Elizabeth Loftus Changed the Meaning of Memory

Loftus told me, “I think I had this fantasy—maybe I could bring the mother and daughter back together.”

Instead, Nicole sued Loftus for defamation. Reading Loftus’s article, she told me, was like “taking a very coarse piece of sandpaper and rubbing it over my entire life.”

In Nicole’s interview with Corwin when she was seventeen, she told him that she hoped to become a psychologist. “I’m prepared to give my life, devote my life, to helping other kids who have gone through what I’ve gone through,” she said. After ten years in the Navy, working as a helicopter pilot, she fulfilled her goal, getting a Ph.D. in clinical psychology and writing her dissertation on how trauma affects memory and identity. By then, her case was so well known—in the lawsuit against Loftus (which she ended up losing), she disclosed her full name—that one of her professors likened her to H.M., the famous patient with an unusual form of amnesia who was studied from 1957 until his death. “I was appalled,” Nicole told me. “My professor was making the point that Loftus had the right to do what she did, because my case has now become one of these ‘for the good of science’ kind of situations.”

As part of her psychological training, Nicole led a therapy group for adult survivors of sexual abuse. As she listened to the other women’s stories, she felt, for the first time, that she was part of a collective. Her suffering no longer seemed like a character flaw. She wasn’t an object in someone else’s story—she could tell it in her own words. Being a survivor soon became the defining fact of her life, the scaffolding on which she rebuilt her identity.

“Oh, great. Now I’ll be late for work.”

Cartoon by Tom Toro

Yet there were days when she asked herself, What if it didn’t happen? She tried to ignore the question. But, occasionally, when a friend asked about her case against Loftus, or when she was cleaning her office and came across her old copy of the Skeptical Inquirer, she would revisit the article. She was disturbed to see that Loftus had made compelling points.

Some days, Nicole believed that her mother had been wrongly accused, and then she’d wake up the next morning having changed her mind. In a conversation with the philosopher Eleanor Gordon-Smith, who interviewed Nicole for her book “Stop Being Reasonable,” from 2019, Nicole said that her uncertainty “affected every single relationship, in every possible way. It requires me to have a sense of self that is not dependent on whether I was sexually assaulted by my mother. It’s a really big ask.” She tried to step away from her identity as a survivor, a process that she compared to dieting: “You start, and then you lose your motivation and you go back to the way you used to eat. I would start, and then I would revert back to my old way of thinking.”

Nicole, who is forty-two, spoke to me from her home office, in San Diego, where she now sees patients remotely. She sat in a swivel desk chair and wore a T-shirt that quoted Desmond Tutu: “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” When I asked if she knew of psychological literature about the effects of having one’s memories doubted, she told me, “Oh, no. There would not be literature on that, because clinical psychologists are trained to believe.”

I was interested in what it meant to “cross the bridge,” as she’d described it, from victim to survivor. I asked if it was similar to what Susan Brison, a philosopher who has written about her experience of rape, had characterized in her book, “Aftermath,” as a process of taking control of one’s narrative. “That control, repeatedly exercised,” Brison wrote, “leads to greater control over the memories themselves, making them less intrusive and giving them the kind of meaning that permits them to be integrated into the rest of life.”

Nicole was silent for a few seconds. “You know, I realized something,” she said. A few weeks earlier, she had exchanged e-mails with a woman whose memories of abuse Loftus had cast doubt on at a civil trial. “We kind of realized together that we are survivors of Elizabeth Loftus,” Nicole said. For years, she’d had intrusive thoughts. “I’m not sure if there is a greater sense of ­outrage than that of having your own memories challenged,” she said. She had felt terror at the idea of seeing Loftus at psychology conferences. Recently, though, “I stopped wanting to hide under a chair every time I thought she might be at a conference and decided, No, I’m going to stand here and let her see me,” she said.

Nicole has entered a new phase in sorting out whether her mother abused her. “Instead of waking up and wondering where I’m going to land today,” she told me, “I just know that I don’t know and that I’m probably not going to know in my lifetime.” She has found herself in a position not dissimilar to that of Freud’s female patients whose memories of abuse were believed and then, a few years later, discredited. But she doesn’t feel commandeered into someone else’s theory anymore. “On the face of it, I look like a sexual-trauma survivor,” she told me, referring to problems that she had with trust. But she wondered if the conflict between her parents or her time in foster care were traumas that could hold similar explanatory power. In recent years, she has drifted in and out of a relationship with her mother. “I realized that I could just never give her what she wants from me, which is to go back in time and be allowed to mother me again,” she said.

