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3Lost in the Mall
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5THE FALSE MEMORY EXPERIMENT
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7Memories are the footprints we leave in our lives; without them we look back and see just a blank stretch of snow, or someone else’s signature entirely. If there is anything that makes us, as a species, feel some kind of continuous authenticity, it is our memory. Plato believed in a form of absolute, or ideal memory, a sphere one could reach where all of one’s past would appear to be perfectly preserved. Freud waffled on the subject, sometimes claiming memory a mishmash of dream and fact, but just as often claiming it as movie, rerun, the film scrolled in some section of the brain recoverable through free association. Our notions of memory are largely based on these two men’s ideas: Freud and Plato, by no means bad company to keep. Psychologist Elizabeth Loftus, however, decided to challenge the field’s great fathers. Her hunch? Memory is as slippery as a stream, as unreliable as a rat. One of the field’s most innovative female experimental psychologists, Loftus invented a rather alarming and philosophically profound experiment designed to test the text of our rememberances so as to determine whether to call them fictions or to call them facts. Her results caused outrage.
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9First she studied stop signs, beards, barns, and knives. “Wasn’t that traffic signal yellow?” she might ask her subjects, and sure enough, once she had implanted the possibility, her subjects remembered yellow when the reality was red. She showed movies in her lab—a shot-gunned face, a masked man on an empty street—and when she asked questions like, “Do you recall that man had a beard?” most recalled a beard, but the man was really masked. “Only the flimsiest curtain separates reality from imagination,” experimental psychologist and University of Washington professor Elizabeth Loftus says, and she has powerfully proved it in her prize-winning experiments on how memory gets contaminated by the subtlest suggestion. Tell someone he saw a blue barn and he’ll make the barn blue, the brain bleeding its facts, our world a watercolor painting, the kind my child makes, loose soupy pictures that might be this or might be that: all cloud.
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11Well before she became famous—or infamous, depending on where you cast your vote—Loftus’s findings on memory distortion were clearly commodifiable. In the 1970s and 1980s she provided assistance to defense attorneys eager to prove to juries that eyewitness accounts are not the same as camcorders. “I’ve helped a lot of people,” she says. Some of those people: the Hillside Strangler, the Menendez brothers, Oliver North, Ted Bundy. “Ted Bundy?” I ask, when she tells this to me. Loftus laughs. “Oh,” she says, “this was before we knew he was Bundy. He hadn’t been accused of murder yet. He was wrongly identified in a kidnapping charge.”
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13“Are you sure?” I ask her. “How can you be so confident the people you’re representing are really innocent?” She doesn’t directly answer. She says, “In court, I go by the evidence. . . . Outside of court, I’m human and entitled to my human feelings.” What, I wonder, are her human feelings about the letter from a child-abuse survivor who wrote, “Let me tell you what false memory syndrome does to people like me, as if you care. It makes us into liars. False memory syndrome is so much more chic than child abuse. . . . But there are children who tonight while you sleep are being raped, and beaten. These children may never tell because ‘no one will believe them.’” “Plenty of people will believe them,” says Loftus. Pshaw! She has a raucous laugh and a voice with a bit of wheedle in it. She is strange, I think, a little loose inside. She veers between the professional and the personal with an alarming alacrity. “The results of our experiment showed that twenty-five percent of our respondents, which is a statistically significant minority, were subject to . . .”—sentences like that and then a sudden swerve, a brief beat of silence and, “Did I tell you about my valentine?” Today is February 14. She’s just received a card from her ex-husband, whom she refers to as her “was-band,” Gregg. “You know what I love about you?” Loftus reads from the card. “All your Freudian slips.” Loftus laughs. “I still love my was-band,” she says. “Too bad he remarried such a twit.”
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15In 1990 something big happened to Loftus. Most lives cannot be defined by particular turning points. Most lives build incrementally, a series of sedimentations that over time yield a shape we can see, if at all, only by the very end. Not so for Loftus. In 1990, a lawyer, Doug Horngrad, called her to testify in a particularly troubling case. Horngrad’s client was a sixty-three-year-old man, George Franklin, whose beautiful red-headed daughter Eileen claimed she remembered, twenty or so years after the fact, that her father raped and murdered her best friend. It’s a long gruesome story of stones and skulls, perfect for Loftus, the diva of drama. She jumped on it. “Totally forgetting that you witnessed something that traumatic, and then suddenly recalling it whole decades after the fact? Burying every detail and then having it float flashbulb into your mind, every inch intact, I don’t think so,” says Loftus. Loftus does not dispute the fact that trauma happens (“of course children are hurt at the hands of others”), only that it can be severed completely from consciousness, stored unmarred in an anterior capsule, like some sunken treasure chest that one day opens to reveal its green mineral stones, its chunks of bright ore. When it comes to memory, Loftus says, the shine fades fast. She has observed firsthand how recollections can be contaminated; her early experiments had shown her how it always decays with time. Now this man, George Franklin, was about to be convicted based on nothing but his grown girl’s remembrances, excavated at the hands of some new-age therapist who practiced all sorts of suggestion. Suggestion! That’s Loftus’s personal hobgoblin. People are just so suggestible, their skin more like shift barely covering bone and muscle; anything can come through. It’s scary.
