PITFALLS OF MEMORY

To the Editors:

In Oliver Sacks’s otherwise beneficial essay on the ways our memory of the past may mislead us [NYR, February 21], he maintains that such phenomena as “source confusions,” “autoplagiarisms” and “cryptomnesias” document its frailties. What we sometimes consider to be veridical memories of events may be no such thing and may, in fact, be false. He references the disastrous legacy of the so-called “recovered memory” movement in psychology, aimed at uncovering repressed memories of early sexual abuse. Unfortunately, it is still with us. Assuring us that we possess no cortical mechanisms for determining the truth or accuracy of our recollections, Sacks goes on to underscore the often elusive character of “historical” as opposed to “narrative” truth: what we deem to be past realities may be constructions of our imagination. But then he avers that such aberrations are “relatively rare” and that our memories are for the most part “solid and reliable.”

            You cannot have it both ways. If we lack inborn mechanisms to determine the truth or falsity of our memories, on what basis can we be sure that most of them are, as Sacks insists, reliable? He takes pains to illustrate the vagaries of memory by referring to Freud’s contribution to the subject, indicating that the father of psychoanalysis uncovered “grosser distortions” of memory when he realized that patient accounts of early sexual abuse were “fantasies.” Commentary on the subject in recent years has raised doubts over whether Freud really obtained “reports” or was actually confusing patient memories with interpretations he forced upon them. If the latter, then memory distortion can even assail investigators pioneering the study of the subject. Accordingly, if false memories can infiltrate hallowed corridors of received wisdom, maybe sometimes it’s not better to let sleeping dogmatists lie.

 

D. A. Begelman

New Milford, Connecticut