7

LOST IN A SHOPPING MALL

I thought I remembered being lost and looking around for you guys. I do remember that. And then crying. And Mom coming up and saying, “Where were you? Don’t you ever do that again!”

—Chris, University of Washington research subject

The flying rumours gather’d as they roll’d Scarce any tale was sooner heard than told; And all who told it added something new, And all who heard it made enlargements too.

—Alexander Pope, “Temple of Flame”

The Eileen Franklin story fulfills our expectations of the way memory should work. Our favorite and most familiar metaphors emphasize the accuracy and efficiency of memory. Memories, we imagine, are catalogued in ever-expanding ultramicroscopic libraries. Or perhaps they are carefully stored as bits of information on a limitless supply of infinitesimal computer chips, or even recorded on blank videocassettes, properly labeled and filed away for future use.

These modern, technological metaphors reveal a deep need for order and consistency. We would like to believe that our minds work according to a method, that there is a strategy to be discovered somewhere in the brain’s chemical stew, even if we can only begin to imagine what it might “look” like. We would like to think that something, somehow, somewhere, is always in control.

Fifty years ago an intriguing series of brain operations appeared to confirm that our minds are, indeed, in ultimate control, regulating with astonishing proficiency the vast and complicated stimuli encountered in any given day. Neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield performed over a thousand brain surgeries on epileptic patients, lifting a portion of the skull and removing pieces of the cortex in an attempt to reduce seizure activity. Patients were anesthetized but conscious during these procedures. Before removing any brain tissue, Penfield used an electric stimulator to plot the functions of different portions of the brain.

When he stimulated the temporal lobes, forty patients reported experiencing a “flashback”—a mental image or sensory experience that they interpreted as a memory. One young woman cried out, “I think I heard a mother calling her little boy somewhere. It seemed to be something that happened years ago … in the neighborhood where I live.” When the electrode was moved slightly, she said, “I hear voices. It is late at night, around the carnival somewhere—some sort of traveling circus. I just saw lots of big wagons that they use to haul animals in.”

These reports of memory “flashbacks” were utterly convincing and seemed to offer proof that experiences and emotions are permanently inscribed in the brain. As a New York Times reporter concluded, “There can be little doubt that Wilder Penfield’s electrodes were arousing activity in the hippocampus, within the temporal lobe, jerking out distant and intimate memories from the patient’s stream of consciousness.” The fishing metaphor supplies a lively and entertaining image of an electrode dangling along the calm surface of the brain when it is given a sudden, powerful tug. A memory, filled with abundant and energetic life, emerges from the gelatinous waters and flops up onto the land of consciousness: an impressive catch.

In his original writings, Penfield favored the more businesslike analogy of a tape recorder, concluding that memories leave a “permanent imprint on the brain … as though a tape recorder had been receiving it all.”

But do Penfield’s brain stimulations really prove that all our memories are accurately recorded and stored away somewhere in the recesses of the temporal lobes? A closer look shows that only a small percentage (3.5 percent) of his patients reported memory flashbacks; furthermore, no evidence exists to corroborate that these memories were indeed factual records of actual occurrences. Of the forty patients who did report memories, twenty-four claimed to have heard only the background “noise” of memory: voices, music, or some other meaningful, identifiable sound. One patient described her memory as “a kind of sound in the distance like people singing.” When asked what the people were singing, she said, “I don’t know. It was like a bunch of old folks in the background, probably some hymns.”

Nineteen patients claimed that they could actually see a person, a recognizable object, or an entire scene, and twelve patients reported both visual and auditory experiences. But it seems likely that even this small group of patients entwined reality and fantasy, relying on imagination to fill in the holes. For example, the young woman who remembered hearing “a mother calling her little boy” recalled that it happened somewhere “in the neighborhood where I live.” Later she said that it was “at the lumberyard.” But when questioned, she claimed that she had no memory of ever being at a lumberyard.

This patient apparently mixed together floating bits of fantasy and reality into something she recognized as a memory, much as the sleeping mind splashes together the oil of fact and the vinegar of fiction into the extravagant salad of dream life. Indeed, in reviewing Penfield’s work, cognitive psychologist Ulric Neisser concluded that the content of these reported memories “seems entirely comparable to the content of dreams, which are generally admitted to be synthetic constructions and not literal recalls.”

When the wild cacophony of dreams, wishes, and desires intrudes, the elegant, linear metaphors begin to sway and topple. While it may be soothing to imagine memory as a predictable, reliable operation, the truth is not so reassuring. Recent research featuring high-tech brain mapping procedures indicates that memory is not a broad, generalized capability drawing on a centrally located storehouse of images and experiences, but a network of numerous separate activities, each carried out in a specific part of the brain.

Scientists believe that the formation of a memory begins with the visual system’s identification of objects and characteristics in space. At each of the original sites of perception, brain cells are directed to store certain impressions for later retrieval; after receiving their instructions, the cells actually undergo specific physical changes. The tiny organ known as the hippocampus1 (of which there are two, one on each side of the brain) links these separate localities, integrating diverse sensations into a single experience that is then imprinted as a memory. Each time a specific memory is retrieved, the connections between the brain cells are strengthened.

Thus we can imagine the brain as filled with hundreds of thousands of tiny overlapping “nets” of information connecting separate and distinct neural locations. Tug on one thread of a particular memory, and the whole net will shift position; surrounding and overlapping sheets of memory will also be disturbed. To further complicate matters, the fabric of memory is composed of blood, chemicals and electricity, a rather slippery and volatile combination. Nets get tangled, knots develop, frays and holes begain to rip apart the intricately knotted fabric. Although the mind struggles valiantly to mend these imperfections, it is not always a skilled or meticulous seamstress. Consider the following memory of an event that occurred on August 18, 1967, in Boston’s Fenway Park.

Twenty-three-year-old Tony Conigliaro, an outfielder for the Boston Red Sox and one of the greatest sluggers of all time, stood at the plate facing pitcher Jack Hamilton of the California Angels. Hamilton wound up for his first pitch, throwing a fast ball that crushed the left side of Conigliaro’s face.

“I never hit a guy that hard,” Hamilton recalled. “He went right down, he just collapsed.” Conigliaro never fully recovered from his injuries, and retired from baseball in 1975; he died in 1990 at the age of forty-five. Hamilton would never be the same again, either. “I’ve had to live with it, I think about it a lot,” Hamilton, now fifty-one years old and the owner of a Midwestern restaurant chain, told The New York Times after hearing about Conigliaro’s death. “Watching baseball on TV, anytime a guy gets hit, I think about it. It was like the sixth inning when it happened. I think the score was 2–1, and he was the eighth hitter in their batting order. With the pitcher up next, I had no reason to throw at him.” It was a day game, Hamilton recalled, because he remembered visiting Conigliaro in the hospital later that afternoon. After the accident he remembered wondering whether or not to return to Fenway Park later that year for another series of games; eventually he decided to make the trip.

Over the years Hamilton thought about this life-changing, publicly recorded experience hundreds of times. But his memory wasn’t even close to the truth. The accident didn’t happen in the sixth inning, but the fourth; the score wasn’t 2–1, but 0–0; Conigliaro wasn’t the eighth hitter in the order, but the sixth; it wasn’t a day game, but a night game; and Hamilton didn’t make another trip to Fenway Park that year because the tragedy occurred during the Angels’ final road trip to Boston.