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17So, Loftus went to testify on behalf of George Franklin, went to tell the jury Eileen’s memory could not be counted on as accurate, not because of Eileen, per say, but because of the mechanics of memory itself, the way it rusts in the rain. In one of the most publicized recovered memory cases of the decade, Loftus stood before the court and told of a mind that blends fact with fiction as a part of its normal course; she told how her subjects in the lab made red signs yellow, put barns in places where they never were, recalled black beards on bald chins. Eileen spoke of seeing the stone her father used to crush the skull of her best friend Susan, seeing the ring flash in the sunlight, seeing again, in her mind’s eye, a bit of blood, a bit of blue, and Loftus said, “Untrue. All these details Eileen later read about in newspaper reports.” The jury didn’t buy it, didn’t buy Loftus, that is, and she went home defeated. She claims it was this event that shaped her future work. Franklin was convicted of raping and murdering his daughter’s best friend more than two decades after the fact, and Loftus felt a chill. “My mission in life,” she says to me, “my mission since then has and always will be to help the falsely accused. I realized that talking about barns and stop signs and yield signs wasn’t going to cut it as evidence, especially in the new climate, where recovered memory therapy was all the rage, and everyone believed in the reality of repression. I realized I was going to have to prove not that it’s possible to distort a memory, which god knows I’ve proven, but that it’s possible to plant an entirely false memory in a person.” Loftus says these words with glee—trick or treat, it’s always trick, the little goblin. She has a Ph.D. from Stanford. She’s a math whiz. She has a genius for putting her finger right on the pulse of popular culture, pollinating it with the spores of her beliefs. And listen, many of her beliefs are good. Some are maybe not so good. In the end, she’s probably just like the rest of us, only amplified, a blend of intelligence and blindness, with many soft spots.
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19IT WAS 1990 when Loftus testified in the Franklin trial, disputing the validity of Eileen’s repressed memory. Only a few years earlier, Ellen Bass and Laura Davis had published their phenomenally successful book The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse, which, much to Loftus’s disgust, announced, “If you think you were abused, . . . then you were.” Other therapists were instructing their traumatically repressed patients to “let the imagination run wild.” Around this time, the courts began peeling back the statute of limitations for sex abuse crimes; instead of five years from the time of occurrence, charges could be pressed five years from the moment of memory retrieval, which meant that hundreds upon thousands of elderly parents were now being accused by their therapized daughters. “There were accusations of satanic cults,” says Loftus, “And never, ever, has the FBI found a single piece of evidence to support this stuff.”
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21A convergence of factors. The Bass and Davis book. The Franklin trial. But mostly letters pouring in from across the country from parents who had seen her defend George Franklin, and who were pleading with her for help. Couples wrote about children accusing them of grotesque satanic abuses beyond any believability—accusations Gothic and seemingly absurd, accusations that destroyed families and devastated mothers and fathers, who swore their innocence.
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23“My home became a one-way relay station for these people,” says Loftus, “and my phone bills were hundreds of dollars each month, and I knew I couldn’t help them unless I could scientifically prove that the mind not only distorts real memories but can create totally false ones. I wanted to prove experimentally that this was possible. But how? There are all these ethical issues—god, what with human ethics committees you can’t get ANYTHING by anymore. You try one tiny harmless psychological experiment on a person and it’s like you’re a doctor leaving syphilis untreated.” She chuckles. “The best thing to do would be to plant a memory of sexual abuse,” she says, “but that’s not ethical, so I thought and thought about how to come up with an experimental situation that touched on trauma but did not traumatize. It took me a long time. I went through so many different scenarios.”
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25“Like what?” I ask her.
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27“Oh god,” she says, “I can’t remember now.”
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29And then it came to her, how she could do it, experimentally implant false memories without violating ethical guidelines. Loftus and her students came up with Lost in the Mall, a Don Dellilo–type trick that captures our national as well as individual absurdities.
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31THE EXPERIMENT HAD many phases. In some pretest versions, Lofts had university students attempt to implant false memories in their siblings over Thanksgiving vacation, tape the sessions, and then present them to her after the holiday. These, although part of the pilot, proved to be some of the richest demonstrations of fact buckling under fiction’s weight. In the formal experiment, she recruited, with her assistant Jacqueline Pickrell, twenty-four individuals. Loftus prepared for each subject a small booklet containing three written accounts of real childhood memories provided by a subject’s family member, and one false written account of being lost in the mall. The constructed stories, done with family members who agreed to help in the hoax, were each one paragraph long. Subjects came to the lab, read the memory booklets, and were instructed to elaborate on them with their own recollections, and if they had none, to simply write, “I don’t remember this.”
