By Benedict Carey
The New York Times
February 3, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/03/arts/03memo.html?_r=1&ref=science&oref=slogin
The beautiful and deeply religious Madame de Tourvel is so distraught after cheating on her husband in the 1782 novel "Les Liaisons Dangereuses" that she blacks out the betrayal altogether, arriving at a convent with no idea of what had brought her there. Soon the horror of the infidelity rushes back, in all its incriminating force.
More than two centuries later, she has become part of a longstanding debate about whether the brain can block access to painful memories, like betrayals and childhood sexual abuse, and suddenly release them later on.
In a paper posted online in the current issue of the journal Psychological Medicine, a team of psychiatrists and literary scholars reports that it could not find a single account of repressed memory, fictional or not, before the year 1800.
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| An 1849 painting of King Lear New York Times Art resource |
The researchers offered a $1,000 reward last March to anyone who could document such a case in a healthy, lucid person. They posted the challenge in newspapers and on 30 Web sites where the topic might be discussed. None of the responses were convincing, the authors wrote, suggesting that repressed memory is a "culture-bound syndrome" and not a natural process of human memory.
Madame de Tourvel "is the closest we got to a winner," said Dr. Harrison Pope, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard and the lead author of the paper. But her amnesia, he said, was too brief to qualify.
The researchers hypothesized that if a natural ability to repress memories were hard-wired into the human brain, then such a thing would surely have occurred in medical or fictional literature before the 19th century, when novelists began using it as a plot device.
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| Michelle Pfeiffer as Madame de Tourvel in the 1988 film “Dangerous Liaisons,” with John Malkovich. Photo by New York |
"This is such a graphic phenomenon that you would expect to find many allusions to it, and not merely oblique ones," Dr. Pope said.
The finding, while adding a literary dimension to a mostly scientific debate, may only inflame both sides. Dr. Pope and a co-author, Dr. James I. Hudson of Harvard, have long been skeptical of repressed memory, while others argue that it is real, at least in some cases.
"It looks to me like they had an answer in mind before they did the study and found what they were looking for," said Dr. David Spiegel, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Stanford University School of Medicine. Dr. Spiegel has submitted a rebuttal to the journal, citing links between trauma and forgetfulness in Greek literature.
The so-called memory wars peaked in the 1980s, when some patients in therapy described long-lost scenes of abuse, often at the hands of their parents. Books and news articles dramatized the experience, and some charges turned into high- profile court cases. The debate died down in the 1990s, after experts raised questions about many claims, but it has revived in recent years, largely because of the sexual abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church.
The authors of the new paper report that they received "more than 100" responses to their challenge. Euripides' Heracles, in a fit of madness, murders his wife and children, but forgets the incident after suffering an injury. In Shakespeare, King Lear at first does not recognize his daughter Cordelia when he awakens disoriented in the French camp. In some versions of the Sanskrit epic Ramayana, the immortal monkey Hanuman forgets that he possesses supernatural powers.
But none of these adventures fit the authors' strict criteria: a healthy person blacks out a specific traumatic event, only to retrieve it a year or more later. Madame de Tourvel's experience — submitted by Richard J. McNally, a Harvard psychologist and a repressed-memory skeptic — may offer "the first glimmering of a concept" that arose during the Romantic era in the 1800s, later took hold in the writings of Freud and eventually provided a staple in Hollywood movies, Dr. Pope said.
David Bromwich, a professor of English at Yale and author of "Disowned by Memory: Wordsworth's Poetry in the 1790s" (University of Chicago Press), disavowed any special expertise on the memory debate. But he said the Romantic period "was full of poets and others saying that the mind works by a combination of invention and re-creation of material from half-forgotten memories."
The scientific dispute is over what constitutes normal forgetting. Studies show that healthy people usually remember frightening or dangerous incidents more vividly than other experiences: the brain preserves these impressions because they are important for survival. But those who believe in the brain's ability actively to repress say this system may break down if the memory is too upsetting.
"Dr. Pope is famous for saying trauma is memorable, but when he is presented with cases of forgetting trauma — as in the 101 cases in my Web site — his answer is that they are normal forgetting," Ross E. Cheit, a political scientist at Brown University who runs the site recoveredmemory.org, said in an e-mail message.
Dr. McNally replied that even if a once vivid memory has not surfaced in years, that does not mean it has been actively repressed.
For example, he said, a child might initially be more confused than upset upon receiving sexual advances from a relative. The brain stores the memory, stuffed into a neural drawer with a thousand other mysteries of childhood, until years later, when the repulsiveness of the act suddenly hits the person, now an adult.
"It's not repression; it's just that the person hasn't thought about it in many years, hasn't appreciated how reprehensible it was," Dr. McNally said. The notion of repressed memory, he went on, is a "culturally provided narrative to account for the fact that the memory is now retrospectively reappraised as traumatic."
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