J.P.Roos
 

REALITY OR NOTHING! FALSE AND REPRESSED 
MEMORIES AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY
 
 
 
 
 

   Dennis Potter's last TV-series, Cold Lazarus, tells how the deep-frozen brain of a TV-writer - a thinly veiled Potter himself - is being reactivated after 300 years. His brain begins to produce visual memories, which are the object of both scientific and commercial interest - a group of scientists debates them and a ruthless TV-mogul plans to broadcast them as the final 'reality TV'. In the memories, the subject is alternately a little boy or the man at the age of his death, sometimes in the clothes of the boy. Once, the little boy is sexually abused by a village marginal - a memory which is unclear and dim at places. But later memories are shown very graphically and narratively and in utmost detail.
   The point of the series is that the activating of memories demands conscious participation from the brain, although the scientists think that it has  no will of its own. In fact, the memory work recreates the personality of the writer. The brain gets more and more distressed, sending messages of wanting to be free from the  memory work (to the astonishment of the scientists who have not believed that the brain could regain consciousness). In the happy end, a member of the team, posing (or being actually, I don't remember!) as a 'ronnie' - a Reality or Nothing terrorist who try to free the world from the clutches of global entertainment monopolies, whose main endeavour is to separate the people from reality - destroys the machine to which the brain is connected, thus liberating the brain from its memories, and simultaneously killing it.
   In this story, producing memories is seen as a painful, difficult but very precise process. The brain, free from all kinds of mental or bodily hindrances, remembers everything, exactly.
   This also seems to be the view of the so-called recovered memory therapy movement, which believes that there are events which are so difficult and horrible (and sexual) that they are totally repressed, to emerge at some later date, prompted by some association or similarity. The problem with this assumption is, that it is extremely difficult to verify such memory recovery, either because there is no independent confirmation of the event remembered or because we can never know whether the repressed event really was forgotten at all. 
  This said, I don't wish to deny the possibility of re-remembering forgotten events stored in the unconscious parts of the brain. The well-known Proustian Madeleine remembrance is an innocuous case of the same phenomenon, except that there is no repression behind the forgotten event. In fact, the madeleine-type associative long-forgotten memories are extremely common, almost daily occurrences. Another type of real memory recovery happens when somebody starts writing autobiographical reminiscences; working at one's past is sure to bring about fresh memories (another question is how reliable they are!).
    The problem I want to address is firstly the possibility of completely repressing from one's memory important events in one's life and secondly the implications of this for autobiographies (i.e the possibility of writing enormously different life stories depending of one's memories). This is a question which is actually underlying most of the history of psychoanalysis, so that Freud himself can be described as the first repressed memory therapist, from the beginning.
    An instance of recovered memory which is important because it has affirmed the reality of recovered memories in court and as a consequence sent a person in jail for murder and rape, is the case of Eileen Lipsker.
   Eileen Lipsker was a woman of highly troubled childhood and youth (alcohol, violence of the father, mental problems of the mother, divorce, sexual promiscuity, drug use etc.) who was later married and had two children, the older an eight-year old daughter. One day she happened to look at her daughter in a position which brought back a similar position of her best friend, who had been eight years when she was raped and killed. The following days and weeks brought back previously repressed memories of having seen her father - an occasionally violent man and heavy drinker - kill her friend during an outing. After these first memories Eileen also recovered memories of being sexually abused by the father. The memory of the murder as described by Eileen was very vivid and detailed. After discussions with her therapist (she was in therapy because of marital and probably also problems related to her past) she came forward with her accusations, the father was brought to justice and condemned in the end, even though there was no other evidence connecting him to the murder. The father denied the murder but did not deny the allegations of incest, which certainly increased the reliability of Eileen's testimony (the defense chose a strategy intended to show that Eileen had reason to hate her father so much that she could even invent a murder accusation). It was later revealed that all details described by Eileen Lipsker had been previously published and that the possibility of father's guilt was already entertained by Eileen's estranged mother and sister, while at the time Eileen was completely silent of her presence in the scene of murder.
  In all, Terr's version of the case of Eileen Lipsker did not sound very plausible. There were several reasons to suspect her testimony and the role of her therapists was central. In fact, the wave of recovered memory cases may have given Eileen Lipsker the idea to come forward with her accusations in a new form. Even if they were true, we can not know whether she had remembered the event all the time, but had been ashamed to come forward after her initial silence. In fact, the conviction of Eileen's father has been overturned and he has been freed. I don't know whether he is now, in turn, suing his daughter and her therapist, or maybe even the expert witness Terr.
   This debate between the truth or falsity of repressed memories has raged now for several years, mainly in the USA. It is a common belief among psychotherapists  that it is possible for children and young adults to repress difficult and traumatic memories, and then recover them. This has led to several court cases and other situations where children have made serious accusations against their parents, other relatives or friends of family. The opposite point of view is that such fatal memories as rape, sexual abuse, violence, cannot be repressed and that their 'recovery' is always spurious. Either the memory has existed always or it is pure fantasy (or a mixture of fantasy and real events, just as any product of the unconscious). In a famous Chris 'experiment' a young boy was told a completely false story about his having lost his way in a shopping center, when he was very small. Some years later, when he was told that this had never happened, he refused to believe it, because the memory had become completely real for him. This proves at least that memories may be real or unreal, they have the same reality for those who have them. When they exist, it is impossible to distinguish them from real events. And when the memories don't exist, it doesn't help much if we are told that we should remember them (how many times have we been told that such and such thing has happened but we have no memory of it?). 

