Recovered Memories Aren't Real

non-falsifiability and life-altering accusations are a bad match

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I have a piece in the Boston Globe making my case that American schools are, in fact, doing quite well overall. Check it out.

You may have read about the dueling lawsuits concerning the bestselling 2025 memoir The Tell. In the book, Amy Griffin describes “recovering” memories in therapy, memories of being sexually assaulted as a child by a middle school teacher, aided by the use of psychedelics. In a grim twist, Griffin is being sued by a woman named Joleene Altum who claims Griffin stole her story, root and branch. (That’s one way to recover a memory….) Griffin has countersued. Reading about the whole sordid affair, I thought three things. One, at this point I assume memoirs are untrue unless I have compelling evidence to believe otherwise, whether that’s fair to memoirists or not. Two, the publishing world and book media sure do roll out the red carpet for those with immense privilege; Griffin is a venture capitalist and (like Belle Burden) a fabulously rich woman. And, three, I cannot believe that recovered or repressed memories appear in our media with such regularity and with so little skepticism. Because recovered memories, at least in the way they’re conceptualized in the public mind, are not real.

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Recovered memory proponents hold that when a person experiences a trauma too devastating to bear, the mind automatically represses the memory, sealing it away from conscious awareness as a protective defense. Years later, that memory can supposedly be “recovered” intact, often surfacing during therapy explicitly aimed at unlocking such memories. (The existence of therapy sessions specifically designed to dislodge buried memories is problematic for obvious reasons.) But regardless of recovery method, there’s no good scientific reason to believe the overall narrative: that our minds take genuine traumatic experiences, banish them whole and unaltered into an inaccessible vault for years or decades, and then disgorge them intact under the right therapeutic conditions.

The popular picture of recovered memories suggests a clockwork mechanism in which horror is filed away and later retrieved like a document from a drawer. This is, to put it bluntly, an unscientific folk theory with the kind of pseudo-medical dusting that is so common in the era of Trauma Culture. There are some rare experiences that are similar to the concept of memory recovery, but the phenomenon as pop culture and pop psychology imagine it - widespread, consistent, and achievable through hypnosis or guided imagery - does not exist. The research record is unequivocal. What exists instead is something far more ordinary and far more dangerous, a memory system that is reconstructive, suggestible - and, I’m afraid, perfectly capable of manufacturing detailed, emotionally convincing recollections of events that never happened.

I’m a crackpot, granted, but my perspective on this is not a fringe contrarian position but rather the consensus of experts in the relevant fields. This may be a somewhat dangerous argument to make, given how intemperate the proponents of recovered memory theory can be, but what I’m saying has a lot of expert backing behind it. In fact my skepticism reflects the considered view of much of the experimental memory-science community, and it has been tested in a uniquely consequential venue: courtrooms. It’s in the legal system that recovered memory theory destroyed real families and imprisoned real people for crimes that the available evidence suggests never occurred. These scenarios ruin lives and prompt unjustifiable prison sentences, and they do so based on claims that cannot be subject to critical review and for which there can necessarily be no physical evidence. It’s nightmarish.

It’s here, I guess, that I should do the requisite throat-clearing and drop the expected provisos. It is of course the case that sexual misconduct and sexual assault occur and occur far too frequently, both in general and against children, and that too often these crimes go unpunished. Of course we need to listen when people make allegations of sexual crimes, and of course we need to do whatever we can to establish the truth and pursue justice. But if what I’m saying is true - if what decades of research tells us is true - and recovered memories are not real, putting faith in them can lead to neither truth nor justice. And unfortunately, the social conditions at hand regarding these kinds of claims are not conducive to truth either. Anyone who expresses doubts about any claims of sexual assault, especially against a child, is accused of being insensitive or indifferent to such crimes or worse, no matter how flimsy the allegations. But supporting false allegations can never help real victims, and yes, there have been dozens of such allegations that have been proven false. The only way to fight sex crimes, against minors or anyone else, is with a fierce attachment to truth, fairness, and to due process. Recovered memories can’t clear that bar.

