Prime Time Replay:
Moira Johnston
on recovered memories
MsgId: *brain_storm(2)
Date: Fri Jul 18 21:58:12 EDT 1997
From: Rob_Killheffer At: 38.254.181.222
Good evening, everyone, and welcome to another edition of Brainstorms (finally!). Tonight's guest is Moira Johnston, an investigative journalist whose latest book, "SPECTRAL EVIDENCE," deals with the controversial issue of recovered memories. Welcome, Moira!
MsgId: *brain_storm(3)
Date: Fri Jul 18 21:59:25 EDT 1997
From: Moira_Johnston At: 207.172.73.205
I'm delighted to be here!
MsgId: *brain_storm(4)
Date: Fri Jul 18 22:01:15 EDT 1997
From: Rob_Killheffer At: 38.254.181.222
Moira, your book is at least as much about the specific Napa Valley incest trial as it is about the recovered memory issue, but you must have done a lot of research into the debate over recovered memories while working on the book. What's your opinion, after seeing what you've seen -- are recovered memories real, or delusional?
MsgId: *brain_storm(5)
Date: Fri Jul 18 22:05:07 EDT 1997
From: Moira_Johnston At: 207.172.73.205
Broad question. My answer, after 3 years of working with several of the best scientists, most credible leading scientists in America is that the kind of massively repressed memory that is claimed to slumber in the unconcious sometimes for decades -- memories of the most horrendous childhood abuse, often for many many years -- and then emerge from the unconscious as full-blown reliable, accurate memories of the past, are not reliable. There is simply no proof among the best scientists that that kind of memory is true. Scientists have simply no definitive proof that this kind of memory is real. And it destructs thousands of families, so it's important to be real.
MsgId: *brain_storm(7)
Date: Fri Jul 18 22:09:30 EDT 1997
From: Rob_Killheffer At: 38.254.181.222
How is it possible for someone to be so totally convinced of these memories if they're not real? I mean, the people behind these accusations aren't usually lying, right -- they really believe the things they're saying, yes?
MsgId: *brain_storm(10)
Date: Fri Jul 18 22:17:53 EDT 1997
From: Moira_Johnston At: 207.172.73.205
It's true. They believe them radiantly and it is very easy, given what we now know about memory, that memory is very suggestable, and this is how most false memories are created, in the very suggestive environment of therapy. Not necessarily in the therapist's office, but in the atmosphere of therapy, which is exactly what happened in Holly Ramona's case. Typically, a depressed unhappy, in Holly's case, bulemic young woman is searching for answers for her unhappiness, for her life not working out, and she goes to a therapist and in the powerful ideological climate of the early 1990's, when recovered memories were in the air, and the slogan "Believe the Child" was everywhere, it was very easy for a therapist to suggest that this young woman look for memories of abuse, to be told that her symptoms sound like incest, to be given memory work, hypnosis, hypnotic drugs, like sodium amytal, for young women to create false memories, and sometimes, the therapists who have done this are well-meaning and did not understand the power of suggestion. So it was primarily in the suggestable environment of the therapist's office, among women looking for answers, that false memories have occurred. It almost always has been connected to therapy.And such things as visualizing, for example, a very trendy technique in therapy, in this kind of climate could help young women visualize incest, combining fragments of truth from their past and things they saw on TV, books like "COURAGE TO HEAL," and they would combine these fragments with a generalized unhappiness about their father and family relationship and focus this unhappiness and these new memories on, generally, their father, as Holly Ramona did. And images of incest would appear, real images, they would see pictures of all kinds of molestation. Holly's grew from a simply sexual look at an early age to 12 years of serial rape, anal, oral, vaginal, and grew increasing grotesque to the point of "seeing" her father force her to have oral sex with the family dog. And Holly believed these memories. Her father was a workaholic, absent a lot, he gave her things, BMWs for her 16th birthday, but neither of her parents gave her the attention she was hungry for. So that in Napa Valley, of all places, she was starved for nurture.
MsgId: *brain_storm(14)
Date: Fri Jul 18 22:21:58 EDT 1997
From: Rob_Killheffer At: 38.254.181.222
I think it'll help to talk more about this specific case as an example of how this process can function and produce such vivid and disturbing visions that feel exactly like authentic memories. Can you give us a brief summary of the facts of the Ramona case?