These are details, of course, and everyone knows that the passage of time can cloud even the most significant and salient memories of our lives. Slightly altering or revising a real memory is not the same as creating a memory of an event that never happened. And yet, in both anecdotal accounts and experimental studies, researchers have shown that it is possible for people to believe that they experienced something that never happened. One of the most famous anecdotal accounts of a false memory is told by child psychologist Jean Piaget:

One of my first memories would date, if it were true, from my second year. I can still see, most clearly, the following scene, in which I believed until I was about fifteen. I was sitting in my pram, which my nurse was pushing in the Champs Elysées, when a man tried to kidnap me. I was held in by the strap fastened round me while my nurse bravely tried to stand between me and the thief. She received various scratches, and I can still see vaguely those on her face.… When I was about fifteen, my parents received a letter from my former nurse … she wanted to confess her past faults, and in particular to return the watch she had been given as a reward.… She had made up the whole story.… I, therefore, must have heard, as a child, the account of this story, which my parents believed, and projected into the past in the form of a visual memory.

Of couse, Piaget was very young, and the memory, although exciting and highly dramatic, had a happy ending. Surely with older children and a more traumatic memory, the details would be more carefully preserved. Or would they?

On February 24, 1984, a sniper fired repeated rounds of ammunition at children and teachers on an elementary school playground in Los Angeles. One child and an adult passerby were killed; thirteen other children and a playground attendant were injured. Several weeks after the sniper attack, researchers from the UCLA Preventive Intervention Program in Trauma, Violence and Sudden Bereavement in Children interviewed 113 children (10 percent of the student body), hoping to better understand the nature and consequences of their traumatic memories.

One of the children remembered that she was walking out the central school door leading onto the open playground with the girl who was subsequently killed. When the shooting began, she was halfway down the stairs and immediately turned back to get her sister. She told the researchers that when she went back outside onto the staircase landing, she saw the dead child lying on the playground with the assailant standing over her body. But from the vantage point of the stairway the girl could not have seen the victim. Furthermore, the sniper was never on the playground. Several hours after the shootings, a SWAT team stormed an apartment across the street and discovered that the sniper had killed himself.

A boy who was away on vacation during the shootings recalled his vivid “memories” of that frightful day. He was on his way to school, he said, when he saw someone lying on the ground, heard some shots, and quickly ran back home. Another child told investigators that she was at the school gate closest to the sniper when the shooting began. But in truth, she was not only out of the direct line of fire but half a block away from the playground. Many of the children who had not been to school at all that day came to examine the schoolyard the next day; in reconstructing the event, they recalled that their visit occurred on the day of the shooting.

For obvious ethical reasons experimenters cannot simulate the scene of a violent sniper attack in an attempt to probe further into the workings of traumatic memory. But they can use suggestion and influence techniques in an attempt to inject a mildly traumatic memory into their subjects’ minds. That’s what psychologist Jeffrey Haugaard and his colleagues did in a recent experiment in which children from four to seven years old viewed a short (three-and-a-half-minute) videotape. In one version of the tape a girl is playing at a neighbor’s pond, even though she had been warned not to play there. The neighbor finds her at the pond, approaches to within about four feet, tells her that he is going to report her to the police, and sends her home. At no time does the neighbor touch the girl or make any gesture indicating that he intends to hit or threaten her. After the encounter the girl leaves the pond and returns to her home.

In the next scene the girl lies to a policeman who comes to the house. While she admits being at the pond, she adds, “But he [the neighbor] hit me two times before he let me come home.” The policeman responds, “He hit you? He hit you before he let you come home?” And the girl replies, “Yes, he hit me.”

After hearing the girl’s “lie,” a number of children came to believe that they actually saw the neighbor hit the girl. Not only did they misrecall the nonexistent hitting, but they added their own details. Of forty-one false claims (29 percent of the total) thirty-nine children recalled that the man hit the girl near the pond, one moved the assault to the girl’s house, and one could not specify exactly where the girl was when the man hit her.

Alison Clarke-Stewart and William Thompson at the University of California at Irvine conducted another fascinating study with young children. Five- and six-year-old children observed an incident in which a janitor (nicknamed by the experimenters “Chester the Molester”) followed one of two scripts while interacting with a doll. Chester either cleaned the doll or played with it in a rough, suggestive manner. When Chester was following the “cleaning” script, he engaged in various actions with the doll while saying cleaning-related words. For example, he sprayed the doll’s face with water while muttering, “This doll is dirty, I’d better clean it.” Then he looked under the doll’s clothing and said, “I’d better see if it’s dirty here, too.” Chester also straightened the doll’s arms and legs and bit off a loose thread.

When Chester was following the “rough play” script, his actions were essentially the same but his words were different. “Oh, goodie,” he said, “I like to play with dolls. I like to spray them in the face with water. I like to look under their clothes. I like to bite them and twist their arms and legs.”

After interacting with Chester and the doll, the children were asked questions; in some cases the experimenter’s questions were incriminating, accusing Chester of playing instead of doing his job. When the children were asked to describe what Chester did to the doll, those children who were not exposed to suggestive interrogation provided reasonably accurate answers. But many of the children who were questioned in a suggestive manner reported a memory consistent with those suggestions, recalling that Chester played roughly with the doll when in truth he had merely cleaned it.

In a series of studies conducted by Nicholas Spanos, adult subjects received hypnotic suggestions to regress beyond birth to a previous life. A significant number of the participants in this study actually developed past life identities that reflected the hypnotically transmitted expectations. When subjects received a suggestion that they were sexually abused as a child, they reported higher levels of abuse than subjects who were not provided with expectations of child abuse. All it took was a suggestion, and they remembered being abused in a past life. “These findings,” Spanos concluded, “are consistent with anecdotal reports indicating that clients in psychotherapy sometimes confabulate complex and extensive pseudomemories that are consistent with the expectations held by their therapists.”

From these and many other experiments, psychologists specializing in memory distortion conclude that memories are reconstructed using bits of fact and fiction and that false recollections can be induced by expectation and suggestion. But how could we, as scientists, convince anyone beyond our own inner circle that these studies were relevant to the phenomenon of repressed memories and recovered memory therapy? After the George Franklin case, that question became even more vexing. For the whole world, it seemed, had gone mad over repressed memories.

“A Story of Incest: Miss America’s Triumph over Shame,” announced the June 10, 1991, cover of People magazine. “People ask me why I didn’t tell what was happening to me,” wrote former Miss America Marilyn Van Derbur in the introduction to her four-page disclosure of childhood sexual abuse. “In order to survive, I split into a day child, who giggled and smiled, and a night child, who lay awake in a fetal position, only to be pried apart by my father. Until I was 24, the day child had no conscious knowledge of the night child.”

Four months later People featured another cover story on repressed memories of sexual abuse: “Roseanne’s Brave Confession: I Am an Incest Survivor.” Roseanne Arnold’s memories began with a series of nightmares, in which she dreamed that she was being molested. When she woke up screaming, her husband reached for pen and paper, quickly jotting down the details of the dream so that Roseanne would be able to recall them later. In the next months, Roseanne began to suffer from suicidal tendencies and various difficulties with trust and intimacy. She sought help in therapy; in individual and group sessions she gradually began to recover memories of her mother abusing her from the time she was an infant until she was six or seven years old, and of her father molesting her until she left home at age seventeen. “He constantly put his hands all over me,” Roseanne revealed in the People article. “He forced me to sit on his lap, to cuddle with him, to play with his penis in the bathtub. He did grotesque and disgusting things: He used to chase me with his excrement and try to put it on my head. He’d lie on the floor playing with himself. It was the most disgusting thing you can ever imagine.”2

In a sidebar to Roseanne’s confession, psychiatrist Judith Lewis Herman speculated on the mind’s ability to create a special place for traumatic memories. “Many kids learn to create a secret compartment in their minds where memories are stored but not readily accessed until later on. The trigger is often a specific reminder of the abuse. Once the memories are released, they can come in a flood.”

