Factoring Humanity

7

Heather called Kyle and asked him to come by the house.

When he arrived—about 8:00 P.M., after they’d both eaten separately—he took a seat on the couch, and Heather sat down in the easy chair opposite him. She took a deep breath, wondering how to begin, then just dived in. “I think this may be a case of false-memory syndrome.”

“Ah,” said Kyle, sounding sage. “The coveted FMS.”

Heather knew her husband too well. “You don’t have the slightest idea of what I’m talking about, do you?”

“Well, no.”

“Do you know what repressed memories are—in theory that is?”

“Oh, repressed memories. Sure, sure, I’ve heard something about that. There’ve been some court cases, right?”

Heather nodded. “The first one was ages ago, back in—oh, what was it now? Nineteen eighty-nine or so. A woman named… let me think. I taught this once before; it’ll come back. A woman named Eileen Franklin, who was twenty-eight or twenty-nine, claimed to suddenly remember having seen the rape and murder of her best friend twenty years previously. Now, the rape-murder was an established fact; the body had been found shortly after the crime was committed. But the shocking thing wasn’t just that Eileen suddenly remembered seeing the crime being committed, but she also suddenly remembered who had done it: her own father.”

Kyle frowned. “What happened to the father?”

Heather looked at him. “He was convicted. It was later overturned, though—but on a technicality.”

“Was there corroborating evidence, or did the original conviction rest solely on the daughter’s testimony?”

Heather shrugged a little. “Depends how you look at it. Eileen seemed to be aware of things about the crime that weren’t generally known. That was taken as evidence of her father’s guilt. But upon investigation, it was shown that most of the supposedly telling details had indeed been reported in the press around the time the little girl had been killed. Of course, Eileen wasn’t reading newspapers when she was eight or nine, but she could have looked them up later at a library.” Heather chewed her lower lip, remembering. “But you know, now that I think about it, some of the details she reported were in the newspaper accounts—but were wrong in those accounts.”

Kyle sounded confused. “What?”

“She remembered—or claimed to remember—things that turned out to be untrue. For instance, the little girl who was killed was wearing two rings, a silver one and a gold one. Only the gold one had a stone in it, but one of the newspapers reported that the stone was in the silver ring—and that’s exactly what Eileen said when she told the police about the crime.” Heather held up a hand. “Of course that’s a trivial detail, and anyone remembering anything that long ago is likely to mix up some facts.”

“But you didn’t just say repressed memories. You mentioned false memories.”

“Well, it’s either one or the other, and that’s the problem. In fact, it’s been a bone of contention in psychology for decades now—the question of whether the memory of something traumatic can be repressed. Repression itself is an old concept. It’s the basis for psychoanalysis, after all: you force the repressed thought into the light of day and whatever neuroses you’ve got should clear up. But millions of people who’ve had traumatic experiences say the problem is the opposite: they never forget what’s happened. They all say things like ‘Not a day goes by when I don’t think about my car blowing up,’ or ‘I have constant nightmares about Colombia.’ ” Heather lowered her eyes. “Certainly I’ve never forgotten—and never will forget—the sight of Mary lying dead in the bathroom.”

Kyle nodded slowly. His voice was soft. “Me neither.”

Heather took a moment to compose herself. “But those things—a war, a car exploding, even a child dying—they are common enough occurrences. They’re not unthinkable; indeed, there’s not a parent alive who doesn’t fret about something happening to one of their children. But what if something occurs that is so unexpected, so out of the ordinary, so shocking that the mind just can’t deal with it? Like a little girl seeing her daddy rape and murder her best friend? How does the mind react then? Maybe it does wall it off; there certainly are some psychiatrists and no end of putative incest survivors who believe that. But…”

Kyle raised his eyebrows. “But what?”

“But there are many psychologists who believe that that simply can’t happen—that there’s no mechanism for repression, and so when traumatic memories suddenly appear years or decades after the supposed event, they have to be false memories. We’ve been debating this in psychology for a quarter-century or more now, without ever coming up with a solid answer.”

Kyle took a deep breath, then let it out slowly. “So what does it come down to? Humans can either shut out memories of traumatic events that really did happen—or we can have vivid memories of things that never occurred?”

Heather nodded. “I know; neither is an appealing idea. No matter which one you accept—and, of course, there’s a chance that both happen at different times—it means that our memories, and our sense of who we are and where we came from, are much more fallible than we’d like to believe.”

“Well, I know for a fact that Becky’s memories are bogus. But what I don’t understand is where such memories could come from?”

“The most common theory is that they’re implanted.”

“Implanted?” He said it as if he’d never heard the word before.

Heather nodded. “In therapy. I’ve seen the basic principle demonstrated myself, with children. You have a child visit you every day for a week. On the first day you ask him how things went at the hospital after he cut his finger. He says, ‘I never went to the hospital.’ And that’s true, he didn’t. But you ask him again tomorrow, and the next day and the next day. And by the end of the week, the child is convinced that he did go to the hospital. He’ll be able to tell you a detailed, consistent story about his trip there—and he’ll really believe it happened.”

“Kind of like Biff Loman.”

“Who?”

“Death of a Salesman. Biff wasn’t a young kid, but as he says to his father, ‘You blew me so full of hot air, I could never stand taking orders from anybody.’ He really came to be convinced by his father that he’d had a much better job in a company than the lowly position he’d actually held.”

“Well, that can happen. Memories can be implanted, even just through suggestion and constant repetition. And if a therapist augments that with hypnosis, really unshakable false memories can be created.”

“But why on earth would a therapist do that?”

Heather looked grim. “To quote an old Psych Department joke, there are many routes to mental health, but none so lucrative as Freudian analysis.”

Kyle frowned. He was quiet for several seconds, apparently contemplating whether to ask another question. And at last he did. “I’m not trying to be argumentative here, but your endorsement of my innocence has been less than ringing. Why do you think Becky’s memories might be false?”

“Because her therapist suggested that my father might have molested me.”

“Oh,” said Kyle. And then, “Oh.”