False Memoirs and the Human Mind

Two very interesting cases have just been written about in the New York Times (and the Boston Globe) in which writers have confessed that their recently published (and highly acclaimed) memoirs were largely or entirely false. The first one was set in Los Angeles. Following (in green type) are some excerpts from the articles:

In “Love and Consequences,” a critically acclaimed memoir published last week, Margaret B. Jones wrote about her life as a half-white, half-Native American girl growing up in South-Central Los Angeles as a foster child who went on to live a gang-banger’s violent life, wielding guns and running drugs for the Bloods.

The problem is that none of it is true.

Margaret P. Jones is a pseudonym for Margaret Seltzer, who is all white and grew up in well-to-do Sherman Oaks, in the San Fernando Valley of California, with her biological family. She graduated from the Campbell Hall School, a private Episcopal day school in North Hollywood. She has never lived with a foster family, nor did she run drugs for any gang members.

The revelations of Ms. Seltzer’s mendacity came in the wake of the news last week that a Holocaust memoir, “Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years” by Misha Defonseca, was a fake.

The memoir of Misha Defonseca, a heartwarming Holocaust-era tale… has turned out to be a fake. The publisher, Jane Daniel, said she disregarded warnings about the book in its early stages… Massachusetts author Defonseca, who wrote "Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years," admitted Thursday through her lawyer that her memoir was fabricated. Published in 1997, the book told the tale of a little Belgian Jewish girl who trekked across Europe on foot during World War II, searching for her deported parents and eluding capture by hiding with packs of friendly wolves. The book was a bestseller in Europe, translated into 18 languages, and the basis for a hit French movie now showing across the continent. After documents emerged that discredited Defonseca's story, her Belgian lawyer issued a statement admitting that she isn't Jewish and that she spent the war safely in Brussels.

The book had excited intense interest at first. The Walt Disney Co. signed an option for a movie, and Oprah Winfrey's program filmed Defonseca frolicking with wolves at Ipswich's Wolf Hollow, but both dropped out amid the bitter court battle.

[Another article about the book, from the NYT, is here; in this article, the author is quoted as saying] “The story is mine. It is not actually reality, but my reality, my way of surviving.”

In at least one of these cases, it appears that the author(s), at some level and at some times, actually believed in the truth of what they were saying about themselves. How can this happen? How might a person come to believe an untrue (even a very implausible) version of the facts of her own life? That we can do speaks to the amazing capacity of the human mind to actually work on itself. We are all familiar with the phenomenon in which it feels as if we are trying to convince ourselves of something (or trying to persuade ourselves that something is not true). It feels as if there is one of us, inside, who is capable of arguing for a certain point of view, much like a lawyer or salesperson; and another one, inside, one who may be stubborn, or may sometimes be gullible, but who is in a position to be persuaded.

This very interesting aspect of human functioning provides one part of the explanation for why radical behaviorism fell by the wayside in mainstream academic and clinical psychology: Human beings cannot be fully understood or explained simply by observable behavior and its various environmental antecedents (classical conditioning, instrumental learning, vicarious learning). There are other factors going on inside us (inside that aspect of human existence known as mind); psychology learned, after a period of infatuation with behaviorism, that “mind” cannot be discarded; nor, so far as we can see, can it be easily substituted by, or reduced to, “brain.”

There are many examples of situations in which people engage in a sort of mental argument with themselves to convince themselves of things; or they fall into a habit of thinking about something that they wish for, or fear, so that it can eventually become more and more “real” to them; or, in other ways, they come to (more or less) firmly believe things that others can clearly see are false. And all of this can take place in individuals who are “normal,” i.e., they are not psychotic, not delusional.

• In an earlier blog entry (January 3) I wrote about people who convinced themselves (with the encouragement of others) to believe that they had been raised in satanic cults and subjected to horrific abuse during childhood.
  

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• In a different earlier blog entry (February 9) I wrote about the phenomenon of “false memory.”
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• In criminal cases, there are many instances of false confessions. In one variety, the person voluntarily approaches the police and states that he committed some terrible crime. In many cases, he seems to truly believe that he has done so, although it soon becomes quite clear that he did not. In other cases, an innocent person falls under suspicion and is subjected to highly coercive and suggestive interrogation, over a long period of time. Eventually, he confesses. In some of those cases, after his confession, he truly believes that he actually did commit the crime that he has learned to describe in great detail.
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• In many other criminal cases, I have observed defendants become apparently convinced of their own innocence, despite massive evidence of guilt (and, often, an earlier confession). In the course of building a defense for trial, the defendant learns to pick apart the government’s case; to insist that witnesses for the government are lying about him; to deny to other inmates in jail, and perhaps to his family, that he committed the crime; to insist that there are plausible ways to explain how he could not have done the crime; and to engage in a sort of partnership with his defense attorney to “prove his innocence.” His enthusiasm for proving that he is, in "fact," innocent can appear to co-exist with a partially suppressed understanding that he did indeed commit the crime.
  

You can see, then, that in the cases of people who write false memoirs, many factors could come into play that would allow them to (at least sometimes) genuinely believe the truth of what they are claiming. What is important to remember is that these cases are seldom as simple as they seem; it is usually a fairly complex matter, both as to the question of "was she lying, or not?" and as to the mental (emotional, motivational) factors that led to the distortions and allowed them to persist.