Newsweek published an article on incest survivors on the same date as the People magazine article. In the Newsweek piece, Arnold explained that her memories, which were repressed for more than thirty years, came back to her as “little flicks of memory. And then they kept coming and getting bigger and bigger … my head burst open. It was like bad memories times 10.” Still, she was filled with self-doubt. “Voices in my head say you’re making this up. Maybe you took everything the wrong way. Maybe you imagined it. Maybe you’re just making it up for attention.”

Scores of noncelebrities added their voices to the swelling chorus of adults who, in therapy, recovered memories of sexual abuse. Time magazine offered the case of a thirty-six-year-old Chicago woman who was deluged with memories of abuse that took place when she was still in diapers. She claimed that she could remember her grandfather sexually molesting her while she lay helpless on the changing table. Another woman mentioned in Time was making love to her husband on their wedding night when she suddenly remembered being raped and sodomized by a teacher two decades earlier. She filed a lawsuit and was awarded a $1.4 million settlement from her church-run school.

Repressed memories even made it onto the best-seller lists. Jane Smiley’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel A Thousand Acres features Ginny, who has repressed all memory of being abused by her father even though her sister Rose frequently discusses her nonrepressed memories of abuse with her. One day, when Ginny walks up the stairs of her childhood home and lies down on her former bed, a memory comes surging back, literally knocking her over with its powerful emotional force.

I knew that he had been in there to me, that my father had lain with me on that bed, that I had looked at the top of his head, at his balding spot in the brown grizzled hair, while feeling him suck my breasts. That was the only memory I could endure before I jumped out of the bed with a cry. My whole body was shaking and moans flowed out of my mouth.… I lay down on the wooden flooring of the hallway because I felt as if I would faint and fall down the stairs.

Betsy Petersen described her sudden recovery of repressed memories in the autobiographical Dancing with Daddy. Petersen was jogging one day when “a thought came into my mind as if it had been projected on a screen: I’m afraid my father did something to me.” Experiencing a sense of urgency and a desire to know if something really had happened, Petersen discussed her fears with her therapist:

“I have this story to tell you,” I said to Kris, my therapist, several days later … “I don’t know if I made it up or if it’s real.”

She listened: “It feels like a story to you,” she said, “because when something like that happens, everybody acts like it didn’t.”

“You mean it might really have happened?” Now I wasn’t sure I really did want to know.

There was a good chance it had happened, she said.

To support her theory, the therapist pointed to Betsy’s symptoms as evidence of abuse. A strained relationship with her alcoholic father, recurrent disturbing dreams, an inability to feel close to her children, and various sexual difficulties all indicated abuse, according to the therapist. When Petersen asked how it was possible to forget such significant and terrifying experiences, her therapist told her that victims of sexual abuse often repress their memories in order to survive. If she had been abused, the therapist reassured her client, the memories would eventually emerge.

But Petersen wasn’t content to let the memories surface on their own; she immediately started digging, using her writing and research talents as tools. “I had no memory of what my father had done to me, so I tried to reconstruct it,” she explains in her book. “I put all my skill—as reporter, novelist, and scholar—to work making that reconstruction as accurate and vivid as possible. I used the memories I had to get to the memories I didn’t have.”

Like the woman mentioned in the Time article who initiated a lawsuit against her former teacher, many of these repressed-memory cases were being argued in the courtroom. A lawyer in San Diego called me about a case involving a twenty-seven-year-old woman who suddenly recalled being molested by her father. The repressed memories, which emerged through counseling and “therapeutic intervention,” included “lewd and lascivious acts, including but not limited to touching and fondling the genital areas, fornication and oral copulation.” One memory recovered in therapy focused on an incident that allegedly occurred in the master bedroom when she was three years old. Her father called her into the bedroom while he was masturbating, forced her to watch him and then made her touch his genitals.

At approximately the same time this case came to trial a bizarre case of repressed memories was tried in Orange County, California. A woman in her mid-seventies and her recently deceased husband were accused by their two adult daughters of rape, sodomy, forced oral sex, torture by electric shock, and the ritualistic murder of babies. The older daughter, forty-eight years old at the time of the lawsuit, testified that she was abused from infancy until age twenty-five. The younger daughter alleged abuse from infancy to age fifteen. A granddaughter also claimed that she was abused by her grandmother from infancy to age eight.

The memories were recovered when the adult daughters went into therapy in 1987 and 1988. After the breakup of her third marriage, the older daughter started psychotherapy, eventually diagnosing herself as a victim of multiple personality disorder and satanic ritual abuse. She convinced her sister and her daughter to begin therapy and joined in their therapy sessions for the first year. The two sisters also attended group therapy with other multiple personality disorder patients who claimed to be victims of satanic ritual abuse.

In therapy the older sister recalled a horrifying incident that occurred when she was four or five years old. Her grandmother caught a rabbit, chopped off one of its ears, smeared the blood over her body, and then handed the knife to her grandchild, expecting her to kill the animal. When the child refused, her mother poured hot water over her arms. When she was thirteen and her sister was still in diapers, a group of strangers (satanic cult members, she learned later) demanded that the sisters disembowel a dog with a knife. She remembered being forced to watch as a man who threatened to divulge the secrets of the satanic cult was burned with a torch. Other members of the cult were subjected to electric shocks in rituals that took place in a cave. The cult even made her murder her own newborn baby. When asked to provide additional details about these horrific events, she testified in court that her memory was impaired because she was frequently drugged by the cult members.

The jury found the accused woman guilty of having neglected her daughters, but nothing more, and refused the requested monetary awards. Attempts to appeal the decision have failed.

A lawyer from Illinois wrote to me requesting information concerning the “unreliability” of repressed memories and bemoaning the fact that in this particular legal area the accused were automatically presumed guilty. “I have several clients involved with charges made by family members anywhere from 15 to 25 years after the fact,” he explained in his letter. “Persons charged as offenders now seem to be presumed guilty, whether criminal charges are involved or not.”

Guilty until proven innocent. The fear and frustration stemming from the automatic presumption of guilt permeated every letter I received from “the accused.” A woman from Michigan wrote me about her thirty-six-year-old daughter who “after a year of counseling now accuses me of abuse … very much like Roseanne Arnold and the former Miss America Marilyn Van Derbur.” An eighty-year-old man from Georgia was desperate to understand why his fifty-three-year-old daughter suddenly recovered memories that he had abused her during her early childhood and teen years. A California woman explained that her husband, who had recently died, was accused by their thirty-five-year-old daughter of sexual abuse. The charges eventually involved the accusation that the elderly couple had molested their grandson.

A retired couple from Colorado was accused by their thirty-three-year-old daughter, an only child, of sexual and satanic ritual abuse. Several months after confronting her parents, the daughter was hospitalized for severe depression. In the hospital she tried to hang herself with a bed-sheet; she survived the suicide attempt but was severely brain-damaged. Her parents brought their daughter back home and assumed the responsibility for her nursing care.

A seventy-three-year-old man revealed that he had been accused three years earlier by his three daughters, ages thirty-seven, forty, and forty-two. “If it hadn’t been for the complete love and devotion of my dear wife, and the support of my cherished son, I would have been completely destroyed,” he wrote. The story he told was long and involved. His youngest daughter was born with a defective bladder, which resulted in repeated infections, bedwetting, and surgery during her childhood years. She began seeing a therapist after her husband committed suicide, and the therapist told her that she had all the classic symptoms of someone who had been subjected to sexual molestation at an early age. Her bladder problem was reinterpreted in therapy, changing from a congenital birth defect to the consequence of forced vaginal penetration during infancy, most likely by her father.