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The concept of memory repression, in Western culture, mainly descends from the psychoanalytic tradition of Sigmund Freud. The idea of repression, or at least its centrality in therapy, traces back to Freud and to the broader nineteenth century interest in dissociation, with repression understood as a defense mechanism that pushes painful experience out of conscious awareness. (I will never shake the academic’s fear of using Wikipedia as a source, but the entry on repressed memories is a good resource, if you’re interested.) Freud wasn’t working in a vacuum here; he drew on the French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, who he studied under, and on contemporaries like Pierre Janet, whose work on hysteria and dissociation supplied a lot of the intellectual scaffolding for the notion that the mind could wall off intolerable experience. It’s worth noting, too, that Freud’s own thinking on this was famously unsteady - his early “seduction theory,” which took patients accounts of childhood sexual abuse more or less at face value, was later abandoned in favor of the idea that many such accounts reflected fantasy, a reversal that has been litigated and relitigated ever since. (Who knew Freud could be problematic?) Whatever the origins, the core proposition is that when an experience is devastating enough, the mind automatically and unconsciously exiles the memory of it, so that the person (or the ego or the consciousness or whatever) can no longer recall the event that caused the distress.

What’s remarkable is how little this core proposition has changed in the century since. Freud's mechanism long ago outgrew the consulting rooms of Vienna and seeped into the broader culture - into self-help books like Ellen Bass and Laura Davis's The Courage to Heal, the 1988 blockbuster that assured readers that if they suspected they’d been abused, they probably had been; into talk shows, where hosts like Oprah Winfrey publicized lurid “recovered” accounts of satanic ritual abuse as incontrovertible fact; into courtrooms, where, as we’ll see, “recovered” memories put people in prison for decades; and into the everyday vocabulary we use to talk about our own pasts. By the late twentieth century it had hardened into something close to common sense: the assumption that buried trauma is not just possible but likely, and that the work of healing means digging it back up, is just one of those social beliefs that you don’t need to justify. Everybody knows that trauma makes us repress memories. Scientific rigor need not apply.

Part of the reason repression-and-recovery theory has proven to be durable is a particularly troubling bit of meme logic. A crucial move you often see in the pop version, especially in “trauma-based” online communities such as the cult of How the Body Keeps the Score, is the claim that the failure to remember abuse is itself evidence the abuse occurred and was repressed. This logic is unfalsifiable in exactly the way good science is not: remembering proves the abuse, while not remembering proves the repression. Checkmate! The theory is built so that no possible observation could ever count against it, and a claim that can’t be contradicted by any evidence isn’t a strong scientific claim, it’s an non-falsifiable one. When a hypothesis is structured so that no conceivable outcome could refute it, we’ve stepped outside the boundaries of what science can actually test. And we need to evaluate this stuff with formal rigor, because recovered memories have been invoked in some really devastating false accusations. Unfortunately, as a little Googling will show - including by looking at reviews of The Tell - many, many people are ready to believe in repressed and recovered memories and just as ready to scream at anyone who challenges those beliefs.

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So, what are some of the problems with recovered memory theory?

The name game is usually not a good sign. Modern clinical writing often swaps the discredited word “repression” for the more respectable-sounding “dissociative amnesia,” but as memory researchers have pointed out, the underlying claims are nearly identical; both hold that memory loss is a coping response, that the memory becomes inaccessible, and that it can later be recalled in original form. Renaming a mechanism, obviously, does not turn it from fake to real. And this maneuver has proven to be all too common when it comes to these kinds of pseudoscientific theories. For example, the comprehensively-discredited technique of facilitated communication has endured despite constant debunking in part because its proponents keep rebranding the practice.

The scientific evidence on how trauma relates to memory demonstrates the exact opposite reaction. Perhaps the biggest problem for recovered memory theory is that it gets the basic science of trauma backwards. The dominant finding in the field is not that terrifying events are forgotten, but that they tend to be remembered too well. Harvard psychologist Richard McNally summarized the evidence bluntly: experiences that are overwhelmingly terrifying or traumatic are generally remembered very well, because… they’re overwhelmingly terrifying and traumatic. And the release of stress hormones during trauma is actually believed to promote consolidation of the memory of that trauma, making it more resistant to forgetting, not more susceptible. This is the opposite of what the repression model predicts. Combat veterans, survivors of torture, and survivors of disasters are typically tormented by the persistence of their memories (intrusive thoughts, flashbacks, nightmares), not by an inability to access them. McNally notes that survivors do sometimes report everyday memory problems after trauma, but these reflect ordinary post-trauma forgetfulness for unrelated daily matters, not a special inability to recall the trauma itself. None of the repression narrative fits.

