Recovered Memories Aren't Real - Freddie deBoer
Freddie deBoer
SubscribeSign in
Recovered Memories Aren't Real<br>non-falsifiability and life-altering accusations are a bad match
Freddie deBoer<br>Jun 24, 2026
294
88<br>38
Share
Getty Images<br>I have a piece in the Boston Globe making my case that American schools are, in fact, doing quite well overall. Check it out.<br>You may have read about the dueling lawsuits concerning the bestselling 2025 memoir The Tell. In the book, Amy Griffin describes “recovering” memories in therapy, memories of being sexually assaulted as a child by a middle school teacher, aided by the use of psychedelics. In a grim twist, Griffin is being sued by a woman named Joleene Altum who claims Griffin stole her story, root and branch. (That’s one way to recover a memory….) Griffin has countersued. Reading about the whole sordid affair, I thought three things. One, at this point I assume memoirs are untrue unless I have compelling evidence to believe otherwise, whether that’s fair to memoirists or not. Two, the publishing world and book media sure do roll out the red carpet for those with immense privilege; Griffin is a venture capitalist and (like Belle Burden) a fabulously rich woman. And, three, I cannot believe that recovered or repressed memories appear in our media with such regularity and with so little skepticism. Because recovered memories, at least in the way they’re conceptualized in the public mind, are not real.
preorder All In Your Head now<br>Recovered memory proponents hold that when a person experiences a trauma too devastating to bear, the mind automatically represses the memory, sealing it away from conscious awareness as a protective defense. Years later, that memory can supposedly be “recovered” intact, often surfacing during therapy explicitly aimed at unlocking such memories. (The existence of therapy sessions specifically designed to dislodge buried memories is problematic for obvious reasons.) But regardless of recovery method, there’s no good scientific reason to believe the overall narrative: that our minds take genuine traumatic experiences, banish them whole and unaltered into an inaccessible vault for years or decades, and then disgorge them intact under the right therapeutic conditions.<br>The popular picture of recovered memories suggests a clockwork mechanism in which horror is filed away and later retrieved like a document from a drawer. This is, to put it bluntly, an unscientific folk theory with the kind of pseudo-medical dusting that is so common in the era of Trauma Culture. There are some rare experiences that are similar to the concept of memory recovery, but the phenomenon as pop culture and pop psychology imagine it - widespread, consistent, and achievable through hypnosis or guided imagery - does not exist. The research record is unequivocal. What exists instead is something far more ordinary and far more dangerous, a memory system that is reconstructive, suggestible - and, I’m afraid, perfectly capable of manufacturing detailed, emotionally convincing recollections of events that never happened.<br>I’m a crackpot, granted, but my perspective on this is not a fringe contrarian position but rather the consensus of experts in the relevant fields. This may be a somewhat dangerous argument to make, given how intemperate the proponents of recovered memory theory can be, but what I’m saying has a lot of expert backing behind it. In fact my skepticism reflects the considered view of much of the experimental memory-science community, and it has been tested in a uniquely consequential venue: courtrooms. It’s in the legal system that recovered memory theory destroyed real families and imprisoned real people for crimes that the available evidence suggests never occurred. These scenarios ruin lives and prompt unjustifiable prison sentences, and they do so based on claims that cannot be subject to critical review and for which there can necessarily be no physical evidence. It’s nightmarish.<br>It’s here, I guess, that I should do the requisite throat-clearing and drop the expected provisos. It is of course the case that sexual misconduct and sexual assault occur and occur far too frequently, both in general and against children, and that too often these crimes go unpunished. Of course we need to listen when people make allegations of sexual crimes, and of course we need to do whatever we can to establish the truth and pursue justice. But if what I’m saying is true - if what decades of research tells us is true - and recovered memories are not real, putting faith in them can lead to neither truth nor justice. And unfortunately, the social conditions at hand regarding these kinds of claims are not conducive to truth either. Anyone who expresses doubts about any claims of sexual assault, especially against a child, is accused of being insensitive or indifferent to such crimes or worse, no matter how flimsy the allegations. But supporting false allegations can never help...