MsgId: *brain_storm(15)
Date: Fri Jul 18 22:24:13 EDT 1997
From: Moira_Johnston At: 207.172.73.205
Yes. Holly Ramona went to a therapist in Orange County, CA, and the first visit she had, was told that 70 or 80 per cent of this therapist's eating disorder patients, like Holly, had had childhood sexual abuse. And she planted the seed and over the months, Holly began to develop brief fragmentary images of molestation that gradually became sharper and shaped into rape by her father. And she never doubted her memories, but at first they were so fragmentary, she wasn't really sure about them, and she took a sodium amytal interview, which is commonly thought to be a "truth serum," to confirm that these images really were her father, that they were really true.And after the amytal interview, which was not videotaped or tape-recorded, and few notes taken, she was told by the people caring for her, therapists, pychiatrists, attendants, "Holly, you didn't lie" because under the amytal, she had seen the same images she had remembered, of her father raping her. And wrongly believing the amytal to be a truth serum, she developed clear strong beliefs in her father's guilt, and the very next day, had him fly down from Napa Valley to meet with her. She confronted and accused him and his freefall began, the total destruction of his life.
MsgId: *brain_storm(17)
Date: Fri Jul 18 22:28:03 EDT 1997
From: Rob_Killheffer At: 38.254.181.222
What did the other people in the Ramona family make of Holly's memories? Did they all believe her and take her side, or were some skeptical from the start?
MsgId: *brain_storm(18)
Date: Fri Jul 18 22:30:50 EDT 1997
From: Moira_Johnston At: 207.172.73.205
Good question. The women in the family, the mother and two sisters, believed Holly because they said she's the most honest girl in the world, she wouldn't lie. They also knew she had suffered terrible emotional distress while she was recovering her memories and they said why would anyone put themselves through this if it wasn't true. These are classic responses to recovered memories. None of the women in the family ever asked Gary Ramona if he did it, and condemned him on the basis of Holly's belief in her memories. And Holly was a fine, shy, honest young lady -- a girl you would believe. Also, the mother was very dissatisfied with her life and, I suspect, she was looking for an escape from her frustrations. And in this accusation of incest, she found a way of changing her life and she divorced him instantly.
MsgId: *brain_storm(19)
Date: Fri Jul 18 22:34:22 EDT 1997
From: Rob_Killheffer At: 38.254.181.222
Also, back when the Holly was recovering her memories, there wasn't nearly so much doubt about the believability of such memories, was there? The public was still hearing mostly from those who supported the idea of recovered memories, so there wasn't as much reason to disbelieve.
MsgId: *brain_storm(20)
Date: Fri Jul 18 22:37:10 EDT 1997
From: Moira_Johnston At: 207.172.73.205
That's very true. I mentioned before that the idea of believe the child, believe the children was too strong. The feeling that we had for too long ignored the child was very powerful. Also, the case that really launched the memory wars was a case in CA called the Franklin case, in which the daughter, Eileen's recovered memories, seeing her father murder her best friend 20 years earlier were believed by a jury and her father convicted and sent to jail for life. And most of us knew little about memory -- we tend to believe not only what we read, but the decisions of a thoughtful jury, and the Franklin case created a powerful suggestive atmosphere for young women like Holly. In fact, she sued her father for incest, for damage, within a month of the Franklin verdict, obviously influenced by that case.
MsgId: *brain_storm(21)
Date: Fri Jul 18 22:38:21 EDT 1997
From: Rob_Killheffer At: 38.254.181.222
So how has that prevailing attitude changed over the last few years? What are some of the key developments that have undermined faith in recovered memories, and how did that affect the Ramona case?
MsgId: *brain_storm(22)
Date: Fri Jul 18 22:40:49 EDT 1997
From: Moira_Johnston At: 207.172.73.205
Well, the Ramona case, in which Gary Ramona sued, for the first time, a therapist, psychiatrist, and a hospital, charging them with planting false memories in his daughter's mind, and in the year or two prior to that, scepticism had begun among accused parents who compared notes and discovered an alarming pattern of similarity. And banded together into a group called the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, which gathered together many very respected scientists on it's advisory board, and they began to argue that these memories must be more thoroughly examined by science before they were believed and permitted to destroy families and lives like Gary Ramona's.Then, when Gary Ramona won the unprecedented right, as a nonpatient to sue therapists, his victory, in which a jury found malpractice and false memories, turned the tide of what are called the Recovered Memory Wars in two ways. And these two ways are the major results of the Ramona trial. First, the malpractice verdict, which was very alarming to the insurers of therapists who could see themselves facing multimillion dollar malpractice suits against therapists led to reform of therapy techniques. The insurers, joined by the major medical and mental health organizations in this country, issued statements of caution about using recovered memories techniques, told therapists to never urge the kind of confrontation Holly had with her father that destroyed the family precipitiously and that trial has truly had an appropriately chilling effect on inept therapy practices that were producing recovered memories. The other impact of Ramona was to move the memory wars into the courts. At first they were fought largely on the daytime talkshows as emotional confrontations between families and daughters. With Ramona, the wars moved to the courts, and because he had staged a massive argument against recovered memories, making the courtroom a mini-Scopes Monkey trial, Ramona set the pattern for rigorous scrutiny, scientific scrutiny of recovered memories.
