• We can be led to false memories.

• We can be led to false memories.
Just as presidents and press agents can manipulate our imaginations, they can also induce false memories by asking leading questions. They guide us to construct images in such detail that we come to take them as memories. LeCarre gives us a good (fictional) example in The Spy Who Came in From the Cold:

Leamas began by insisting he couldn’t remember Ashe, and Ashe said he was surprised. He said it in the sort of tone that suggested he was hurt. They met at a party, he said, which Derek Williams gave in his flat off the Ku-damm (he got that right), and all the press boys had been there; surely Alec remembered that? . . . Ashe remembered vividly. They’d been drinking stingers, brandy and creme de menthe, and were all rather tiddly, and Derek had provided some really gorgeous girls, half the cabaret from Malkasten, surely Alec remembered now? . . . and Bill had been so embarrassed because he hadn’t any money on him and Alec had paid, and Bill had wanted to take a girl home and Alec had lent himanother tenner--
“Christ,” said Leamas, “I remember now, of course I do” (44-5).

This scam operates in real life, too, in a highly organized way, as with the spate of Satanic child abuse accusations in the late 1980s. Christian activists in the courts, social service agencies, and police forces accused many parents and child care workers across the nation of abusing children as part of Satanic rituals. In the course of the craze, communities were disrupted, some people lost their jobs, others went to jail. In Gilmer, Texas, 10 people, including a police sergeant, were charged with the cult murder of a local teen, on no evidence except the testimony (coerced, it turned out later) of one adult and a six-year-old. In East Wenatchee, Washington, one officer jailed twenty people, mostly low-income women (Shermer 113). The witch hunt grew out of the horrific stories of Christian activists and kids who said (or denied!) they’d been abused.

A 1992 account by Bill Ellis gives something of the flavor of a the crusade:
Sue Plante of the San Diego County Child Protective Services interviewed a young woman who described years of ritual abuse by her parents, members of a Satanic cult, who also had custody of three grandchildren.

Early in August, Plante entered the house without warning and began looking under the children’s clothing for signs of abuse. Discovered and warned by Bill Jones to leave or he would call the police, she allegedly said, ‘Go ahead . . . . You’ll find out who I am and what I can do.’ On August 22 she returned with three patrol cars of police and removed the three children from the house. . . . The children denied suffering any abuse, but Jean Campbell, a La Jolla psychologist, found symptoms of fear and anxiety. The 12-year-old girl, she said, ‘came across as an ideal teenager in a too-good-to-be-true sense.’ . . . She recommended that the children be completely isolated from their family for six months and given twice-weekly therapy sessions: ‘Given positive therapeutic conditions,’ she expected that the two younger children, at least, would eventually ‘be able to disclose’ (Victor 120-1).

Two months later, after other psychologists could turn up no evidence of abuse, and county officials learned that the accuser was on state disability for schizophrenia, the kids were returned to their grandparents. Intimidation, “therapy”, a selective interpretation of behavior-- these practices were featured in case after case in many different communities. The patterns were similar because there had developed a loose network of ritual abuse activists. They had videotapes, books and newsletters. Plante herself had co-authored a booklet for the county titled “Ritual Abuse-- Treatment, Intervention and Safety Guidelines.” In the Gilmer case, the local prosecutor led foster parents and a team of Christians for Child Protective Services to threaten and physically pressure the six-year-old “witness” until he told them the story of torture and cannibalism that they wanted to hear. These folks were convinced of a global satanic conspiracy, and they used their official positions to promote the idea.

The movement represents an interesting confluence of trends, including the ongoing social and economic upheavals and conflict over gender roles, the resurgence of Christian political activism, “New Age” awareness methods, the plateauing of anti-abortion successes, and the broad public acceptance of the magnitude of the child abuse problem. Shermer (100-108) thinks many elements set up a self-intensifying “feedback loop” similar to the medieval witch hunts, in which even contradictory information is reinterpreted as evidence supporting the crusaders’ agenda. A similar mix of anxieties and new techniques has given rise to the UFO sightings movement, and its subset, alien abductions.

