– especially when a therapist is involved –
a false memory can be described as …
“a condition in which a person’s identity and interpersonal relationships are centred around a memory of traumatic experience which is objectively false but in which the person strongly believes.”
Victims of false memory may continue to believe vehemently that their ‘memories’ are accurate, in spite of objective evidence to the contrary.
Very often these cases are characterised by the emergence of new abuse memories following psychiatric illness, counselling or psychotherapy.
Some therapists believe that problems which present in adult life are a result of repressed trauma …
Based on highly controversial principles and diagnoses, this treatment can broadly be described as ‘recovered memory therapy.’ It is not accepted by the mainstream medical and psychiatric professions and it is renowned for implanting false memories.
The British False Memory Society
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Repressed memory is a controversial, and largely scientifically discredited, claim that memories for traumatic events may be stored in the unconscious mind and blocked from normal conscious recall.
As originally postulated by Sigmund Freud, repressed memory theory claims that although an individual may be unable to recall the memory, it may still affect the individual through subconscious influences on behaviour and emotional responding.
Despite widespread belief in the phenomenon of repressed memories among laypersons and clinical psychologists, most research psychologists who study the psychology of memory dispute that repression ever occurs at all.
While some psychologists claim that repressed memories can be recovered through psychotherapy (or may be recovered spontaneously, years or even decades after the event, when the repressed memory is triggered by a particular smell, taste, or other identifier related to the lost memory), experts in the psychology of memory argue that, rather than promoting the recovery of a real repressed memory, psychotherapy is more likely to contribute to the creation of false memories.
Wikipedia
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False memory syndrome
False memory syndrome (FMS) is not recognised as a psychiatric condition, but Prof Chris French, the head of the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit at Goldsmiths, University of London, and a member of the scientific and professional advisory board of the British False Memory Society, says he is in no doubt that the phenomenon of false memory is genuine. “Therapy,” he says, “is almost the perfect environment for generating false memories.”
A therapist who is predisposed to look for evidence of sexual abuse, for example, might easily influence their subject to “remember” it. And once the client has accepted the possibility of repressed memories of abuse lying at the heart of their problems – and they have developed what Prof French calls a “shared understanding” with the therapist that “recovering” those memories is part of the therapeutic process – it is easy for false memories to appear.
Prof Elizabeth Loftus, an American cognitive psychologist and one of the world’s leading authorities on the malleability of human memory, has written of how dream analysis in therapy can be especially problematic in the hands of a therapist who discusses sexual abuse during the day, causing sexual material to appear in the patient’s dreams at night. The therapist then uses those dreams as a “resource” to reconstruct supposed childhood sexual abuse. “The danger that these questionable activities might lead a patient to a false belief and memory that sexual abuse actually occurred is more than a passing risk.”
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