1999 LECTURE SERIES

The Myth of Repressed Memory: False Memories and Allegations of Sexual Abuse

Dr. Elizabeth Loftus
Department of Psychology
University of Washington
February 2, 1999

Back in the early days of medicine, some 2,500 years ago in Greece, a guiding principle was formulated. The principle first, do no harm. You don't want your patient walking into a doctor's office with one disease, and walking out with two diseases. But that's exactly the kind of thing that has happened in our society over the last decade.

I'm talking about something that has been referred to as the "repressed memory" controversy, and maybe you've heard it referred to in other ways. Sometimes I've heard people refer to it as the major mental health crisis of the 20th Century. In fact, I even heard somebody refer to it not long ago as the lobotomy of the mental health industry, a reference to the pre-frontal lobotomy procedures that were used by the medical profession some 40 years ago or so.

I'm talking about a very specific kind of situation. For example, a person goes into therapy. She's got one set of problems or maybe she's a little depressed. Maybe she's got an eating disorder. Maybe she's not that interested in sex right now. Maybe her self-esteem is down, and she ends up with a therapist who says, "everyone I've seen with these problems was sexually abused as a child. I wonder if anything like that happened to you?" And there begins a process of questioning and maybe a little hypnosis, maybe a little sodium panathol to try to excavate these allegedly buried trauma memories.

I first got interested in this problem less than a decade ago. I was doing some studies of memory and memory distortion and occasionally testifying in court cases. A defense attorney who had been a public defender and tried many cases in his career called me up. He said, "I have the most remarkable case. I have never seen a case like this. My client is accused of murder. His name is George Franklin, and the only evidence against him is the testimony of his daughter, Eileen. She says that when she was about eight years old, she saw her father kill her best friend, back in 1969. She saw her father rape her best friend. She buried the memory for 20 years and then the memory came back to her in 1989. She called the police, and the police believed her."

The prosecutor decided to prosecute George Franklin for this allegedly buried trauma memory of the murder. Eileen also reported that she had recovered memories of extensive brutalization, rapes and other crimes, committed upon her by her father and other men. The only evidence against this man who was tried in San Mateo County, California in 1990 was this supposedly repressed and de-repressed memory. I had heard about repression - that's a Freudian idea. But as an expert witness, now as a consultant hired by the defense to look into the evidence, I was stunned when I started to comb the literature. I found there were anecdotes that supposedly supported the idea of repressed brutalization, but there was no good scientific support for this concept. In fact, I had come across an extensive chapter by a clinical psychologist named David Holmes, Professor of Psychology at the University of Kansas. He had reviewed 60 years of efforts to try to document this fundamental idea of repression and said there was no good scientific support. And by the way, Holmes has updated his analysis in the Harvard Mental Health letter. He says 70 years of efforts to document this fundamental idea have shown no good support whatsoever.

Despite the fact that there didn't seem to be any good support for the idea of somebody repressing a murder and extensive rapes and other crimes and then reliably recovering this later, a jury in San Mateo County, California convicted George Franklin of murder. It was virtually the first time in our society that a human being had ever been convicted of murder and sent to prison, based on nothing other than an allegation of a repressed and a de-repressed memory.

George Franklin did spend about five or six years in prison. He lost every appeal in the California system. And finally, when he got into the federal system, a federal judge overturned his conviction. Why? One of the major reasons was because the defense attorney in this case was not allowed to bring in all the media coverage back in 1969, when little Susie Nason was found with her head crushed with a rock. The defense attorney was prevented from bringing in all that media coverage that would have shown where all this detail in Eileen Franklin's memory could have come from. Now Franklin is suing the prosecutors, the police, and others for planting false memories in the mind of his daughter and conspiring to deprive him of his civil rights.

I thought that would be the end of my short career with the topic of repression. I would not have any idea that my career with the topic of repression was just getting underway. A year later a celebrity came forward and said she had recovered repressed memories of her mother and father molesting her beginning when she was six months old. What are we suppose to do with this situation? Without independent corroboration, there is no way to know whether a memory is real or a product of some other process like fantasy or suggestion. There is no way of knowing whether a memory is real or not. Yet, in this case, we do know a little more. This person was claiming she had memories from the age of six months. We know, as cognitive psychologists, that adults don't have concrete, reliable memories of things that happened in the first couple months of life - or even the first couple years of life.

The next thing happened in the Washington State legislature. In 1989, Washington was the first state to pass legislation that stated that if you wanted to sue someone whom you said molested you when you were a child - no matter how long ago it was - if you repressed your memories and then the memories came back to you, you had some number of years from that point in time to file a lawsuit. Within two years of that date, 12 states enacted similar legislation.

