This is a response to Joan Acocella's article, "The Politics of Hysteria" published in The New Yorker April 6, 1998. Because when I was growing up The New Yorker was the most respected magazine my parents read, I have felt the need to respond to the article at great length, mostly to validate myself to myself. What I have written here is not so much for reassurance to people inside the community, as my defense of my beliefs to outsiders who may be skeptical. I have therefore tried to take a moderate point of view; members of the community may feel that I have conceded too much to the other side.

There are three kinds of responses I want to make to the article. First is to talk about the recovered memory debate, second is to talk about Multiple Personality/DID, and third is to respond to some of the "facts" and journalistic techniques of the article.

#1 Recovered Memories

To me, the recovered memory debate is a strange thing. Don't most people have the experience of forgetting some minor trauma and then suddenly remembering it when some event triggers that memory? The "false memory" people sometimes say that memories of traumatic events are never repressed and then recovered, and that just seems absurd.

It works better to turn the question the other way: some people have the experience of recovering what they believe to be repressed memories--are those real? The false memory people point to examples and mechanisms to show that not all such memories are real. That seems to me to be a trivial point. I don't think anyone doubts that some memories are not completely accurate and some may have no relationship at all to actual events. The important question is, what percentage of recovered memories are false? If it is 10 or 20%, then false memories are a side issue. False memories would cast a significant shadow on the accepted wisdom of the survivor and therapist communities only if the majority of recovered memories were false, and that is what the false memory community seeks to claim.

Before talking about whether a significant percentage of memories are false, it is important to define what it means to say a memory is false. Philosophers have written about the nature of memory and pointed out that memory is never the same as what would have been recorded by a videocamera in the sky. Memory, at best, is how I subjectively made sense of an event, and that may be quite different from the memory of other people who were present.

I can imagine a child, horrified by an enema, making something fairly simple into an abuse memory. In that case, one would want to say that memory of traumatic events is problematic evidence in a court of law (though obviously courts of law deal everyday with witnesses whose recollection is distorted by the emotional impact of their experiences). It seems to me, in that kind of case, however, the memory is true in the context of therapy (that is, what it meant to that person) even if it is not true in the sense of the word used in court.

In a family, in which such feelings could not easily be talked about, the different interpretations of what happened could cause separation and pain. It seems to me that, at least in an ideal situation, it would be possible to work out a mutual understanding that something happened that meant very different things to the people participating.

That is a different situation from the question of whether memories are ever completely false, in the sense that they bear no significant relationship to actual events. When the false memory folks claim that their study shows that they can induce memories of being lost in a mall, they are claiming that the memory bears no relationship to something that actually happened (though one might wonder if the person really never had something like that happen as a child). It seems to me that this is the important claim. Therefore, I want to focus on whether the majority of recovered memories are essentially false.

A number of mechanisms have been proposed by which false memories might be created. I want to examine each of those and consider whether there is reason to believe that they are common.

It is certainly possible that an unprofessional therapist could suggest something to a vulnerable person, so strongly, that they would begin to remember it. People are suggestible (consider the tendency of medical students to diagnose themselves with the diseases they read about) and people in pain may be so desperate for an explanation that they are ready to grasp at straws. However, most therapists know better, and so that is going to affect a very small percentage of survivors. Even before the current fuss, I never had a therapist suggest anything to me, and in the current situation, the vast majority of therapists are unwilling to say anything about memories.

It is also possible that the client could be making the memory up to get attention and care. It seems like an odd thing to do. I can't imagine that very many people would choose all this pain--but it clearly happens occasionally. It would probably be a form of Munchausen Syndrome, which is fairly rare (1% of illnesses is one figure I found). I assume that over time, therapists are likely to see a pattern if they work closely with a person who is making up memories.

More significant is the issue of whether reading books and articles about incest survivors plants the seeds of false memories. Books and articles can trigger related memories. That is why some authors write that if it particularly bothers you to read an account of abuse, then something similar may have happened to you. I was quite cautious of possible influence at first, limiting what I read and watching my memories carefully for similarities to what I had read. I found it very rare that reading directly triggered a memory, and that if it did the memory was distinctly different from what I had read.