Memory, p.43
Memory, page 43
What about repression of memories for events that occur later in life? Of course the answer to this question depends completely on how you define repression. Repression, often called ‘the queen of defences’, most generally refers to ‘… a warding off of any conscious experience of a frightening memory, wish, or fantasy, or of unwanted emotions’. The literature is full of case histories and some experimental studies that support the idea that people sometimes fail to remember horrifying experiences from their past. One study of concentration camp survivors, for example, shows the extent to which forgetting of horrors is possible. One person was beaten so badly he was unable to walk for several days. Interviewed 40 years later, he remembered receiving only an occasional kick.fn6 But just because something horrible is forgotten does not mean it was ‘repressed’; repression is supposed to involve something beyond ordinary forgetting.
When repression is discussed in childhood sexual abuse, the extent of banishment from consciousness is virtually total. John Briere calls this ‘total repression’, Richard Ofshe and Margaret Singer call it ‘robust repression’.fn7 The concept of total or robust repression is being invoked to explain how endless numbers of traumatic events spanning years of one’s life can be banished completely from awareness, leaving an individual who professes to have had a relatively happy childhood.
Claims about the commonness of repressed memories are freely made; they give the sense of a phenomenon that is extraordinarily prevalent. For example, E. Sue Blume, a social worker who works with incest survivors, claims that ‘half of all incest survivors do not remember that the abuse occurred’. B. Engel, a licensed marriage, family, and child counsellor, and a leading expert in the treatment of adults who were sexually abused as children, maintains that ‘many victims of childhood sexual abuse have entirely repressed the horrifying memory of the abuse’.fn8 Renée Fredrickson, a psychotherapist with 18 years of experience, claíms that ‘Millions of people have blocked out frightening episodes of abuse, years of their life, or their entire childhood.’ Later she tells readers that ‘sexual abuse is particularly susceptible to memory repression’.fn9 In a case in which I recently testified, one book recommended to a client by her therapist tells readers that a noted expert who is named in the book believes that ‘as high as 70 percent of women have no conscious awareness of a molestation that occurred in their past’.fn10
With psychotherapists advancing these claims, it is hardly surprising to find them in the popular media. John Bradshaw tells readers of Lear’s Magazine: ‘About 60 percent of all incest victims don’t remember the sexual abuse for many years after the fact. This characteristic – the delayed emergence of long-repressed memories – has been widely reported in incest cases …’fn11 These claims are being made despite a review of 60 years of controlled studies showing virtually no support for the idea that an event can be accurately reproduced in memory after a long period of robust repression.
Several recent studies confirm that sexual abuse survivors sometimes report memory difficulties. In one study, 59 per cent claimed that there was a period of time between the first forced sexual experience and their eighteenth birthday when they could not remember the forced sexual experience. But, if the first experience occurred before the offset of childhood amnesia, the memory difficulty would be completely normal and unsurprising. In another study, 26 per cent were classified by their therapists as having severe memory defects.fn12 But these deficits could also be due to ordinary childhood amnesia. Moreover, there is no evidence that these particular cases were validated.
Not everyone accused is innocent, of course. Certainly we must accept the reality of childhood traumas that can be highly damaging. But at the moment, we do not have the means for reliably distinguishing true memories about the guilty from false memories about the innocent. We cannot get to the truth about the past by remembering alone. Until we can, it seems prudent to be cautious about how one goes about piercing some presumed amnesic barrier. Is it unfair to the truly victimised to make this point? Definitely not. For uncritical acceptance of every claim of sexual abuse, no matter how dubious, is bound to have another chilling consequence: it will make trivial the true and ruthless cases of abuse and increase the suffering of genuine victims.
