Terence Hines - Pseudoscience and the Paranormal

This case shows the power of belief in repressed memories and the techniques used to “recover” memories of events that never took place. Not only can individuals become convinced they were victims of abuses that never took place, it is also possible for a person to convince himself that he committed terrible crimes when, in fact, he did not. At the time of Ingram’s trial, little of this was known, so it could not be used in his defense. He was convicted and remains in jail in spite of pleas for a pardon.

The nature of human memory was a central issue in both the recovered /repressed memory controversy and the controversy over claims of satanic ritual abuse. As noted above, by the time the recovered repressed memory issue came to the fore, memory researchers had long since abandoned the concept of repression as yet another Freudian myth. The therapists who accepted the reality of repression were simply unacquainted with anything approaching the current research on the real nature of human memory. This may seem surprising. One might think that a person trained in psychotherapy would have had to have obtained a solid background in the scientific study of how the mind works, and that this would have included much material on memory. In fact, many therapists—even those with master’s or doctoral degrees—obtain their degrees with essentially no training in the nature of memory. Many programs granting master’s or doctoral degrees in psychotherapy require little or no course work on the scientific understanding of how the mind actually works. It is rather as if programs training jet aircraft mechanics did not require the mechanics to know how a jet engine worked! In many cases, the only information about memory the therapists have will have come from a long ago and mostly forgotten undergraduate course.

This lack of training in the scientific basis of how the mind and its various components function is the reflection of a sometimes hostile and frequently dismissive attitude on the part of therapists and would-be therapists that such information would be of any use to them. In my role as a college professor I often advise students who want to be psychology majors. When I tell them that the psychology major (at least at Pace University) requires that they take several courses covering human cognitive function and brain function, as well as statistical analysis, an all-to-frequent reply is something like, “Gee, I want to be a psychotherapist. Why do I have to take all that science stuff?” This strikes me as the equivalent of someone who wants to be a surgeon whining about having to take “all that anatomy stuff.” Certainly, the tragedy of the repressed I recovered memory debacle would have very likely been avoided had therapists been better trained in the facts about memory so they could have avoided, from the outset, the trap of believing that the methods of “recovery” they used were producing memories of real events.

As of the mid 1980s, when the satanic ritual abuse hysteria was getting rolling, cognitive scientists and psychologists already knew a great deal about how memory worked—and about how it didn’t. Among the things that were clear by then was that memory was often unreliable. But not just unreliable in the rather trivial sense that from time to time we can’t pull out of memory information that we want or need. Rather, as the pioneering work of Loftus (noted previously on page 172) made clear, memory could be distorted by information presented in questions about an event. Leading questions, for example, added new (false) information to memory and resulted in the “rememberer” really remembering events that never took place . These studies, however, had been done with college-aged subjects, not children. The controversy over the reports and charges made by the child witnesses in the satanic ritual abuse cases motivated a large amount of research specifically aimed at assessing the reliability of children’s memories and their susceptibility to various suggestive questioning techniques.

In what is now a classic experiment Bruck et al. (1997) made up an event that they knew from talking to the parents had not happened to a child: for example, getting a finger trapped in a mouse trap and having to go to the hospital. Upon initial questioning, the children correctly reported that the event had not happened. But all it took was several repeated questionings, spaced several days apart, and the admonition to “think about it,” to get a substantial percentage of the children to believe that the event occurred. Some children came to “remember” the event with considerable detail and were resistant to acknowledging that it had never occurred when so informed. Note the ease with which a false memory of a very unpleasant event had been created—no high-pressure tactics were used. Obviously, with the high-pressure tactics used by the investigators in the satanic ritual abuse cases, the proportion of children reporting horrible events would be greater. In a related study using college-aged students, Loftus (1997) showed that the simple repetition of a question could create a memory of a childhood event that had never taken place, this being lost in a shopping mall. Again, all it took for memories of this nonevent to form was being asked about it several times in succession during questioning sessions spaced several days apart. These two studies serve to give the flavor of a much larger literature on this topic. A thorough review can be found in Bruck and Ceci (1999).

Therapists often claim that they can easily tell the difference between children’s real memories and false or created memories. But the evidence shows this not to be the case. Bruck and Ceci (1999) review several studies that show that “trained professionals in the fields of child development, mental health, and forensics… cannot reliably discriminate between children whose reports are accurate from those whose reports are inaccurate as the result of suggestive interviewing techniques” (p. 432).

Most of the time memory serves us well. But studies of the conditions under which it fails us—misleads us into believing that something happened when it did not, for example—have led to a view of memory very different from what might be called the “common view” of memory. In the common view, memory is likened to a videotape recorder. The type may be fuzzy, or even erased, but if an image appears on the tape, it must be real. In this view, the act of remembering is basically a passive process of retrieving some piece of information that is stored in memory. Research not only on the suggestibility of memory in adults and children, but also on many other aspects of memory, shows that the act of remembering is much more complex. Remembering is an interactive process in which the information that is stored can be altered in different ways (added to, made more or less specific, etc.) by the situation the “rememberer” finds herself in. For an excellent (albeit quite technical) review of this area of memory research, see Koriat et al. (2000). This research shows that the conditions under which memory becomes most unreliable, while uncommon in everyday life, are just those conditions found in the therapy sessions of recovered/repressed memory therapists and the interrogation rooms of child-care workers, social workers, and psychologists who elicit reports of horrible satanic abuse of children.

Freud was a physician who had considerable training in neurology. This would strongly influence the development of psychoanalytic theory. Basically, Freud felt that psychoanalysis was a biological or neurological theory of the mind and that the constructs found in psychoanalytic theory—such as repression, the unconscious, and all the rest—were neurologically real. Much of his theory was based on what was believed about the neurophysiology of the nerve cell (the neuron) at the time the theory was being developed, in the late 1800s. Unfortunately, as McCarley and Hobson (1977) point out, “many of Freud’s ideas about the function of neurons were simply and fundamentally wrong” (p. 1213). These fundamental errors became incorporated into psychoanalysis.