ON A February night 10 years ago, John Zebedee murdered his father. As John later told police, he was awoken by 94-year-old Harry Zebedee, who had dementia. When John went to check on him, Harry made a gesture that triggered John’s memory of childhood sexual abuse his father had inflicted. When the older man was found strangled to death, John confessed to the killing. He was later convicted of murder.
At the time of his arrest, John described in detail how his father had assaulted him when he was a child. But months later, John said his father hadn’t abused him after all. “He wrote to me from prison,” says psychologist . He told Shaw that he had sought treatment for an alcohol use disorder and it was only then that the subject of abuse came up. “He says that… a therapist suggested to him that he must have been abused as a child,” says Shaw.
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The idea that memories can be repressed, only to suddenly re-emerge years later, was debunked in the 1990s, when memory researchers pointed out that the concept goes against everything we know about how memory works. They also noted that it is so easy to implant false memories that it is impossible to tell a recovered memory from an implanted one.
With that, the idea should have been consigned to history. Yet in recent years, it has become clear that the belief in memory repression has lingered among some therapists, the public and in the criminal justice systems of many countries. “It has not ended at all,” says , a clinical and forensic psychologist at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. “It could be even worse.”
Otgaar and others are warning that, in an era where historical cases of sexual abuse are increasingly being investigated, good science is more important than ever. Unless something changes, he believes, unsafe convictions based on bad science will wreck lives, while people with real, but patchy memories of abuse might not be believed. And people who believe they have uncovered repressed memories can experience significant distress, sometimes unnecessarily, as can their families.
“If the brain has a way to lock away memories, it hasn’t been found yet”
The idea that memories can be repressed can be traced to Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis. Freud believed that certain uncomfortable urges or painful experiences could be locked away from the conscious mind, to protect a person from further suffering. “The idea is that… this automatic defence mechanism kicks in,” says , an emeritus professor of psychology at Goldsmiths, University of London. “It shoves the memory deep down into your non-conscious mind, and it’s completely inaccessible.”
Freud himself changed his mind about memory repression, but the idea gained ground all the same. Buried memories of trauma might explain why some people experience mental health conditions later in life, the idea goes, and the best way to treat these conditions is by coaxing people to recall these traumas in order to process them.
This view was especially popular among therapists in the US during the 1980s and 1990s. It led to a spike in legal cases, in which adults described how, after seeking treatment for a mental health issue such as an eating disorder or depression, they discovered long-lost but vivid and detailed memories of childhood sexual abuse.
The release of a high-profile memoir in 1980, Michelle Remembers, was one driver of the trend. It was based on the account of a woman who, in therapy, retrieved memories of being abused by a satanic cult whose members included her mother. The account was later shown to contain multiple inaccuracies, but not before it had spawned panic in the US about the possibility of a hidden underground of satanic sexual abuse.
At the time, , a psychologist at the University of California, Irvine, was researching the way that witness statements could be vulnerable to suggestion and distortion that could change the account of an event. She wondered if something similar could be happening in cases where memories appeared as if from nowhere. In the research that followed, she showed that not only could this happen, but that there was no way to explain repressed memories using our best understanding of how the brain works.
The idea of repressed memories relies on the assumption that our memory works as a filing system, maintaining crystal-clear records of events and storing them away for future retrieval. In fact, far from being a faithful record of events, our memories are malleable.
The formation of a long-term memory requires the strengthening of electrical connections between different parts of the brain, specifically the hippocampus and the cortex. Signals from various brain regions might be incorporated to add details to the memory, such as the smell of a person or the feel of a carpet in a room. Being reminded of one of these sensations – a taste or smell from childhood, for example – can bring back the others. Recalling – or “rehearsing” a memory strengthens the connections in the brain, making it easier to retrieve.
Once encoded, these memories are far from fixed, however. Every time we recall an event, we have the chance to alter the memory in some way. That reactivated memories are vulnerable to change is a feature that allows us to update the way we understand the world around us. But it also means that your memory of a past event is only as good as your most recent recollection of it.
This is partly why we forget things, and there is no doubt that we do forget things. First of all, some details of our experience, including those of truly horrible events, don’t get committed to memory. Otgaar gives the example of someone being threatened at gunpoint: it is possible that the person may have focused on the gun and so can’t remember the face of the perpetrator. “That’s not a repressed memory,” he says. The memory may have never formed in the first place.
