Psychoanalysis and Hollywood
I’m reminded by a Facebook conversation that there are people who still believe in “repressed memory.” (I’m reminded – see what I did there?)
An interesting article from 2008 talks about it as a cultural phenomenon:
ARE SOME experiences so horrific that the human brain seals them away, only to recall them years later? The concept of “repressed memory,” known by the diagnostic term dissociative amnesia, has long fueled controversy in psychiatry. During the 1980s, claims of childhood sexual abuse based on recovered memories led to a spate of highly publicized court cases. A number of the supposed victims retracted their allegations in the early 1990s, admitting that they had been swayed by therapeutic techniques. Yet the scientific validity of dissociative amnesia has remained contested ground.
In a recent study, professor of psychiatry Harrison Pope, co-director of the Biological Psychiatry Lab at Harvard-affiliated McLean Hospital, put “repressed memory” to the test of time. He reasoned that if dissociative amnesia were an innate capability of the brain—akin to depression, hallucinations, anxiety, and dementia—it would appear in written works throughout history. In collaboration with associate professor of psychiatry James Hudson, Michael Parker, a professor of English at the U.S. Naval Academy, Michael Poliakoff, director of education programs at the National Endowment for the Humanities, and research assistant Matthew Boynes, Pope set out to find the earliest recorded example of a “repressed memory.”
They found quite a lot from the 19th century, but nothing before that.
The researchers then offered a $1,000 reward—posted in three languages on more than 30 Internet websites and discussion groups—to the first person to identify a case of dissociative amnesia in any work of fiction or nonfiction prior to 1800. They received more than 100 responses, but none met the “repressed memory” criteria. Although many early texts describe ordinary forgetfulness caused by natural biological processes, as well as instances of individuals forgetting happy memories and even their own identities, there were no accounts of an inability to recall a traumatic experience at one point and the subsequent recovery of that memory.
In a report of their findings published in Psychological Medicine, Pope and his colleagues concluded that the absence of dissociative amnesia in works prior to 1800 indicates that the phenomenon is not a natural neurological function, but rather a “culture-bound” syndrome rooted in the nineteenth century. They argued that dissociative amnesia falls into the diagnostic category “pseudo-neurological symptom” (or “conversion disorder”)—a condition that “lacks a recognizable medical or neurological basis.”
It makes such a compelling story.
What, then, accounts for “repressed memory’s” appearance in the nineteenth century and its endurance today? Pope and his colleagues hope to answer these questions in the future. “Clearly the rise of Romanticism, at the end of the Enlightenment, created fertile soil for the idea that the mind could expunge a trauma from consciousness,” Pope says. He notes that other pseudo-neurological symptoms (such as the female “swoon”) emerged during this era, but faded relatively quickly. He suspects that two major factors helped solidify “repressed memory” in the twentieth-century imagination: psychoanalysis (with its theories of the unconscious) and Hollywood. “Film is a perfect medium for the idea of repressed memory,” he says. “Think of the ‘flashback,’ in which a whole childhood trauma is suddenly recalled. It’s an ideal dramatic device.”
That’s what I mean about compelling. Movies can show the memory as it’s recovered – that is, they can seem to show it, which for us open-mouthed watchers amounts to the same thing. Movies can be incredibly good at overwhelming our critical faculties.
Meredith Maran’s My Lie is a good personal account of someone who got sucked into the whole repressed memories phenomenon. What’s telling, I think, is how little has changed in some activist communities to be the most victimized. Fascinating read.
Human memory is plastic and not stored on some infallible hard drive, we are able to edit our memories every time we retrieve them. ‘Therapists’ can also change their patients’ memories to suit their agendas. If someone’s job is to find witches, they will certainly find them.
Not only are we able to edit our memories every time we retrieve them, we’re unable not to. We tweak them a little every time we call them up.
To labour the point, that’s because we don’t call them up, we recreate them each time in some fuzzy and poorly understood way. It’s like the ultimate in compression algorithms.
Think about a memory. Then imagine something. Say what the difference is.
Guess what, there isn’t any.
Of course, in fiction, people act, think, behave the way the authors BELIEVE they do.
Fictional characters suffered from unbalanced humours, were cured by bleeding, never got sick from drinking polluted water etc. etc.
Interesting point about the female swoon. What happened to that? I remember hearing something about a big contributing factor (I guess besides culture) being those corsets. They caused so many blood pressure and abdominal compression problems that the least emotion caused loss of consciousness. In which case, presumably, lower class women without expensive corsets would have been less susceptible?
They (the swoons) certainly seem to have vanished.
“Play it again, Sam…”
Actually there was probably some factual basis for the “swoon”. In an era of tight corseting – like most of the 19th C – women who laced very tightly (so, fashionable young women and women looking for husbands) restricted their ability to breathe deeply. Sudden emotion or exertion diverts blood to the muscles, increases blood pressure and muscle tension and speeds the heart rate (the “fight or flight” response). To supply enough oxygen to the heart and muscles requires us to breathe more deeply to take in more air. If a woman can’t do this in response to sudden emotion or exertion it could leave them weak enough to collapse, lapse into semi-consciousness or even a full faint. Once the lady had calmed and there was less demand on her system she would regain consciousness.
Of course this response also accorded with 19th C ideas about femininity. Real women were fragile and delicate. Their brains and bodies were unsuited to rough emotion or heavy work. Notably, swooning was very much a middle class and upwards behaviour. The working classes – who would not lace tightly because they had to, y’know, work were seen as constitutionally coarser and less feminine. So combine the two things and you have a nice positive feedback loop. Some women genuinely “swooned” for physiological reasons, this became associated with proper “feminine” behaviour so some women would copy it to be thought of as feminine enough so the associations grew stronger.
When fashions changed and the habit of tight lacing faded away women automatically became more active simply because they could now actually move. There was a slower move away from the idea of delicate womanhood (though it’s never gone entirely). Women stopped swooning. Eventually novelists stopped writing about it and it is now recognised as a particularly 19th C behaviour.
Didn’t “recovered memories” enjoy quite a lot of mainstream acceptance in the early 1990s? ISTR the concept even making its way into witness testimony in courts in Canada