"The Trauma Society"

A very long, fascinating, and unsettling essay by Sally Satel in The New Republic, May 19, reviewing a new book by Richard McNally on memory and trauma. (I'd be interested to know what St. Blog's lawyers have to say about this.)

.... Consider the plasticity of memory. Elizabeth Loftus has conducted several important studies of memory manipulation. Her findings have been widely replicated. In one experiment, Loftus showed college-student subjects a film clip of a two-car crash. She asked half of them about seeing broken glass after the cars "hit" each other and the other half about broken glass after the cars "smashed into" each other. While no broken glass was depicted anywhere in the film, subjects who were asked about the "smash," but not the "hit," were much more likely to report having seen it. Loftus calls this post-event suggestion. In a second type of experiment, memories were injected outright. The best known of this genre is Loftus's lost-in-the-mall study. She told subjects that she had learned from relatives that when they were five years old, they were lost in a shopping mall, rescued by a shopper, and reunited with their family. Unknown to the subjects, Loftus contacted the relatives before relating the made-up vignette. Not only was Loftus able to convince one-quarter of the subjects that they had experienced the event, some even added embellishing details to the "memory."

Using similar techniques, other researchers have successfully implanted dramatic childhood memories such as near-drowning, animal attacks, and injuries inflicted by other children. Thus the story creates the memory, rather than vice versa. Even outlandish fantasies can be deeply held. McNally's research team at Harvard University found that when subjects who claimed to remember being abducted by aliens are read scripts of abduction (based on details that they gave the researchers), they manifest increases in physiological indices of emotion, such as heart rate and skin conductance (sweating on the palm of the hand), that are larger than those registered by Vietnam veterans diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder who hear scripts of their combat traumas.

Does this mean that the phenomenon of repression is merely psychological folklore? Or that no long-forgotten knowledge and images recovered during the course of psychotherapy or otherwise can ever be true? No, McNally says. It is a potential hypothesis, but it remains to be proven. What we do know, McNally makes clear, is that the data are rock solid in establishing that memory is highly malleable, and that without corroboration we cannot infer from the vividness or the intensity of a memory that an event is historically true. As it stands, McNally correctly states, the burden of proof that the "ordinary response" to horror is its expulsion from awareness remains with those who believe it is so.

How to get to the bottom of this? McNally systematically sets out the minimum standards that studies should meet in order to confirm that repression occurs. The basic plan would entail gathering a pool of subjects who were involved as children in a well-documented traumatic situation. Then, years later, they would be interviewed to see how many had no recollection at all of the event. Finding such a pool would take work, but the task is not impossible. Once the pool was divided into those subjects who remembered and those who did not, researchers would need to exclude from the latter group those who had any of four possible reasons for failing to recall the event.

The first reason for exclusion is that the subject was less than three or four years old when the trauma occurred. This cutoff minimizes the chance that failure to remember was due to natural childhood amnesia, which wipes out events that took place when the subject was very young. The second disqualification is that the subject should not have suffered head injury, malnutrition, brain diseases, or severe sleep deprivation, because these conditions interfere with memory acquisition and retrieval. The third is that the subject has some obvious reason to deny continuous knowledge of the abuse. (There is the matter of the law itself: in some states, only lawsuits involving "repressed" memories can be filed; if someone has always remembered being abused, the statutes of limitations typically prevent him from seeking justice.) And the fourth reason is that the subject simply forgot. A forgotten event is one that is brought to awareness relatively easily with prompting, and is quickly recognized ("oh, yes") as having once transpired. This is much more likely to happen in the case of an event that was not perceived as traumatic at the time it took place. Not uncommonly, men and women who were fondled as children report that while they found the experience confusing or upsetting at the time, it was not terrifying or life-threatening (the properties of a true trauma). Thus, they chose to put it out of their mind, and did so successfully.

McNally could not find a single study or case report that met all of these standards. In fact, in study after study — of Holocaust survivors, of accident victims, of the children of the Chowchilla bus kidnapping, of torture victims — the subjects do not complain about forgetting; if anything, some are still tormented by their memories. Several studies said to support repression actually involved victims who sustained head injuries as part of the traumatic event they could not later recall. To be sure, even if a study meeting all four of McNally's requirements failed to identify any repressors, this would not tell us that the phenomenon never occurred in nature. After all, if something occurs rarely (say, less than one in one thousand times), most research samples will miss it. But at least we could reject as radically off the mark estimates made by repression enthusiasts that one-third to one-half of all incest victims are unaware of their mistreatment....

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Wed. 05/21/03 10:26:30 AM
Categorized as Social/Cultural.