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NZ Herald
September 17, 2003
Memory a sucker for fabrication
by Denis Dutton
Denis Dutton teaches philosophy at Canterbury
University
Our will to protect the welfare and fate of our children is deep and fierce.
It brings out the caring best in people - a sense of sacrifice, an intense
desire to offer them a better life.
But this same primal impulse can also bring out the worst in us - hysterical
panics about the latest threat to our children. At the low end, such perceived
threats might include fast-food obesity or violent video games. At the high
end, we worry our children will fall victim to drug pushers or child
molesters.
These are authentic worries because incest and sexual abuse are as real as
drugs. But given the complexities of the human mind and the mechanics of
memory, sex- abuse anxieties have also resulted in witch-hunts and horrific
miscarriages of justice.
Memory is a tetchy subject. Even people who would not claim to have a good
memory are quite confident of what they do remember. For the past 30 years,
however, psychologists have shown what an imperfect instrument memory is.
In particular, work by researchers such as Victoria University
psychologist Maryanne Garry has demonstrated how easy it is in a therapeutic
setting to implant false ideas into a person's mind - which are then
fervently taken to be accurate recollections.
A simple line of questioning can establish in visual memory that a blue
sports car was white or that a bald man had hair on his head. Whole episodes
that never happened, such as getting lost in a shopping mall, can be
manufactured from ideas implanted in a young person's mind.
Early childhood is a particularly treacherous area for memory. Many of us
"remember" childhood events not from direct experience but from
stories told to us later, including anecdotes that might have been about a
friend or sibling. The child's request, "Mummy, tell me about the time I
spilled the paints", might create images permanently embedded in the
mind as early memories of spilling the paints, when, in fact, they are later,
story-induced imaginings.
This tendency for us so confidently to believe in memory (a process we see in
others but have trouble recognising in ourselves) produced episodes of
unspeakable ugliness in the sex-abuse panics and memory wars of the 1980s and
90s.
In a typical scenario a young woman went to a therapist for depression or
anorexia. The therapist had adopted the ideology that many common
psychological malaises were caused by repressed memories of sexual abuse.
(The very idea goes counter to what is known about memory of trauma: people
who have experienced real trauma have trouble forgetting, not remembering
it.)
Using a process of suggestion and leading questions, the patient was
convinced that her real problem was a terrible childhood event, usually
incest or rape by a friend or neighbour.
This fabricated memory, often developed in the most lurid detail, then became
the single explanation of all the patient's present failures and problems.
Recovered memory therapy, as it was known, destroyed families and lives in
the English-speaking world (the fad, oddly, never caught on in continental Europe, Latin America
or the rest of the world). The victim-survivor, backed by a support group of
fellow victims, would confront her stunned parents, demand they be jailed or
sue them. Grandmothers were cut off from grandchildren and families blown to
pieces.
I saw cases of this here in New
Zealand. In one instance a woman in her
30s with a history of borderline psychosis had, with the help of a therapist,
at last recovered memories of the "real cause" of her problem - her
parents. A quiet, pleasant North Island
couple, they had supposedly forced their daughter to be gang-raped in front
of them when she was a child.
On the therapist's advice, the daughter cut them off and denied contact with
the grandchildren, leaving them bewildered and utterly heartbroken.
Which brings us to a twist in the Peter Ellis case, a stunning interview
carried by Radio New Zealand. Nathan, as he was named, is a 22-year-old Christchurch resident
who had been at the Civic Creche for a short time in 1985. He, too, now
claims that Peter Ellis had abused him.
It wasn't until he was 16 that he told his parents about this, although you'd
think his mother, who was also interviewed, would have realised it, since she
now claims that as a small child he ran from the room when Peter Ellis' face
appeared on television.
And how does Nathan know he was abused? At "about 14" he noticed
that he would "freak out" if a girl kissed him, and that he
couldn't handle and was "uncomfortable" in sports changing rooms.
Socialising with girls "scared the heck out of me" to the point
where "I knew there was something wrong".
He also apparently knew more about sex than a normal 14-year-old should have
known. The explanation in his mind is that he remembers lurid details of
things that happened to him in the few weeks that he was at the Civic Creche
in 1985. He also now understands why he has nightmares and wakes up in the
night to vomit.
There is a problem, however. According to Gaye Davidson, the supervisor of
the creche at that time, Ellis made his first appearance at the creche in
August 1986, assigned to it on a community service scheme. (Davidson rejects
the idea that Ellis ever hung around the creche in the previous year.)
Given the intense publicity swirling about the Peter Ellis case in the 1990s,
it is no surprise whatsoever that a troubled young man should come forward
with such fantastic allegations. Nor is it surprising that the police have
refused to pursue the case on his behalf.
What is astonishing is that Radio New Zealand would give him 40 minutes to
share with the nation the genesis of his problems - those dreadful
experiences at age 4 at a creche that did not then have Ellis on its staff.
There is no doubting Nathan's sincerity, however turbid or confused his
memories might be. But how curious that he was allowed to go on National
Radio to express his sense of injury and hatred of Ellis, virtually without
serious challenge. The memory wars are not over yet.
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