“I almost vomit as I write this,” the father wrote. When his daughter discussed her fears with her sisters, they agreed to go into therapy; after several months they became convinced that their ongoing sexual and emotional difficulties were also the result of sexual abuse. The eldest daughter remembered hearing a step on the stairs leading to her bedroom and thinking, Oh, no, not again. After unsuccessful attempts to recover specific memories in counseling she attended a spiritual retreat; one day during the retreat she was staring at a blank wall when she suddenly “knew” that she had been abused as an infant. The middle daughter had no real memories but experienced intense feelings of rejection and alienation from her parents. In a series of hypnotic rebirthing sessions, she was “age-regressed” to the point where she, too, recovered memories of being sexually molested as an infant.

*   *   *

I’m not sure that in the beginning, when the epidemic of repressed memories was just starting to spread and infect the mass media, I ever asked the truly important questions: What is happening? Where is it going? Why is it going on right now, in the 1990s, in this country? How can we begin to study and understand it? Perhaps I hadn’t yet recognized “it” as a phenomenon that could be studied, but even if I had been inclined to ask the questions, I had no time to search for the answers. I was too busy trying to sort through the piles of letters and phone messages on my desk, which threatened daily to grow out of control. I knew if I didn’t make it through today’s stack, I’d be buried beneath the rubble tomorrow. This can’t last, I kept thinking, but it did, and it got worse. Day after day the requests for help flooded in, each more anguished and more desperate than the one before.

With some relief at escaping the chaos of my office and with hopes of gaining some insight into the problem of repressed memories, I flew to San Francisco on August 18, 1991, to attend the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association. That same week Mikhail Gorbachev announced the coming disintegration of the Soviet Union. As a child of the 1950s with vivid memories of covering my head while hiding under a wooden desk during air raid drills, I should have been rejoicing along with the rest of the real world. But in this strange universe that had enveloped me, I felt insulated and emotionally numb. I read the newspapers and listened to the nightly news reports, smiled and cheered and agreed how amazing it all was, and then gratefully retreated into my confused absorption with repressed memories. Everyone in the world was preoccupied with the end of the Cold War and all I could think about was buried memories of sexual abuse.

The annual APA conventions are huge, with thousands of participants and a printed program thick enough to qualify as a textbook. I looked through the program, starring the talks and panel discussions I wanted to attend, and scribbled down my schedule for the week. One talk particularly intrigued me. George Ganaway, a professor of psychiatry at Emory University and the director of a dissociative-disorders unit at a psychiatric hospital, was speaking on “Alternative Hypotheses Regarding Satanic Ritual Abuse Memories.” Ganaway, I learned from the scuttlebutt that always accompanies these meetings, was embroiled in the controversy over the link between multiple personality disorder (MPD) and satanic ritual abuse (SRA) memories.3 While many of his clinical colleagues had come to the conclusion that traumatic childhood experiences can lead to MPD, in which the personality fractures and alter personalities (“alters”) protect the host personality by keeping the horrific memories secret, Ganaway believed that MPD was massively overdiagnosed and urged caution regarding the recovery of abuse memories. Referring to such memories as “reconstructions” and “pseudomemories,” Ganaway argued that the brutal scenarios of bloody rituals and satanic tortures reflect “psychic reality” rather than historical, fact-based reality.

If the memories aren’t real, where do they come from and why are patients so willing to believe them? In his talk, Ganaway blamed false memories on the overuse and misapplication of hypnosis. He held therapists accountable, expressing amazement at the large number of experienced therapists who do not understand the innate suggestibility of their own patients. Individuals with severe dissociative disorders are highly hypnotizable, suggestible, and fantasy-prone, he explained, and will spontaneously enter “autohypnotic trance states,” particularly during stressful interviews (for example, therapy sessions). In their interactions with these patients, gullible therapists can reinforce the patient’s delusions or even unwittingly implant memories.

Serious problems arise, Ganaway warned, when therapists get caught up in their patients’ emerging “memories” and accept them as historically accurate. He listed a whole string of clinical entities that are incorporated into reconstructed memories, including fantasy, distortion, displacement, condensation, symbolization, and confabulation (a process by which a person unknowingly fills in the gaps and holes in memory with inferences, plausibilities, and guesswork). Mix into that mystifying stew a patient’s suggestibility, high hypnotizability, and fantasy-proneness and you end up with, in Ganaway’s words, “a potpourri of facts, fantasy, distortion and confabulation” capable of confounding even the most experienced therapists.

Poorly trained therapists and therapists who operate under a fixed belief system (for example, “All MPD patients have been ritually abused”; “Memory operates like an interior videorecorder”; “Healing comes only when the client accesses buried memories, resolving and integrating the trauma experience”) are at greatest risk for confusing fact and fiction. Through tone of voice, phrasing of questions, and expressions of belief or disbelief, a therapist can unwittingly encourage a patient to accept the emerging “memories” as real, thus reinforcing the patient’s delusions or even implanting false memories in the patient’s mind. Ganaway warned that such therapists may be doing a great deal of harm to their patients and their profession.

He kept hammering away at the gullibility of therapists and the need for “cautious circumspection.” Therapists must be careful that their interactions with patients do not create or reinforce the patients’ delusional memories. They must always, at all times, try to avoid implanting memories of abuse, either through suggestion or expectation, because once a suggestion is seeded it can sprout into an elaborate “screen memory” that serves to block out the patient’s ambiguously painful but relatively unremarkable childhood experiences. A trauma fantasy is gradually structured into a believed-in memory that contains clear and logical distinctions between good and evil, allowing the patient to see himself as “special” and worthy of the therapist’s attention and compassion.

Ganaway illustrated his discussion with several fascinating case histories. Sarah, a fifty-year-old multiple personality disorder patient, employed “screen memories” in an attempt to shield herself from an upsetting childhood experience. One day during a therapy session “Carrie,” a five-year-old “alter” who until then was completely unknown to Sarah, spontaneously emerged to describe her participation in a ritual mass murder near Sarah’s childhood home. Twelve little girls from her Sunday school class were bound, raped, and brutally murdered, “Carrie” revealed, but Sarah was spared by the cult leader (who happened to be a member of her church). As “Carrie” related the grisly tale, she became deeply emotional; it was almost as if she had gone back to the past and was once again watching the ghastly scene.

After “Carrie” withdrew, Sarah sought validation for the memory. Other alters, she claimed, were telling her that “Carrie” had even more horrific tales to tell. Ganaway remained neutral, refusing to offer an opinion on the validity of the memory and allowing his patient to come to her own conclusions. Two sessions later “Sherry,” a previously known child alter, came forward to confess that she made up the whole story, creating “Carrie” in an attempt to mask the terror she felt when she recalled a real childhood memory: her grandmother reading to her from detective magazines, leaving out none of the grisly and gory details.

Ganaway concluded that Sarah invented the “screen memory” of the Sunday school mass murder in an attempt to preserve her grandmother’s image as a loving, protective figure. By allowing her “alter” to weave the fiction of the crime stories into the fact of her actual experiences, she was able to hide the intolerable reality of her grandmother’s emotional abuse behind an elaborate latticework of fantasy and illusion. The created memory wheeled in like a gaudy movie set to cover drab background scenery.