There is a new category of lawsuit that is taking over from the earlier generation. There are now a group of women who have discovered in their psychotherapy that family members extensively brutalized them. Sometimes they file criminal charges, sometimes they file civil cases. The families have been wrecked. They then have discovered that this never happened. Then they sue their former therapists for malpractice, for planting false memories. One of the first big cases where this happened was a case against a psychiatrist named Dr. Diane Humananski. A number of her patients accused her of using a variety of suggestive and coercive techniques to get them to remember that they had been sexually molested, to get them to remember false memories of sexual abuse.

The first patient to bring her case to a jury was Vannette Hammond. Vannette was a fairly well functioning person. She had a bit of generalized anxiety. She went into psychotherapy in September of 1988, and just ten months later, by June of 1989, Dr. Humananski had diagnosed Multiple Personality Disorder, MPD. Dr. Humananski would manage to get Vannette to remember that she had been molested by her mother and numerous relatives when she was nine months old and three months old, and that she'd been forced to have a baby when she was eight years old. She'd been forced to go to satanic rituals, where there were animal and child sacrifices.

She would develop 100 personalities. She developed female personalities, male personalities, even a dog personality. I was looking over the names of her personalities one day, and I came across this curiosity. Why did she have a personality called "Just Me." Most of her personalities had normal names, like Sarah or David. So when I had a chance to interview Vannette, right before I would testify on her behalf, in her medical malpractice case against her psychiatrist in St. Paul, Minnesota, I asked Vannette, why she had normal names for most of her personalities and then this one called, "Just Me?" Vannette told me that she went in one day and Dr. Humananski said, "Who are you? You're strange today." Vannette said, "Well, I'm me." The doctor replied, "No, I can tell, you're someone else today. You're someone else. Who are you?" Vannette said, "No. I'm just me." So "Just Me" became the 89th personality, and there went on to be a few more.

In this particular case, the jury in St. Paul awarded Vannette Hammond and her family $2.67 million. But how is it that this happened? If we look at some of the materials that were prepared in the context of this litigation and look at the accusations against Dr. Humananski you can see a little bit about what might have happened in this case. The defendant in this case was accused of failing to inform the plaintiffs, which means Vannette, her husband and daughter, of the serious risks and dangers of several treatments like hypnosis and guided imagery, sodium panathol to recover memories, reaction experiences and group therapy for personality disorders. The defendant was accused of ordering her patient to use hypnosis tapes daily, without disclosing the well-known risks of hypnosis. The defendant was accused of contaminating the diagnosis with suggestive and abusive books and videos. The defendant was accused of using negligent, misleading and false statements and projecting them to the Hammond family about hypnosis, memory and repression, such as telling her patient that by using relaxation and imagery, she could accurately recover so-called repressed memories from the early months of life. This defendant was further accused of telling her patient that sodium panathol is a truth serum and one cannot lie or produce false memories under the influence of sodium panathol. That is absolutely not true. The defendant was accused further of engaging her patient in terrifying and bizarre indoctrination, telling her patient, for example, that Baptist and Catholic ministers were in Satanic cults that murdered children. She told her patient that the American medical system was heavily infiltrated by satanic cults and that the nurses on her unit were in the cult. And finally, this defendant was further accused of plying her patient with false statistics that wrecked her relationships with males, such as telling her patient that 50 percent of males were sex abusers, and also telling her patient that all presidents of the United States were either abusers or abuse victims. In this particular case the jury did decide to award a significant amount to this patient. A year later, Elizabeth Carlson went to trial against the same therapist. There was a different jury, but the same location, St. Paul, Minnesota. She won a $2.5 million jury verdict. A year after that, a Texas jury awarded $5.9 million award to Lynn Carl, against her therapist. And the largest settlement or jury verdict to date, $10.6 million against a psychiatrist and hospital in Chicago on behalf of Patricia Burgess and her three children who were also diagnosed at three and five years old as having Multiple Personality Disorder and hospitalized in Chicago. Right now, at this moment, there is a criminal prosecution going on in Houston, Texas where certain mental health professionals are being prosecuted for planting false memories in the minds of their patients. You may not have realized that there is a crime on the books about planting false memories, if you're in a legal profession. Well that's not the name of the crime. The crime is defrauding American insurance companies. The means and mode of accomplishing that crime is through the planting of false memories, and we'll see what eventually happens in this Houston case.

I get accused sometimes of presenting a couple of bad apples and trying to tarnish this profession. I'm not trying to do that. Every profession has bad apples. There are bad psychology professors, there are bad cab drivers, there are bad lawyers, there are bad everything. We know that this is more than just a few bad apples from some recent psychological surveys of the beliefs and practices of mental health professionals. One of these surveys, published in 1995, shows that mental health professionals who are trained and educated, express beliefs and practices that some of us would consider risky if not catastrophic. These include the use of hypnosis and guided imagery to try to extract supposedly buried trauma memories, guided imagery related to abuse situations, instructions to give free rein to the imagination, dream interpretation and so on. How is it that you can get people to believe in experiences like this? How can you get people to believe in any kind of false childhood experiences? Not to mention some of the more horrific experiences that some of these women have been led to believe in.