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33What surprised Loftus most about the results of her experiment were not the statistically significant figures, but the narrative detail that accompanied some of the false memories. “The detail people confabulate and then believe in just astounds me,” Loftus says, but her voice is not astounded—it’s delighted, like she has come to the core of fairy tales, peeled back the brain to find where myths are made. In one pretest, for instance, Chris, who had been convinced by his older brother Jim that he had been lost in a shopping mall at age five, recounted the false episode with flourish and feeling. Just two days after the memory implantation, Chris reported, “That day I was so scared I would never see my family again. I knew that I was in trouble.” By day three Chris was recalling conversations with mom: “I remember mom telling me never to do that again.” A few weeks later Chris, entirely unsuspecting, returned to the lab with the small memory seed now in hothouse bloom, colorful, scentful, absolutely authentically inauthentic, a perfect plastic pearl: “I was with you guys for a second and I think I went over to look at the toy store, the Kay Bee toy and uh, we got lost, and I was looking around and I thought, ‘uh oh, I’m in trouble now.’ You know. And then I . . . I thought I was never going to see my family again. I was really scared you know. And then this old man, he was wearing blue flannel, came up to me . . . he was kind of old. He was kind of bald on top . . . he had a ring of gray hair. He had glasses.” Amazing. None of the details had been provided in the tiny suggested seed; apparently our minds abhor blank spots, are existentially unprepared for emptiness. We fill in.
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35Loftus’s work reveals example after example of this kind of confabulation. In another pilot study, an Asian girl confabulated an entire Kmart, the terry-cloth feel of the towels, the long white wincing lights, the lurch of the slippery aisles as she ran to find her grandmother. In the formal experiment, twenty-five percent of the subjects suddenly remembered being lost in a mall and, when debriefed, expressed surprise, or even shock, at the deception.
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37“LOST IN THE MALL,” says psychiatrist Judith Herman, founder of Victims of Violence and author of Father-Daughter Incest, “is cute. It’s a cute experiment that tells us exactly the opposite of what Loftus thinks she’s telling us. Loftus thinks she’s telling us that peoples’ memories can’t be relied upon, but look at her data. Seventy-five percent of her subjects did not confabulate. They were reliable.”
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39Bessel van der Kolk, another psychiatrist who specializes in trauma, is even more forthcoming. “I hate Elizabeth Loftus,” he says. “I can’t even bear to hear the name.”
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41Loftus knows her reputation in some circles. It doesn’t seem to bother her. This may be because she’s so passionate about her science that the politics simply cease to exist, or it may be because she knows, like any good self-promoter, that no publicity is bad publicity and bad publicity is better than no publicity. When I ask her about Herman’s comment, the seventy-five-percent nonconfabulators and the implication that, therefore, most survivors are telling the truth, she snorts. “I think twenty-five percent is a VERY significant minority,” she says. “Furthermore, Lost in the Mall became a springboard for other false memory experiments that got as much as a fifty percent or even higher confabulation rate.” Loftus goes on to tell me what some of those other experiments were: the “impossible memory experiment,” where subjects were induced to believe they recalled the first few days of their infancies; the spilling-the-punch-at-the-wedding experiment, where people dredged up fictional memories of a white dress, a crystal bowl flying from their hands, a pink, seeping stain; their fault. “The best false memory planter in this country,” Loftus says, “is Steve Porter, formerly from University of British Columbia. You should see that guy.” After Loftus’s Lost in the Mall experiment, Porter was able to convince roughly fifty percent of his subjects that they’d survived a vicious animal attack in childhood. “And of course,” says Loftus, “it never happened.”
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43LOFTUS PUBLISHED HER Lost in the Mall findings in 1993 in the American Psychologist. The mood in this country was exuberant. Everywhere walls were coming down. Mikhail Gorbachev announced the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Berlin integrated. In this country, scores of people were identifying their own iron curtains, their own split selves, and pushing pieces together. What we wanted was wholeness, a united world, a single self, no more covert constructions. The international media went to work reporting astounding events, the USSR morphing into Russia, a suddenly accessible land where reindeer lived and the sun set in a Siberia where the grass was the color of corn, the color of rust. Not so far away, in our own country we had our own, typically schmaltzy and solipsistic version of this going on: Miss America stepped forward and claimed she’d recovered netherworlds of frosted memories in the basement of her brain and, having lured them to the surface with a silver hook, was on her way to becoming complete. “I split into a day child who smiled and giggled and a night child who lay awake in a fetal position, only to be pried apart by my father.” Thanks to the fishing expedition that her therapy was, Miss America, however, was finally coming together.
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45So too for Roseanne Barr, whose caustic iron curtain came straight down when she confessed on the cover of People magazine, “I Am an Incest Survivor.” Roseanne claimed she had multiple personalities, but she was integrating, along with many other people, mostly women, some men, whose voices joined the jubilance, and the terror. So popular was the idea of recovered memories that Time and Newsweek reported on them, and a Pulitzer prize–winning novel, Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres, described them.
