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The reader will be aware that the Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud introduced some radical ideas at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. Freud was not necessarily the first person to have such ideas, but he was certainly the person most influential in propagating these ideas.

The first idea to which I refer is that of the unconscious mind. Few psychologists would disagree with the statement that our mind engages in much activity that is below the level of our awareness. In fact there is a deal of modern experimental psychological evidence to support this contention, and it can perhaps be said to be one of the significant legacies of Sigmund Freud. However, this is far from an acceptance of the main thrust of psychoanalytic psychology that Dr. Freud developed, which put in crude terms was essentially that we as human beings are driven by unconscious desires and motivations, and that these unconscious desires and motivations relate to early experiences of which we have no conscious memory.

A major objective of psychoanalytic therapy was to reveal or bring into consciousness not only these desires and motivations, but also memories upon which they were based which were somehow buried in the unconscious. This idea has been largely rejected by modern psychology and psychiatry. The experimental evidence of the way in which memory works and our current understanding of memory simply do not support such contentions.

This is not to say that such a therapeutic approach has no value; in many cases it has great value. But once again, I emphasise the distinction between a forensic process and a therapeutic process. These are two entirely different things.

In my opinion it is interesting that such beliefs which have been largely rejected wholesale by mainstream psychology continue as a part of popular cultural knowledge. When discussing recovered memory I will often use the phrase that a belief in such events owes far more to Hollywood than it owes to psychology. I have an interest in how psychology is portrayed in the cinema and I would draw the reader’s attention to two films— The Seventh Veil (1945) and Spellbound (1945)— that in my opinion popularised this view: a view which, as I note above, continues in popular culture but not in psychological practice.

The Seventh Veil depicts the relationship between an introverted young girl and a controlling older man who whilst encouraging her musical ambitions also subjects her to emotional and physical abuse. As a result of her painful experiences at the hands of this man, the girl matures into a troubled young woman whose career as a concert pianist is in jeopardy. A psychoanalyst helps free her from the repressed trauma of her past, although in the film’s final reel she ends up with her sadistic mentor anyway (a denouement perhaps explainable by the fact that he is played by James Mason at his most elegant and saturnine). Dismissed by the film critic Pauline Kael as “a rich, portentous mixture of Beethoven, Chopin, kitsch and Freud”, The Seventh Veil presents a distorted albeit entertaining view of psychoanalysis.

Alfred Hitchcock’s film Spellbound also features psychoanalysis, only this time psychoanalytic therapy is pressed into service as a crime-solving technique. The film’s opening credits feature this written prologue:

Our story deals with psychoanalysis, the method by which modern science treats the emotional problems of the sane.

The analyst seeks only to induce the patient to talk about his hidden problems, to open the locked doors of his mind.

Once the complexes that have been disturbing the patient are resolved and interpreted, the illness and confusion disappear . . . and the devils of unreason are driven from the human soul.

Ingrid Bergman portrays a junior psychoanalyst working in a psychiatric facility whose new director (Gregory Peck) is revealed to be an amnesiac who is impersonating the actual director who has disappeared. Unable to account for this mysterious turn of events, he stands accused of murder and goes on the run. She meanwhile persuades him to undergo psychoanalysis in an attempt to unravel his fractured identity.

Whilst trying to recover lost memories of the man’s evidently traumatic past, the analyst (assisted by her own psychoanalyst, who appears as a sort of Hollywood caricature of Freud) solves the murder by finding clues to the crime revealed in the dreams her patient reports to her, dreams which appear as surreal cinematic set-pieces (Salvador Dalí collaborated with Hitchcock on the visuals for the film’s main dream sequence). In the end the murder mystery is solved, lost memories are recovered, and analyst and analysand are united in what in 1945 passed for ‘romance’ but which today would be considered an unethical dual relationship.

I should like to thank my devoted assistant and daemon Ann (who knows far more about film than I do) for her contributions to this post.

There are many types of psychological interventions, sometimes known as ‘talking therapies’. It is by no means inevitable that a competently delivered form of psychological therapy will necessarily create confabulated memories. However, in order to comment as to whether a particular therapeutic intervention has the potential to create confabulated memories, it is necessary to consider both the style of therapy and the details of the ways in which the individual therapist delivered that therapy.

