Alison Winter

This is really a history of psychologist's treatment and beliefs about memory. And, in fact, I think it is a pretty damning record of how psychologists and psychiatrists have consistently got it wrong. And it's not as though their errors were victimless. In fact they have had massive effects on people and society ....mainly, it seems from this narrative, negative effects. The author, Alison Winter runs through a series of beliefs accepted by the psychiatric community, about memory: Including the use of truth serums. traumatic events recalled in war, Penfield Wilder's ideas that memories were permanent and lodged locally in neuron trails, the Bridey Murphy story of a recollection of previous lives, Hypnosis in the cold war as a way of recalling inaccessible memories, Flashbulb memories that were supposedly especially accurate because they were fixed at the time by some sort of trauma, memories of childhood abuse (often shown to be prompted by the psychotherapists suggestions, Bartlett's work on memories having a constructive or reconstructive character .....they are not fixed for all time. The memory wars with arguments over the recall of repressed memories often involving sexual abuse as children....and the courtroom battles with accused parents etc.
My impression from all of this is that the psychological profession needs to be treated with a fair degree of skepticism whenever they make a claim. Partly, there is a massive influence over these sorts of beliefs via the media and via pop psychology (as in the Bridey Murphy story.
I suppose one positive that seems to have emerged from this rather sorry tale is that there are some solid researchers out there who have fought diligently to overturn the errors and myths which had become entrenched in the [American] mind. The book has a very American focus. However, there seem to be a very long list of patients who have suffered ineffective and damaging surgery, or severely damaged relationships with family. And others who have endured false memories ..relived or prompted by psychologists or have endured damaging court cases that have ruined lives.....been subjected to truth serums and hypnosis to secure convictions buy the authorities in a rather brutal and misguided way. I wonder, in all of this....dis any good come out of all these treatments? Surely, if the professions kept doing brain surgery they would have been looking for overall life improvements instead of permanent brain damage. The medical profession has its own sorry history of wrong theories such as the use of leeches to draw blood but generally, it seems to me, that these were rather benign compared to the psychological missteps.
I guess, I'm left with the concern that psychology is not really a true science because it has no underlying theory and this is why it becomes captive to every fad that emerges into the public imagination and or is promoted by some charismatic evangelist. On the whole. I think Winter has done a remarkable job of explaining the development of ideas about memory that have evolved over the last 200 or so years ....and some of the dangers that they brought in their wake.
Here are a few gems that I've harvested from Winter's book"
The assumption promoted by the laboratories and departments of psychology that were built in the 1900s to 1920s was that trustworthy knowledge of human behavior could be gained only by individuals trained to ask questions and make disciplined observations in the ways sanctioned there.
Truth serum’s later history was rather peculiar, seeing neither increasing legitimacy nor consistent decline. On the contrary, its appeal spiked at various times of urgency, as we shall see in later chapters: in World War II, when truth drugs became central to the military treatment of battle trauma; in the early 1960s and mid-1970s, when forensic psychiatrists and police seized on forensic hypnosis and hypnotic drugs as tools for refreshing witnesses’ memories; and in the 1980s and 1990s, when psychotherapists and their adult patients turned to the drug to help in the “recovery” of lost memories of childhood sexual abuse. At other times it languished with little respect or credibility.....Not every psychiatrist was convinced that it worked; a Dr. J. L. Clegg complained that Amytal delivered nothing more than “ordinary conversation,” and that at most it loosened subjects’ tongues about memories of which they were aware but “ashamed.” But such skeptics were soon in the minority. Clegg himself was roundly told off by a number of psychiatrists, among them Horsley himself, for being too inexperienced to carry out the procedure effectively.
During the war, thousands of doctors and tens of thousands of patients were introduced to psychiatry through these memory techniques. In the first years after the conflict, this understanding of memory moved into civilian culture. Army doctors took up civilian practices and, in record numbers, got formal qualifications in psychiatry and psychoanalysis. Feature films made flashbacks and abreaction central to their plots. And new medical, surgical, and psychological discoveries seemed to confirm and extend the idea of movielike memories secreted in the subconscious.
Milner’s work transformed the status of memory in the neurosciences by showing that both the creation of memory and stored information were localized in such specific parts of the brain.
Psychoanalysis was the dominant framework for mid-twentieth-century psychiatry. But it was not rooted in conventional medical research, its scientific authority was contested at best,....Their “maps” were metaphorical, representing dynamic relationships they perceived between different psychic processes...
