Background

An unfortunate fact of life is that a person in a position of power does not always have the best interests of those under him or her in mind. A particularly unfortunate example is a therapist who would rather believe that a young woman was raised in a satanic cult and convinces his patient that this really is what happened, despite a complete lack of evidence (Schacter, 1996). This example is only one of many; there are many cases of patients recovering memories with the help of therapists only to later discover that these “memories ” were not at all true. Yet these patients completely believed those memories until the mountain of evidence against them simply grew too big. It is because of these cases that researchers became interested in how the mind comes distort real memories in order to accommodate false ones. Even though Freud and others have studied repressed memories, the study of false memories as a cognitive process has only recently come to the attention of researchers. Schacter (1996; Loftus, 1993 tells a similar tale) reviews one account of the history: In 1990 George Franklin was convicted of the 1969 homicide of his daughter’s friend Susan Nason. The conviction was based almost entirely upon repressed memories which his daughter claimed to have recovered. Regardless of whether or not the allegations were true, many questions arose as to whether these memories were in fact real. Even if the memories were not real, Franklin’s daughter truly believed them to be. This case sparked many—by 1992 the number of lawsuits based upon the recovery Implicit Memory versus False Memory 2 of repressed memories had grown to such a great number that parents joined with professionals to form the False Memory Syndrome Foundation. Within four years of its founding, the Foundation had been contacted by 17,000 people about repressed memory cases (Schacter, 1996). In discussing the recovery of repressed memories, several cognitive questions arise: Is it even possible to repress a memory of a tragic event? If so, is it possible to recover those memories at a much later date? How do you tell the difference between a truly recovered memory and a memory which was merely suggested by the process of attempted recovery? It is this last question which I will investigate