It is also possible that traumas can be entirely forgotten over time, especially those that were experienced at a young age. We rapidly forget events when we are young, and don’t tend to remember experiences from before the age of about 4. It isn’t clear why this is the case, but .
Cara Laney Thede, a psychologist at the College of Idaho, also points out that, in general, old memories tend to be hazier. “Past events are more likely to be lost, unless they are rehearsed,” she says. This can even be true for traumatic memories. , more than a third didn’t recall the original abuse, for example. Those that were younger at the time of abuse were the least likely to recall it. The same study also showed that those who were subjected to more force and those who were emotionally close to the perpetrator were more likely to forget the abuse. Other studies have found that deliberately not rehearsing memories can weaken them – suggesting that if a person deliberately chose not to recall an event, the memory of it would weaken over time.
“People can completely forget about [traumatic events],” says . “Things can be forgotten, and we don’t know why.” Because there is often no way to be sure whether an event took place or not, recovered memories of trauma could be “genuine, false, or a mixture of the two”, he wrote in a .
For all that, however, most researchers don’t believe that faded or forgotten memories can somehow be retrieved in detail years later, as if the repression lock has been suddenly removed. “There is no credible scientific support for that idea,” says Loftus. Indeed, there is no known mechanism for storing away memories without being able to access them, says Larney Thede. If the brain has a way to lock away memories, it hasn’t been found yet.
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What muddies the waters further is that there is plenty of evidence that implanted memories can, over time, feel as real to the person experiencing them as something that actually happened.
We have known about implanted memories for a while now. In a seminal study, published in 1995, Loftus and her colleagues asked 24 adults about their childhood experiences. After speaking to the volunteers’ parents, the team asked each volunteer about three real experiences and one that was entirely invented – getting lost in a shopping mall at the age of 5. Just over two-thirds of the real events were remembered. But seven of the .
Since then, multiple studies have demonstrated the same phenomenon. More recent work has shown that people can or , for instance, when they haven’t.
In one large online study, with more than 5000 participants, . Even once they were told that some of the stories they had been shown were fake, a quarter of the participants said that they remembered the event, and couldn’t recognise it as false.
False memories can be just as upsetting as memories of real events. People who claim to have been abducted by aliens are totally convinced by their memories of what happened, and when recalling the “memory” of the event they get just as stressed as people who have experienced documented trauma. , Richard McNally at Harvard University and his colleagues compared the physiological responses of people who were known to have experienced trauma, whether as a result of war or sexual abuse, and those of people who said they had been abducted by aliens. As the participants described their experiences, the researchers measured their heart rate, sweating and muscle tension. There was . More than half of those who believed they had been abducted by aliens showed signs of post-traumatic stress disorder.
This suggests that, without corroborating or exonerating evidence, it is impossible to tell if a memory is real or false, says Loftus. Lawrence Patihis, a forensic psychologist at the University of Portsmouth, UK, who used to believe that repressed memories exist, also points out that certain kinds of therapy, which encourage people to imagine scenarios or elaborate on remembered fragments, may cause false memories to take hold.
How can we distinguish implanted memories from real ones? One red flag is if someone says they have recalled an event that they had completely forgotten but are able to suddenly describe in striking detail, says Patihis. Research into memory suggests that memories fade over time, unless they are recalled regularly. “It would be impossible to recall abuse you had no idea about with detail 30 years later,” he says. “To create perfect memories out of nothing just doesn’t add up.”
Another thing to look out for, says Patihis, is how these detailed accounts emerge. If a therapist believes that a patient has repressed memories, they may, sometimes inadvertently, encourage them to describe things that might not be true during therapy sessions.
“The therapist could use guided imagery, in which the patient is guided by the therapist to imagine what the abuse could have been, and expand that in their mind and add to the scene,” says Patihis. “Week to week, that imagination turns into the belief that something happened.”
The search for differences between true and false memories is an area of ongoing research, says Laney Thede, who says it forms a huge proportion of her work. “Child sexual abuse happens all the time, and it’s terrible,” she says. “But we need to develop techniques… to separate the true from the false memories.” Some researchers have tried to , exploring how people’s recollections may differ between the two or . Today, there is still no way to distinguish a true memory from a false one.