  In autobiographies, this problem has not been discussed, but it is important from a theoretical point of view. Is the writing or telling an autobiography in any way related to the process of memory recovery? If so, what about false memory? What implications does this discussion have on the realistic approach to the life stories?
  The recovered or false memory debate has until now mainly taken place in the USA (and the UK). This debate is in many ways typically American: naive exaggerations, extreme positions on both sides, dramatical court cases, monetary considerations. In Europe, the situation is much more subdued: discussions inside professions, confrontation between the therapy-oriented social workers, doctors and families. In Europe there is also much more often a situation where the state is against families, in extreme cases those of social welfare administration taking custody of children against the will of the parents. The well-known Swedish child 'Gulags' have given a bad reputation to the European welfare state as a leviathan-like system which crushes the individual, beginning with the child. Also, in these cases, false memory is not so much an issue as the trustworthiness of children and the interpretations of therapists.
   The false memory debate is an extreme example of the problem of the trustworthiness and reality of life stories as a whole, or even more generally, the debate between realistic and textual positions in the analysis of life stories. This problem which has been a classic question in philosophy (Bertrand Russell described memorably in his autobiography how happy he was when he finally could believe that tables or houses really existed and were not just imaginary constructs) to be declared a non-question by Wittgenstein for whom there were only things to be discussed with language and images which could not be expressed with words at all. This debate of external vs. linguistic reality was introduced into the social sciences gradually via linguistics, psychoanalysis, literary studies and postmodern theory, and which, for short, is a question of whether there is an external reality ('real life') of which the life story in a more or less faithful rendering or if we should rather see life as being a narrative (social) construct (or a language construct), ever changing and always newly constructed so that all the different versions are equally true.
    Ian Hacking (1997) has given an interesting example of social construction: the 'construction' of child abuse. Child abuse was 'discovered' in the 1960's when doctors noticed that children's fractures were the result of severe beatings. By 1975 child abuse had become sexual, so that the actual mistreatment and violence had been practically forgotten. Still mistreatment of children has always existed and has always been considered wrong even though the tolerance of corporal punishment has somewhat diminished. So the social construction is relatively independent of the phenomenon itself, precisely as a realist (like myself) would say. It would be absurd to say that child abuse is a pure social construction of the 70's (in its sexual meaning). But as Hacking notes, it has now become an absolute Bad, so that discussion of sexuality of children has become extremely difficult (also think of the difficulties to remake Lolita and distribute it!).
   I have participated elsewhere in this debate. My own position is that a person may have somewhat different versions of his or her life story during different periods of his life and that contextual effects are very important (for instance depending of whether the story is written for your children or if its context is work) but still the basic story is very much the same and more importantly, the individual strives always to render a version most adequately representing his or her life, as is is presently understood by the writer. So the changes introduced in the life story are more often than not results of an improved understanding or knowledge bringing to story closer to the 'real life', not new arbitrary versions attempting to create a new identity. And, as Bertrand Russell reports from a privately conducted experiment with one of his women friends: 'If you try to persuade an ordinary uneducated person that she cannot call up a visual picture of a friend sitting in a chair, but can only use words describing what such an occurrence would be like, she will conclude that you are mad' My own favourite example is the quite ordinary distinction between external reality and its linguistic expression which we experience when we try to find a word for a thing which we have in mind, but cannot express it in words; an extremely frustrating experience. You know perfectly what it is you want to express, but you cannot do it in words. 
   The false memory debate is precisely about this: are the 'new' memories which change completely a person's view of his or her previous life (memories of being sexually abused by close relatives, or other equally traumatic and terrible events which suddenly emerge from the subconscious and can become extremely concrete and realistic) really true or are they just imaginary products, created in cooperation with a professional therapist specialized in such memories or after reading books on the subject etc., or even caused by the general atmosphere, media publicity etc. Are they real or just constructs? This is then an extreme case of the more ordinary question of how a life story is connected to the real life. Or in other words, and extreme case of the thesis of social or narrative constructionism.