Generated by the patient in an attempt to disguise or mask more prosaic forms of childhood abuse, screen memories are one source of ritualistic abuse memories. “Iatrogenic implantation” is an even more potent source of these memories, Ganaway explained. An “iatrogenic” ailment is one produced by or resulting from the activity of a physician (or therapist). Thus, the attitudes, expectations, and behavior of the therapist may suggest and then reinforce a patient’s vivid memories of horrific abuse. The treatment creates the disease; the illness is doctor-made.

Ganaway told an amazing story about Ann, a young woman who had been unsuccessfully treated several years earlier for multiple personality disorder stemming from abuse by her psychotic grandmother. When Ann became pregnant with her second child, her dissociative symptoms returned and she immediately started therapy with a doctorate-level therapist specializing in the treatment of MPD. The therapist, who had been to several SRA seminars and appeared to have certain expectations and a well-defined agenda, began to explore the possibility that Ann’s grandmother had been in league with “satanists.” Was there a group or a cult? the therapist queried. Were they wearing robes? Were babies present at the rituals, and did Ann participate?

When Ann answered no to each of these questions, she was instructed to go home, think about the possibilities, and try to remember details. In follow-up sessions while she was under hypnosis, Ann eventually agreed that she had been involved in a cult. Relying heavily on yes and no answers by the use of finger signals while Ann was in trance, her therapist successfully “contacted” several satanic alters who confided that the cult intended to sacrifice the newborn baby. After emerging from the hypnotic trance and listening to her therapist’s account of the alters’ plans, Ann expressed skepticism, arguing that the “memories” did not seem real to her. She wondered if the alter personalities might be lying, and she asked for the therapist’s help to sort out the facts from the fiction. Disregarding his patient’s concerns, the therapist informed her that the rich detail and consistency of her memories confirmed that she had been involved with a satanic cult.

The sessions continued, and the therapist proceeded to reinforce Ann’s memories, communicating by gestures4 while asking suggestive and leading questions. When Ann went into labor, her therapist insisted on setting up around-the-clock surveillance to protect the baby. Ann was permitted to see her newborn only briefly, and always under guard, because the therapist feared that a satanic alter, programmed in Ann’s mind, would emerge to perform the mandated sacrifice. The hospital staff and law enforcement personnel heeded the therapist’s warnings, participating in efforts to strengthen hospital security and save the baby from the murderous clutches of the satanic cult.

Ann was eventually transferred to Dr. Ganaway’s psychiatric unit by her physician husband, who was understandably concerned about his wife’s therapy and the bizarre protective measures surrounding his newborn child. Within two days of psychotherapy, during which the psychiatric staff neither reinforced nor attempted to extinguish the satanic abuse memories, the entire array of memories “spontaneously evaporated.” Ann eventually came to the understanding that she had fabricated the SRA memories in response to the nurturing and attention her therapist offered as a reward for confessing her cult involvement. Her greatest fear was that she might be exploited again by a manipulative therapist using invasive hypnotic techniques.

*   *   *

I was enthralled. Ganaway was stating clearly, forcefully, and without equivocation that therapists can unintentionally plant suggestions that lead to the creation and rapid growth of false memories of abuse. A respected scholar and esteemed psychiatrist was openly and freely admitting that he had seen evidence in his clinical practice of the same processes of memory distortion and implantation that I had observed in my laboratory. He agreed that memories can be distorted, even created, in susceptible minds by the tone of voice, phrasing of a question, subtle nonverbal signals, and expressions of boredom, impatience, or fascination. In short, he believed that in some cases—in his opinion, far too many cases—therapists were creating the very problems they hoped to cure.

How generalizable were Ganaway’s conclusions? If a therapist can unwittingly implant a memory in a highly suggestible patient, and that suggestion generates a whole garden of memories, wouldn’t it also be possible for a patient with less severe but nevertheless significant problems to pick up on a therapist’s expectations of abuse and remember events or experiences that never happened? The memories might not be so flamboyant and spectacular as in these MPD patients with their bloody, paranoid visions of torture and ritual abuse. But given the right conditions, wouldn’t it be possible to cultivate discrete and detailed pseudomemories in the fertile soil of normal minds?

I introduced myself to Ganaway after the talk, briefly filling him in on my experiences with the Franklin case and the recent onslaught of letters and phone calls from accused parents.5 “You encounter the extreme cases in your work with MPD patients and SRA memories,” I said, feeling a little uneasy with the unfamiliar acronyms. (I was much more at ease talking with memory researchers about “STM” and “LTM,” short-term memory and long-term memory.) “But isn’t it possible that the same potential for contamination and implantation exists in the larger population of confused people wandering into therapists’ offices in search of answers to their life problems?”

“I think there is a similar danger,” Ganaway said evenly, without so much as raising an eyebrow. “Two basic sources of contamination lead to the creation of pseudomemories. We are all susceptible to influence by books, newspaper and magazine articles, sermons, lectures, films, and television. For example, exposure to docudrama television shows, which mix fact with dramatic visual reconstructions of purported crimes, can be a potent source of contamination, creating fears, expectations, dreams and imaginings in susceptible minds. The second powerful contaminating source can be discovered in the suggestions or expectations of an authority figure with whom the patient desires a special relationship.”

“In other words, a therapist,” I interjected.

He nodded. “Suppose a patient desires the approval of a therapist and feels the need to be interesting, unusual, or somehow special. Or perhaps the patient feels ‘stuck,’ as if she is getting nowhere in her therapy. Now suppose that this patient’s therapist believes that sexual abuse is approaching epidemic proportions and that a great majority of the people who walk into his office have been sexually or ritually abused. Assume further that the therapist believes that memory works like a video recorder, imprinting every thought, emotion, and experience and storing it away for safekeeping. Those are precisely the right conditions for the creation of a false memory, and I believe those conditions are being met daily in hundreds of therapy sessions.”

“But why would patients want to incorporate into their history and sense of self such brutal and painful memories?” I asked him the question everybody asks me. “What would motivate people to see themselves as victims and portray their loved ones as cruel and uncaring?”

“Screen memories impart a feeling of importance and specialness, even a sense of adventure,” Ganaway explained. “A patient may have felt deprived or ignored as a child, or perhaps he felt unexceptional because nothing exciting or unusual ever happened to him. Any number of experiences can cause suggestible patients to retreat into fantasy. Their elaborate pseudomemories help them to feel special and worthy of a therapist’s attention, even fascination. If the therapist becomes overly fascinated, asking specific, suggestive questions, expressing surprise, disgust, belief, or disbelief, voicing an opinion, or becoming excited and agitated, then the patient might feel pressured to authenticate the memory. In other words, the reaction of the therapist can function as a catalyst to solidify the imaginative material into a concrete memory.”

I had one final question. “As a clinician, how can you tell if a patient’s memories are real or imagined?”

“Without independent corroboration, I don’t know of any way for a therapist to be absolutely sure,” Ganaway said. “Actual deprivation and abuse certainly affect the nature of a child’s developing psychic reality, but not in a way that allows a therapist years later to differentiate with certainty what is real and what is imagined.

“Most psychodynamically trained therapists understand and respect this fact,” Ganaway continued, “for it is the careful, systematic exploration and understanding of the meaning derived from unconscious fantasies regarding wishes and fears that has been the focus of modern psychoanalytically informed therapies, rather than determining the factual basis of recollected personal experiences. Only recently when some therapists of various theoretical persuasions and personal motives began to completely ignore the psychodynamic influence of unconscious fantasy on their patients’ memories did the current epidemic of ‘abuse memories’ take root and the ‘psychology of the victim’ begin to flourish in our society. Freud would be turning over in his grave if he knew what these therapists have done to oversimplify, distort and cheapen his complex theory of the mind to suit their personal agendas. It may be years before the public’s faith in the efficacy of traditional psychoanalytic psychotherapy is restored in the wake of the damage done by what I call ‘McTherapy’—the fast food pseudotherapies of the 1980’s and 1990’s.”