The neuroscience backing is weak. Neuroimaging studies related to behavioral disorders has fallen out of favor in general, and for good reason; I also think, personally, that a lot of people in the broad world of psychology and psychiatry are far too quick to dismiss the brain’s potential role in dysfunction. (The idea that mental illnesses are necessarily not brain diseases is a textbook example of mistaking absence of evidence for evidence of absence, and an ideologically motivated one.) Still, a lot of pop neuroscience has failed to pass muster when the neurological claims have been subject to real scientific review, and recovered memory is no different. When researchers examined the neuroscientific case for “dissociative amnesia” directly, they found that it was very thin. A 2025 review concluded that relevant brain-imaging studies suffer from small samples, frequent absence of comparison groups, and a lot of statistical ambiguity. Critically, they also found that the brain activity offered as evidence of unconscious “dissociative amnesia” may instead reflect ordinary, intentional memory suppression or general cognitive control, which is a different thing entirely, obviously. People who have been through trauma frequently try to avoid thinking about it, for obvious reasons. That deliberate avoidance is not the same as a mind that has secretly sealed a memory away beyond reach.

Recovering memories looks an awful lot like inventing them. The biggest problem of all, morally and legally and psychologically, is that the very techniques used to “recover” repressed memories are demonstrably good at creating false ones. The capacity to force this kind of false remembering has been demonstrated for decades. This is the body of work most associated with the American psychologist and memory researcher Elizabeth Loftus. In a famous experiment, Loftus and colleagues planted entirely fictitious childhood memories in subjects with help from their own relatives, most memorably by convincing a meaningful fraction of participants that they had been lost in a shopping mall as a young child, an event that never happened. Later variants implanted impossible memories, such as meeting Bugs Bunny at a Disney park. (Which is impossible, to be clear, because Bugs Bunny is a Warner Bros character who would never appear at Disney.) Across various implantation studies, a substantial minority of subjects have come to “remember” invented events, sometimes elaborating them with confident, vivid, emotional detail. Some participants even angrily resisted being told that the events were fake.

It’s important to point out that the mechanism for inducing false memories in a lab setting closely matches the conditions under which “real” memory recovery happens in therapy. In the classic Loftus design, the experimenter targets an event a family member confirms did not happen, then encourages the subject over repeated sessions to recall details, sometimes adding additional (made up) details in a way that implies the subject is remembering more and more. This is a near-exact laboratory model of recovered-memory therapy: an authority figure suggests an event occurred, repeatedly probes for it, and validates the fragments that emerge until the subject “discovers” the false memory. How large is this risk? Reviews of the implantation literature suggest that on average on the order of 15 percent (and in some studies considerably more) of subjects can be led to form false autobiographical memories. That’s a very meaningful percentage of potential patients, a frightening one. Even completely setting aside false accusations, that many people being misled is a public-health-scale problem; add in the capacity for accusations to ruin lives….

None of this is to deny that people sometimes fail to think about a bad experience for years and are later reminded of it. That happens all the time; it’s just a matter of ordinary forgetting and ordinary remembering, the same machinery that makes a song on the radio suddenly return you to a specific summer you hadn’t thought about in a decade. The distinction lies in the fact that, with ordinary forgetting, the memory was always accessible in principle; it simply wasn't being called up, and no force was actively keeping it down. The repression-recovery theory needs something categorically stronger, a special, trauma-triggered, unconscious mechanism that takes the most significant experience of a person’s life and actively seals it behind a wall the conscious mind cannot breach, sometimes for decades, until therapy pries it open. That’s a far more specific and far more dramatic claim than “I hadn’t thought about it in a while,” and it’s precisely the claim the evidence does not support. The everyday phenomenon is real; the extraordinary version is not. And the difference is very important because of the human wreckage that has followed recovered memory theory.