   For a realistically oriented life story researcher, this question is a very tricky one: we usually assume that the stories of people are mainly true and that they usually fail by omission, not by fabulation or pure invention. And we (the realists!) are unwilling to admit that there is a strong construction which causes them to be different depending on the social situations in which they are told. Therefore, if there is a possibility that people can produce whole episodes (and very central ones) of their lives just out of thin air (even though they believe these episodes are true), the realistic position seems very weak indeed. On the other hand, false memories are a very strong argument for the postmodern view of social reality: people may construct whatever stories they wish and they need not have any connection with real events. Incidentally, note that the therapists producing these memories are ambivalent realists: their livelihood depends on the belief of the reality of the recovered memories (and they criticise Freudian psychoanalysis for having denied this reality), but on the other hand they are not so keen on the necessity of proof. 
   Of course a realist may choose to believe in the recovered memories which usually give a really dramatic picture of a previously rather dull or 'normal' reality. But in this case he/she will also have to deal with extremely conflicting descriptions of the same reality: the stories before and after, the versions of other relatives who are usually quite unaware of what has been (supposedly) happening. So the best solution for the realist would be to require proof, corroboration of of the memories, and a healthy suspicion of the more dramatic and unbelievable versions (such as satanistic rituals, extreme forms of sexual abuse, fantastic children's stories etc). 
   I shall not discuss here the problem of individual or family secrets, ie. situations where some event has been kept a secret for a long time and then revealed suddenly. Secrets are another, very interesting and related question. It can be said that most families and individuals have their intimate secrets, in many cases quite dramatic ones. Some of these secrets may be precisely of the kind revealed through 'recovered' memories. In the Eileen Lipsker case, discussed above, one plausible explanation is that Eileen reveals a family secret in a 'socially acceptable' way (this is my own explanation for it, assuming that her father was guilty). Here I have explicitly discussed cases where it is claimed that something has happened to the person, that he or she has completely forgotten the event (repressed it) and that at some later stage she (usually she) suddenly remembers it, recovers it, usually with the help of a psychotherapist specialized in recovered memories. I am not interested in the more extreme (and patently false) cases of satanistic rituals, UFO:s, snowballing stories of whole communities involved etc., which are just forms of mass or collective hysteria, but in those cases where there is a genuine memory in which the person believes and where it is really possible that the event has taken place.
  A related question is what the children remember and can tell about sexual abuse, violence etc. They are usually quite unreliable as witnesses, not because they want to invent things or make them up, but rather because they can be easily influenced and are very difficult as interview objects. This is a problem of therapists or the  police coming up with questions that lead the child inte specific conclusions. In Finland, there is one very famous case which showed how difficult it is to stop the process once the witch hunt has been started.
   I have personally not encountered cases of life stories where people would have recovered previously forgotten memories. They may use in their life stories previous diaries which describe events of which they have no direct memories, but otherwise they tell what they remember and have remembered. They may attempt to go back as far in the childhood as possible and also attempt to distinguish those memories told by others and those remembered authentically (this is also possible to deduce on the basis of the remembered episode; a child cannot usually know complicated terms or places and the memory is always somewhat unclear). But I have not encountered spontaneous autobiographies with recovered memories. If there is incest or violence, this is may be something that the author has kept a secret which is now revealed in the autobiography (the cases of incest related in the stories are relatively innocuous, with some notable exceptions). 
   According to  Frederic Crews (1997) there are no cases in which repression has been 'proved' to exist during the past 60 years. And always when Mark Pendergrast (1996) tried to get corroboration for cases cited by defenders of recovered memory, there was no real case. There are, however some cases where we have independent evidence of traumatic events in childhood: accidents, revealed cases of child abuse, kidnapping etc. In these cases (and of course one could think of several others: e.g. children taken from their parents when extremely young) it is possible to ask the now adult persons what they remember of the event. Yet in all cases they must now be aware of the facts (it would be unethical to remind them!): some of them admit to remembering them all the time, some of them don't remember what happened to them, but none report a spontaneous recovery of the memory. What is most astonishing is that there is so little research which tries to find corroborative evidence for repression. In an article devoted to this question there are only two references of this kind among literally hundreds discussing the phenomenon of repressed memory. In the case of recovered sexual abuse memories, it is obvious that the other witness(es) of the event will have a strong incentive to deny it, but still one should expect that during the period in which 'recovered' memories have been known, there should be some actually proven cases, not only claims and counter-claims. Frederic Crews (1997, 165) mentions one case where it has been proven that a recovered memory of sexual molestation was real. Even here, the question about its repression is not clear: the incident was not very traumatic and it can have been simply forgotten. 