In relation to the potential for any therapeutic intervention to create a confabulated memory, the devil is in the details.

For completeness, I will add that the potential for confabulation as a result of therapeutic intervention probably arises for no better reason than the fact that talking therapy typically involves an intense interpersonal relationship between therapist and client focused upon specific problems in the client’s life and sometimes the reasons for those problems. In other words, although therapeutic interventions have a high potential to create confabulated memories, the fact of the matter is that any such conversation, interview, or discussion has this potential, and ‘talking therapy’ is merely a special case of this type of interaction.

Another set of circumstances that has been associated with the creation of confabulated memories is the investigating process itself, particularly the methods of interviewing used by, for example, the police. Such issues as interviewer expectations, specific types of questions (particularly leading questions), summaries that confirm interviewer expectations and omit or deny contrary information provided by witnesses, etc. are all things that have the potential to pollute memory.

There is a standard protocol for interviewing vulnerable witnesses and in particular those who report sexual offences. This protocol is called Achieving Best Evidence (ABE). In order to conduct an effective ABE interview, a police officer will have been specially trained to allow the person making the allegation to do so in her or his own words and to avoid putting words into the alleged victim’s mouth (which may well have the potential to create a confabulated memory).

As a part of my expert witness work I have watched many recordings of ABE interviews, and I can say that although historically it was certainly not the case, the standard of ABE interviewing seems to have improved in recent years. As with any area of professional activity, some people engage in it far more successfully than others. However, it is not only the ABE interview that has the potential to create a confabulated memory: it is any conversation about the alleged events. This is one of the reasons why other professionals not directly involved in the investigative process are required to report an allegation to the police at the earliest opportunity without discussing the allegation in detail with the alleged victim. The reader will understand that we are now in an area that we are far less able to control than a formal interview. In my experience an alleged victim, having made the initial allegation, is likely to repeat the story time and time again to others, with each repetition having the potential to create a false memory.

Once again, there is a plethora of research that demonstrates how a process of formal investigation has at least the potential to corrupt the memories of alleged victims.

Psychologists and psychological counsellors have over a number of years come under criticism in cases in which confabulated memories have been demonstrated to have occurred as a result of psychological therapy. Although a well trained and experienced therapist will do her or his best to avoid encouraging confabulation of memory, in my opinion much of the criticism is not justified. I say this simply because the therapeutic process is an entirely different process from a forensic investigation.

In therapy one is less concerned with the accurate detail of a person’s experience than the feelings the client or patient reports that may or may not be associated with a specific event she is describing. In order to assist a patient or client with emotional turmoil it is often a necessary part of a psychological counsellor’s technique to go over the same material time and time again. As the research referred to above notes, such a technique has significant potential for creating a confabulated memory.

Also, the ‘atmospherics’ of a therapeutic session are such that the therapist provides validation for the client’s or patient’s reported experiences without any attempt to challenge the details.

Put at its crudest, I think it would be reasonable to say that in a therapeutic situation that even if one suspected that the details being reported were not entirely accurate, as a psychologist one would be more concerned with dealing with the feelings associated with the recollection than one would be with the veracity of the details of that recollection.

Some people are more prone to confabulation than others. For example, children reach a developmental stage in which they become more able to tell the difference between a ‘story’ and a ‘reality’; but even then, children as a group are more prone to confabulated memories than healthy adults.

There is a vast body of research that demonstrates the phenomenon of confabulation of memory. This is not intended to be an academic treatise, so I will not be providing references. But if anyone is interested in reading further on this topic I would strongly recommend the work of Professor Elizabeth Loftus of the University of California, Irvine and the University of Washington. Loftus was one of the early researchers in this field.

If a memory is confabulated a person who experiences that memory has in a sense invented the memory, although that person will not in any way be aware that it is an invention. In other words, confabulated memories are experienced as if they are the truth. Indeed, one of the ways that researchers are able to on some occasions identify clearly confabulated memories is by the certainty with which those who report those memories maintain them in the face of irrefutable evidence to the contrary.

