Terence Hines - Pseudoscience and the Paranormal

A second variable operates in the case of humans to make memories of events that took place during early childhood and infancy difficult to recall. This is the development of language. Infants and very young children have no-or at best very limited—language skills. As language develops, it becomes, among other things, a major way of storing information in memory. Adult human memory is language-oriented. Memories of events that took place before language developed must be stored in some nonlinguistic fashion, if they are stored at all. Since the human adult typically uses language processes to code and retrieve memories, the mismatch between the type of coding of prelanguage (infant and early childhood) memories and postlanguage (later childhood and adult) memories will render the former difficult to retrieve. White and Pillemer (1979) have discussed this idea at length.

Many experimental studies have been conducted to validate the existence of repression. Holmes (1974) has reviewed this large literature. He concluded that “there is no consistent research evidence to support the hypothesis” that repression actually exists (p. 649). He further commented that the failure of numerous studies to support the reality of repression was “especially notable in view of the wide variety of approaches which have been tried and the persistent effort which has been made during the last half century to find support” for repression (p. 649).

More recent research on repression has been no more successful in turning up evidence in support of the concept, although claims to the contrary are sometimes made. For example, Davis and Schwartz (1987) argue that the results of their study, in which they asked college students to recall emotional memories from childhood, shows the existence of repression. These authors found that students they termed “repressors’ recalled fewer negative emotional memories from childhood than did other students. However, they also found that these “repressors” recalled fewer emotional memories from childhood for which the associated emotion was positive. What Davis and Schwartz (1987) demonstrated is that some people are better than others at recalling emotional experiences, positive or negative, from childhood. This is not repression.

The unconscious plays a large role in psychoanalytic theory. It includes “instinctual drives and infantile goals, hopes, wishes, and needs that have been repressed, or concealed from conscious awareness, because they cause internal conflict” (Bootzin et al. 1986, p. 455). Thus, the Freudian unconscious is a seething cauldron of lusts, desires, and frustrations. Does such an unconscious actually exist? Research in cognitive psychology has revealed a great deal about the nature of conscious versus nonconscious cognitive processing. It is clear from this research (for a review see any recent cognitive psychology text) that a great deal of cognitive processing goes on outside conscious awareness. Further, such processing cannot be brought to consciousness even when an individual wishes to do so. However, the character of the “unconscious” processes that have been discovered by cognitive psychologists are different from the processes in the unconscious postulated by Freud. For example, it has been repeatedly shown that when a single word is presented visually, that presentation activates a stored representation of the word’s meaning in the subject’s long-term memory. In addition to activating the presented word’s semantic representation, it also activates the semantic representations of words related in meaning to the presented word. Thus, the presentation of the word king will also activate the internal representation corresponding to the word queen . This activation of the representations of both king and queen is automatic in the sense that it takes place without any conscious awareness on the part of the subject. Further, the subject cannot block such activation should he or she wish to do so. This activation process can be likened to a reflex. It simply happens once a word is presented. It takes place extremely rapidly, with some activation demonstrable as soon as 40 milliseconds following word presentation. The activation is also short-lived, lasting no more than a second or so in most situations. So, here is an example of a cognitive process that is unconscious in the sense that the individual is not aware of it and, apparently, cannot become consciously aware of it. Nonetheless, it is a very different type of process than those postulated by Freud to be taking place in the unconscious.

Some psychologists have misinterpreted work in cognitive psychology and the closely related discipline of neuroscience as supporting the existence of an unconscious of the type Freud proposed. Miller (1986), for example, argues that such research “may be rallying to Freud’s support” (p. 60). Some of the research Miller discusses in his article does, in fact, show the existence of an unconscious. None of it, however, supports an unconscious even remotely like that hypothesized by Freud. The argument is seriously flawed that states that because research in cognitive psychology and neuroscience has shown that some mental processes take place outside consciousness, Freud’s specific postulations about the nature of the unconscious have been supported. Such an argument is equivalent to an astrologer pointing out, correctly, that both astrology and astronomy postulate the existence of stars, and then arguing that because modem research in astronomy and astrophysics verifies the existence of stars, that research also shows that astrology is valid.

The Freudian concept of repression was the keystone of one of the most bizarre and damaging episodes in the history of psychotherapy: the repressed (or recovered) memory hysteria that broke out in the late 1980s. While this has now greatly abated, it has not totally passed from the scene. The episode grew out of a concern about a very real and serious problem—sexual abuse of children by parents, relatives, and other caregivers. However, as the legitimate recognition that such abuse had been underappreciated and underreported for years grew, so did fantastical claims that hundreds of thousands, even millions, of people, mostly women, had been abused as children but had repressed the memories of these hideous events. In some cases, the recovered memories included truly horrific accounts of satanic ritual abuse and the killing and eating of children. Several women “remembered” that they had been used as “baby factories” in their adolescence; the babies they gave birth to were then used for ritual torture and cannibalism. Many women, including the actress Rosanne Barr, “remembered” incidents of abuse that occurred with they were less than a year old, three months old in Barr’s case. Another common finding was that the therapist discovered that patients suffered from multiple personality disorder (MPD—now usually termed Dissociative Identity Disorder, or DID). The 1988 publication of the book Courage to Heal by Ellen Bass and Laura Davis brought the recovered memory claims to wide public attention, as it soon became a best-seller. This and similar books stated that not only had millions of women repressed their memories of childhood abuse, but that the unremembered abuse was the cause of numerous psychological problems these women suffered from. In her book Secret Survivor , E. Sue Blume (1990) argued that half of all women were sexually abused as children. Further—and this was the truly damaging and dangerous aspect of the ideology of what became known as “repressed memory therapy”—the only way to deal with and cure these psychological problems was for the patient recover (i.e., bring back to consciousness) memories of the abuse and confront their abuser(s). This therapeutic approach was, in fact, based on fundamental misunderstandings about how human memory worked. As such, when implemented, it was a recipe for disaster.