   In other words, the recovered memory discussion throws in my view more light to the debate concerning reality and construction of life stories than on the actual question of repression of memories. Here I think that the main problem lies in the risks brought about by the acceptance of the idea that life stories are just constructs which should not be taken as representations of reality. 
   The main risk here is that the analysis of life stories becomes in a sense independent of the actual story. We become free to give any interpretations we wish, even absolutely contrary ones to the claims of the narrators. We lose all (or most) sense of reality. It is (in my view) much better to err to the side of mistaken belief in the reality of the story than mistaken belief in the complete malleability of the story. 
    A Finnish colleague, Matti Hyvärinen has discussed several times one life story of a Finnish leftist student activist 'Anu Rantanen', whom he interviewed several years ago. The story itself is not very complicated. Anu Rantanen becomes, as a young student, involved in the communist student movement, is very active and becomes for a time even chairperson of a local group. All the time, however, she describes herself as unsure of herself and feeling to be completely on contradiction with her true self, who is not at all the outward oriented, politically dogmatic activist everybody else sees her to be. What is most intriguing in her story is that while she herself says that she gave up on the ideology quite early immediately after the peak period of the movement (i.e. in the mid-70's), she actually resigned from the Commmunist Party in the mid-80's hanging around as a passive, but paying member for a long time.
    Since Hyvärinen presented this case for the first time (1994), he has changed his position completely ('this is my sixth version' he says in 1997!). The first version described Anu Rantanen as an unpolitical person who just happened to be politically active and was somewhat mystified about the long process of separation. The most recent version shows Anu Rantanen as a person true to herself and politically very conscious, so that her story becomes a coherent and very political story, from an incoherent, conflicting and very unpolitical story. In the last version, the slow process of separation follows logically from her identity as a withrawn, self-effacing woman. Her self-rhetoric is no more seen to be in conflict with her actual life, but actually very coherent: being a dogmatic and leading activist in conflict with her own feelings was only logical for a quiet and self-effacing person (who does not wish to show off by coming clean ...). 
   For me, Hyvärinen is a good example of the completely fictive story approach. Anything is possible: the rhetoric is everything and  the 'simple' question what kind of life do the stories tell about, are much less interesting than questions about production of gender and identity in the life stories, both narratively and textually. 
   Why should one have to think that people are producing gender in their stories, independently of their 'real' gender produced by social and biological facts or that their future lives would be influenced by their way of telling about their past lives). If I could to paraphrase Bertrand Russell, we could find a hypothetical 'ordinary' person and ask her how she is producing her gender or how she is influencing her life by her story or even to whom they are telling their life stories? As Russell says, this person would consider the person asking such questions as quite mad (or at least incomprehensible). Or take another example: in most European languages, there is the cumbersome division between he and she (not to speak of gendered nouns!), so that a gender-conscious author must either avoid the third person or use he/she (or she/he). Miraculously, in Finnish such a distinction does not exist: there is only one third person pronoun which refers to both genders and there are no gendered articles like in French or German. Does this mean that we Finns have a different conception of gender than other people? The textualists should certainly think so. The only consequence I am aware of, is that we have great difficulties in distinguishing between gendered words in other languages, but certainly not between 'real' gender (or not less or more than anybody else).
   Hyvärinen criticizes also my own position, in which I have claimed that ordinary people write their stories better when they are free from literary conventions and that all kinds of obvious literary means function more or less as a veil between the 'real thing' and the story. Against this, Hyvärinen posits the linguistic turn, in which only the different literary, stylistic and vocabulary means produce the feeling of reality and authenticity, not any relation to the life itself, of which it is impossible to know anything. In addition, in Hyvärinen's view, all stories are directed to a public, and thus strictly contextual. He gives as an example a reading of Augustine's Confession, which lends itself readily to a rhetorical interpretation, being simultaneously a 'true confession' and a document whose objective is to convert people and convince those already converted.
   Augustine is a good counterexample of what ordinary life stories usually attempt to do, but on the other hand its 'rhetoric' of truth and especially the idea that God sees everything, has strongly affected the idea of autobiography. Without Rousseau and Augustine, we would not have the idea of the truth as a basic requirement of autobiography! This is also a good instance of the influence of great literary autobiographies in ordinary life stories, in which it is not so much the model or style that is important, but a principle (often misunderstood), the origin of which is usually unknown to the author. Even though Hyvärinen comes round to the view that the realistic starting point is also important (referentiality and reality are essential parts of the life story for him, contrary to many constructivists), he tries, it seems to me, to reconcile things which cannot be reconciled. Either there is an attempt to approximate reality narratively or then there is a rhetorical construction of one's past and future life.