From IAN HACKING, Rewriting the Soul (1995)
Does it matter whether what we seem to remember really happened, more or less as we remember it? In daily life it matters most of the time. I thought I left my wallet in my raincoat pocket; it’s not there. Panic. I (seem to) remember loaning you my copy of Putnam’s book. Oh, I’m sorry, I loaned it to Lisa; I was confused. But what about seeming memories of long ago? They matter when our beliefs affect other people. That is the point of the false memory polemics. If someone cuts off all contact with her family, because she wrongly has come to believe that her father abused her and her mother knew but kept silent, then incalculable harm has been done to the family. In that case, the false beliefs, which seem to be memories, have terrible effects. But what about false beliefs that do not affect other people? What is wrong with mistaken memories that do no harm? I shall suggest an answer in terms of what I call false consciousness.
I mean something quite ordinary by false consciousness: the state of people who have formed importantly false beliefs about their character and their past. I argue that false consciousness is a bad state to be in even if one is not responsible for being in that state. False memory – something of a contradiction in terms – is only a small part of false consciousness. This is because ‘false memory syndrome’ usually refers to a pattern of memories of events in one’s own past that never took place. It is not that the events are remembered inaccurately (for most events are). It is rather that nothing remotely like those events occurred. Indeed, the so-called syndrome might be called contrary-memory syndrome, for the seeming memories are not merely false but contrary to all reality. In the prototypical example, a ‘recanter’ says that she seemed to remember being regularly raped by her uncle, but now she realizes that nothing of the sort ever occurred. Nobody ever raped her. Her uncle was gentle and caring. Her seeming memory that the abuser was her uncle does not cast him as a stand-in for someone else, for no one ever abused her. That is what I call a contrary-memory. That is the sort of ‘memory’ that the False Memory Syndrome Foundation advertises. A person with contrary-memories of her own most intimate life would, in my terminology, have false consciousness. But there is more to false consciousness than that.
A merely-false-memory, in the same ballpark as the above example of a contrary-memory, would be one in which the uncle is, in memory, a screen for the father, the real perpetrator. Thus the memory is not contrary to all reality, but the past has been radically remolded. Another possibility is that the uncle did not rape her when she was six, but did fondle her improperly. The false memory syndrome people have expressed little interest in merely-false-memories like that. But such seeming memories could certainly feed what I call a false consciousness – for example, if the victim seems to remember vile treatment from her uncle, who was sweetness and light, in order to shield her father, and her own self-image.
Another relevant defect in memory could be called wrong-forgetting. That is the suppression of central items from one’s past that are integral to one’s character or nature. I say suppression, not repression. Repression is a postulated mechanism whereby incidents are lost to conscious memory and drives or tendencies are lost to conscious desire. Part of the postulate is that the repression is itself not a deliberate and conscious act on the part of any moral agent. A purist, especially a psychoanalytic purist, might say that a person who has not worked through the past and liberated repressed memory suffers from false consciousness. Well, maybe a person with five years of free time and a great deal of money, who declines analysis out of fear, is afflicted with false consciousness. But ordinary mortals bringing up a family, and supplying its needs of love, care, and sustenance, are not suffering from false consciousness, in any important way, if repressing their memories keeps them on an even keel. If, however, some memories have been suppressed, deliberately, by whomever and by whatever means, then we may begin to think of false consciousness.
Contrary-memory, merely-false-memory, and wrong-forgetting by no means exhaust the possibilities. Let me group these and other possibilities under the heading of deceptive-memory. I am inventing compound words with hyphens to flag the fact that, strictly speaking, we are concerned not with memories but with seeming memories or the absence of memories. In deceptive-memory I include seeming memories, or absence of memory, of definite facts about the past. I am not referring to the indeterminacies about past human action discussed in the previous chapter. But of course if there is what I called semantic contagion, then a person may arrive at definitely false beliefs that seem to be incorporated in memory. If she passes from redescribing a past action as sexual abuse (an adult’s obsessive attention to her genitalia when washing her as a child) to the seeming memory that her mother constantly forced a rubber duck into her orifices while bathing her, we have semantic contagion and deceptive-memory.
