False Memories Lead to Injustice

Many of those working in our legal system have such a poor understanding of the nature of human memory that miscarriages of justice are an almost inevitable consequence, according to a book published today by the British False Memory Society. Miscarriage of Memory, edited by William Burgoyne, Norman Brand, Madeline Greenhalgh and Donna Kelly, presents factual accounts of prosecutions in the UK that were based entirely upon memories of sexual abuse recovered during therapy in the absence of any supporting evidence.

Typically such cases occur when a vulnerable individual seeks help from a psychotherapist for a commonly occurring psychological problem such as anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, and so on. At this stage, the client has no conscious memories of ever being the victim of childhood sexual abuse and is likely to firmly reject any suggestion of such abuse. To a particular sort of well-meaning psychotherapist, however, such denial is itself evidence that the abuse really did occur.

Despite strong criticism from experimental psychologists, many psychotherapists still accept the Freudian notion of repression – the idea that when someone experiences extreme trauma, a defence mechanism kicks in that buries the memory of the traumatic event so deep that it cannot be retrieved into consciousness. Like radioactive waste, its presence is said to exert a malign influence. Indeed, the whole rationale of such therapy is that these hidden memories must be recovered and worked through in order to achieve psychological health.…

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