Once a memory has been confabulated it is impossible to separate it from a real memory. Therefore, if a person can create a confabulated memory he or she can certainly maintain it consistently even though in a sense the memory is fabricated. Not only can the individual who experiences the memory not distinguish between a real memory and a confabulated memory, but research has also demonstrated that without external reference psychologists are no better at distinguishing confabulated memories from real memories than are others. However, there are some contextual factors and features that properly raise doubts in relation to the veracity of a memory when it is considered.

The research also demonstrates that there are specific circumstances that are likely to increase the possibility of the creation of confabulated memories.

One set of circumstances that has been associated with the creation of confabulated memories is when a person has been the subject of certain types of psychological counselling or other interventions of psychological therapy.

The second set of circumstances is the investigative process itself. This is to say that there is evidence to suggest that the way in which the police or others ask questions of a person who may have been for example sexually abused has of itself the potential to create false memories.

I will be considering both of these sets of circumstances in my next post.

A lay view of human memory might well be characterised as a belief that memories are recorded and stored rather like an archive of video recordings to be retrieved and replayed at will. Research over decades has demonstrated that this is not accurate. The general view that psychologists hold of memory is that memories are stored not as whole narratives, but as fragments. Fragments of memory are reconstituted into narratives at the time of their retrieval. I would note that functions of memory are clearly much more complex than the description I have just given; but I believe my description represents a simple overview that accurately contrasts with the lay version of memory noted above.

Whatever the mechanisms of memory, most of us believe that our memories are more or less accurate. We also believe that we are better at remembering important events than trivial events. Research has consistently shown, however, that our memories are probably far less accurate than we believe them to be. Our memories are sufficient for most practical purposes as demonstrated by the fact that we can function in our day-to-day lives.

But there are occasions when normal people in normal situations ‘remember’ things that have not occurred. This ‘remembering’ of events that have not occurred is known in psychology as confabulation. Confabulation is also referred to in more general contexts as ‘False Memory Syndrome’ and sometimes ‘Recovered Memory Syndrome’. Confabulation of memory is one example of our brains/minds filling in the gaps of missing information in order to make sense of the world. Both our visual system and our auditory system also routinely perform this task, and indeed sometimes get it wrong.

Most of us at some time or other have had the frustrating experience of losing our keys. In fact some of us (me included) would lose them every day if we did not have a regular place in which to keep them. Sometimes we lose our keys and simply cannot remember what we did with them; other times we believe we can remember what we did with them, but they are not where they are supposed to be.

So for example, if I go to my blue jacket (the one I remember putting my keys in yesterday) and the keys are not there and then after an extensive search I discover them in my brown jacket, I may conclude that some silly bugger who may not be me has moved the keys from one jacket to another. I may have a clear memory of placing the keys in my blue jacket; however, if I am the only person who had access to my jackets, the memory of placing my keys in the blue jacket that does not match the reality of placing my keys in the brown jacket is an example of the confabulation of memory.

This example is of course very trivial and something that most of us may have experienced at some time or other. It merely illustrates that confabulation is a normal artefact of memory. Unfortunately, this failure of memory sometimes occurs in much more dramatic situations.

For now I want to be clear that confabulation is a normal artefact of memory that happens to the healthily functioning brains/minds of most people at some time or another.

In my next post I want to talk about groups of people who are more prone to confabulation than others.

On a number of occasions during the last few years I have given evidence as an expert witness in trials of men falsely accused of historical sexual abuse.

One cannot fail to be moved by the emotional devastation exhibited by such men when they hear the jury’s verdict acquitting them. These are often men who have had no previous contact with the criminal justice system, and always men whose lives have been virtually destroyed by that contact.

An example from several months back is the case of Sir Cliff Richard. I hasten to say that this is not a case that I have had any professional involvement with, and the only details I know are those that have been reported in the press. Thankfully the false accusations against Sir Cliff Richard were not pursued to trial. In subsequent interviews he made it clear that the effect of the accusations and the way in which those accusations were pursued has been devastating.

I was particularly struck by Sir Cliff’s reference in one interview he gave to his deeply felt sense of violation as a result of the police invading his property and going through his personal effects. This was of course made worse by the public arena illuminated by the glaring media spotlight, in particular the disgraceful collusion by the police and the BBC, in which these events unfolded.

I am put in mind of a professional man many years ago who was also falsely accused of a serious offence (not of a sexual nature) who suffered the invasion of his home in a similar albeit less public way to that experienced by Sir Cliff Richard. A point he made (and one with which I agree) is that having your home invaded in this way by the police is not only akin to being burgled, it is in many ways actually worse.