Since memoro-politics has largely succeeded, we have come to think of ourselves, our character, and our souls as very much formed by our past. Hence, in our times, false consciousness will often involve some deceptive-memories. It need not do so. The Delphic injunction ‘Know thyself!’ did not refer to memory. It required that we know our character, our limits, our needs, our propensities for self-deception. It required that we know our souls. Only with the advent of memoro-politics did memory become a surrogate for the soul. Even today there are plenty of kinds of false consciousness that have nothing to do with memory. We all know those who genuinely believe that they are generous and sensitive, when in fact they are self-centered and indifferent. Kant held the maxim ‘He who wills the end wills the means,’ yet I know someone who is a living refutation of Kant. For he sincerely strives for worthy ends, but he is lacking in self-understanding and sensibility for other people; hence he does not comprehend what could serve as means to the ends for which he strives. He wills the end but seems incapable of willing the means. That too is a kind of false consciousness. Every reader will furnish other examples close to home, or closer: readers who are sure that they are free of any taint of false consciousness are perhaps the falsest of all.
Here, however, we are concerned with remembering, and hence with false consciousness that feeds on deceptive-memories. I say that it feeds on them, because it is not enough that we have deceptive-memories. In order for there to be false consciousness we must use the deceptive-memories as part of our sense of who we are. They must be part of the story that we tell about ourselves. They must be part of the way in which we constitute ourselves, or see our selves as constituted.
So much impassioned rubbish is now spoken and written about ‘false memory’ – that is, contrary-memory – that we shall have a cleaner slate if we think instead about wrong-forgetting No one, I think, so systematically cultivated deceptive-memory as Pierre Janet. He did so from the highest motives. His patients were in torment. Their symptoms were caused by ill-remembered trauma. His cures often relied on eliciting the trauma by discussion and by hypnosis. Once the cause of the distress had been brought to light, he hypnotized the patient into thinking that the events never happened. To recall two cases discussed earlier, Marie had been traumatized by her terror of her first menstrual period, and by standing in a barrel of freezing water in order to stop it. Her periods did cease, for a while, but later on she endured hysterical hypothermia, terrible fits of freezing cold every month. She did not understand why, and more and more hysterical symptoms appeared. When Marguerite was six she had to sleep beside a girl with a disgusting facial skin disease and had been made to put her hand on it to show she was not frightened by it. As an adult, she developed rashes, paralyses, insensitivity, and blindness on that side of her face and body. Janet hypnotized these women into believing that the events never occurred. Marie had never, on the occasion of her first menstrual period, stood for hours in a freezing water barrel. Marguerite had never had to sleep beside a girl with an appalling skin disease on her face. In both cases the hysterical symptoms vanished.
Marie and Marguerite did not suppress their memories, but Janet did. Hence, by my definition, they have wrongly-forgotten a critical event in their lives. Should we say that these women suffered from false consciousness? Not on the basis of what Janet told us. Marguerite’s trauma is, so far as Janet has informed us, an accident, a mere incident in her life that repelled her. We may well suspect that a great deal has been left out. Why was she made to sleep beside the sick girl? Why did she have to touch the repugnant skin? What cruel mother or aunt did this to her? What else did that person do to her? What sort of family was this, anyway? Likewise with Marie we wonder why she was so terrified of her periods, why she took such desperate measures. There is a great deal to learn about both lives. We may suspect that after treatment by Janet both women were living in a state of thoroughly false consciousness. But we cannot prove that. It is a counsel of perfection that everyone should understand themselves to the core.
