“I have a memory: true or not true?”
In her memoir, Why be Happy When You Could be Normal, writer Jeanette Winterson opens anecdotes with this disclaimer. She tells stories of her depressive, ardently Pentecostal mother locking her outside for minor infractions, disappearing at length to engage in vices she religiously disavowed, and offering a love that was conditional and cold. Although she intends to share truths about her childhood, Winterson flags that this is borderline impossible. However, she writes and publishes the memoir regardless, and we read it.
Memory is powerful. We can exercise control over it, an intangible possession unique to our minds. In artist Joe Brainard’s memoir, “I Remember”, he begins sentences with this refrain. “I remember light green notebook paper…I remember that the minister’s son was wild”. Intrinsic to these statements is the subject “I”, the establishment of subjective power before the memory is even described. Reviewing this work, New Yorker staff writer Joshua Rothman captures memory as “treasure houses that we struggle to unlock”. Our memories are indeed glimmering and valuable in decorating our perspective. But they are not piles of gold coins locked behind a vault – a better analogy may be the way banks actually function (as every child learns the hard way), promising a safe house for money but transferring it to other parties, interfering with it, and promising to provide the equivalent value but sometimes coming up short.
Understanding memory as infallible is not new. Blurring fact and fiction in autobiography is not new, and was wrought by the likes of Virginia Woolf and Charlotte Brontë. Despite the insistence on a binary in legal cases and newsrooms, objectivity and subjectivity clash. When we recall our lives, we know it is not an unblemished record. Our brains are far more complicated that a video recorder machine, as useful as that may be to us.
With fact becoming increasingly elusive in media output and journalistic practice, we might bemoan this neurological tendency. We seek truth-telling to resist propaganda – we need it. But the issue does not lie in our inability to regurgitate our experiences in videotape. Rather, we need to interrogate what truth actually means, where it must intervene and how it confers value.
Unfortunately, the narrative that memory can be useless benefits those in power, so it serves them to suppress questions that recast our definition of truth and memory. To discredit testimony based on a misconstruction of what we know (and don’t know) about how our brain encodes, retrieves and distorts memory.
We know this occurs on an interpersonal scale in abusive dynamics: the abuser claims that the survivor is misremembering things, is wrong, is overreacting, is hysterical. Combine this with trauma’s work of effacing self-esteem, and the survivor learns to believe this. The knowledge that memory can be distorted assists the abuser in silencing their victims. With this architecture built inside a victim-survivor’s mind, they are less likely to come forward and deliver their story: the mental path is physically occluded. How can you piece together your perspective with a mind constantly under construction? Though increasingly discussed in discourse surrounding “gaslighting”, this element of abuse which perpetuates it is often overlooked and difficult to tackle. We ‘valorise’ or prioritise stories of abuse which lead with a headline of physical unsafety, not realising that these environments of chronic dismissal and manipulation are deeply dangerous. But it is not only within households that this discourse about memory devalues survivor testimony.
In The Lasting Harm, journalist and survivor-activist Lucia Osborne-Crowley reports on the gruelling and disenchanting trial of Ghislaine Maxwell for her facilitation of Epstein’s regimented and horrifying child sexual abuse. On one day, the defence counsel wheel out a high-profile figure of psychology academia – a household name for students of PSYCH1001 – Elizabeth Loftus. Loftus is a pioneer in researching reconstructive memory, particularly the ability of language to insert false memories. One of her most famous studies reveal that if a participant watches a video of a car collision, whether the researcher uses the trigger word of “crash” or “bump” retrospectively influences the participant’s estimate of car speed and carnage. Her conclusion: mere words – synonyms boasting different modalities – can cause participants to fabricate details such as broken glass in the video. She enfolds an examination of emotion, also. In one study, researchers insert a memory into participants’ minds that they once lost a parent in a shopping mall. Emotional, yes, but quotidian.
Even though her research does not touch on traumatic memory, which researchers understand to be processed in different areas of the brain, often leading to a ‘snapshot’ accuracy, it has been readily identified by defense lawyers as an avenue to question victims in high-profile sexual abuse cases.
Loftus appeared at the Weinstein trial, answering questions about the nature of memory to direct the jury in their findings. Her research that a person can invent a memory of being abandoned at a shopping mall is used as the basis for a claim that young girls have constructed memories of sexual abuse. A five-year-old can poke holes in this “logic”, in this leap between two deeply incomparable incidents. However, in a courtroom already hostile to survivors, this narrative about reconstructive memory is a useful excuse to discredit witnesses. Juries already harbour unconscious biases about the credibility of witnesses, based on their appearance and confidence, given the plethora of social narratives that paint women as ‘hysterical’. A direct discussion about memory as infallible confirms and magnifies these biases.
But Loftus herself expressed extemporaneously in a 1985 trial that she herself is a survivor of child sexual abuse, slotting her into the trope of a “survivor who questions the validity of survivorship”, according to psychologist Lauren Slater. Although Loftus has come under fire from students and university departments for her complicity in discrediting survivors, it must be remembered that she is but a symbol of how “justice” systems yearn to keep survivors quiet, and will latch onto any tool to achieve this. If not Loftus, it could be a researcher on any other abstract topic, with loose connection to traumatic experience.
Research into traumatic memory, particularly memories of chronic child sexual abuse, is nascent, but much better placed to direct juries in interpreting witness testimony. Trauma psychologists and researchers articulate how inconsistent testimonies and narrative fragmentation can indicate the experience of trauma, rather than serving as a lie detector.
Survivors of abuse who must darken the steps of the courtroom to seek “justice” often speak of being retraumatised at court in a number of ways. After years of being disbelieved by the abuser, social circles and wider society, the court is the final disenfranchising hurdle, and often the most disappointing, given its promise of justice. Once we recognise how expert research is weaponised to undergird an agenda, we must keep these worlds of research and courtrooms separate, bridging them only where there is sufficient connection which enables justice. Otherwise, we are doing whatever we can to sweep away the possibility.