   The problem with constructivism is its elusiveness. A good example of this is Dausien's (1996) analysis of differences between women's and men's autobiographical interviews. The analysis shows that men differ from women in telling stories where they are single heroes and other personages don't exist (such as wives or children). women, on the other hand describe interaction, complexity of life where they have to be responsible for the family as well as a carteer, caring for the home etc. This Dausien presents as social construction of gender. To the question whether this distinction could simply be the result of social reality, where men are not responsible for family, where their life is centered around work etc., you get the answer that this is also social construction. In  my sense it is not: social construction is construction only if from same materials we can construct really different alternatives, as in the case of Lego pieces. If the social 'construction' is determined by social reality, there is no quarrel. The problem is that you get often both kinds of messages.
    One excellent way to demonstrate the impossibility of the fictive autobiography position is if we introduce this same discussion in the field of biography. Biography and autobiography are in some ways very different and biographers usually see it as an important endeavour to show how false and misleading a person's autobiography is, as the literary autobiographies often seem to be. My point is simply that if a biographer would by way of introduction tell that he or she is a textualist/narrativist/postmodernist for whom the actual reality of the events related in the biography are irrelevant or simply a textual construction, we should also be prepared to judge the biography only by its literary and textual merits. My question is: why should we treat autobiographies differently from biographies, even if the author is simultaneously the subject of the life story?
    Daniel Bertaux' recent contributions against the narrativist turn (1996, 1997a, b) err to the other direction. As an empirically oriented but theoretically informed researcher, who is singularly well placed to discuss the rise of life story approach in the 1970's and 80's, having been one of the main movers and participant observers, Daniel Bertaux has chosen to lump together narrativists, constructivists and textualists, as well as those who work with single biographies, as enemies of realism and of the sociological point of view. For me, the unique quality of Daniel Bertaux has always been his ability to combine a very good sociological imagination with an excellent story-telling and analysing ability. For him to be fulminating against narrativists is truly a contradictio in adjecto, whereas both constructivism and textualism are certainly enemies of realism. The idea that historical reality presents itself in the form of a narrative is quite plausible, as well as the idea that the narrative already implies  an interpretation of reality. What makes this standpoint realist is simply the idea that the story is a function of the real events and that the storyteller tries to come close to these events.
   Bertaux gives, in his B&S text (1996) , an interesting example of both the stability of one's story and of how the story changes when the positions change. In Bertaux' still unpublished but already classic baker study, the bakery workers were unanimous in telling how difficult and terrible their period as apprentices was, whereas the bakers were reluctant to discuss this period and only when questioned admitted that it was difficult, emphasizing much more what they learned. Note that here we may, in a sense, speak of repressed memory! The constructivist point of view is of course that depending of the present, the past is constructed accordingly. The realist response is that we can, with the help of these different perspectives, reconstruct the social reality and the opposing social positions of the storytellers, but that the perspective of the workers is certainly more true and complete, as far as the apprentice experience is concerned. It is simply necessary to collect stories from different positions, in order to get at the reality (which is not denied by the bakers themselves). If we want to get a complete story of the bakers' lives, we must get also their experience as bakers' apprentices right. 
    That is, the 'repressed' sections in the life story should be discovered, rather than invented or interpreted freely by our textualist analyzer. From a postmodernist point of view, life stories have been compared to an onion, which you can peel endlessly and never get at the truth of the onion, but it is possible to go further and compares the analysis of the life story to adding new layers, richer and more complex, to the lived life. The more we analyse, the farther from the truth we get! For me, a life is much more like an artichoke, where the best part comes when you have 'peeled' the whole fruit off (and tasted every separate leaf!).
   To come back to the repressed memory discussion, it is from a realist point of view important to get at the truth behind all kinds of hidden and falsified versions of life stories and family stories. But this truth is not possible to glean from the processes of the unconscious but rather from triangulated stories, where different members of the same social or family group discuss the same events. Here, Daniel Bertaux' realistic sociological approach is a much better guide than the different, actually very vague exhortations about social constructivism, narrativity and textuality. 
 