*   *   *

Extreme suggestibility. Dissociative defense mechanisms. Therapist-induced belief systems. Iatrogenic influences.

I flew back to Seattle with a sense of purpose and direction. Ganaway’s clinical observations supplied all the pieces—vulnerable clients, gullible therapists, a credulous society, pervasive fear of sexual abuse. Now all I had to do was figure out how to put these pieces together in a psychological experiment. The major difficulty confronting me was how to pierce the heart of the problem—the central question about the authenticity of these lost-and-found memories. While I couldn’t prove that a particular memory emerging in therapy was false, perhaps I could step around to the other side of the problem. Through careful experimental design and controlled studies, perhaps I could provide a theoretical framework for the creation of false memories, showing that it is possible to create an entire memory for a traumatic event that never happened.

The day after I returned to Seattle I sat down with a group of graduate students and psychology majors and brainstormed with them about the possibility of experimentally implanting an entire memory for a fictitious event. As dozens of ideas were generated and then discarded, we realized that we were confronted with several seemingly insurmountable problems. First, the implanted memory had to be at least mildly traumatic, because if we succeeded in injecting a pleasant memory, or even an ambiguously unpleasant one, into our subjects’ minds, critics would argue that our findings were not generalizable to recovered memories of sexual abuse.

Second, in order to parallel the therapeutic process, the memory had to be implanted by someone the subject trusted and admired, either a relative, a friend, or a respected authority figure. But we couldn’t be blatantly manipulative and risk endangering the relationship between the subject and the “implanter.” Nor could we cause our subjects undue emotional stress, either through the creation of the pseudomemory or in the debriefing during which subjects learned that they had been intentionally deceived. The trick was to design a study powerful enough to prove that it is possible to implant a false memory while also winning the approval of the university’s Human Subjects Committee, which reviews proposed research projects to ensure that they will not be harmful to participants.

We kept coming up with ideas and dismissing them as too unlikely to succeed or too traumatic. I began to wonder if it was even possible to design a false-memory experiment. Maybe the only way around this particular problem was to approach it obliquely, reporting on real-life anecdotes and evidence demonstrating that memory is malleable even in the most traumatic experiences. In fact, a friend and colleague was in the process of doing just that in his experiments with “flashbulb memories” of the January 1986 space shuttle Challenger explosion.

The morning after the explosion and then again two and a half years later, cognitive psychologist Ulric Neisser asked forty-four student subjects this question: “How did you first hear the news of the Challenger disaster?” While most subjects described their two-and-a-half-year-old memories as “vivid,” not one of the memories was entirely accurate, and over a third were, in Neisser’s words, ‘wildly inaccurate.’ Consider the following:

January 1986:

I was in my religion class and some people walked in and started talking about the [explosion]. I didn’t know any details except that it had exploded and the schoolteacher’s students had all been watching which I thought was so sad. Then after class I went to my room and watched the TV program talking about it and I got all the details from that.

Two and a half years later this student forgot all about her religion class; her new memory featured a roommate, a news flash, and a phone call:

September 1988:

When I first heard about the explosion I was sitting in my freshman dorm room with my roommate and we were watching TV. It came on a news flash and we were both totally shocked. I was really upset and I went upstairs to talk to a friend of mine and then I called my parents.

Even more surprising than such dramatic changes in the original memories were the subjects’ astonished reactions when confronted with their original written accounts. They simply could not believe that their revised memories were mistaken; even after reading and reviewing the questionnaires they had filled out the morning after the explosion, they insisted that their altered memories were more accurate and “real.” “This is my handwriting, so it must be right,” one student explained, “but I still remember everything happening the way I told you [two and a half years later]. I can’t help it.”

“As far as we can tell,” Neisser concluded, “the original memories are just gone.”

Neisser’s study challenges popular thinking about “flashbulb memories,” which holds that strong emotions create vivid and accurate memories. As psychologist William James put it more than a hundred years ago: “An impression may be so exciting emotionally as almost to leave a scar upon the cerebral tissues.” The Challenger explosion definitely left a vivid impression on its viewers’ minds, but it was almost as if the brain, in an annual spring-cleaning frenzy, kept snipping out the scar tissue and grafting it onto a new spot. What triggered these transplants?

That was the question I attempted to answer in my experimental studies on the distorting effect of post-event information. But now I was obsessed with a Brave New World kind of experiment. I wanted to “scar” the brain with something that never happened, creating a vivid but wholly imagined impression. I just couldn’t quite figure out how to do it.

*   *   *

In late October I flew to the University of Georgia to give my usual talk on what I call the misinformation effect. When people witness an event and are later exposed to new and misleading information about that event, what happens to their original memory? I typically answer this question with observations from real life and laboratory experiments showing that people can be led to believe that they perceived events or objects in a way that differs from reality or even that they remembered something that did not in fact exist. Once a person adopts a reconstructed memory, he or she tends to believe in it as strongly as in genuine memories, even replacing earlier recollections with the new, invented facts.

This speech is always a good place to insert amusing anecdotes, and I told a little story about former president Ronald Reagan’s habit of confusing fact and fiction. As one might expect, the fiction in Reagan’s entertaining stories was supplied by popular films from his movie star days. During the campaigns of 1976, 1980, and 1984, Reagan told and retold a story of heroism and sacrifice set during a World War II bombing raid over Europe. A B-1 was hit by anti-aircraft fire, and the wounded gunner, an inexperienced young man, cried out in terror when he could not eject from his seat. His commander, older, wiser, and very brave, comforted him, saying, “Never mind, son, we’ll ride it down together.” Reagan ended the story with misty eyes, recalling that the commander was posthumously awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for his heroism.

A curious journalist checked the 434 World War II Medal of Honor winners and found no such award. He did, however, turn up a scene in a 1944 movie called A Wing and a Prayer, in which the pilot of a Navy torpedo bomber rode the plane down with his wounded radioman after the gunner bailed out. “We’ll take this ride together,” the pilot said. The journalist also discovered a Reader’s Digest story in which the gunner, not the pilot, went down with a wounded crew member. “Take it easy, we’ll take this ride together,” the last man to jump heard the gunner say.

When the White House was questioned about the accuracy of President Reagan’s accounts, which were always presented as if they were factual, a spokesman said, “If you tell the same story five times, it’s true.” Despite the witticism, a serious debate apparently ensued within the White House over whether the President knew what he was doing when he told made-up stories—or whether he actually could not distinguish films from fact.

That story always generates a lot of chuckles, and I rode the wave of goodwill into the dangerous waters of repressed memories. I told the story of Eileen Franklin’s recovered memory and ended my talk with a hypothetical question and a simple plea for help. “Could it be,” I asked, “that Eileen’s memory was put together by an overactive, fantasy-prone imagination, with bits and pieces of the factual story supplied by newspaper reports, television accounts, and numerous conversations that took place over the years? I’m looking for a way to study the phenomenon of false memories in the laboratory, but I haven’t quite figured out how to do it. If anyone has any suggestions, I’d be more than happy to hear them.”

The next morning I got a ride to the Atlanta airport with Denise Park, a cognitive psychologist who studies information processing in the elderly. Her two children, Rob and Colleen, sat in the backseat and listened politely as I explained to their mother how frustrated I was getting with the memory-implantation experiment.

“I want to implant a whole memory,” I told Denise, “not just a piece of a memory. And the memory has to be traumatic, but not so traumatic that the experiment would be rejected as unethical.”