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Survey research suggests, unfortunately, that belief in repression-and-recovery theory is widespread. If the science is this lopsided, why does the public and much of the therapy profession still believe in recovered memories so ardently? In part, because professionals who should know better perpetuate the mythology. Belief in repressed memory remains strong and deeply rooted in Western culture, and in particular (and strikingly) mental health professionals are no more skeptical than the average respondent in surveys. In fact, in some clinical specialties, belief has actually increased over time even as the negative evidence has grown more unequivocal. Skepticism is concentrated mainly among researchers working in legal or cognitive psychology. Another way to look at this is to say that the people most likely to be applying recovered memory theory to real patients are among those most likely to believe in a phenomenon the evidence does not support; those who are most skeptical are those who are most exposed to the consequences of bad science regarding memory.

Luckily, this belief appears to be subject to persuasion. When research subjects are taught the actual science of memory, with the shaky foundation of recovered memory theory laid out in scientific terms, their endorsement of repressed memory and dissociative amnesia drops, and they become more likely to recognize a therapy-induced “recovered memory” as probably false. The myth survives not because the evidence is genuinely balanced but because there hasn’t been enough corrective education, particularly in the media, which seems collectively unwilling to acknowledge that recovered memories aren’t real because they fear being screamed at by online advocates.

And we really do need more education, considering just how much damage has been done in the name of recovered memories. This is where the argument stops being academic. The recovered-memory movement of the 1980s and 1990s didn’t merely lose a scholarly debate; it ruined lives. As a clinician writing in Psychology Today points out, families were torn apart and people went to prison for decades on the strength of “recovered” memories, while the FBI found no evidence for the supposed organized satanic abuse cults that many such memories described. There are dozens and dozens of legal cases where recovered memories were invoked irresponsibly, including as part of the 1980s Satanic sex abuse panic. And if we look at some of the documented cases, you’ll see how Kafkaesque and contrary to due process this all can be.

[Forgive the broken links in this section - they should be fixed.]

George Franklin. In 1990 Franklin became, by most accounts, the first person in the United States convicted of murder essentially on the basis of a supposedly recovered memory. His daughter, Eileen Franklin-Lipsker, testified that while watching her own young daughter play in 1989, she suddenly recovered a two-decade-old memory of watching her father rape and murder her eight-year-old friend Susan Nason in 1969. There was no physical evidence tying him to the crime; the conviction rested almost entirely on her recovered account. In 1995 a federal judge overturned the conviction, and the case then collapsed entirely. Among the reasons: the defense had been wrongly barred from showing that every detail Eileen “remembered” had appeared in contemporary newspaper coverage, and her sister later testified that both daughters had been hypnotized (a technique that can render testimony legally inadmissible) and had lied about it under oath. Eileen also later “recovered” memories of two additional murders by her father; DNA testing excluded him from one of them, and another man was eventually convicted. Prosecutors declined to retry Franklin, and after more than six years in prison he was freed.

The Franklin case, for the record, provoked a prototypical version of the non-falsifiable trap I described above: as discussed in a 2024 retrospective in the Los Angeles Times, jurors rationalized major inconsistencies in Franklin-Lipsker’s testimony by saying that they just proved how traumatized she had been.

Gary Ramona. Ramona was a successful winery executive whose adult daughter Holly, in treatment for bulimia and depression, was told by her counselor that eating disorders were frequently caused by childhood sexual abuse. After therapy that included the drug sodium amytal, falsely promoted to her as a kind of truth serum that could verify recovered memories, Holly “remembered” that her father had repeatedly raped her as a child and accused him publicly. He lost his marriage, his family, and his job. In 1994, in a landmark verdict, a California jury found that the therapists had negligently reinforced false memories and awarded Gary Ramona roughly half a million dollars, the first time a non-patient third party successfully sued therapists for implanting false memories. An expert witness at the trial, a bulimia specialist, testified that despite pop psychology beliefs the disorder is not in fact caused by childhood abuse, undercutting the theory that started the whole tragic chain of events.