We see a somewhat comparable phenomenon in some African cities, where war, AIDS and economic chaos have smashed families and communities, and provided fertile fields for a religious revival. "As a result, literal, perverse belief in Harry Potter has gripped Kinshasa, leading to the mass-hysterical denunciation of thousands of child 'witches' and their expulsion to the streets, even their murder (Mike Davis, 196)." Some preachers promote fears of witchcraft, to offer Christianity as the protection against it. As with the false child abuse accusations in this country, the hysteria in Kinshasa produced its own fantastic testimony:

Witch children, like possessed maidens in seventeenth-century Salem, seem to hallucinate the accusations against them, accepting their role as sacrificial receptacles for family immiseration and urban anomie. One boy told photographer Vincen Beeckman:

I’ve eaten 800 men. I make them have accidents, in planes or cars. I even went to Belgium thanks to a mermaid who took me all the way to the port of Antwerp. Sometimes I travel by broomstick, other times on an avocado skin. At night, I’m 30 and I have 100 children. My father lost his job as an engineer because of me-- then I killed him with the mermaid. I also killed my brother and sister. I buried them alive. I also killed all of my mother’s unborn children (Mike Davis 187-8).


For my purposes, the distinctive feature of the movements in the U.S. is their reliance on the newly popular notion of “recovered memories.” I suppose it all goes back to Freud’s idea of repressed memories: that we push some exceptionally shocking knowledge out of our conscious minds, but that it lingers on in the unconscious, sickening us like an infected sliver or an ectopic pregnancy. Repressed memory has had a long career in the movies and on TV, as a dramatic metaphor for deep emotional disturbance; the distraught heroine wanders in an amnesiac daze, pursued by the mob boss whose crimes she witnessed, till the sensitive detective rescues her mind and her heart. At some point the romance of repressed memory collided and began to merge with the “past lives” movement, in which thousands of people learned to remember their earlier incarnations as Alexander the Great or an Indian princess. The offspring was “recovered memory”, and as soon as it became available, Christian activists adopted it as the warhorse of their campaign against Satan.

It works like this:

Recovered memories are alleged memories of childhood sexual abuse repressed by the victims but recalled decades later through the use of special therapeutic techniques, including suggestive questioning, hypnosis, hypnotic age-regression, visualization, sodium amytal (“truth serum”) injections, and dream interpretation. What makes this movement a feedback loop is the accelerating rate of information exchange. The therapist usually has the client read books about recovered memories, watch videotapes of talk shows on recovered memories, and participate in group counseling with other women with recovered memories. Absent at the beginning of therapy, memories of childhood sexual abuse are soon created through weeks and months of applying the special therapeutic techniques. Then names are named-- father, mother, grandfather, uncle, brother, friends of father, and so on. Next is confrontation with the abused, who inevitably denies the charges, and termination of all relations with the accused. Shattered families are the result (Shermer 108).

Skeptical of the process involved, and spurred by the destructive outcomes, Elizabeth Loftus and colleagues have examined how interrogators can manufacture false memories (Loftus 70-75). In one experiment, they interviewed subjects and their relatives about the subjects’ childhood experiences. “We prepared a booklet for each participant containing one-paragraph stories about three events that had actually happened to him or her and one that had not”-- getting lost in a shopping mall at about age five. Relatives verified that such an upsetting event had not really occurred. Subjects were asked to read the booklets and try to recall the events in as much detail as possible.

After reading the booklet, seven of 24 participants (29 percent) remembered either partially or fully the false event constructed for them, and in the two follow-up interviews six participants (25 percent) continued to claim that they remembered the fictitious event. Statistically, there are some differences between the true memories and the false ones: participants used more words to describe the true memories, and they rated the true memories as being somewhat more clear. But if an onlooker were to observe many of our participants describe an event, it would be difficult indeed to tell whether the account was of a true or a false memory.

Loftus has conducted hundreds of experiments in memory manipulation, and other researchers have confirmed her findings. One of the key techniques in manufacturing memories is asking participants to imagine a scene. As mentioned above, the information we store in memory doesn’t necessarily come with “True” and “Imaginary” tags, and we tend to interpret any clear and vividly detailed scenes as being true-- “an act of imagination simply makes the event seem more familiar and that familiarity is mistakenly related to childhood memories rather than to the act of imagination . . . . The investigators found that the more times participants imagined an unperformed action, the more likely they were to remember having performed it” (Loftus).

And this is exactly what some therapists encourage.

