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Guilty Of Murder In The First Degree

          That was the jury’s verdict in the case of George Franklin, Sr, who was charged with murdering his daughter’s plyamate. But this case ws different from -  most other murder cases. It was based on memories that had been repressed for twenty years. Franklin’s daughter claimed that she had forgotten everything she had once known about her father’s crime until two years earlier, when she began to have flashbacks of the event. Gradually, though, the memories became clearer in her mind, until she recalled her father lifting a rock over h is head and then seeing her friend lying on the ground, covered with blood. On the basis of her memories, her father was convicted – but then later cleared of the crime following an appeal of the conviction.

          Although the proscutor and jury clearly believed Franklin’s daughter, there is good reason to question the validity of repressed memories, recollections of events that are initially so shocking that the mind responds by pushing them into the unconscious. Supporters of the notion of repressed memory (who draw on Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, first discussed in Chapter 1) suggest that such memories can remain hidden, possibly throughout a person’s lifetime, unless they are triggered by some current circumstance, such as the probing that occurs during psychoogical therapy.

          However, memory researchre Elizabeth Loftus (1997, 1998), maitains that so called repressed memories can well be inaccurate or even wholly false – representing false memory. For example false memories develop when people are unable to recall the source of a memory of a particular event avout which they have only vague recollections. When  the source of the memory becomes unclear or ambiguous, people become confused about whether the actually experienced the event or whether they imagined it. Ultimately, people come to velieve that the event actually occurred (Schacter, 1999a, Clancy al, 2000)

          In fact, some therapists have been accused of accidentally encouraging people who come to them with psychological difficulties to recreate false chronicles of childhood sexual experiences. Furthermore, the publicity surrounding well publicized declarations of supposed repressed memories, such as those of people who claim to be the victims of satanic rituals, makes the posibility of repressed memories seem more legitimate and ultimately might prime people to recall “memories” of events that never happened (Lym, 1997).

          The controversy regarding the legitimacy of repressed memories is unlikely to be resolved soon. May psychologists, particularly those who provide therapy, give great weight to the reality of repressed memories. On the other side of the issue are many memory researchers, who maintain that there is no scientific support for the  existence of such memories. The challenge for those on both sides of the issue is to distinguish truth from fiction (Brown et pope, 1996, Pezdek et Banks, 1996; Loftus, 1997, Walcott, 2000)

          Can you think of any way to determine which details of a repressed memory are true and which are false? How do you think attorneys and psychologist go about establishing memories of allegedly criminal actions?

source: essentials of understanding psychology by robert s. feldman