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47It was into this climate that Loftus published her study. It was a climate of outrage and healing, pink scars and tender intimate tissues; it was the time of a certain story. And Loftus challenged it, saying, in effect, that a lot of people can be induced to believe false things at someone else’s suggestion. Who is to say these so-called survivors weren’t being induced at the hands of their therapists, especially those who actively practiced suggestion? After she published her article on Lost in the Mall, Loftus went on record saying she disbelieved a number of abuse narratives; they were concoctions, same as her subjects’. She then went one step further and challenged the whole Freudian notion of repression. According to Loftus, there is absolutely no substantial evidence that repression as a psychological or neural mechanism exists. Loftus instead posits that the rising of repressed memories is really a concatenation of fantasy, fear, innuendo, and news, with wisps of truth woven in. There are two kinds of truths, Loftus says, “Story truth and happening-truth. . . . As we put meat and muscle on the bare bones of the happening truth, we can get caught up, captured if you will, with the notion of our own stories. We become confused about where the happening truth leaves off and the story truth begins.” As to why someone would concoct such a gruesome tale, Loftus says, “The real facts are sometimes so subtle as to defy language. A person can’t find the words to talk about banal hurts that nevertheless have a searing significance, so they substitute an obvious plot. Other times a person concocts a story that they believe with every cell in their bodies because it provides them with an identity: survivor.”
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49Now, no one particularly likes to have the dominant paradigm challenged, but to do it when the stars at the story’s centers are victims, and when one of the story’s main themes is the destructiveness of denial, to do it then takes courage, which Loftus clearly has. A long, long time ago, Darwin held back his theories because he feared religious reprisal; many scholars accuse Freud of abandoning his original theories regarding the origins of hysteria because he knew they wouldn’t fit well with the sexual and social mores of Victorian Vienna. Never for a second did Loftus consider doing this. “I couldn’t wait to get my ideas out there,” she says. Part of her courage surely comes from a compulsion toward controversy. Part of her courage surely comes from a deeper place, but what it is I do not know.
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51“After I published my findings, people did the meanest things,” Loftus says. “I’ve had to have body guards. People threatened to sue programs that were inviting me as their speaker; they wrote letters of complaints to Washington’s governor; the clinical psychology students at the university practically hissed when I walked by. My students and I endured a lot of abuse,” she says, “but you know what? We didn’t repress any of it.”
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53LOFTUS FREQUENTLY WALKS around campus with only one earring on, because she has her other ear pressed to the receiver of her phone so many hours of the day. She sleeps little, and when she does, she dreams of work, statistics splattered across her mind, high-flying planes, lectures with no notes. She is utterly focused, constantly fueled. Therefore, the criticisms did nothing to stop her—not the woman who yelled “whore” in the airport a few years back; not the egged windows of her home, the yolks drying to a crisp crust, obscuring her view of the mountains. Instead, Loftus just plundered on, accruing enemies and frequent-flier miles and fans and fame at a rather astounding clip. Outside her office, accused parents were posting love letters and supposed survivors were sending hate mail; inside, Loftus just worked on. After she succeeded in implanting false memories of surviving a traumatic event, she began to wonder, would it be possible to implant false memories of perpetrating an event? Before she could construct an experiment to test this, an astounding case came forward.
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55Olympia, Washington, a place where the trees are always green, where the fields are softly mounded. A church, a Christian man whose name was Paul. Paul Ingram. He was forty-one years old and had two daughters. These two daughters one day remembered, during a religious retreat where sins were called forth and darkness dispelled, that they had been horrifically abused by their father. Their father, Paul, was questioned by detectives, held for hours in a cramped room, a tape recorder whirring: did you do it, did you do it? The detectives asked, leaning forward, so close Paul could probably feel the soft blast of breath on his face. He was a middle-aged man, this Paul, frightened of Satan’s wily ways, and the detectives were saying things like, “You did it. Your daughters wouldn’t lie.” Day turned into night turned into day—sleeplessness, coffee, questions—remember, try to picture it. Paul tried. He said, “Jesus, O Jesus, O Jesus, Merciful Jesus help me,” crying and clutching the table. And then, after days of drilling interrogation, of vivid scenes the detectives sketched when he supposedly fondled his daughters’ breasts, he said he remembered. He said it haltingly at first. “Sweet Jesus, oh sweet Jesus,” he kept calling out and then he said it was coming clearer. Right there in that room this man Paul Ingram first confessed to raping both his daughters, and then he went on, he just went on. He recalled rapes and gang bangs and an entire decade-long participation in a Satanic cult—it became real to him—the chanting, the things he did. He wept. He was imprisoned.
