This issue provides an opportunity to examine the role of scientific data and theories in the formation of cultural beliefs. Many of the participants in the memory wars take a strong stance on the scientific nature of their claims. Elizabeth Loftus, experimental psychologist and darling of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, asserts that it is a scientifically demonstrable fact that adults do not forget sexual abuse. Van der Kolk argues that Loftus studies only propositional memory and that memory for abuse is different in kind: it is buried but indelibly engraved in visual images or felt in our bodies. Leonore Terr, therapist and the of author of "Unchained Memories: True Stories of Traumatic Memories, Lost and Found", asserts the scientific fact that two types of trauma exist: one-time and repeated, which have different memory consequences. Terr claims that one-time events are not forgotten, they are "burned in" as visual images (akin to the concept of "flashbulb memories"). In contrast, Terr postulates a special repressive mechanism that comes into play to protect the psyche from repeated abuse.
Schacter argues the opposite case: that specific events will be forgotten but that the general event knowledge will remain. This explanation fits with the incompleteness and patchiness of some abuse survivors memories. It is extraordinarily difficult to establish the veracity of memories of abuse. Schacter cites one study that tries to circumvent this problem by interviewing women who had a documented emergency room visit for abuse 17 years before. Williams found that 38% of her sample failed to recall this particular hospital admission, and more remarkably, 12% reported no history of abuse. Unfortunately Williams does not proceed to examine all the aspects of memory that we would hope from reading about the nature of memory in Schacter's book. Some of her study participants were as young as 6 months old at the time that abuse occurred, but she did not analyze the data in terms of age or consider the phenomenon of infantile amnesia. Futher, there is no analysis of single time/repeated for the different groups so we don't know if her data supports Terr's hypothesis. One thing that is clear from this study is that it is possible for some (a minority) of abuse survivors to forget single abusive incidents.
The PET study on false memories conducted by Schacter and colleagues and discussed in the Scientific American Frontiers video demonstrated that in the "induction of close associates false memory" that the auditory areas of the brain only light up on a PET scan for words that appeared on the list, not for the induced false words. When Alda discusses this with schacter he is very careful to say that they have found a means of determining the veracity of memories under these conditions, for these 12 subjects. The media reporting of this study with headlines claiming that scientists now know how to distingish false from true memories is in stark contrast to Schacter's conclusion that there are:
"No scientifically based criteria that allow us to distinguish memories of events that actually occurred from false recollections."
In a stimulating article on memory science and politics Hacking makes the argument that the current memory battles are based on depth knowledge of memory.
Memoro-politics is a power struggle founded upon a depth knowledge that came into being fairly late in the nineteenth century as a way to study the soul. The depth knowledge was the knowledge that there are underlying truths about memory."One feature of modern sensibility is dazzling in its implausibility: the idea that what has been forgotten is what forms our character, our personality, our soul.
"We need to recognize that memories do not exist in one of two states - either true or false."