Was Repressed Memory a 19th-Century Creation?

[Dave Monroe]

Was Repressed Memory a 19th-Century Creation?
By Shankar Vedantam
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, February 26, 2007; A08

There is a pain -- so utter

It swallows substance up

Then covers the Abyss with Trance

So Memory can step around -- across. . . .

Emily Dickinson wrote those lovely words sometime in the middle of the
19th century, probably after a love affair broke her heart. Over the
next century and a half, that same idea found its way into countless
books, plays and movies -- when a memory becomes too painful to bear,
the mind finds a way to seal it off, to "step around -- across."

But when researchers recently mounted an exhaustive effort to find
examples of trauma-related amnesia in literary works before the 19th
century, they drew a blank. If repressed memories are one way the
brain deals with painful memories, why would there be no literary
examples of the phenomenon that are more than 200 years old?

In an unusual study, a group of psychiatrists and literary scholars,
led by Harrison Pope of Harvard Medical School, recently argued that
the psychiatric disorder known as dissociative amnesia (often called
repressed memory) is a "culture-bound syndrome" -- a creation of
Western culture sometime in the 19th century.

Pope pointed out that Shakespeare, Homer and other pre-19th-century
writers show numerous characters suffering from other psychiatric
disorders: the disjointed thinking that we call schizophrenia, or the
persistent sadness that marks depression. Because art draws its
inspiration from life, Pope said, this shows that those disorders have
been around forever. In the opening lines of "The Merchant of Venice,"
for example, Antonio vividly describes what it feels like to be
depressed:

In sooth, I know not why I am so sad:

It wearies me; you say it wearies you;

But how I caught it, found it, or came by it,

What stuff 'tis made of, whereof it is born

I am to learn.

Pope said a wide search of literary texts in European languages,
Arabic, Sanskrit and Chinese has produced no convincing example of a
character created before the year 1800 who suffered a traumatic event,
repressed the memory and later recovered it. The scientists recently
published their findings in the journal Psychological Medicine.

The researchers are offering $1,000 to anyone who can produce an
example to disprove their theory. (To send a suggestion, go to
biopsychlab.com and click on "Repression Challenge.") Pope said many
intriguing examples have come in, but none has been exactly right.
Besides, he says, if dissociative amnesia has its origins in actual
brain functioning, there ought to be many examples of it -- just as
there are countless examples of characters who have epileptic
seizures.

In "Shakuntala," a play written in ancient India, a king falls in love
with a woman. After a curse, the king forgets about his love. But his
amnesia, which eventually reverses itself, was not triggered by a
traumatic event.

Examples of trauma-related amnesia proliferated in 19th-century
Western literature, said Michael Parker, a professor of English at the
U.S. Naval Academy and one of Harrison's co-authors. One of the best
examples is in Charles Dickens's "A Tale of Two Cities," published in
1859, in which Dr. Manette is horrifyingly imprisoned in the Bastille
but has no memory of the trauma until revelations in the plot cause
him to recall some of what happened.

Movies and television have produced ever more such tales; a recent
"Masterpiece Theatre" production of "Jane Eyre" showed her suffering
amnesia after finding out on her wedding day that the man she was
about to wed was already married. Interestingly, Charlotte Bronte's
1847 novel has no reference to such amnesia; the television version
invented it.

"What that illustrates is repressed memory is such a wonderful
dramatic device," Pope said. "Film is such a perfect vehicle for
someone to have a flashback that grows back into a memory. . . . Maybe
Hollywood to some extent has kept this concept in the foreground."

Pope's literary-based study offers an unusual take on the controversy
over repressed memory. Over the past two decades, many people have
come forward to say they abruptly recovered memories of childhood
trauma, especially sexual abuse. Some of the memories have been proved
false.

One implication of Pope's paper, said Richard McNally, a professor of
psychology at Harvard who studies reactions to trauma, is that
therapists should focus their attention on treating patients for the
symptoms they are displaying -- such as depression -- with tools such
as psychotherapy and medication, rather than assuming that hidden
memories are the source of their emotional problems. Pope and McNally
emphasized that a culture-bound syndrome was no less "real" than a
biological brain disorder -- the suffering of patients in both cases
can be identical.

Indeed, many experts argue that all psychiatric disorders, including
schizophrenia and depression, have cultural aspects. For one thing,
the ways people express emotional suffering are informed by the
cultures they come from. But given that there are no laboratory tests
to diagnose schizophrenia or depression -- doctors make those
diagnoses based on criteria agreed upon by consensus -- one critic of
Pope's study argued that it has the effect of belittling dissociative
amnesia when it is no less scientific than other psychiatric
disorders. Matthew Erdelyi, an experimental psychologist at Brooklyn
College, argued that his own experiments show that human memory is
indeed malleable and that people's ability to recall distant events
can decline or improve with time.

"I think it is patronizing," he said of the paper. "What is the claim
of the article? You can't find repressed memories in historical
articles. But that does not argue to the proper therapy for repressed
memory."

Erdelyi said the paper illustrates the enduring tension between modern
psychiatry, which emphasizes the treatment of patients' symptoms, and
Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic approach, which emphasizes the
exploration of past events as a way to resolve patients' problems.
Freud himself worked with patients to recover memories of trauma. But
by 1895, Erdelyi said, Freud had modified his idea after he realized
that most people were not suffering from a single trauma.

"He started to emphasize insight," Erdelyi said. "The insight was not,
'Oh my God, my father raped me!' but that 'There is a pattern to my
problems.' The task of therapy is not to recover a particular point of
memory, but to connect the points and to see a pattern in what makes
you depressed."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/25/AR2007022501048.html