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57Loftus, of course, when she heard about this case, and the kind of questioning Ingram underwent, well, Loftus raised one eyebrow, smelled something fishy, and thought about it. She got in touch with her friend and cult expert Richard Ofshe, who trundled down to see Paul in his jail cell. Ofshe, like Loftus, is an expert in suggestibility, and like Loftus, he has a passion for revealing the fictions that many facts are. So Ofshe went to see Ingram, and he told him that one of his sons and one of his daughters had accused Paul of forcing them to have sex with each other while Paul watched. Ingram’s eyes went wide. Oh. Oh. Ingram said what he always said, in the very beginning, “I guess I don’t remember that.” “Try to think about the scene, try to see it happening,” Ofshe said. He told Ingram to return to his jail cell and try “praying on” the scene. And then Ofshe went away.
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59When he came back a day later (note how similar this structure is to Loftus’s Lost in the Mall experiment, planting the memory, waiting twenty-four to forty-eight hours), Ingram had composed an entire confession about an event that Ofshe had completely concocted. He wrote that yes, he had forced his daughter and son to have sex in front of him, and he wrote about it in graphic detail, the pink, the pleasure, the horror. Ofshe and Loftus presented this as evidence to the court that Ingram was being led down the primrose path of presuppositions, that he was so malleable as to confess to anything. And indeed, later on when they told Ingram the story was false, he recanted all the other supposed memories, but it was too late for him—he was behind bars, where he has stayed for too many years, guilty of one thing for sure: a graphic imagination.
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61Loftus learned from the Ingram case that the tendency toward invention is strong and all encompassing. It is a tendency so strong it overrides self-preservation. We don’t only concoct stories that make us look innocent; no, we concoct stories at all costs, because we need to, because we have to. So powerful is the urge to have a socially sanctioned narrative that we will adopt one even if it means we are the villain at its center.
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63Meanwhile, Loftus herself was sleeping less and less. Her work acquired a kind of frenetic energy. Much of what she drew our attention to was valid and balanced. She wrote in one article, “False memories can be created by a small suggestion from a trusted family member, by hearing someone lie, by suggestion from a psychologist . . . of course, the fact that false memories can be planted tells us nothing about whether a given memory of child sexual abuse is false or not, nor does it tell us how one might distinguish the real cases from the false ones. The findings on the malleability of memory do, however, raise questions about the wisdom of certain recommendations being promoted in self help books . . . and by some therapists themselves.” That’s nothing if not nuanced. But then, not long after, in another article, Loftus writes, “We live in a strange and precarious time that resembles at its heart the hysteria and superstitious fervor of the witch trials.” She took rifle lessons and to this day keeps the firing instruction sheets and targets posted above her desk. In 1996, when Psychology Today interviewed her, she burst into tears twice within the first twenty minutes, labile, lubricated, theatrical, still whip smart, talking about the blurry boundaries between fact and fiction while she herself lived in another blurry boundary, between conviction and compulsion, passion and hyperbole. “The witch hunts,” she said, but the analogy is wrong, and provides us with perhaps a more accurate window into Loftus’s stretched psyche than into our own times, for the witch hunts were predicated on utter nonsense, and the abuse scandals were predicated on something all too real, which Loftus seemed to forget: Women are abused. Memories do matter.
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65Talking to her, feeling her high-flying energy, the zeal that burns up the center of her life, you have to wonder, why. You are forced to ask the very kind of question Loftus most abhors: did something bad happen to her? For she herself seems driven by dissociated demons, and so I ask.
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67What happened to you?
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69Turns out, a lot. Loftus grew up with a cold father who taught her nothing about love but everything about angles. A mathematician, he showed her the beauty of the triangle’s strong tip, the circumference of the circle, the rigorous mission of calculus. Her mother was softer, more dramatic, prone to deep depressions. Loftus tells all this to me with little feeling. “I have no feelings about this right now,” she says, “but when I’m in the right space I could cry.” I somehow don’t believe her; she seems so far from real tears, from the original griefs, so immersed in the operas of others. Loftus recalls her father taking her out to see a play, and in the car, coming home at night, the moon hanging above them like a stopwatch, tick tick, her father saying to her, “You know, there’s something wrong with your mother. She’ll never be well again.”
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71Her father was right. When Loftus was fourteen, her mother drowned in the family swimming pool. She was found floating face down in the deep end, in the summer. The sun was just coming up, the sky a mess of reds and bruise. Loftus recalls the shock, the siren, an oxygen mask clamped over her mouth as she screamed, “Mother mother mother,” hysteria. That is a kind of drowning. “I loved her,” Loftus says. “Was it suicide?” I ask. She says, “My father thinks so. Every year when I go home for Christmas, my brothers and I think about, but we’ll never know,” she says. Then she says, “It doesn’t matter.”
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73“What doesn’t matter?” I ask.
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75“Whether it was or it wasn’t,” she says. “It doesn’t matter because it’s all going to be okay.” Then I hear nothing on the line but some static.
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77“You there?” I say.
