event, which may block or even alter the memory until years later when you might realize what actually happened and hopefully be better equipped to deal with it. You can also use denial to such an extent that memories of certain events refuse to form completely. Raypole gives the example of: “a child who witnesses domestic violence between their parents. They might temporarily check out mentally.

As a result, they might not have a ‘picture’ of what happened in their memory. Still, they get tense when watching a fight scene in a movie.”

There is also dissociative amnesia which the British Psychological Society says: ”(..)involves a more widespread reversible deficit in memory retrieval that is not attributable to brain damage. It typically affects autobiographical memory for events occurring prior to a stressful event and is well recognised in the context of exposure to trauma.”

We know that Dissociative Identity Disorder, or DID, is a real diagnosis in which people can experience different personalities which do not necessarily know about the others. This is different to Dissociative Amnesia, however, and Dissociative Amnesia, while a symptom of DID, is more likely to have occurred in patients than therapists suddenly discovering a whole tranche of the population with multiple personalities.

Dissociative amnesia is usually related to stress or trauma and not physical injury. The National Alliance on Mental Illness, or NAMI, gives the examples of a car crash survivor blocking out the event, an abuse victim only remembering small bits of their ordeals, a generalized amnesia where the person can’t remember any details about themselves or their life and systematized amnesia which might be where a person can remember everything fine apart from a particular person or topic. In these cases, the amnesia might resolve itself or it might not.

The general consensus is that the memories, if lost, are lost, forgotten or never formed. They are not walled off waiting to be recovered.

The vivid, in-the-moment physical responses that some patients were having with recovered memories could also be explained by the fact that they are only now coming to terms with something awful that didn’t make sense before and they’re overcome with the horror of it.

In a piece on Psychology Today called “Forget Me Not: The Persistent Myth of Repressed Memories”, David J. Ley writes:

”(…)research cited by Otgaar, et al. suggests that between 40-89 percent of the general lay public believe that traumatic memories can be suppressed and forgotten, that even an act of murder can be suppressed. Events of our past may sometimes come back to us in sudden recollection. But research finds no evidence that this happens with traumatic memories.

Indeed, prospective research (following people after a traumatic event) finds that though trauma victims would like to forget their experiences, they do not. Traumas that involve brain damage may, and do, interfere in memory, but this is a neurological effect, not a psychological one.

Eventually, the recovered memory fad died down and some patients ended up suing their therapists. The clinics and specialist units for DID started closing down as it turned out that not so many people were suffering from it as previously thought. Repressed memories started being treated more sceptically, with LegalMatch.com now telling us: “In criminal law, the use of repressed memories as evidence is generally met with skepticism and may not be admitted if the court finds them unreliable or if the process of recovering the memories involves suggestive techniques.”

Of course, there are detractors to the detractors as well. Lots of people have come for Elizabeth Loftus, saying her research is flawed or condemning her for going after Jane Doe, although that was more of an attack on her personally and not really anything to do with her work. I found a piece on TeachTrauma.com called “Are ‘Recovered Memories’ Reliable?” which notes: “Dalenberg et al.(…) observed that researchers who challenge the reliability of recovered memories have not offered a single study in which all or most of the recovered memories were false, nor has any study in which evidence of trauma was systematically sought found an absence of corroboration in most recovered memory clients.”

The thing here, though, is that you can’t prove every memory is false. Without some sort of checking system, it’s impossible. What the challengers are doing is presenting alternative suggestions for what these recovered memories might be i.e. false memories or fabrications. We’ve seen in the course of this episode how people can be fed false memories or create them themselves and while it may not have been done knowingly, it’s a branch of therapy that can easily sway impressionable minds.

In the end, even Sigmund Freud wavered on his definition of a repressed memory when he found out that things patients were telling him weren’t necessarily true. He also attributed his patients’ symptoms to repressed sexual fantasies—of course—and used the term “repression” interchangeably to refer to both a conscious and unconscious process.

If you do feel that you have some unresolved memories or whatever going on, then talking to a therapist or seeing a specialist is still the best way to go. An ethical therapist will not ask you leading questions or try to push you in one direction or another. They won’t jump straight to CSA but they won’t reject the idea straight away either. You’ll find many therapists still offering recovered memory therapies, just know what you’re getting into if that’s what you decide to do.

Also, just a note that in the UK at least, you don’t need any formal license, training or qualifications at all to call yourself a counsellor or a psychotherapist. To ensure you find someone who has done the training and got the qualifications, check places like the UK Council for Psychotherapy’s website at psychotherapy.org.uk for a register of alleged non-charlatans. Or you can call me, psychotherapist Katy Watson at your service.

Not really, just kidding. I was having trouble thinking of how to end this piece, but then remembered how we talked about getting a hand caught in a mousetrap so I think that experience should be a lesson for us all.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is recovered memory therapy?

Recovered memory therapy is a form of psychotherapy where therapists help patients uncover repressed memories, often of traumatic events, that the patient has supposedly forgotten. Techniques used include hypnosis, age regression, brainspotting, somatic transformation therapy, and primal therapy.

What are false memories?

False memories are recollections of events that did not actually occur. In the context of recovered memory therapy, false memories can be implanted or suggested by therapists, often leading patients to believe they experienced traumatic events that never happened.

How can false memories be created?

False memories can be created through leading questions, hypnosis, and other suggestive techniques used by therapists. Patients in a suggestible state may start to believe and recall events that never occurred, often influenced by cultural narratives or the therapist’s beliefs.

What is the significance of the book ‘Sybil’ in the context of recovered memory therapy?

The book ‘Sybil’ by Flora Rheta Schreiber was influential in popularizing the idea of multiple personalities and repressed memories. It was later revealed that the story was largely fabricated, with the real Sybil admitting she made up her multiple personalities to gain attention and support from her therapist.

What is the ‘Lost in the Mall’ study?

The ‘Lost in the Mall’ study, conducted by Elizabeth Loftus, involved giving participants false memories of getting lost in a mall as children. About a quarter of the participants incorporated this false event into their personal narratives, demonstrating how easily false memories can be implanted.

What is the McMartin Preschool Trial?

The McMartin Preschool Trial was a highly publicized case where parents accused the owners of a preschool of sexually abusing their children and engaging in Satanic rituals. The trial, which became the longest and most expensive in U.S. history, ultimately resulted in all charges being dropped due to lack of evidence.

What is the ‘Mousetrap’ study?

The ‘Mousetrap’ study, conducted by Stephen Ceci, involved repeatedly asking children if they had ever gotten their hand caught in a mousetrap. Over half of the children eventually added details to the false story, and a quarter still believed it had happened even after being told it was fake.

What is the Jane Doe case?

The Jane Doe case involved a girl who, at age six, claimed her mother had abused her. Eleven years later, she recalled more details but was later found to have been influenced by her father and stepmother. The case was used to support the idea of repressed memories but was later debunked.

What is the current stance on repressed memories in legal and psychological communities?

The use of repressed memories as evidence in criminal law is generally met with skepticism and may not be admitted if the court finds them unreliable or if the process of recovering the memories involves suggestive techniques. Many therapists still offer recovered memory therapies, but ethical practitioners avoid leading questions and suggestive techniques.

What is the significance of the book ‘Michelle Remembers’?

The book ‘Michelle Remembers’ by Michelle Smith and Lawrence Pazder claimed that Michelle had been a victim of Satanic ritual abuse as a child. The book was later debunked, with Michelle admitting she made up the story to gain attention from her therapist, who later became her husband.

Sources

• Original Decoding the Unknown video: Recovered Memory Therapy: How We Create False Memories
• Hero image source by Benderbr / openverse, cc0.