Penfield was perhaps the most prestigious and academically authoritative person to make claims for permanent and restorable memory traces, and his claims were more literal and specific than, say, the advertisements for home movie cameras. The idea that our experiences do not fade and die, but forever lie waiting to be reawakened, was practically intoxicating......the cognitive psychologist Elizabeth Loftus, pointed out that the kind of experiences that had generated the extraordinary attention for Penfield’s claims had in fact occurred in very few of his patients—some 3.5 percent, by her count......Loftus’s point was that the responses on which Penfield staked great claims about memory were in fact very rare.
The Bridey [Murphy] “spell” proved powerful. As Life magazine testified, its influence was rapidly stretching “deeper and wider as fast as the written word, awed gossip and the televised image could spread it.”.....though much later it became clear that Bridey Murphy was the result of a “mental patchwork,” cobbled together from memory scraps by Tighe’s own “subconscious mind.”
In the 1950s through the 1970s, forensic hypnosis grew from a little-known oddity to a well-known resource with unbounded therapeutic and forensic potential. By the late 1970s many police, lawyers, psychotherapists, witnesses, and defendants had come to see it as a golden key to unlock an otherwise inaccessible past and make it clearly visible to the institutions of the law.
American Medical Association conferred formal legitimacy on hypnosis as a medical practice, and psychiatrists founded professional associations centering on it......But fundamental inconsistencies of explanation, interpretation, and practice remained. And because of them the authority of forensic hypnosis remained fatally fragile.....Orne led the court through the videotape of Ritchie’s entranced testimony to indicate moments where, he claimed, the defendant had been led by the hypnotist. The court ruled to exclude the hypnotic evidence as unreliable.......Confabulation was a psychological term dating back to the early years of psychoanalysis, referring to a process that knitted memories of past experiences together with fantasies or suggestions to form an imaginative construction that appeared to be a memory.
James McGaugh, a neuropsychologist who made his name in the 1960s and 1970s studying consolidation and amnesia, 36 became interested in the role of emotion in actively preserving vividness and detail in long-term memories........The idea that one-off traumatic experiences could produce unusually faithful records was not a matter of public controversy when Brown and Kulik first published. In the late 1980s it was, because it had come to be a central issue in the “memory wars.”
Psychological theories that have been enshrined in the law have a special kind of cultural heft, a legitimacy that is institutionalized—.......In the early 1980s, significant numbers of adults began to complain that they had been abused as children. A few isolated cases soon became a stream, and the trend developed its own momentum.......Surely some of these diagnoses were straws grasped by troubled people searching for someone to blame besides themselves.
This sweeping rejection of psychological expertise was contentious. It was based on the distinction made by philosopher and psychoanalyst Donald Spence between “narrative” and “historical” truth. Psychoanalysis produced “narrative” truths, he argued—stories about the past that helped explain the present. These narratives were meaningful because they came from the experience of the patient, but they were not historically true in most people’s understanding of that term.
Bartlett has come to stand for a kind of claim about memory that has become commonplace among academic psychologists: that memories have a constructive or reconstructive character. We do not merely forget information over time, we “reconstruct” the content of our memories by adding to and otherwise altering them. This idea has become central to recent accounts of memory.
The surge in allegations of long-forgotten childhood sexual abuse during the 1980s sparked a period of intense controversy that came to be known as the memory wars.....The history of false memory syndrome is in certain respects even more interesting than that of the movement it arose to confront. It tells us not only about aspects of the history of memory, but also about ways that scientific legitimacy can be established, overthrown, and reconstituted......By the 1980s, psychoanalysis had lost quite a bit of the authority and glamour it had enjoyed in the middle years of the twentieth century;......Despite the energetic research of clinicians, by the middle 1990s, recovered memory was in serious trouble. It had become a contested concept with rapidly waning plausibility.......It seems that the memory wars ended, and that false memory won........Just as the FMSF declared that no personal memories could be trusted without external corroboration, so now it cautions that the psychological community will try to rewrite its collective memory.
One of the hottest new theories of the past decade is “reconsolidation.”......Scientists had now established that hormones like cortisol had an effect on memory, not only at the time of the original experience but also later, when that memory was being retrieved. They seemed to affect not just the retrieval but the stored information itself......From this they concluded that memories had to be maintained by being consolidated anew—reconsolidated—after every retrieval,
I'm left, overall, with a profound distrust of psychologists. How could we have confidence that their current thinking is correct when they have a long history of embracing incorrect theories with such enthusiasm. I guess, that I was disappointed that there was no discussion about the findings of neurologists in current thinking on memory...or from other fields like philosophy. But a fascinating work....four stars from me.… (mais)