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79“Oh I’m here,” she says. “Tomorrow I’m going to Chicago, some guy on death row, I’m gonna save him. I gotta testify. Thank god I have my work,” she says.
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81“You’ve always had your work,” I say.
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83“Without it,” she says, “where would I be?”
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85IN LOFTUS’S UNIVERSITY of Washington office, she has a picture of herself standing with a Supreme Court justice, and next to it, a picture of Demi Moore’s body on top of which Loftus has perched a photograph of her own head. “I wish I had thinner thighs,” she tells me. Maybe the odd combination of loopiness with gravity has contributed to her success. She is certainly accessible; by the end of the interview, I know not only Loftus’s shoe size but her bra size too. “Can we keep that out of the chapter,” she asks; we can. She has, perhaps, of any psychologist this century, crossed the line between the professional and the public. She’s been on Oprah, Sally Jesse Raphael. She’s published in Glamour on the one hand and in journals with names like Psychology and Its Neural Substrates on the other. It’s clear why some people, alleged victims and their accusers, would feel so strongly about her, but how or why has she managed to become so known in certain fields? What is the resonance in her message?
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87Loftus is talking about so much more than memory. She’s talking about authenticity and whether, as human beings, we have it. She’s pointed out to the public—in a way no postmodern scholar ever could—how pastiche are our pasts, how all of us are artists whose images have only the vaguest relationship to reality. She has tossed us into an existential abyss, and we don’t like it here. She has made us all Alzheimer’s patients, long before our brains have begun to atrophy, for in Loftus’s world, memory decays, its traces so far from indelible; as soon as an event hits the hippocampus, it begins its dissolution.
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89Loftus’s view of memory and its incredibly fragile structure runs counter to deeply held notions and neurological beliefs. We have interpreted Freud’s work on repression to mean that we hold pieces of our pasts in clear capsules and can access them—our lives!—with enough verbal maneuvering. Loftus says no: what we access is half-dream, half-construct, entirely unreliable. Thus, with one swoop of her hand, this psychologist has driven a stake through Father Freud’s heart. We don’t like that, our father. Sometime soon after Freud, a researcher by the name of Wilder Penfield found what appeared to be the material substrates of Freud’s repression. He split the skulls of epileptic patients and, before taking out the damaged tissue, moved a charged probe around on their bare brain tissue while the patients were conscious. Penfield found that when he touched certain areas in a person’s brain, all these memories seemed to float back, crisp and clear—memories of a child crying by a stone wall, memories of a mother, memories drenched in yellow; it lived in us, our whole lives. Most of us don’t know Penfield’s work, but it has made its way into our culture, his charged probe, the secret drawers deep in the brain where yellow and mothers live. Of Penfield, Loftus says, “Let’s look at the data. Only three percent of his patients actually had these memories when the probe touched their brain, and we have no idea if they were real memories or dream fragments.” True. Boom. There goes Penfield; he’s on the floor with Father Freud.
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91After Lost in the Mall and its rather astounding results, and after the follow-up experiments by other researchers, who were able to implant such extreme memories as being attacked by vicious animals, Loftus began to tackle the whole notion of repression. She already suspected that many repressed memories were probably false memories suggested by therapists and self-help books, and from there it was an easy leap to question whether repression really existed at all, as a psychological or neurological phenomenon. Was there any real proof of repression? she wondered. In our culture, this is like asking if there’s any real proof of the sun. It’s up there, you can see it, it singes your skin. But I can’t see repression, Loftus said. Show me. No one could.
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93She went on a hunt then. Perhaps repression was repressed somewhere, and she could dig it from its dirt and examine its mechanisms. She examined hundreds of papers on the subject, but not one of them presented real evidence that people can completely forget a trauma, store it in human ram, and then call it back up on cue years later. There’s no indisputable neurological evidence of this, no repression coffer that has ever been definitely identified in the brain. But more than that, her studies of trauma showed just the opposite of what the dominant cultural story said. What Loftus found was that most trauma survivors obsessively remember what happened to them. There are, for instance, no cases of Holocaust victims just forgetting they were in concentration camps, or plane-crash victims just forgetting when the jet went down, only to recall it on their eighty-fifth birthday, when they take the Concorde to France.
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95While that may be true, and Loftus eagerly cites this as evidence, she overlooks the fact that these traumas are different from sexual abuse traumas, which are shrouded in secrecy, erased as the acts are performed. Says Loftus when I throw this her way, “If secrecy is the ingredient of repression, then why aren’t all sexual abuse acts repressed? They’re almost all secret.”
96
97“What kind of evidence would you need in order to believe in repression?” I ask.
98
99“Corroboration,” she says. “It’s so simple.”