Denise was quiet for a moment. Then, in a sudden burst of inspiration, she said, “How about getting lost?”

“Lost,” I repeated. We happened to be driving past a huge shopping mall, and the idea just popped into my head. “What about getting lost in a shopping mall?”

“That’s perfect,” Denise said, “because it taps into every parent’s worst fear—losing sight of your child in an immense place filled with strangers. What do you think, Rob, Colleen?” She looked at her children in the rearview mirror. “What would it feel like to be lost in a shopping mall?”

“Scary,” they answered in unison.

Colleen squirmed in her seat. “I don’t even like to think about it,” she said.

“What if we had a parent or older sibling make the initial suggestion?” I said after watching Denise’s interaction with her children.

“Yes, that’s perfect!” Denise was getting excited about the idea. “You’d have all the ingredients you would need for implantation—the traumatic event, the trusted authority figure offering the suggestive comments, and the vulnerable, suggestible subject.”

“It’s certainly harmless enough,” I mused. I was wondering if we could get the idea through the Human Subjects Committee. Maybe. “And if it worked you could argue that you had implanted a whole memory for a false childhood event. It would be even better than the Piaget anecdote.”

Jean Piaget’s attempted-kidnapping story, which I quoted earlier, is the best example psychologists have of a whole memory implanted into a vulnerable mind by a trusted authority figure. But it is not a perfect illustration, because the story was undoubtedly told and retold many times and became part of the family folklore. We have no idea when and how Piaget’s memory began, or how many times it metamorphosed over the years. But the shopping mall idea would enable us to know exactly what was suggested to the subjects, and if the suggestion was accepted, we could watch the memory take root and grow.

The more I thought about the possibility the more excited I became. It just might work. A week or two later I was at a party, talking with a friend whom I hadn’t seen for a long time. “What’s new in memory research these days?” he asked. I told him about the repressed-memory controversy and my attempts to study the phenomenon in the laboratory, mentioning the new idea for the shopping mall experiment.

“Every parent’s worst nightmare,” he said, immediately and automatically echoing Denise Park’s sentiment. “I can’t imagine how frightening it would be to lose Jenny, even for a few minutes.” He gestured toward his daughter, who was sitting in a corner of the room and looking bored with the cocktail conversation.

“How old is she?” I asked.

“She just turned eight.”

“Do you think it might be possible to convince her that she was lost in a shopping mall when she was five years old?”

“No way,” he said with a laugh. “Jenny’s very logical, very rational, and she has an amazing memory.” He shrugged his shoulders. “But why don’t we give it a try?”

He called Jenny over, put his arm around her, and introduced us. I asked about the family’s plans for the upcoming holidays. What was she going to do during the school vacation? Did she have a Christmas wish list? Her father used those questions to slide into the shopping mall suggestion.

“Hey, Jenny, remember that time when you got lost at the Bellevue Mall?”

A confused expression came over Jenny’s face, as if she were trying to remember but couldn’t come up with any details.

“You were five years old,” her father prompted, “and it was about this time of year, a month or so before Christmas.”

“That was three years ago, Dad.” Jenny looked slightly embarrassed and elbowed her father in the ribs. “How do you expect me to remember that far back?”

“Don’t you remember? I had to go into the Eddie Bauer store to buy a present for Mom, and you wanted to play on the tugboat.” The tugboat is a familiar landmark at the center of the Bellevue Mall. “Then when I came out of the store a few minutes later, you were gone.”

Jenny continued to look perplexed.

“I looked in Nordstrom’s, the toy store, and a shoe store before I found you.”

Jenny slowly nodded her head. “Oh yeah, I guess I do remember that,” she said. “I was looking all over for you, and I couldn’t find you.”

“Were you scared, Jenny?” I asked. She shook her head noncommittally.

“I was scared,” her father said.

Jenny smiled and snuggled up against him. “Not as scared as I was,” she replied.

I couldn’t believe what I had just witnessed. In five minutes, with a few suggestions and minor prods from her father, Jenny had accepted a false memory and embellished it with details of her own. She remembered being lost, she remembered looking all over for her father, and she remembered being scared. In less time than it took to cook a hard-boiled egg, we had created a false memory.

The next week in my cognitive psychology class I announced the term project. “I want you to go out and try to create in someone’s mind a memory of an event or experience that never happened. You could try to convince your roommate that she had chicken last night instead of hamburger. Or you could try to convince a friend or relative that he owes you money, and it’s time to pay it back.”

I give the same assignment every year, but this time I included a little extra twist. “I’ve been thinking a lot lately about whether it is possible to inject into someone’s mind a whole memory for a fictitious event. For example, would it be possible to make someone believe that they were lost in a shopping mall as a child when, in fact, they had never been lost in a shopping mall?”

My suggestion was successfully implanted. When the assignments were handed in three weeks later, two students had devised a way to create a memory for being lost. Eight-year-old Brittany was convinced by her mother that when she was five years old she and her best friend got lost in Selby Ranch, a condominium complex. This is the story Brittany’s mother told her as if it were the truth:

A kind old lady who lived in the complex found Brittany and took her into her condo and gave her a cookie. The lady had a beautiful daughter who was a model in San Francisco and the daughter gave Brittany a bouquet of balloons.

Eighteen days later a friend of the family interviewed Brittany under the pretext of getting information for a school newspaper article on childhood memories. Tape-recording the conversation, the friend inquired about several genuine memories and then asked questions about the false memory. Brittany failed to remember anything about one of the real events, her sixth birthday party at her aunt’s farm.

“Don’t you remember it?” the interviewer asked.

“I don’t. It was in our house at Houston.”

“Don’t you remember what you did?”

“No,” Brittany responded.

“Do you remember who was there?”

“No … well, I know Samantha was there. No, she wasn’t. She wasn’t born yet.”

But when asked about the false memory, Brittany had quite a story to tell.

“Do you remember where you were?”

“Selby Ranch.… I can’t remember like how it looked. But I think it was there. There was like hay. It was around Halloween, so there were pumpkins around.…”

“Who was with you?”

“Um … Christina, Camille … and me and my mum were visiting my grandparents.”

“What were you doing?”

“Well, we were playing, and, but then Christina left. I think she had to make a phone call or something. And then me and Camille went off playing in the woods. And … um … I really can’t remember this, but I think this happened when we went to this girl’s house. Her daughter was a model. And then we made cookies at her house. And then my mum finally found us.”

Brittany continued to embellish the false memory. The kind woman who took them in not only gave them a cookie but baked a whole batch of cookies with their help. The woman’s home became a “small cottage outside the gates of Selby Ranch” (in reality, most of the houses in the area are 3,000- to 4,000-square-foot contemporary California-style ranch houses). And Brittany recalled the exact words her mother said when she found her: “Thank goodness I found you, I was looking all over for you.”

Another student, Jim Coan, created a false memory in the mind of his fourteen-year-old brother, Chris. In the first phase of his case study, Jim presented Chris with a one-paragraph written description of four childhood events, only three of which actually happened. Chris was instructed to write about all four events every day for five days, offering any facts or descriptions he could remember about each event. If he could not recall any additional details, he was instructed to write “I don’t remember.”

The false memory was introduced in this paragraph:

It was 1981 or 1982. I remember that Chris was five. We had gone shopping at the University City shopping mall in Spokane. After some panic, we found Chris being led down the mall by a tall, oldish man (I think he was wearing a flannel shirt). Chris was crying and holding the man’s hand. The man explained that he had found Chris walking around crying his eyes out just a few moments before and was trying to help him find his parents.

