Scientific American published an article called Creating False Memories (pdf) in their September 1997 issue.
In it the authors discuss a study where they planted benign false childhood memories and a significant number of test subjects remembered the planted memories in later interviews.
One example: being lost at the mall at 5, comforted by an elderly woman, and being reunited with family. Another: spilling a punch bowl on the parents of the bride at a wedding.
I should clarify my earlier comments. I’m less skeptical about the existence of psychogenic amnesia than I am about the possibility of recovered memories… If such a thing is possible, I don’t see how it’s feasible to identify the recovered memory as absolutely true, absent corroboration. Trauma is especially tricky in this regard, as there is evidence that when traumatic experience is shared, people take on the memories and experiences of others. That’s why debriefing following catastrophic events has been shown to make PTSD worse.
It is a good article. I probably read it at the time it appeared. I might point out that its author was eventually hounded out of U. Washington and ended up at U Cal, Irvine.
But I was mainly asking whether a clearer consensus had been reached 19 years later.
The fact that people have actually been convicted on the sole basis of ‘recovered memories’ is quite terrifying. Reading the False Memory Syndrome Foundation article on civil and criminal cases brought on such grounds at the height of the hysteria in the 90s is chilling. (It’s unsurprising that roughly half of all national cases were brought in California, the home of many 20th century witchhunts).
One of the worst cases is that of Paul Ingram.
The words of Macaulay on the 19th century British public may with as much truth be adapted to that of modern America, except for ridiculous I’d substitute frightening.
I’m not aware of anything solely based on recovered memories. But as noted above, the Sandusky case relied heavily on recovered memories, and at least some of the victims who testified at that trial were testifying solely on the basis of their recovered memories.