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Remembering True and False TRAUMATIC EXPERIENCES

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), July, 2000 by Sonia Cunningham, Maryanne Garry

A false memory is created when an event that really happened becomes confused with images produced by trying to remember an imagined event.

IN 1987, Donald Watt told his wife of seven years that, during World War II, he had been a stoker at Auschwitz. In his autobiography, Stoker, he relives how, for the first time, he revealed to his wife that he had escaped from Stalag 357 (a prisoner of war camp), only to be recaptured later by the Nazis, tortured, and then sent to a concentration camp to stoke the furnaces of the death chambers. Watt paints a graphic picture of his journey first to Bergen-Belsen and then on to Auschwitz. He recounts the horrors of seeing a trainload of Jews who fought over a piece of bread, and how he watched as many were trampled to death. Watt goes on to describe how he managed to escape the gas chambers at Bergen-Belsen, only to end up at Auschwitz. It was there, he remembers, that he was a stoker of the crematoria that disposed of the thousands who had been exterminated.

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It was an unspeakably horrifying ordeal for anyone at Auschwitz, and what made it worse for Watt was that, as a stoker, he helped the Germans murder thousands of innocent people. It is a terrible memory for a proud veteran to face up to. It is a burden that Watt does not have to bear, because he was never at Auschwitz. The many errors in his recall are evidence that his memories are false.

Many of these errors have been uncovered by Konrad Kwiet, deputy director of the Centre for Comparative Genocide Studies at Macquafie University in Sydney, Australia, an advisor to the Australian government on war crimes, and his student, Darren O'Brien. For example, at the time Watt claims he saw a deportation train full of Jews, they were not required to wear the yellow Star of David, so he could not have identified these people as Jews. He could not have had to escape from the gas chambers in Bergen-Belsen, because there were no gas chambers at that concentration camp (although he has since admitted to O'Brien that he was wrong on this point), and the way he describes the layout of Auschwitz, including a hut close to the crematoria, is simply not accurate.

How can it be that Watt remembers such a horrible, yet utterly false, experience? In recent years, much attention, both in the popular press and in more scientific circles, has been devoted to understanding repressed memories. Indeed, in his autobiography, Watt says that "I just wanted to forget about it." Forty years later, according to the book's introduction, "Repressed memories, long buffed in his subconscious, came back to haunt him." Thus, his World War II story evolved as he gradually recovered memories, a technique Watt believed helped him accept the reality of his ordeal.

Is it possible that he repressed these traumatic memories for 40 years and then remembered them? Of course it is, but that is unlikely. Some mental health professionals, though, would argue the answer is not only yes, but that it is likely. Yet, when one looks for any scientific basis for their belief, there is none to be found. Countless researchers who have interviewed victims of trauma often claim that people such as Watt have had periods of time when they put aside their awful memories by shoving them into some special place in their subconscious. However, if one takes a closer look at these studies and how they define the concept of repression, the "repressed period" can simply be explained as a period of forgetting.

Take Linda Meyer Williams' 1994 research, for example. A study, published in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, is one of the most frequently cited as evidence for repression, but also among the most misrepresented and incorrectly cited. She asked a sample of women who had been admitted to a hospital 17 years earlier for treatment following a sexual assault about their memory of the attack. Thirty-eight percent stated that they could not remember the episode of abuse (or at least chose not to report it).

There are many reasons why these women didn't report the target incident, and one is that they forgot about it. Another point worth mentioning about these studies is that they do not have a control group. That is, it is unknown whether the subjects would be just as likely to have periods in their lives when they forgot non-traumatic events.

D.J. Read and S.D. Lindsay, in an article in the Journal of Traumatic Stress, describe how they found that some people report periods of partial and complete amnesia for non-traumatic events, such as summer camps and high school graduations. Thus, the act of simple forgetting can explain a period of time when a non-traumatic event is remembered less than it is at the time of the question. This is not considered a repressed memory. Why, then, should traumatic events that have been forgotten for a period of time be termed a special class of repressed memories?

In some ways, it is to the advantage of those who advocate a repression mechanism that its very existence can not be scientifically disproved. Academic psychologists point out that, although there is no scientific evidence for repression, there is more than 100 years of research on forgetting and remembering. Thus, there is ample scientific evidence providing an alternative explanation for how memories can be "recovered."

Remembering True and False TRAUMATIC EXPERIENCES

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), July, 2000 by Sonia Cunningham, Maryanne Garry

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