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A STRANGE TIME

This is a strange time, Mister. No man may longer doubt the powers of the dark are gathered in monstrous attack upon this village. There is too much evidence now to deny it. You will agree, sir?

—Reverend Hale, in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible

The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie—deliberate, contrived and dishonest—but the myth—persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic.

—John F. Kennedy

I am a research psychologist who has devoted her life to the study of memory. For twenty-five years I have conducted laboratory studies, supervised graduate students, written books and articles, and traveled throughout the world attending conferences and delivering speeches. My vita is filled with research papers with titles like “Distortions of Recollection After Misleading Information,” “Information-Processing Conceptualizations of Human Cognition,” and “Misinformation Effect: Transformations in Memory Induced by Postevent Information.”

I am considered an authority on the malleability of memory. I’ve testified in hundreds of court cases where a person’s fate depended on whether the jury believed the eyewitness’s sworn testimony and pointing finger of blame: “He’s the one.” “I saw him.” “He did it.” I take the witness stand and speak my academic truths, cautioning the court that our memories are flexible and superimposable, a panoramic blackboard with an endless supply of chalk and erasers. I try to impress the jury with the mind’s vulnerability, its inherent permeability. I think up metaphors, hoping to better convey my point. “Think of your 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 these murky memories.… Who among us would dare to disentangle the water from the milk?”

I like this particular metaphor because it defies the oft-heard explanation that memories reside in a certain part of the brain, like coded computer disks or crisp manila folders carefully placed in a file drawer for safekeeping. Memories don’t sit in one place, waiting patiently to be retrieved; they drift through the mind, more like clouds or vapor than something we can put our hands around. Although scientists don’t like to use words like “spirit” and “soul,” I must admit that memories are more of a spiritual than a physical reality: Like the wind or breath or steam rising, the cirrus and stratus of memory exist, but when you try to touch them, they turn to mist and disappear.1

This view of memory has been a hard sell. Human beings feel attached to their remembered past, for the people, places, and events we enshrine in memory give structure and definition to the person we think of as our “self.” If we accept the fact that our memories are milky molecules, spilling into dream and imagination, then how can we pretend to know what is real and what is not? Who among us wants to believe that our grasp on reality is so provisional, that reality in fact is impenetrable and unfathomable because it is only what we remember, and what we remember is rarely the literal truth?

No, this is too much like science fiction, hocus pocus, magic … and we humans like to deal with the real, the physical, the material. We seek terra firma under our feet, and we send thick roots downward into the soft soil of our history, seeking to embed them in something called the truth. Ambiguity makes our hair stand up on end.

I know the prejudices and fears that lie behind the resistance to my life’s work. I understand why we want to believe an eyewitness who says, “He did it, he’s the one.” I sympathize with the need to own the past—that is, to make it one’s own truth. I have my own reasons for wanting the past to be solid and immovable rather than quicksand under my feet.

But memory surprises me again and again with its gee-whiz gullibility, its willingness to take the crayon of suggestion and color in a dark corner of the past, giving up without any hint of an argument an old ragged section of memory in exchange for a shiny new piece that makes everything glow a little brighter, look a little cleaner and tidier. In my experiments, conducted with thousands of subjects over two decades, I’ve molded people’s memories, prompting them to recall nonexistent broken glass and tape recorders; to think of a clean-shaven man as having a mustache, of straight hair as curly, of stop signs as yield signs, of hammers as screwdrivers; and to place something as large and conspicuous as a barn in a bucolic scene that contained no buildings at all. I’ve even been able to implant false memories in people’s minds, making them believe in characters who never existed and events that never happened.

My work has helped to create a new paradigm of memory, shifting our view from the video-recorder model, in which memories are interpreted as the literal truth, to a reconstructionist model, in which memories are understood as creative blendings of fact and fiction. I’ve changed some minds, helped to save some innocent people from being sent to prison, inspired new research, and provoked some heated arguments. My plan for my life was to keep working away, designing studies, pursuing grants, giving speeches, training graduate students, all in the hope that my accumulated life’s work would instill a sense of the wonder and mystery of memory-making and promote a healthy skepticism about holding up any memory, even a piece of memory, as the literal truth.

But recently my world has been turned upside down. I find myself casually tossing out acronyms—MPD, DID, PTSD, SRA, DSM-IV—while my colleagues regard me with concern and amazement. I answer hate mail and struggle to defend my work from a rapidly enlarging and increasingly hostile band of critics. My feminist friends accuse me of defection. Fellow professors wonder out loud if I’ve abandoned the scientific method.

As the grant applications pile up in the corners of my hopelessly cluttered office, I spend my days talking on the phone to strangers accused of the most loathsome crimes imaginable. They write long, emotional letters, entrusting me with the intimate details of their lives. The letters start off calmly enough:

“My family is currently in a state of disruption.”

“I have a very serious problem.”

“I feel a great need to know about your work.”

But the succeeding paragraphs quickly reveal the extent of the horror.