Memory research exploded, scientists felt an urgency to help solve this major health issue, and the outcome has been that in the last few years, courts across the land are increasingly rejecting these memories and even stopping them at the courtroom door, by holding pretrial hearings on the scientific admissability of these memories into court.
MsgId: *brain_storm(26)
Date: Fri Jul 18 22:49:49 EDT 1997
From: Rob_Killheffer At: 38.254.181.222
The recovered memory issue seems like a classic example of the limitations of "expert" testimony in the courtroom. It's good to hear that the courts are handling these cases more circumspectly now, but how can similar problems be prevented in the future? How can the courts judge the validity of new developments such as recovered memory therapies before scientists have?
MsgId: *brain_storm(27)
Date: Fri Jul 18 22:56:05 EDT 1997
From: Moira_Johnston At: 207.172.73.205
That question leads to a proposal I have, that I think would answer that. I really do agree that the courts have become forums for $400 an hour expert gladiators, skillfully fighting one side against the other. And often the very best science, the breaking news of memory science, does not make it's way into court. The other problem with the courtroom, no matter how rigorous the scrutiny is, the prolongation of the Ramona case, 8 years, is a terrible experience for the family -- courts are not a place to heal. What I'm suggesting is that a body that could transcend the polarization and the political adversarial atmosphere of the courtroom should look at these cases and I suggest the National Academy of Sciences should appoint a committee to study recovered memoriesNot just the science, but the relevant social issues as well. It is a body that is above political bias and alignment. It can call on the very best scientists in this nation, and the very best other experts. I believe that it could come back with a report within a year on how to stop this terrible, this family-destroying war, it would have enormous influence. I think it would preclude almost any trial being held, because I think the memories would be found so unreliable that tehy would simply never be allowed into court. But we need this kind of scrutiny of the memories because the political vested interests who are fighting fiercely to keep the memory wars alive, will continue to feed these thousands of lawsuits that are now in process through our courts and I think we need a body that can transcend that climate -- tell us what science knows and tell us what to do. No one has suggested this, but I think this is needed. The ideal congressional committee to ask for this is the National Institutes of Health and the Justice Department, because it's a mental and legal issue.
MsgId: *brain_storm(30)
Date: Fri Jul 18 22:59:54 EDT 1997
From: Rob_Killheffer At: 38.254.181.222
In one sense it's a relief to learn that many or most of the alarming recovered memories are false -- that there aren't so many families out there with such horrid secrets in their past -- but on the other hand, it's perhaps even more disturbing to think that our memories are so unreliable. Will we have to give up our faith in our memories? How will we tell what's real in our pasts and what's not?
MsgId: *brain_storm(31)
Date: Fri Jul 18 23:04:45 EDT 1997
From: Moira_Johnston At: 207.172.73.205
Our memories are generally reliable -- the gist is generally true. We wouldn't survive if that weren't the case, but it's clear that we must now come to recognize that our memory is a reconstructive event, a process, rather than a videotape replay, which is what we mostly tend to think it is. It is not alarming to me to begin to accept that my memory is less accurate than I thought it was otherwise, because human memory is very good at generalizing and it tends to accurately remember the general concepts of things, although it's not very good at details. It's that generalizing power that gives us the means to think and also it's true that much memory is accurate. Children can be very accurate, even though their memory can be easily distorted.And finally, I think it's important to say that there are cases of people who claim to remember childhood sexual abuse who find corroboration of that abuse. But scientists believe that most of these are not explained by massive repression, but by ordinary remembering and forgetting. All of us will forget memories for a very long time, and a trigger, like a high school reunion, will bring it back. And it's very important to separate out, and care about, the cases of genuine child abuse that may have been forgotten for a time, from the memories that are part of a hysteria far more destructive than the Salem witch trials.
MsgId: *brain_storm(33)
Date: Fri Jul 18 23:08:04 EDT 1997
From: Rob_Killheffer At: 38.254.181.222
That's what makes all the current research into the workings of memory so important: we need to be better able to distinguish the accurate memories from the inaccurate ones, so the valid ones are recognized, and the false ones as well. Well, we're about out of time for tonight. Thanks, Moira, for joining me here for an interesting discussion of a fascinating topic.Viewers, join me here next week when my guest will be Terence Deacon; we'll be discussing the role of language skills in the evolution of the brain. See you then!
MsgId: *brain_storm(34)
Date: Fri Jul 18 23:08:53 EDT 1997
From: Moira_Johnston At: 207.172.73.205
Thank you for a wonderful interview! It was very exciting. Good night! :)
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