J.P.Roos is professor of Social Policy at the University of Helsinki. He has written several books and articles on life stories and has been instrumental in organizing collections of life stories through competition in Finland, Russia, Estonia, Lithuania.
Department of Social Policy
Box 18, 00014 University of Helsinki, Finland
j.p.roos@helsinki.fi

References

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Bertaux, Daniel: 'The Usefulness of Life Stories for a Realist and Meaningful Sociology', in Voronkov, V- Zdravomyslova, E (eds): Biografitsheskii metod v isutsenii postsotsialistitsheskih obsestv, (Sankt Peterburg 1997a).
Bertaux, Daniel: Les récits de vie. Perspective ethnosociologique. (Paris 1997b).
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Coleman Lee: "The Manufacture of Sexual Abuse 'Memories': Psychiatry's Latest Fad", in Krivacska James J. & Money, John: The Handbook of Forensic Sexology (Amherst 1994).
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Hacking, Ian: 'Taking Bad Arguments Seriously'. London Review of Books, Vol 19, Nr 16 (21 Aug 1997)
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Roos, J.P.: 'Context, authenticity, referentiality, reflexivity: Back to basics in autobiography', in Voronkov,V-Zdravomyslova,E (eds.): Biografitsheskii metod v isutsenii postsotsialistitshekih obsestv, (Sankt Peterburg, 1997).
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Terr Leonore: Unchained Memories. True Stories of Traumatic Memories Lost and Found, (New York, 1994).
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Webster, Richard: Why Freud Was Wrong. Sin, Science and Psychoanalysis, (London 1996)
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Voronkov, Viktor - Zdravomyslova, Elena (eds.): Biografitsheskii metod v isutsenii postsotsialistitshekih obsestv, Sankt Peterburg, 1997
 
 

Borneman Ernest: 'Sexual abuse of children - a self-fulfilling prophecy', Child protectors and clients, First international forum (28-30.6.1995).

Grosskurth Phyllis: Melanie Klein. Her World and her Work, (Cambridge, Mass. 1987)
Haavio-Mannila Elina & Kontula Osmo: Matkalla intohimoon. Nuoruuden hurma ja kärsimys seksuaalielämäkertojen kuvaamana, (Porvoo-Helsinki 1995).
Rahkonen, Keijo: 'Der biographische Fehlscluss: einige kritische Bemerkungen', Bios 4 (2.1991), 243-246

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