The Myth of Repressed Memory

THE MYTH OF REPRESSED MEMORY. BY Elizabeth Loftus and Katherine Ketcham. St. Martin's Press 1994. Pp. 290.

Elizabeth Loftus and Katherine Ketcham have produced another provocative, timely, and persuasive book, The Myth of Repressed Memory. The book is timely because the United States is riddled with episodes of recaptured memory of child abuse.1 The book is persuasive because it primarily consists of a long parade of horribles; shocking examples of families destroyed, probably innocent persons condemned to the penitentiary, and abominable perversions of justice.

Dean Pound, a former Harvard Law School Dean, once observed that the eighteenth century was the Age of Reason, the nineteenth century the Age of Empiricism, and the twentieth century, the Age of Sentiment.2 There is much evidence of this thesis. In the present century numerous people have been murdered because of their religion, their race, their class, or their beliefs. At least in the thirteenth century Genghis Khan had a more practical purpose: the Mongols needed more pasturage for horses!

It is in this late twentieth century that some psychotherapists, psychologists, and perhaps a number of politically-correct psychoquacks, have "helped" thousands of people discover "repressed memories" of childhood sexual abuse. Many of these "memories" may be false. In the case of certain types of insecure or unsuccessful people, "discovery" of childhood abuse offers a convenient and rewarding scapegoat. As Dr. Richard Gardner, a Clinical Professor of Child Psychiatry at Columbia University, observes:

You're 35 or 40 and your life is all screwed up, and someone offers this very simple solution. "Ah, I never realized I was sexually abused. That explains it all!"-It's a simple answer for the therapist as well as the patient.5

Across America people are going to jail and families are torn apart because of the revived memory fad in psychology and the therapeutic professions. Events of the forties or sixties or seventies are "recovered" in the 1990s, leading to children suing their parents-and often they are awarded damages. The theory is that when the mind has suffered a horrifying experience, it may bury the memory of the event so deeply in the subconscious that the memory can only be recovered with great effort-therapeutic effort.6 The recovered memories usually relate to child abuse, though sometimes they may recapture...