100
101But simple it is not. Says Judith Herman, “Lauren, as a psychologist you should know. There’s plenty, PLENTY of evidence that repression is possible. Look at Charcot, Janet.” And indeed Daniel Schachter, a memory researcher at Harvard, cites one case in which a forty-year-old man, bothered by an intrusive mental image of himself at ten years old surrounded by assaultive boys, was eventually able to uncover a traumatic memory regarding this incident and sexual abuse. The event was then corroborated by a cousin, who had been present during the abuse. So there’s one example; it can happen. However, Schachter also writes, “. . . there is as yet little or no scientifically credible evidence that people who have suffered years of violent or horrific abuse after the years of infancy and early childhood can immediately and indefinitely forget about the abuse.”
102
103WHEN LOFTUS WAS young, she kept a diary. It was a small red vinyl-covered book with pages lined in pale blue. She knew her mother sometimes read it, so she devised an ingenious strategy for preserving her privacy. She would write one acceptable story on the actual diary page, and if there was something really personal, she would write it on a separate page, append it with a paperclip, and then, if she felt her mother was on the prowl, she would hide the paper-clipped pages. These paper-clipped pages Loftus called her “removable truths.”
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105Right from the beginning then, Loftus lived in a world that was shape shifting and relentlessly narrative. Right from the beginning she suspected history was construction, and this in the 1950s, before “postmodern” had landed on anyone’s lips. Precocious. Prescient.
106
107Her critics, however, resist the trope of removable truths, especially as they apply to trauma. Says Bessel van der Kolk, “Loftus may have shown us that kids in a lab can think they were lost in a mall, but this cannot be applied to traumatic memory. Traumatic memory is encoded in the brain entirely differently.”
108
109Van der Kolk, a handsome Dutch psychiatrist who lives in Boston’s South End, on a fairy-tale street of cobblestones and gas lamps, a street that seems stuck in time, believes “the body keeps the score.” His street has preserved its history; so too does the brain. Van der Kolk’s theory of trauma and memory goes something like this: When a traumatic event happens to a person, it is frequently so overwhelming that it cannot be comprehended by the normal narrative means. So the memory of the event gets stored in the nonnarrative parts of the brain, the somatosensory cortex, where it exists as muscle aches, keen but nameless surges of panic, serrated flashbacks that burst and then dissolve before the mind can say what it saw. The job of healing, according to van der Kolk, is to somehow elevate the nonnarrative trauma into the storytelling circuits of the brain, so the spell can be broken by speech and then woven into the larger tapestry of the person’s life story, where it can take up residence as one event among many, blending in, integrated.
110
111Loftus claims van der Kolk has no real evidence of this theory, although van der Kolk, in his writings, cites brain imaging studies and anecdotal evidence. Loftus calls anecdotal evidence “anecdata.” And even, she might say, if van der Kolk’s lyrical theory of splits and mergers were correct, it still wouldn’t support the idea of repression per se. Sure, the person may have physiological responses to cues that bring back the trauma. Sure they may have panic attacks and muscle stiffness and all the rest. But just because the body contains traces of horror doesn’t mean the mind has completely forgotten it. Ask shell-shocked soldiers if they forget their battles? Ask rape victims if they forget the man in the greasy alleyway? The body keeps the score, Loftus might say, but that doesn’t mean the mind has taken time off.
112
113Judith Herman cites as evidence for the theory that traumatic memory is reliable, and that it is emblazed in the brain, certain lab experiments with rats. When rats learned a task in a state of high stress, it was difficult, if not impossible, for them to subsequently extinguish their behaviors. “This is an animal analogue, if you will, of the ‘indelible imprint’ of traumatic events on memory.” What Loftus says to this, “And they accuse me of generalizing from college students to trauma victims. They’re generalizing from a rat!”
114
115Loftus began a broad survey of other studies regarding traumatic memory and its reliability. She cites one study of children who had witnessed a sniper attack on their school. Immediately after the shooting, children reported where they were and what they were seeing. A week or so after the shooting, however, the children’s memories had faded or become distorted, and they gave reports that differed from their original ones. A little girl, for instance, who had been in the schoolyard at the time of the shooting, later reported she had been outside the playground fence. Her memory seemed far from emblazed; within seven days it was already going the way of decay. Colleagues of Loftus’s studied memories of the Challenger explosion. The day after the explosion Ulrich Neisser of Emory University asked people where they were when they saw the space shuttle blow up. They took down specific accounts from witnesses. “I was standing in front of a phone booth.” “I was frying an egg in my kitchen, the radio on the windowsill.” And then Neisser followed up on these accounts they did the day after the explosion. Very few of the respondents gave the same account they did the day after the explosion. Their memories had shifted considerably, so the egg morphed into meatloaf morphed into the beach, and the phone booth, Dali-like, melted and stretched its shape so it was a museum. When subjects were shown their original accounts, written fresh in the wake of disaster, they could not believe them. They felt certain of their current description, which illuminates the tenuous connection between feeling sure and being right. The false memories were saturated with subjective veracity, so fictions felt like facts in a topsy-turvy world.