I told her of Loftus’s hope that her work might have inspired Nicole and her mother to reunite. “It’s transference,” Nicole said of Loftus’s preoccupation with her case. “To act out this darkness from her own past.” In her clinical practice, Nicole is cautious whenever she faces patients whose struggles remind her of her own. “It is paramount that I say to myself, ‘Nicole, it is not your job to save this person. You can’t go back and save yourself by saving this person.’ ”

“I unravelled it,” Loftus’s brother David, a seventy-four-year-old lawyer and the president of a Buddhist meditation center, told me in our first conversation. One night, when he was in his late thirties, he was in a hot tub and began to feel sleepy. “It was part of some drug experience, and, as I was beginning to submerge, something woke me up,” he said. “I thought, Wow, this is what happened to our mom. It became so clear to me that there was nothing intentional about her death.”

His younger brother, Robert, a property manager in Garberville, a small town near the northern tip of California, had pieced together a different explanation. In the years after their mother’s death, he was in “grief free fall,” he told me. “It’s like somebody jumping out of a plane who hasn’t figured out to pull the cord on their parachute—and that’s where I came up with the idea of ‘accidental suicide.’ The fact that it is an oxymoron doesn’t bother me at all.” He theorized that his mother might have taken sleeping pills and then had some sort of panic attack—perhaps she felt that her skin was on fire—and jumped into the water. He went on, “But David tries to big-brother me and outmaneuver me, and the other night he was trying to get me to walk back the ‘accidental suicide’ label and say, Why not ‘accidental drowning’?”

Since the pandemic began, Loftus and Robert have spoken on the phone daily. David joins their calls most weekends. Recently, on a Saturday evening, we all talked together on Zoom. “I’m pretending it’s happy hour,” Loftus said. She sat in her home office, in her three-­bedroom condominium in University Hills, a residential complex for faculty at U.C. Irvine. “So, hey—cheers,” she said. She took a sip of white wine.

A few days earlier, I had interviewed their cousin Debbi. “Oh, it was suicide,” she told me when I asked about Rebecca’s death. That I had framed this as a question seemed absurd to her. “We found her, my mother and I,” she said. “We found her in a cold spring. I remember it like it was yesterday.” Debbi had been twelve at the time. Later, her father showed her a suit of his with a bullet hole through one sleeve and explained that Rebecca had initially attempted to kill herself with a gun that he kept in his bedroom closet. “She must have fired it too early,” Debbi told me. “The bullet went through my father’s suit. It was at that point that my parents knew she needed to be institutionalized.”

Debbi hadn’t seen her cousins for years. Loftus asked me what I had learned. “We all would like our memories stimulated, if they can be,” she said, at the beginning of our call.

I warned them that Debbi did not think there was any ambiguity about their mother’s death. “Maybe there’s a reason you’ve not asked her these questions,” I said. “I don’t want to mess around with your—”

“Denial system?” Loftus asked.

“With the way that you’ve made peace with things that happened a long time ago,” I said.

“I understand that completely,” Loftus said. “In Linda Meyer Williams’s paper”—a 1994 study in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology—“she did not want to tell people, ‘I have rec­ords from the hospital that you were abused,’ because, if they were in denial and living with that, maybe it would do something bad to them. But I think we are giving you permission.”

“You have to tell us, or you’re not in our circle of trust anymore,” David joked. He was sitting at his desk in a two-bedroom wooden geodesic dome in Northern California.

“Yeah, our memories are already polluted to the saturation point,” Robert said.

I explained that Debbi had been with their aunt Pearl when she found Rebecca’s body—in a cold-water spring, not a pool. I was about to continue when Loftus interrupted, “The swimming pool was a little lake-ish, so I’m not sure I trust that. I mean, if it were in an urban area you would know the difference between a lake and a pool, but in this summer place—what is a pool?”

“Sounds to me, from the country-­property point of view, that our idea of a pool is much different,” Robert said. He had been a math prodigy, the most brilliant of the three children, Loftus had told me. Now his speech had the cadence of someone who had spent his formative years socializing with stoners. He does not have an Internet connection, so he was sitting in the trailer of his adult son, Abe, who lives on his property, and was sharing his hot spot. Abe sat next to him, staring out the trailer window.

“What else did Debbi remember?” Loftus asked.

I said that Debbi seemed surprised that anyone believed Rebecca’s death was an accident. “She sort of acted like it was a no-brainer,” I said.

“If she believes that . . .” Loftus paused for a few seconds. “I’m not sure she believes it from her own ­observation or what she would have learned afterward. Debbi was living in the world of the relatives who hated our father, so I don’t think Debbi’s age-twelve observations are—I mean, Debbi’s great, but.” She stopped mid-sentence.

The sun was setting in California, and there were few working light bulbs in Abe’s trailer. Robert wore a flannel shirt, unbuttoned, and his image was so dim and grainy that he somehow looked like he was twenty again. He said, “When Beth did the Weinstein case, she was saying that after one of the gals went through the interrogation it sort of massaged her memory in a way to get it to migrate.”

from Hacker News https://ift.tt/31rg44b