HOW RELIABLE ARE RECOVERED MEMORIES?

Sometimes, recovered memories can be proven to be false. One typical case involved an adult recalling memories of having been sexually abused as a child in the attic. Investigation shows that the house did not have an attic. In one case, a woman remembered being abused by her father at home at the age of 2; records show that her mother was in prison at the time that the abuse is alleged to have happened and was raising the daughter there with no contact from the father.

The "Franklin" criminal trial is probably the most famous criminal case involving repressed and recovered memories: Eileen Franklin recovered memories in 1989 and 1990 of her father murdering her 8 year old girlfriend, Susan Nason, in 1969. Eileen also remembered seeing him murder a woman in 1976. George Franklin was convicted of the 1969 murder and will shortly be retried. There are some obvious weaknesses to Ms. Franklin's statements:

At various times, she stated (1) that the repressed memories appeared:
- in a dream,
- during hypnosis in a therapy session, or
- spontaneously when she looked at her 5 year old daughter
Eileen remembered that she and her girlfriend had played hooky from school on the day of the murder. In fact, Susan had gone to school that day, had returned home and talked to her mother at 3 PM.
Eileen remembered that her father took a mattress from the back of the van and covered her girlfriend's body with it. A newspaper account mentioned the mattress. In reality, it was a box spring which was too large to fit into the van.
Eileen remembered that her girlfriend was wearing a "silver ring with a stone in it". This was precisely as described in a newspaper account at the time. However, in reality, the girlfriend was wearing two rings: one plain silver ring and a gold ring with a topaz.
A DNA test on a semen sample from the 1976 murder scene proved that the father could not have been the murderer.
Evidence surfaced in mid-1996 which proved that George Franklin was at a union meeting on the day of the 1976 murder. All of his time was accounted for on that day.
Eileen's sister Janice testified in a re-trial hearing on 1996-JUN-14 that they had both lied when they testified in the 1991 trial that they had not been hypnotized.

It is probable that Eileen Franklin unconsciously combined real memories of her childhood friend with newspaper accounts of the murder and produced false recovered memories of having been present at the murder. The recovered memories of the second murder are obviously false. In 1996-JUL, all charges were dropped and he was released from prison.

In other cases, recovered memories can be traced to distorted recollections of non-abusive events. For example, a woman's recovered memories of genital torture by her mother during childhood (2) may be based upon real and painful recollections of having been catheterized by her mother because of chronic kidney and bladder infections.

Recovered memories usually feel identical to normal memories to the adult. The only certain method of verifying the accuracy of recovered memories is to find supporting evidence. Unfortunately, there is typically a period of decades between the time of the alleged abuse and the time when the memories are recovered. This delay usually makes it impossible to confirm or disprove a memory.

Herman and Schatzow (4) studied 53 adults in an incest survivors group to determine if they had corroborating evidence of their abuse. The group was composed of two very different populations:

38 survivors (74%) had little or no amnesia to begin with; they had always been aware of their abuse, continuously from childhood to adulthood. One would expect that they would have a good chance of verifying their abuse.
15 survivors originally had no abuse memories during adulthood; they all recovered memories later during therapy or group work.

44 women (83%) said that they had been able to obtain some confirmation of the abuse. Unfortunately, Herman and Schatzow accepted these opinions second hand without verifying them. There is no way of knowing how valid these confirmations were. The women were believed to have been subjected to considerable peer pressure in the group to report some confirmation. Unfortunately, the percentage of women who were able to confirm their abuse was not reported separately for the two populations. The study needs to be replicated

with a larger group, so that the results will hold more weight
with verification of the women's stories of confirmation
separately reporting the degree of confirmation by women who have never forgotten the abuse with those who had no memories until they were recovered during therapy.

Mark Pendergrast wrote the first edition of Victims of Memory (5; P. 517) in 1995. He was only unable to uncover two cases in which an adult survivor suffered from amnesia, recovered memories of incest and was able to corroborate the events by obtaining confessions from perpetrators (the father in both cases). The latter accepted the belief that they had abused their daughters because they believed their children to be truthful. Neither father had any memories of the abuse. While preparing his second edition, he found two additional cases of sexual abuse memories that were forgotten and later recovered spontaneously as a result of a trigger. Both involved limited abuse over a short period of time. He has been unable to find any "convincing cases of massive repression in which years of traumatic events were completely blocked from consciousness."

Ofra Bickel, producer of Frontline's documentary Divided Memories was able to find only one probably verifiable recovered memory after a long search among survivors.

Stan and Jared Abrams (7) studied polygraph (lie detector) tests of alleged perpetrators of childhood sexual abuse. They pooled findings of a number of polygraph examiners. The alleged perpetrators were attempting to use the polygraph test to prove their innocence. Results were:

46 alleged abusers were accused by survivors who originally had no recollections of the abuse during childhood, but who recovered memories during therapy. 4 of the alleged abusers (9%) were found to be lying (presumably guilty of abuse). 42 (91%) were truthful (presumably innocent of abuse).
300 alleged perpetrators were accused in cases where there was no significant repression/recovery of memory. 234 (78%) were found to be lying (presumably guilty of abuse); 66 (22%) were truthful (presumably innocent).

Polygraphs are not absolutely reliable devices. In the hands of an experienced, trained operator they are generally accepted as being accurate 85 to 90% of the time. One might conclude that none of the persons accused as a result of recovered memories are guilty of abuse, and that perhaps 80% of those accused as a result of always-present memories are guilty.

All of these studies have grave weaknesses. Polygraph tests are inexact and are regarded by some as unreliable. Studies often are inconclusive because the wrong questions were asked, because the number of individuals is small, etc. Often, there is no differentiation among recovered memories which:

were totally absent, but returned instantly as a result of a trigger (e.g. meeting a perpetrator or reading an newspaper account)
were absent and were recovered as a result of "self-therapy" after reading The Courage to Heal or similar self-help books
were added onto to always-remembered events of childhood abuse
were originally absent, but were recovered as a result of long periods of suggestive therapy.
were of events that happened in infancy, before the child's brain had matured sufficiently to be able to store long term memories

However, the studies that do exist seem consistently to suggest that most memories recovered through the lengthy use of suggestive techniques are highly distorted and/or are of events that never happened. We recommend that such memories not be acted upon (e.g. used to sever relationship with the survivor's family of origin) unless they can be verified.

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References

Harry MacLean, Once Upon a Time, Harper Collins, New York NY, (1993)
Beckylane, Where the Rivers Join, Press Gang Publisher, Vancouver BC, (1995)
Dr. Elizabeth Loftus, The Myth of Repressed Memories, St. Martin's Griffin, New York NY, (1994)
Mark Pendergrast, Victims of Memory, Second Edition, Upper Access, Hinesburg VT, (1996). Order at: 1-800-356-9315.