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For more than three decades, I have conducted research on memory. My research shows that memory is malleable - and that it is a flimsy curtain indeed that separates memory from imagination.
I've seen how false memories can destroy lives, especially when such mistakes in recollection work their way into the legal system. As a result of eyewitness accounts of imagined events, I've seen more than a few innocent people sent to prison.
Doing research that has practical implications, and being willing to speak out about those implications, can be risky. Giving expert testimony in the adversarial setting of a court case - as I have done - is not simply moving from the laboratory into the field. It's moving into a battlefield.
As a result of publishing findings that have cast doubt on cases of supposed repressed memory, I have become accustomed to receiving harsh criticism, and even personal threats. But nothing had quite prepared me for the Orwellian nightmare I currently confront.
This nightmare began with my reading of a paper coauthored by a psychiatrist named David Corwin. In an article published in 1997 in the journal Child Maltreatment, Corwin purported to offer new proof that repressed memory was a genuine phenomenon, by recounting the story of "Jane Doe." Corwin had videotaped Jane on several occasions. The first was in 1984, as part of a custody dispute between her divorcing parents; in this video, the six-year-old Jane described how her mother had sexually abused her. On the basis of Jane's testimony, the mother lost custody of her daughter, and also lost the right to visit her.
Eleven years later, at Jane's request, Corwin videotaped another interview. Now seventeen, Jane was bothered that she could not now recall being sexually abused by her mother. But under further questioning by Corwin, Jane suddenly did recall, recounting an instance when her mother had sexually abused her in the bathtub - thus, to Corwin's satisfaction, confirming the phenomenon of traumatic amnesia.
After publishing his paper about Jane Doe in Child...