Now turn to another historical example of what was probably wrong-forgetting. Goddard’s nineteen-year-old Bernice had an alter aged four, the obnoxious Polly. Bernice repeatedly told Goddard about incest with her father. Goddard convinced her, and I think hypnotized her, into believing this was a fantasy. Let us suppose that Bernice’s memories of incest were pretty much correct. (That is only a hypothesis on my part, but assume it for this analysis.) Let us suppose also that Goddard succeeded in suppressing Bernice’s memory. (This is dubious; we know, from letters written by the superintendent of the Columbus State Hospital for the Insane, that Goddard lied when he ended his account of Bernice by saying that he sent her off effectively cured.) I use these two suppositions not to present a ‘Real Person,’ in Kathleen Wilkes’s sense, but to provide an example that in many ways resembles a real-life incident. Under the first supposition, Goddard induced wrong-forgetting. Under the second supposition, Bernice believed that she was not molested in any way by her father or anyone else. But, under the first supposition, she was.
This only slightly imagined Bernice certainly has deceptive-memory. Unlike Marguerite and Marie, I think that she also has false consciousness. For she has not forgotten an incident or pattern of behavior that we, or she, or people in her community, in 1921, would take to be a mere incident in her life. The incest was something deeply important about her growing up, her family, her young life.
But is there anything wrong with the false consciousness that Goddard induced and to which Bernice succumbed? There might be obvious, utilitarian, things wrong with it. It might have had terrible consequences. For example, in historical fact, in 1921 Bernice had a number of younger siblings, including a three-year-old sister, Betty Jane. Her father had died of tuberculosis three years earlier; her mother also died of TB soon afterward, and the family was broken up. Betty Jane was adopted by an upright family in the community, even changing her surname. Now if the father had not died when Bernice was sixteen – when Betty Jane was an infant – many experienced social workers would bet their bottom dollar that father would have been after Betty Jane in a while. If so, Goddard would have achieved an evil consequence. Bernice, who might have given the alarm, is now silenced. She no longer remembers what once she knew. But for the utilitarian, the false consciousness is not what is wrong. It is the fact that Bernice was deprived of a crucial piece of information that would have mattered to young Betty Jane.
False beliefs about one’s past can have less dramatic bad consequences. Most of us find it embarrassing to be contradicted, even in matters of no significance. But in the story as told, there were no survivors to contradict Bernice. Even a twin sister, who may well have been assaulted, died at the age of eleven. In this story that I am adapting from historical fact, Bernice was simply insulated from all contradiction. It would have been different if all this had happened thirty years later. Bernice, aged nineteen in 1951 (rather than 1921), comes to believe that the incest never occurred. But by 1981, when she is forty-nine, she can hardly escape the media coverage of child sexual abuse and incest. We can certainly envisage a severe midlife crisis, to say the least, as she dimly feels her mind torn by a vague sense that something awful happened to her long ago.
In the story that is closer to the historical situation, however, Betty Jane is safe (we hope) in her adoptive home, and almost everyone else is dead. Given Bernice’s health record, I expect that she died before incest became front-page news. There was no occasion for any cognitive dissonance. Thus I am deliberately telling a story in which there may be no utilitarian argument to show that Bernice’s false consciousness in 1930, say, was a bad thing. There were no bad consequences. But perhaps we can find utilitarian objections to Bernice’s state of affairs. There were still dangers. For example, the dead father may have been a member of a cult. That cult might go on harming children, and Bernice, with memories suppressed, would not be able to blow the whistle. Or even in 1930 there was the risk that Bernice’s suppressed memories might, after all, resurface. Then, lacking adequate support, she might endure dreadful psychological self-torture. Janet himself was well aware of this danger and sometimes found it necessary to re-hypnotize his patients into re-forgetting their trauma. Only half in jest he said that he hoped he would outlive his patients, for without him to make the resurfaced memories go away again, they would be in trouble.
The utilitarian has to work harder and harder to find anything to object to in false consciousness. That is not surprising, for false consciousness is (I say) objectionable in itself, not in its consequences – and what utilitarians must object to is consequences. Suppose Goddard’s therapy had worked. Bernice issued as a relatively whole person, able to carry on a life, perform light secretarial work (she was not a very well person), able to fulfill the societal norms of her day, marry, raise a family. What’s wrong with that if there were no bad consequences?
