A Challenge to Fans of Repressed Memory

Some time ago Dr. Harrison G. Pope, Jr, and the Biological Psychiatry Laboratory at McLean Hospital issued the following challenge:

Our research suggests that the concept of “repressed memory” or “dissociative amnesia” might be simply a romantic notion dating from the 1800s, rather than a scientifically valid phenomenon. To test this hypothesis, we are offering a reward of $1000 to the first person who can find a description of “repressed memory” in any written work, either nonfiction or fiction (novels, poems, dramas, epics, the Bible, essays, medical treatises, or any other sources), in English or in any work that has been translated into English, prior to 1800. We would argue that if “repressed memory” were a genuine natural phenomenon that has always affected people, then someone, somewhere, in the thousands of years prior to 1800, would have witnessed it and portrayed it in a non-fictional work or in a fictional character.

Dr. Pope was in the news quite recently because he reportedly played a role in the preparation of the amicus brief submitted by the International Committee of Social, Psychiatric, Psychological Science, Neuroscience, and Neurological Scientists to the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts in the appeal of Paul Shanley, a priest who was convicted in 2005 on the strength (I use the word "strength" advisedly) of the testimony of a man in his 20s who claimed that he had "recovered" his "suppressed" memory of having been abused by Shanley when he, this man, was a child. It is entirely possible that Shanley did indeed sexually molest minors. But I believe that the evidence that led to Shanley's conviction was scientific malarkey -- and against common sense. The courts of Massachusetts have not distinguished themselves in cases such as these. Let's hope that the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court now does something to redeem the standing of the court system it heads.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper The Boston Globe also did not distinguish itself in the Shanley case. Its reportage on the case was awful. Perhaps that's because the Globe was too busy pursuing a Pulitzer Prize. Now that august paper is fighting for its life. The mighty have fallen a fair distance.

P.S. A controversy later ensued about whether someone had met Dr. Pope's challenge See this and this.

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Octgenarians normally lose memory rather than recover it

Octgenarians normally lose memory rather than recover it. But perhaps the prospect of $1,000,000 stimulated two octgenarians' brains and enabled these octogenarians to remember what happened to them more than 60 years ago. See Jeff Diamant, "Six decades later, 2 men accuse nuns of sex abuse," The Star-Ledger Online) (Oct. 3, 2009).

These two octgenarians say they recently recovered recollections of being sexually molested by nuns in the early 1940s. "Coffey, who like Fioretti lived at Sacred Heart from 1937 to 1943, said his memory of being sexually abused returned after he learned on television, in October 2004, that the Newark Archdiocese had settled with victims of sex abuse for $1 million without acknowledging wrongdoing." Id.

The amount of time during which these two plaintiffs' memories were allegedly repressed outstrips even the amount of time involved the case in Massachusetts, the case in which a plaintiff claimed that her memory had been repressed for some 47 years and then recovered it. See Time and Justice in Massachusetts, August 25, 2002.

I had hoped against hope that the "theory" of repressed and recovered memory had been so thoroughly debunked that not even the most entrepreneurial lawyers would venture to file complaints or petitions alleging that their clients had lost their memories for years and then, miraculously and fortuitously, had recovered them. Well, let's hope that New Jersey courts have enough common sense to reject these two claims of much-belated "recoveries" of suppressed memories.

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