When we hear that someone has had his or her house burgled, we have a great deal of sympathy for him or her, and we show that person our support. We expect the experience to be psychologically hurtful. We also have a belief with some justification that even the burglars knew that what they were doing was wrong, even though they chose to ignore social morality. In the case of home invasions committed by the police, the victim experiences a group of self-righteous, arrogant oafs with the misplaced backing of a larger society rifling through their belongings. Such a victim is denied immediate support, even often by friends and family, because of the pall of suspicion that hangs over him. When such a victim is exonerated the police cling to the feeble excuse that they were ‘only doing their job’.

Some victims such as Sir Cliff Richard have expressed understanding that the police have to investigate accusations. I would however like to make a clear distinction between an investigation and a witch hunt. An investigation is a process by which people determine the facts, and those facts are intended to lead to a logical conclusion. A witch hunt is a process in which a conclusion has been arbitrarily decided before the ‘investigation’ begins, and the only facts that are ‘investigated’ are those intended to support the arbitrary conclusion. I believe that ‘investigations’ of historical sexual abuse are for this reason more akin to witch hunts.

People heal from psychological trauma in many ways. Some heal as a result of quiet and solitary reflection, some with the support of friends and family, and some by taking comfort in their faith; but others are best helped by effective psychological counselling. I do not suggest that these different ways of healing are in any way mutually exclusive. Sometimes all paths are pursued simultaneously.

I wish all the victims of false accusations well in their journey of healing.

I have been a psychologist for more than 30 years. Unusually, I specialise in a number of different applied areas within psychology: Clinical Psychology, Forensic Psychology, Counselling Psychology, and Occupational Psychology. This may be because I have a shorter attention span than most people, but I like to think that it is more likely due to the fact that I am genuinely interested in both human behaviour and the context in which that behaviour occurs. There are overwhelmingly similar aspects of all human beings and overwhelmingly unique aspects of all human beings, and the same applies to the many contexts in which we live, love, work, and experience the world around us.

I worked for many years exclusively in conducting assessments and delivering treatment. For the last 15 years or so I have spent much of my time providing expert opinion and testimony in a variety of different cases.

I am engaged now in what will probably be the last enduring adventure of my career, which is my virtual clinic ipsychology.clinic.

When I first started to deliver psychological counselling using the medium of the internet (in particular Skype video conferencing) I was perhaps a little apprehensive as to how successful the delivery of remote psychological services could be. My apprehension lasted almost 10 minutes into the first session. To my delight, I have discovered that not only does delivering therapy by this means provide much needed access to a wider population in much more convenient ways, but there seems to be something about the interaction between client and therapist via video conference that actually enhances the experience. I know that this is somewhat counter-intuitive, but my experience is that the boundaries created by the medium provide a safe context in which to experience the intimacies of the therapeutic relationship.

In addition to launching this exciting venture, which I hope and expect will grow into a virtual clinic with many providers, the platform allows me another exciting opportunity, which is this blog.

In a sense I have been ‘blogging’ for years; just not in the medium of a blog, so to speak. It has always been a matter of fascination to me that so many people are so fascinated by various aspects of psychology. My blogging to date has been on planes, trains, and in entirely social contexts when others have discovered what I do for a living, and I then find myself responding to the many questions that follow.

This is exactly how I want to engage with this blog in this space. Initially I will be expecting to post weekly, but this could become more frequent if demand dictates. Where we go from here will be entirely demand-led.

I have many topics and anecdotes that I will be sharing with you— some topical, some poignant, and (I hope) some humorous.

Over the coming weeks I expect to talk about false accusations of historical sexual abuse (I have given evidence in quite a number of such cases); the frailties and fallibilities of memory and the myth of recovered memory; the lifelong effects of narcissistic parenting; and many other diverse topics.

My request to you is to help enable me to structure this blog in the conversational way I have been able to do informally for so many years. If there is any aspect of psychology that interests you, or if you have a question that you have always wanted answered, please feel free to contact me. If I know nothing about the subject I will let you know; but if I do, and if it is a subject that I think will be of interest to others, I will address it here.