False Memory Syndrome; How It Happens?

The term; “False Memory Syndrome”  is applied to a situation where a person’s basic identity and their various relationships are focused on a ‘memory’ of a traumatic experience that never happened.

The event never happened, yet the person so strongly holds to it that they spend their lives constantly focusing on it, repeating it, refusing to accept all evidence that it is false.

The so-called memory is so central to the one that holds it that it controls the rest of their life.  Their behaviour, their attitudes, their life.   So powerful is this False memory that it will destroy all other behaviour.

The holder of this False Memory will avoids  all factual evidence that challenges the memory.

It takes on a life of its own.

All attempts to correct, to show proof that it never happened is resisted.  So compulsive is this need to maintain the memory that real problems are ignored.

Mainstream psychiatric and psychological professional associations; the American, British and Canadian psychiatric associations have warned against ‘sudden’ adult memories of childhood trauma.

To prove the point,  Dr. Elizabeth Loftus created the “Lost in the Mall” technique.

This experiment was to implant a false memory of being lost in a shopping mall as a child in the minds of subjects.

In her initial study, she found that 25% of subjects came to develop a “memory” for an event that never happened.

Later studies raised that percentage to 30%,  where persons could be convinced that they had experienced events in childhood that had never occurred.

The research of Elizabeth Loftus has been used to counter claims of recovered memory in court and resulted in stricter requirements for the use of recovered memories being used in trials.

In America, some states no longer allow prosecution based on recovered memory testimony and insurance companies are reluctant to insure therapists against malpractice suits relating to recovered memories.

This is due to a number of cases.

One of the first cases, which I referred to in earlier articles on this topic concerned that of a woman whose relationship with her parents was destroyed when a therapist planted the false memory of childhood abuse.  The abuse never happened.

There are other cases in which an accident was twisted into a ‘suicide’ attempt.  A woman who had fallen out of a window when she was 15 was brought to believe she had jumped.

She recalls opening the window, standing on the ledge, then jumping.

The fact the screen was on the ground, meaning the woman would have ‘jumped’ through it and not opened it was ignored.  The fact the window had no ledge, was ignored.

The fact medical personnel stated that the woman had been asleep or unconscious as she had not tensed her body, and that the first responder, a woman who lived on the first floor was asked; “Why are you in my bedroom,” convinced the police she had fallen.

She was released back to her home without the slightest qualm and lived there until she moved out shortly before attending the therapist.

How the idea of attempted suicide entered the picture is due to the therapist seeking to find a reason why this woman who had been half asleep fell out of the window which was very low and close to her bed, obliterated all other considerations.

The woman will say; “I opened the window and stood on the ledge before I jumped,” ignores the fact of the screen and that was no ledge.  Photographs of the window will be glanced at, and there will be a pause, and then a retreat to the basic position of opening the window, standing on a ledge because the false memory is so powerful and all attempts to resist it become futile.

It is not the person him or herself who alone creates the False Memory.  There is often some outside source which manipulates the recollection of the subject.

Just as in the ‘Lost in the Mall’ experiment where the ‘memory’ never happened, those who were prompted to create it, continue to ‘remember’ it, and repeat it often so as not to ‘forget’ it.