Paul Ingram. Perhaps the most chilling case, because it shows how recovered memories can become contagious, so to speak. Ingram, a Washington county sheriff’s deputy, was accused by his daughters of sexual and satanic ritual abuse. He initially said he had no memory of any of it, but investigators told him that abusers often repress such memories and that confessing would help him recall them. Subjected to months of interrogation, prayer, and even a supposed exorcism, Ingram began producing increasingly elaborate “memories” and confessed. The sociologist Richard Ofshe, brought in to help the prosecution, ran a now-legendary test: he invented an event that no one had ever accused Ingram of and asked him to pray about it. (Pray on it? Over it?) Ingram soon produced a detailed written confession to the fabricated event, complete with invented dialogue - and when told it was made up, insisted it felt as real to him as anything else. This “contagious” tendency of recovered memories is one of the more chilling aspects of their use in legal cases. Once again, no physical evidence ever corroborated any of the claims, and in his Pulitzer Prize–winning book Remembering Satan, Lawrence Wright concluded that the confessions had been false products of suggestion. Ingram nonetheless served fourteen years in prison.

These aren’t isolated anomalies; they’re the predictable output of a theory that treats imagination, suggestion, and authority-driven probing as a reliable retrieval tool. The popular image of repressed memory - a faithful recording sealed away by trauma and recoverable intact - fails on every front that matters. It contradicts what we know about how stress consolidates rather than erases memory. Its rebranded successor, “dissociative amnesia,” rests on studies too small and too confounded to bear the weight placed on them. Meanwhile, the techniques used to “recover” buried trauma are the same ones that, in controlled experiments, implant detailed false memories in ordinary people. And when this theory escaped the clinic and entered the courtroom, it did exactly what the science predicts a false belief would do: it convicted George Franklin, shattered Gary Ramona’s family, and put Paul Ingram in prison for crimes the evidence suggests never happened.

The mind does not work like a vault at a bank, with stored memories that can be withdrawn on command. It works more like someone telling a familiar joke, endlessly reconstructing, easily prompted, and happy to change details as needed. And our decades-long refusal to put recovered memories in the dustbin of discredited science where they belong isn’t a victimless error. It’s the kind of societtal failing that sends innocent people to prison while teaching genuine survivors to distrust the ordinary, durable memories they have always had.

Perhaps it’s useful to finish with a reference to “Sybil,” the most famous case of “multiple personality disorder” in history and a long-verified fraud. Sybil, whose real name was Shirley Mason, was a deeply damaged woman who had experienced terrible sexual abuse and neglect from a young age. She did not, however, have multiple personalities. As Debbie Nathan meticulously demonstrates in her 2011 book Sybil Exposed, Mason was in fact manipulated into developing elaborate stories about “alters” by her psychoanalyst Cornelia Wilbur, whom she became totally economically and emotional dependent on. Mason really had been abused, but her boring stories of routine trauma were apparently uninteresting to Wilbur, and so (as has been documented in many other patient-therapist relationships, sadly) she began “recovering” more and more memories of sensationalist and prurient tortures that she had been subject to. Richard Beck describes the lengths that Wilbur went to in order to extract these “recovered memories” from Sybil/Mason in his indispensable 2015 book on the 1980s Satanic sexual abuse hysteria, We Believe the Children:

Wilbur obtained these stories by slowly and methodically turning Shirley Mason, who never displayed her “alter” personalities to anyone other than her analyst and her roommate, into a drug addict. When Mason had a particularly bad day, Wilbur would regularly give her up to five times the prescribed dose of Daprisal, Amytal, Demerol, or any number of other medications, and as therapy progressed, Wilbur added a powerful antipsychotic called Thorazine. At the center of this pharmaceutical regimen was Sodium Pentothal, a barbiturate so renowned for its ability to lower patients’ inhibitions that it was colloquially, though inaccurately, known as “truth serum.” Wilbur administered Pentothal injections with such frequency and in such large doses that Mason would often come out of a therapy session unable to remember anything she had said. “Under Pentothal,” she once confessed in a letter to Wilbur, “I am much more original.” As Mason’s personalities multiplied, and as the stories those personalities provided became more horrifying and more lurid, Wilbur decided a book had to be written about the case.

And now another story of trauma - maybe Amy Griffin’s trauma, maybe Joleene Altum’s, maybe no one’s at all - has been turned, as these salacious recovered memories so often are, into a book.