When I had originally started to get involved in these court cases, there had been a lot of research in the area of memory and memory distortion. There had been a lot of studies of how leading questions could alter or contaminate somebody's memory. There had been studies of hypnotic pseudo-memories. But often these studies involved just changing people's memories for a few details here and there. What if you wanted to try to get someone to believe that they had an experience in childhood that they never really had? How would you do it? One of the first obstacles you would face, is a Human Subjects Review Committee. Every college and university campus, every scientific institution that's involved in research with human participants, has to worry about not doing harm to human subjects. Even in the name of science, we can't go out and plant false memories of your father molesting you. But is there some other way that we could try to plant or suggest a memory? Something that would have been maybe mildly traumatic if it had happened, but something that never really did happen?

I sent my students off to the library. They came back after scouring the literature with some findings. What we could do is get people to believe that when they were a kid, they were lost in a shopping mall or other public place. They were frightened, they were crying, they were ultimately rescued by an elderly person and reunited with the family. We could get this through the Human Subjects Committee.

We talked to our subjects' families. We got information about the early childhood of our subject, and we used that information to talk to the subject about some true experiences, things that actually had happened. We also tried to plant a false memory about being lost in this big public place and frightened, crying, rescued by an elderly person. All of the memories that we presented to our subjects were presented in a simple, basic, paragraph. And so, here's what we tried to suggest to a particular subject, a 20-year old Vietnamese American named Tran.

We suggested that we had talked to her relatives and we found out that one day she, her mother, brother and sister all went to the Bremerson K?Mart. She would have been about five years old. Her mom gave her some money to get a blueberry Icee, and she ran ahead and eventually she got lost and was found crying to an elderly Chinese woman. And by the time we were done, after three fairly suggestive interviews with Tran, she was remembering a relatively detailed version of this event that had been completely made up by her relatives along with our help. She was saying to us, "I remember we went to the shoe department, and so after I got lost, I thought maybe everyone went there. So I went back to the shoe department. I looked in all the aisles. I was crying. I was really young. I was just crying. I walked down all the aisles. I walked to the shoe department. Then I walked to the back of the K?Mart where all the sheets and comforters were. Then I went to where the electronics were, and I was crying."

Across all of our subjects in all of our critical events, the proportion of subjects who remembered something about the real events that they had been asked about during the three interviews is constant at about 70 percent. About 25 percent of our sample remember something, all or part, about the false event that we suggested came from their older relative. What this study shows is that it is possible, with a fairly strong suggestion, to get a significant minority of people to remember an event that would have been at least mildly traumatic, an event that never happened.

You may be saying to yourself that getting lost is a very common experience, and can't be compared to satanic abuse or other bizarre experiences presented in these cases. Fortunately, another investigator, Professor Ira Hyman from Western Washington University, used a similar methodology with his collaborators and did exactly that. He got relatives of adult subjects to collaborate in the suggestion of false experiences that never happened. In this case, the false memory was when you were a kid, you had to go to a hospital. You had a horrible pain in your ear, and you had to go and spend the night in the hospital for a suspected ear infection. By the end of the second interview, 20 percent of this sample of adults had bought into all or part of that false memory.

Is it possible that in some psychotherapy there is suggestion that's not so strong, that's subtler, but perhaps for that reason even more insidious? In scanning some of the writings of psychotherapists and some of the tapes that I got as a result of my involvement in court cases, I was having to figure out what's going on in psychotherapy by analyzing the artifacts that these therapists leave behind. The writings, the speeches they give at work shops - these are little remnants that are available to figure out what they do, because therapy is done in private.

Marian Geary, who is now teaching in New Zealand, Chuck Manning, a graduate student, Jim Sherman, Professor of Social Psychology at Indiana University, and I published a study a couple of years ago in which we wondered about the effect of getting people to imagine they had experiences that they didn't really have. It's a simple method. You ask people about childhood, giving them a life events inventory, and then you wait a couple of weeks, and then you have the subjects try to imagine that they had experiences in childhood. Some of them are going to imagine four events and not imagine others. Different subjects will imagine different events. Finally, you assess some measure of what happened in childhood again. The kinds of things that we had people imagine were things that they had previously denied happening, so we had certain critical events.

In controlled conditions when people are not apt to engage in the act of imagination, they mostly give the same answers. However, after a single one-minute act of imagination, the chance of increasing their confidence that they had a certain experience rises more after a single act of imagination than without that imagination. And that's what we're calling "Imagination Inflation." A single act of imagining that you had an experience as a child can make you more confident that you had the experience even though you previously denied it.