116
117WHEN THE CHALLENGER blew up, I was with my sister in the Tufts University cafeteria. We were eating tuna-fish sandwiches, lettuce with scalloped edges peeking out between the tan crusts. Outside the huge plate-glass windows, the trees branched dendritically, bare and black against the shiny sky. I have always remembered this, but now I’m not so sure. I’m not so sure of anything. Maybe I was in my mother’s living room, with the yellow brocaded furniture and the coarse raspy rug, watching on the television the two-tailed plume of vapor in the darkness. But no, I think. That’s not quite right. It was raining that day, was it not? And my big-chested Irish boyfriend and I were drinking beer at the Black Rose pub, or was that later, at night? The spaceship was always falling, whenever we turned on that TV; what I remember are the jubilant faces of the crowd, tipped toward the patriotic sky, and then the sucking-in sound, the Oh. Oh, and the ship breaking up, fluffy pieces of it drifting down, the bodies invisible, already gone.
118
119“Where were you when the Challenger blew up?” I ask Loftus.
120
121“I was in my office, alone,” she says, and I picture her there. And then I picture her alone in her home, her spacious West Coast home, the ties from her ex-husband still in the closet, as though he might someday return. “He left because I couldn’t stop working,” she says. “He wanted to take vacations and lead a normal life. My idea of fun is to sit in front of my computer and try to figure things out.”
122
123Loftus has no husband, and she has no children, which she says she regrets. “By the time we tried, it was too late,” she says. “I was thirty-six. Every month, a little spot of blood on my underwear.”
124
125I picture her alone in her office or alone in her home, alone, most of all, in her field of inquiry, while another woman, Christa McAuliffe falls through the sky. I have to wonder, if a man were asking Loftus’s questions, would he be so questioned? But in truth, I don’t think its gender that occasionally undermines her credibility. It’s not that she’s falling through some sky, radically alone, where a woman shouldn’t be. It’s the fact that when all is said and done, Loftus does not seem quite in control. She does not appear to be steering her ship. She blurts out odd comments, has targets from a rifle practice affixed to her office wall; but at the same time she does brilliant memory experiments while comparing herself to Schindler. She calls me up, then slams down the phone, and then calls back sheepishly: “God that was rude.” No explanation, so strange. “I just,” she says, “I just have this NEED to reunite families fractured by false memory accusations; I just want to reunite people,” Loftus says, this motherless girl, who, twenty years after a divorce, still keeps her was-band’s belongings in a cradle in her living room. “This NEED,” she says to me, “reunions,” she says to me, but she appears to have little consciousness that the need is evidence of what she’s trying so hard to disprove. There is something split off in Loftus, unresolved, damped down, working its way out sideways. She is the survivor who questions the validity of survivorship. That’s one way out of a bind.
126
127But listen, Loftus has given us many gifts. Her singular free fall has yielded absolutely significant insights that we can’t dismiss. Where were you when the Challenger blew up? Do you remember this? Do you remember that? What Loftus has shown us is how high we fly, how far the ground—we are weightless.
128
129“What grounds you?” I ask her. “If you can’t trust memory, what can you rely upon.” I’m thinking of how Dostoyevsky claimed that a few good memories were all one needed to find faith in the world. But after you’ve lived in Loftus-land for awhile, it’s hard to know where to place your faith. “Do you have a religion?” I ask her.
130
131“What do you have?” I ask her, but what I really mean is: what do any of us have then? What?
132
133Loftus doesn’t answer me. Instead she says, “I wrote a letter to my mother a few days ago.” She shows it to me.
134
135Dear Mother,
136
137It’s Sunday, it’s raining, it’s dreary outside. I woke up this morning with a sense of dread. You’ve been gone for forty years. . . . I’d like to tell you some of the things I’ve done in the past four decades. Recently I gave a speech about my research on memory at a conference in Chicago. It was a National Conference On Wrongful Death convictions and The Death Penalty. While there, I watched twenty six men and two women, all wrongly convicted former death row inmates, weep and hug each other. . . . My work has brought me into contact with people suffering a terrible injustice. . . .
138
139When I’m not working on the research or teaching my classes, I spend time on the cases of the falsely accused. Of course, I’m not sure that someone I’m helping is being falsely accused rather than rightly, but the idea that the accusations could well be wrong consumes me. . . . I feel compelled to help and almost guilty if I let up for a minute.
140
141Why am I such a work-a-holic? Does it give me a way to escape from painful thoughts? Does it help me feel an importance that is and was otherwise missing from my life. . . . Me now: busy with work, and I don’t have much time to think about what is missing. A family love and closeness. That’s what I miss. That’s what I miss about you.
142
143Love forever,
144
145Beth
146
147In the end, then, Loftus does not give me an answer about what she has, rather what she has not. In the end, there is this flash of insight and one woman’s plain pain. Maybe that’s all any of us have, just plain pain. No solid memories, but real regrets, regrets as substantial as stones—we can count on those. We can, like Loftus, pile those stones one on top of the other, standing skyward, stretching out toward something.