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How Memories Can Be Created In Therapy
The Act of Remembrance
To understand how memories might be created in therapy, one must first realise that the act of remembering is a reconstructive process. Rather than thinking of a specific memory as having its own seperate storage in the brain, models of rememberance portray the memory as a collection of linked, but separately stored, parts. During recall, the individual must piece the separate parts of the memory back together.
An example of the problems that might occur during reconstruction is the incorrect association between a memory and source of that memory (Johnson, Hashtroudi, & Lindsay, 1993). Source monitoring deficiencies are one explanantion for extensive empirical evidence showing that memories are malleable enough to be distorted by the mere wording of a question Loftus & Palmer,1974; Loftus & Zanni, 1975; Belli,1989; Lindsay,1990).
Another important factor to bear in mind is that only limited aspects of an event is perceived or stored in the first place, and memories of an event are coloured by both our experience of the event at the time, and our feelings and knowledge about the event at the time of recall. Put another way, a person witnessing an event is restricted to their own point of view of a scene, and what they see may be transformed or biased by their interpretation of it, either at the time or when remembering it. Similarly, a child who is sexually abused will not always perceive what is happening to them as a bad thing, as they may be too young to understand the moral issues involved.
Beliefs about Sexual Abuse and Ritual Abuse Prevalance.
Clinicians may overestimate the base-rate of sexual abuse when they make diagnoses. At the moment it is very difficult to tell what percentage of the population was abused, because available estimates use widely different definitions of sexual abuse, and it is impossible to know how many victims remain undetected.
Because of their high exposure to genuine sexual abuse victims and because of the confusion surrounding estimates of actual incidence, some therapists may make false correlations between patient symptoms and a history of sexual abuse. In truth, there is little agreement amongst therapists about the long-term after-effects of childhood sexual abuse. (Poole, Lindsay, Memon, A. & Bull, 1995).
A clinician may become confident that the symptoms presented by the client constitute evidence of past abuse. However, once a diagnosis is made, the therapist will tend not to explore other possible explanations for the client's psychological trauma. The reported absence of memories for abuse by the client may be interpreted as 'denial' or 'repression', and confirmatory biases will influence the therapist to view the behaviour and affect of their client as further evidence of past abuse. In fact, the very absence of memories of suspected child abuse is taken by some as evidence that the client has experienced a particularly traumatic event. The circularity of this way of thinking is disturbing and dangerous, as suspected abuse can never be disconfirmed.
Memory Repression
The idea of repression may enjoy wide popularity in pop psychology, but lacks credibility as a concept. There is no clear definition of repression, but the basic premise is that particularly shocking and unpleasant events can trigger the mind to hide the memory away from conscious awareness (Loftus, 1993). However, the presence of repressed memories in the unconscious yeilds unpleasant psychological symptoms. These symptoms can best be relieved if the individual can 'recover' the traumatic memories and deal with them consciously (Claridge, 1992). Thus, the therapist who believes that repressed memories are the cause of a client's problems will try to provide an environment in which the memories may be brought back into conscious thought.
Although the concept of repression is a favoured explanation by some therapists for many psychological symptoms, it is not a universally accepted phenomenon. Amongst experiemental psychologists it has recieved even less support. Thus far there is no empirical evidence for its existence (Holmes, 1990), and it has been argued that the concept contradicts known facts about memory. For instance, while we know that memory for an event is especially bad if the event in question has not been thought about for some time (Ebbinghaus, 1885; cited in Loftus, 1979) repressed memories are treated as though they are precise and whole accounts of long-ago events, untainted by time.
In virtually all ritual abuse cases, survivors are said to have repressed their memories of the events, due to the extremely traumatic nature of their experiences. Thus, in almost every case, the memories are only found after extensive memory recovery work during therapy. From what is known about suggestibility and memory fallibility, this practice provides a partial explanation for the reports of bizarre torture and rituals that are the staple of memories retrieved in therapy. Because memory retrieval techniques are used on people that are already convinced by their therapist that they are repressing traumatic memories, it is likely that memory reconstruction will be biased towards this. In other words, the client will be inclined to interpret innocuous memories as abusive or sinister.
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