Are we all susceptible to these kinds of manipulations? Are some of us more susceptible than others? The Disassociative Experiences Scale is an instrument that measures self reported lapses in memory and attention. We all have some lapses in memory and attention. How often does it happen to you that you are listening to somebody talk and all of a sudden you realize you're not hearing what they're saying? We wondered whether these self reported lapses in memory and attention would be related to the extent to which you would be susceptible to these kinds of memory contamination.

We did an imagination inflation study in conjunction with John Paddick, a clinical psychologist and former president of the Georgia Psychological Association. We asked people about their childhood. We asked them again, some weeks later. We had some of them imagine experiences that they previously denied. Subjects showed more increased confidence about an experience they previously denied after a single act of imagination. With imagination, 38 percent of the items increased, relative to only 21 percent increasing in those who had not engaged in imagination. The Disassociative Experiences Scale, the extent of self-reported lapses in memory and attention, strongly correlates with susceptibility to this manipulation.

Why is that important? Many of these patients who go into therapy are patients who do experience disassociation. They report lapses in memory and attention. And so it may be that the very techniques that are being used with some of these patients are techniques that are being used on a patient population that is especially vulnerable to influence that might be damaging to them. There's been criticism of some of this work that it doesn't have any bearing on real psychotherapy, and these simulations don't look anything like real psychotherapy.

With a collaborator, Julianna Mizzone from the University of Florence, we tried to design a procedure that does simulate a psychotherapy session. We take a vivid, recurring dream from our subject and we have a clinical psychologist interpret that dream. Dream interpretation is common in psychotherapy. Our subjects told about their childhood and then told about their childhood again, three to four weeks later, as part of one experiment. But unbeknownst to these subjects, they were lured into a separate experiment as well. Different consent form, different cover story, different location, and their dream was interpreted. The psychologist took whatever they dreamed about and told the subjects that he interpreted it to mean that they had been lost in a big public place for a long period of time when they were children. The subject says, "I don't really have any memory of that, but I suppose it's possible." And then, unbeknownst to these subjects, one to two weeks later they would talk to a completely different person as part of a totally different experiment. What happened? After this one-half hour of dream interpretation and mini-therapy, 89 percent increased their confidence that they had had this experience. Fifty-eight percent increased their confidence they were abandoned by their parents before the age of three, and 79 percent increased their confidence that they felt lonely and lost in an unfamiliar place before the age of three.

So in a simulation that far more resembles a psychotherapy patient interaction, many people change their beliefs about experiences that they previously denied. We've shown in these studies that you can distort people's memories not only with a fairly strong form of suggestion. The most recent of these studies, a wonderful doctoral dissertation from the University of British Columbia by Steven Porter, shows that about half of his adult sample can be led to remember that they were victims as children of serious animal attacks and similar traumatic events. We've also shown that with more subtle forms of suggestion, like inducing people to engage in imagination or interpreting their dreams, we can get people to alter their autobiographies, either their beliefs about their childhood or even to develop concrete memories of things that are only things that we have suggested.

I think that this tells us about something that Kathy Ketchum and I tried to convey in our book, The Myth of Repressed Memory. We asked readers to think of a mind as a bowl filled with clear water. Now imagine each memory as a teaspoon of milk stirred into the water. Every adult mind holds thousands of murky memories. We're thinking about what it means to absorb suggestive influences and use them to supplement, alter, or contaminate memory.

In no way would I want to argue that just because we can contaminate memory in this way, that every time somebody remembers something - even something traumatic that they haven't thought about in a long time - that it must be false. That would be a wrong inference. But I do think that this work helps us to understand how it is that people can come to develop memories for things that most of us would agree are relatively impossible. These people don't need to be lying. But maybe they have come to really believe that they've had these experiences.

The implications of these findings for people in our society are enormous. If people who enter therapy are being diverted away from the true cause of their problems and from getting the help that would really make a difference in their life, obviously this kind of treatment is not doing these people any good. And I have been worried. I used to think it's just a small percentage and that these people are just being kept from help rather than being harmed. But after seeing how some of these individuals went from being fairly happy, married, employed and psychiatrically healthy, to divorced, childless, hospitalized, self-mutilating, unemployed - maybe it's time to think that this kind of therapy is making people worse.

When these accusations hit upon a family, it affects more than just the individual who's falsely accused. The tragedy for the falsely accused extends to the other children in the family who then have to undergo the whispers and the stigmatization. The insult to the mental health profession, tarnishing the reputation, is dragging down the good therapists along with the bad ones.

Finally, there is one last group of people hurt by the myth of repressed memories: the genuine victims of real childhood sexual abuse and other horrible traumas that, unfortunately, happen to people in our society. These kinds of uncritical acceptances, digging for every little trauma memory, uncritically accepting every single thing that comes forward no matter how dubious, trivialize the experiences of the genuinely abused, the truly traumatized. It increases their suffering.