“One week before my husband died after an 8-month battle against lung cancer,” writes a woman from California, “our youngest daughter (age 38) confronted me with the accusation that he had molested her and I had not protected her. This has broken my heart; it is so utterly untrue.”

“I am a seventy-five-year-old retired obstetrician,” a man from Florida writes, “and I am being sued for six million dollars by my forty-nine-year-old daughter who claims that I sexually abused her during her early childhood and teen years.”

“We were suddenly and inexplicably accused four years ago,” a woman from Maryland writes, “by our now 28-year-old daughter of having sexually and incestually [sic] abused and molested her, i.e., her father raped her as of age 3 months, I raped her repeatedly as of a very young age, one of her two older brothers raped her consistently. It is like a nightmare situation, where I feel that my daughter’s mind has been replaced with another’s.”

“Please help us,” a woman from Canada writes. “We were a normal, caring family, and we would like to become normal again.”

And a man from Texas writes: “Our youngest son is in a seminary and as part of his training he went through an intense two-week counseling session. It was shortly after this that he accused my wife and myself with not only condoning his sexual abuse by others, but also accused us of sexual abuse. He spoke of memories floating up like bubbles.”

Each of these stories, and hundreds more like them, began when a grown man or woman walked into a therapist’s office seeking help for life’s problems. Each of these stories involves memories of childhood sexual abuse recovered while in therapy—memories that did not exist, or at least were not remembered, before therapy began. Each story tells of a family wrenched violently apart.

I put the phone back in its cradle, place the letters in their files, and sit back, staring out the window, wondering how human beings can endure such anguish, wondering where this is in my job description, wondering how I will find the time to deal with their requests. “Do you have any additional knowledge or research that might help families like us?” the letter writers inquire. “Are there any support groups you know of that can help families bereft of a child who is not dead, but is as good as dead?” “Do you have any literature dealing with this phenomenon of false memories?” “Where can we turn, who can help us, how did this happen?”

I used to think of time as a solid, unyielding reality—an hour to read a journal article, three hours to write a review, one and a half hours in seminar, three-day conferences, two-day trials. But time has gone soft, and I feel overwhelmed by all these anguished appeals for help.

*   *   *

If I had known what my life would be like now—the frantic phone calls, the tearful confessions, the paranoid thoughts of conspiracy, the gruesome stories of sadistic sexual abuse, torture, even murder—would I have beaten a hasty retreat back to the safety and security of my laboratory? No. Never. For I am privileged to be at the center of an unfolding drama, a modern tale filled with such passion and anguish that it rivals the pathos of an ancient Greek tragedy. Who would not be captivated by these tales of hypnotic trances, sadistic rituals, and bloody sacrifices? Oedipus would walk onto this modern stage and feel right at home, as would Medea, Hamlet, Macbeth, and Lear. So would Reverend Parris, John Proctor, Abigail Williams, and the others accused and accusing in Salem. Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung would have a field day with these stories of incest, lust, and forbidden desire.

Mark Twain once said, “The past may not repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme.” And Hegel, ever the pessimist, said, “What history teaches is that men have never learned anything from it.” What is happening on this particular stage in this final decade of the twentieth century has happened before in other cultures and at other times. Much larger and more significant than any of its separate parts, this story rises above and beyond itself to raise questions that have haunted human beings for thousands of years.

The central question—“Who am I?”—has been reduced by modern psychotherapy to “How did I get this way?” To understand who we are and why we are the way we are, many therapists encourage us to go back to our childhoods and find out what happened to us there. If we are in pain, we are told there must be a cause; if we cannot locate the cause, we have not looked deep enough. And on goes the search to find the truth of our lives in the memories we have and the memories we have lost.

When we begin to look for memories we have lost, we enter a strange psychic realm called repression. The concept of repression presumes a certain power of the mind. Those who believe in repression have faith in the mind’s ability to defend itself from emotionally overwhelming events by removing certain experiences and emotions from conscious awareness. Months, years, or even decades later, when the mind is better able to cope, these “repressed memories” can be dredged up piece by piece from the watery grave of the past, studied and painstakingly analyzed like ancient scrolls filled with literal truth.

Believers claim that even while the traumatic memories are safely buried, the emotions entombed with them seep into our conscious lives, poisoning our relationships and undermining our sense of self. This is why we must go back to the past, excavate the buried memories, and expose them to the light of day. Only through this encounter with the dark truth of our past can we discover understanding, knowledge, healing, and release.

Skeptics point to the reconstructive nature of memory and ask for evidence and corroboration. Without proof, they wonder, how can we be certain that these long-lost memories represent fact and not fiction?

I study memory, and I am a skeptic. But this story is much more important than my carefully controlled scientific studies or any specific argument I might have with those who cling so fervently to the concept of repression. The modern-day unfolding of the drama known as repression is rooted in the very depths of the human psyche—that inner place where reality is primarily symbolic, where images are alchemized by experience and emotion into memories, and where meaning becomes possible.