Surveys of clinical psychologists reveal that 11 percent instruct their clients to ‘let the imagination run wild,’ and 22 percent tell their clients to ‘give free rein to the imagination’. Therapist Wendy Maltz, author of a popular book on childhood sexual abuse, advocates telling the patient: ‘Spend time imaging that you were sexually abused, without worrying about accuracy, proving anything, or having your ideas make sense . . . . Ask yourself . . . these questions: What time of day is it? Where are you? Indoors or outdoors? What kind of things are happening? Is there one or more person with you? (Loftus)

So it’s not surprising that people anxious to please their therapists or other members of a therapy group, and asked leading questions to spark their imaginations, and encouraged at first not to worry about the truth of their stories, should sometimes develop very detailed stories about events that never happened. Some accounts of ritual abuse include excruciatingly gruesome tales of torture, murder and cannibalism.

What’s infuriating about this Satanic Panic (the title of Jeffrey Victor’s book) is not only that so many people were falsely accused or even jailed to advance a political agenda, but that child abuse is a very real and widespread crime, and these crusaders have drastically undermined the credibility of the real victims.


Nowadays corrupt cops may be leading practitioners of manufactured memory, suggesting crime details in the context of a menacing atmosphere, or claiming to have corroborating witnesses.

This effect was demonstrated by Saul M. Kassin and his colleagues at Williams College, who investigated the reaction of individuals falsely accused of damaging a computer by pressing the wrong key. The innocent participants initially denied the charge, but when a confederate said that she had seen them perform the action, many participants signed a confession, internalized guilt for the act and went on to confabulate details that were consistent with that belief. These findings show that false incriminating evidence can induce people to accept guilt for a crime they did not commit and even develop memories to support their guilty feelings.

Or consider this interrogation from 1775, as the French police sought to manufacture an “outside agitator” explanation for the hunger riots of that year. In this case, they weren’t able to sufficiently intimidate their detainee:

Q. How was it known that there were riots elsewhere?
A. Everybody said so in the market at Mouy.
Q. Did any “strangers” come by who urged the people to riot?
A. He saw none.
Q. What did these “strangers” look like?
A. Repeats that he saw none.
Q. What did they talk about?
A. Repeats that he saw no “strangers.”
Q. Did they claim to be bearers of the King’s orders and did they produce papers purporting to prove it?
A. Repeats that he saw no “strangers” (Rudé 216).

Manipulative “investigation” in a seemingly more supportive environment marks the UFO abduction movement, where therapists and writers commonly ask leading questions, focus selectively on some details while ignoring others, and suggest ways to interepret ambiguous data, fill in gaps and make disjointed narratives coherent. Matheson gives many examples culled from abduction literature, including:

At one point . . . [Betty Andreasson] speaks vaguely of being in a strange realm which [investigator Raymond] Fowler and others immediately determine to be the aliens’ planet. . . . [Fowler] provides an explanation for the separation between the two colored realms by suggesting the presence of an ‘invisible force field,’ which Betty immediately embraces, lost as she was for appropriate words to explain the scene. Elsewhere, he helps Betty account for the dominance of bird imagery by saying it might be an emblem, the alien equivalent of the American eagle, to which Betty, again groping for answers herself, quickly assents. But in fleshing her narrative out, he not only gives it continuity and a new form, but changes significantly its effect on the reader. In fact, the narrative has become a joint creative effort (91-2).

Even though the questioners were initially told by [Bob Andreasson] that this was a mental experience, they persisted in asking qustions of a ‘nuts-and-bolts’ nature, such as ‘How far away are they?’; ‘Do you leave the ground and go somewhere with them?’; and most pointedly, ‘Did you scream when you saw them?’
Bob, of course, did not originally say he saw them at all and had made no reference to screaming, at least not in any of the transcripts within Fowler’s book . . . . Soon after, the hypnotist says, ‘Suppose we progress in time to your next UFO sighting,’ making an implicit suggestion that such a sighting had occurred; Bob, of course, picks up on this as well.
But the most potentially contaminating involvement of investigator with subject takes place when hypnotist Fred Max says he wants to speak to the beings and ask them questions, a request that again is little more than an overt invitation to Betty to concoct answers to those questions, which of course she does (100-101).