Closing this gap is important, not only to prevent tragedies like the murder of Harry Zebedee and unsafe convictions, but also to make sure people who are truly guilty can’t get away with their crimes. The arguments against memory repression shouldn’t discredit the validity of claims of sexual trauma, says Brewin. Equally, there is a need to protect vulnerable people from the ordeal of working through potentially false traumatic memories.
This is particularly important because Loftus’s work suggests that “recovering” memories of trauma doesn’t improve a person’s mental health and well-being. Quite the opposite. When Loftus looked at 30 randomly selected cases that had been approved for state compensation in Washington state, she found that , not better. In the study, published in 1996, 26 of the 30 individuals had first recalled childhood abuse during therapy. Three of the claimants said they had considered suicide before therapy, but 20 did after “remembering” abuse. Two had been hospitalised before “recalling” the abuse, while 11 were hospitalised afterwards, and one had self-harmed before compared with eight afterwards. And while 25 had jobs before therapy, only three were in employment afterwards.
“Families have been torn apart by accusations of abuse that were later retracted”
There are . “They convince people they had a much worse life than they had, which is tragic,” says Patihis.
One challenge is a subtle change in terminology used in therapy. “The term ‘repressed memory’ has gained a bad reputation,” says Shaw. Instead, she says, people now refer to buried or lost memories. Individuals are described as having the closely related concept of “dissociative amnesia”, a diagnosis recognised in the latest version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), colloquially known as the psychiatrist’s bible.
Meanwhile, legal cases based on recovered memory continue. In a recent search of the legal database LexisNexis, Laney Thede found more than 300 US legal cases that have used the word “repression” since 2000 and more than 2000 that reference dissociative amnesia. “This is just the tip of the iceberg, because this idea affects many cases where the word repression is never uttered, and many more that are not in the database,” she says.
Where do we go from here? Some researchers feel that an important step would be to remove the term “dissociative amnesia” from the DSM. The American Psychiatric Association, which is responsible for the DSM, , clarifying that it is “not normal forgetting”, and “is associated with having experiences of childhood trauma, and particularly with experiences of emotional abuse and emotional neglect”.
“It’s really just the same idea of repressed memories, but dressed up differently,” says French, who is one of many researchers who think that the diagnosis doesn’t belong in the DSM. Laney Thede agrees. “They gave up the word but not the phenomenon,” she says.
Better training and regulation for therapists could help. While psychiatrists and psychologists tend to have to undergo training to qualify, in many countries anyone can call themselves a therapist, counsellor or life coach, and offer support to people with mental health conditions.
Memory researchers like Otgaar and Loftus have also been trying to get the word out to the general public. It is here that the greatest challenge may lie. “The book stores are filled with suggestive literature,” says Loftus. A quick internet search reveals plenty of symptom checklists for people who want to find out if they might have repressed memories. Sometimes even an engaging television programme can be enough of a trigger for someone to become convinced that repressed memories of trauma might explain their current low mood or poor mental health.
Otgaar believes that better education of lay-people, as well as therapists and people working in criminal justice, is the only way to put this seductive, yet scientifically unlikely, idea to bed.
Need a listening ear? UK Samaritans: 116123 (). Visit bit.ly/SuicideHelplines for hotlines and websites for other countries
Bad therapy
When Jeanette Bartha was diagnosed with depression in her late 20s, she was referred to a therapist. He didn’t use the term “repressed memory” but told her that the reason she was depressed was because she couldn’t remember something that had happened to her. Remembering the traumatic experience would help her get better, he said.
She was hospitalised for what turned into an initial three-year stay, followed by multiple readmissions. While she was in hospital, Jeanette started believing that her uncle might have been abusive. Later, she began to describe satanic ritual abuse. “I’m not even sure how that got started, but I was hanging out with other people who had the same diagnosis,” she says. “We would feed off each other constantly… soon enough I would start having the same memories, or something similar.”
Far from healing her depression, these “memories” took a further toll on Jeanette’s well-being. “You’re told that you killed people, that you ate people, and it just starts making you think oh my god, I’m a monster,” she says. “I got worse and worse and worse, and I don’t know anybody who actually got better. I know five people who died – most by suicide.”
After her release from hospital, while her therapist was away on holiday and out of contact, Jeanette began to fear that she was on the same path. She moved away from the area and took legal action against the therapist. She has since accepted a settlement. And although Jeanette has experienced post-traumatic stress disorder and chronic fatigue since her ordeal, her symptoms are improving. “I refuse to allow him to mess up my life,” she says.