In his five-day journal, Chris gave the following details:

Day 1: I remember a little bit about that man. I remember thinking, “Wow! He’s really cool!”

Day 2: That day I was so scared that I would never see my family again. I knew that I was in trouble.

Day 3: I remember Mom telling me never to do that again.

Day 4: I also remember that old man’s flannel shirt.

Day 5: I sort of remember the stores.

In summarizing his memory, Chris produced a new fact, recalling a conversation with the man who found him: “I remember the man asking me if I was lost.”

Was Chris simply trying to help his older brother by elaborating on this “memory”? Chris’s responses to one of the true memories seemed to argue against this possibility. On the first day Chris wrote, “I can’t remember.” And for the next four days he wrote, “I still can’t remember.”

What if Jim had inadvertently tapped into a real memory?

Perhaps Chris really did get lost in a shopping mall when he was a young boy. To test for this possibility, Chris’s mother was presented with Chris’s “memory” of the day he got lost in the shopping mall and asked if she remembered the event. On day one she said, “I have thought about this day, but I am having trouble remembering the details.” On day two she said, “I have tried and tried to remember this day. I see us looking under clothes racks for Christopher’s feet, but I can’t honestly say that this was that time.” After five days of trying to remember, she summarized her feelings: “For some reason I feel guilty about this, that I can’t remember.”

A few weeks later Chris was interviewed again and asked to describe each of the four events and rate it according to how clear it was on a scale from 1 (not clear at all) to 11 (very, very clear). For the three true memories, Chris gave ratings of 1, 10, and 5. For the false shopping mall memory, he assigned his second-highest rating: 8. Asked to describe his getting-lost memory, Chris supplied rich and abundant details.

I was with the guys for a second, and I think I went over to look at the toy store, the Kay-Bee toys and uh, we got lost, and I was looking around and I thought, “Uh-oh. I’m in trouble now.” You know. And then I … I thought I was never going to see my family again. I was really scared, you know. And then this old man, I think he was wearing a blue flannel, came up to me … he was kind of old. He was kind of bald on top … he had like a ring of gray hair … and he had glasses.

In a final part of the study, Chris was informed by his brother that one of the memories was false. Did he know which memory was implanted? Chris selected one of the real memories. When told that the memory of being lost in the shopping mall was the false memory, he couldn’t quite believe it.

Really? Well, no…’cause I thought I was … I remember being lost and looking around for you guys.… I do remember that.… And then crying and Mom coming up and saying, “Where were you? Don’t you ever do that again!”

I looked at my students’ results and listened several times to the tape recordings in which Chris and Brittany described their false memories. With each additional review, I became more convinced that we had the idea for our formal experiment. This rough, preliminary data proved that it was possible to experimentally implant in a suggestible person’s mind an entire, and entirely false, childhood memory. Not only was it possible, it was unbelievably easy.

The method used to create Chris’s false memory seemed almost ideal, although we needed to smooth out some problems before putting together a formal proposal for the study. For example, we wanted to include older subjects in our study, but shopping malls weren’t widespread until the 1970s. So we made a few modifications and tried out our ideas with twenty-two-year-old John and forty-two-year-old Bill.

With the help of his aunt, we convinced John that he had been lost in a large sporting goods store at the age of five or six (“I have a vague memory of being at the top of the ramp, crying”). And with his sister’s help, we convinced Bill that he had been lost in a Sears store when he was five or six. “I remember what Sears looked like in Santa Monica—or was it J. C. Penney’s?” Bill said, trying to put the details of his newly implanted memory in logical order. “I felt panicky—where were Mom and Linda? I felt scared … I remember going up or down the stairway at Sears. I remember the elevator bell at Sears. Now I remember—it was Sears, not J. C. Penney’s.”

These five cases offered proof—what scientists call existence proof, which is simply proof that something exists or is possible—for the fact that it is possible to create false memories for childhood events. Five people, ranging in age from eight to forty-two, were induced to develop a memory for something that never happened. Was the memory real to them? The subjects’ willingness to expand on the memory and provide details that were not even hinted at in the initial suggestion seemed to indicate that the memory was very real indeed. Jenny remembered being scared. Brittany embellished her memory with pumpkins, hay, and batches of cookies. Chris recalled verbatim conversations, balding hair, and glasses. John remembered standing at the top of a store ramp, crying. Bill imagined elevator bells.

We now had a clear procedure in mind, we were optimistic that we could produce false memories of getting lost, and we were confident that the procedure would not harm the individuals who participated in our study. (In fact, all our preliminary case examples thoroughly enjoyed their part in the study, reacting with good-natured amazement to the news that experimenters had successfully tampered with their memories.) We filled out endless questionnaires, and sent our proposal to the Human Subjects Committee for approval.

The formal study would be conducted in two major phases. In phase one, subjects would be asked to write about four childhood memories. Three memories would relate to events that actually happened when they were about five years old, but the fourth would be the false memory of being lost in a shopping center or other public place. Subjects would write about the four memories over several days; one group would keep a daily journal for five days while another group would keep a journal for only two days. In phase two of the experiment, which would take place approximately two weeks later, a researcher would interview the subjects about their memories to determine whether they “remembered” the false events. Subjects would be asked to rate the clarity of their memories on a scale from 1 to 10, where 1 indicated an extremely vague memory, and 10 an extremely clear memory.

We could hardly wait to begin the study and answer some of the crucial questions about false-memory implantation. How often would we succeed in implanting a false memory? How would subjects rate the clarity of their false memories? What would the comparisons between the “true” and the “false” memories teach us? Would the real memories have more emotion in them, more details, more inherent credibility?

We waited for two months before receiving a reply. The Human Subjects Committee tore our proposed study apart. “What if your subjects are under emotional stress and became upset at the deception inherent in the experimental situation?” the Committee members asked in their written report. “How do you plan to screen out vulnerable subjects? What will you do if someone becomes seriously distressed when informed of the deception? What if a subject finds the false memory disturbingly similar to an event that actually happened? Will your subjects experience a sense of betrayal at being manipulated?”

We carefully responded to the committee’s concerns, developing a procedure for screening out psychologically unstable subjects, another plan for dealing with participants who might find the implanted memory disturbing, and additional strategies for removing confusions, defusing tensions, and repairing breaches of trust. Once again, we waited, fingers crossed. When we finally got word that the Human Subjects Committee had approved a modified version of the shopping mall study, we immediately began to recruit students to help run subjects and analyze data.

*   *   *

Several months later, when the study was well underway, one of the student researchers knocked on my office door. In her hand was a copy of Cosmopolitan magazine.

“I don’t usually read this,” she laughed, holding up the cover, featuring a stunning model in a sequined and bangled bikini, “but I couldn’t resist this article titled ‘Questions About Sex (Even the Most Adventurous Cosmo Girls Want Answered).’ Take a look at the third question.”

I read the question and answer out loud.

QUESTION: My breasts are sensitive—I don’t like anyone even touching them. I know this doesn’t endear me to men, so should I smile my way through the displeasure? Since my breasts are small, could the sensitivity be mostly psychological?

ANSWER: Discomfort of this kind usually means there’s a link between your breasts and an unpleasant experience in your past. When you were very young, perhaps someone fondled or commented unfavorably on your breasts; it was so unpleasant that you’ve repressed the whole memory … I would suggest you find out what the discomfort is all about.

I remember putting the magazine down and shaking my head, not in dismay or disbelief necessarily, but almost in an attempt to dislodge my skepticism and come back to this world that no longer made any sense to me.

“Well, what do you think?” the student asked cheerily.

“I think another repressed memory is about to be recovered,” I said.