At one point Fowler tells us, ‘Try as he may, Tony could not get [abductee] Chuck to remember the beam reaching the canoe.’ Finally, ‘in desperation,’ Constantino asks him to imagine he is watching a film, which as I have argued before, will strike many readers as an extremely questionable technique. Only then do they get the kind of results they so obviously desire (220).


Loftus reminds us that, however new the recovered memory movement is, the basic techniques are not. Catholic interrogators during the witch hunts, and Communists during Stalin's purges, generated thousands of outlandish confessions, mostly by torture, but also by manipulating their prisoners to believe in their own guilt.

Makes you wonder, when Dick Cheney claims to have foiled countless terrorist attacks by torturing suspects hundreds of times: how reliable were these confessions? And: who was more caught up in fantasy, interrogator or detainee? Compare the "let your imagination run wild" directions of the lie-inducing psychologists above with this bold innovation at the CIA: “Of his own agency Tenet said, ‘We spend a great deal of time encouraging analysts to get out of their own skins, to try to think the way the enemy thinks.’ . . . Tenet said that his analysts have been encouraged to extend themselves, to lower the threshold for what is credible” (Goldberg 2-10-03). In the headlong rush to war, the head of the world's biggest spy agency declared the enemy and instructed his researchers to make up reasons to attack.


When I worked at a workshop center in Tennessee, which hosted discussions by hundreds of people, I saw something like induced memories only once. Folks were talking about the ways they’d been attacked for their work on environmental and other issues. Some had truly hair-raising stories of being shot at, burned out or bombed. It was hard for many to talk about such scary experiences and what they’d lost, but for some there was also a sense of relief in being able to talk in a safe environment. Our purpose in encouraging the discussion was not only to draw some strategic lessons but also to lend support for folks who often had too little. Perhaps inevitably we paid the most attention to the scariest stories.

One woman told a moving story about being threatened and beaten for her work. As we kept in contact with her over the next several months, she added more shocking details to the story, and then came up with new stories of being hounded by company thugs. We got indirect hints that others in her organization were beginning to distrust her, and we may have become less sympathetic when she called us. At first our coolness provoked even more heart-rending stories, but eventually we lost touch.

I’m still not sure what happened. It seems possible that a part of her story was true, but that she embellished it to keep our attention and sympathy. If she did lie, she may or may not have realized it. It may have been that there were other traumas in her life, not directly related to her political work, and that good therapy could have helped her.

The episode raised important questions for us as educators. We were trying to bring such corporate crimes out into the open, and any untruth would have undermined the credibility of every victim. We were also trying to make a safe space where people could trust each other enough to talk about very, very hard experiences. We were trying to be as accepting as possible, because we knew that these folks had often been rejected and ridiculed by the press, the regulatory agencies and some of their neighbors. We were also very deliberately building a network of activists who could support each other’s work. We did not put words in participants’ mouths or demand a “right answer” to our questions. But we may have fostered a dynamic that rewarded the best story-tellers with greater recognition in the group.

In this case it was other members of this woman’s community organization who alerted us to be more skeptical than we would have been otherwise. We never came across another story as suspicious as this one. But we didn’t develop any good process for evaluating truthfulness, either.

In looking back, we had two purposes. Our primary goal was to build a collective analysis that could strengthen participants’ work in their communities. We had no need to be acting as investigators; in fact, that would have irretrievably hurt the whole process. We knew that the important understandings would emerge not from this or that person’s testimony, but from a pooling of everyone’s knowledge.

But a secondary goal was to help bring these issues to public attention, through the participating organizations and, in a small way, directly from our own group. Here’s where we needed to develop a clear way to vet the information we were passing around. We could have helped the participating groups do this, too.

The credibility issue goes beyond simply making some space for the truth to be heard, as important as that is; I also want to shut down the space for lies. It’s not nearly so effective for folks to accept what environmentalists say, for instance, if at the same time they accept the equal validity of UFOs, the Arab(/Jewish) Conspiracy, and competitive capitalism. Given the ruling institutions’ capacity to hijack our memories and imaginations, I want folks to be able to identify and fight lies more quickly and coherently. Some writers like Senator Al Franken tackle the corporate liars head-on, but we all need to be able to do it for ourselves, without internet access and a Harvard research team.