Hillary Clinton's False Memory?

Like many people, I am fascinated by Hillary Clinton's stories about "landing under sniper fire" in 1996, on a trip to Bosnia. Not only did she say something that was dramatically and demonstrably incorrect, but it appears that she said it several times, even after others who had been there with her contradicted her in public (here's a recent opinion piece discussing this).

The question becomes: was she deliberately lying in an effort to inflate her "toughness" credentials? Or was this an example of a "false memory" (a phenomenon I have discussed previously in this blog in several entries, here)? Or (as seems most likely to me), something in between?

The story seemed odd and unlikely to me, anyway, from the outset. I'm not a pilot, but I grew up in the US Air Force; my father was a pilot in WW II, and throughout the Cold War. I have heard a lot, in my life, about military and combat flying. I cannot imagine that a pilot would land his airplane, with the First Lady aboard, if he had been informed that there were snipers actually firing in the area. So the phrase, "landing under sniper fire" seems fishy, to me. But, probably even more significantly, a presidential candidate who is running on a platform that includes an effort to assert something that approximates to military credentials (being very, very close to the Commander-in-Chief!) should know at least as much as I do about whether or not the "landing under sniper fire" story was even plausible. That, alone, speaks (I believe) poorly as to her grasp of certain realities about the military.

One way that Clinton may have come to believe in the truth of her (untrue) story is this: She knew, before and during the flight into the airfield in Bosnia, that sniper fire had been a major feature of the combat in that area for years. It is likely that this was discussed among the passengers on the flight (even though, as some are asserting, the "war was over" by the time that Hillary visited in '96). There was probably some sense among the passengers that they were arriving at a place that still carried some threat of danger (particularly, the remote (?) threat of sniper activity). And that sense of danger was probably inflated just by the fact that Hillary was then the First Lady, and always accompanied by Secret Service agents who are, of course, highly sensitive to any sort of threat to the people they are protecting.

Fast-forward 12 years; Hillary Clinton is running for president, and she has no military experience, no combat experience, and very little foreign policy experience that she can legitimately call her own. And she strongly feels that it is necessary that she convince the world that, contrary to appearances, she actually DOES have all kinds of quasi-military experience, and that she has, in effect, been exposed to hostile fire. How can she do that? In rummaging through her many experiences and travels (and travails!) as First Lady, she comes upon the fact that she actually did go to Bosnia! And there were snipers in Bosnia! And she was frightened! And, if she had been frightened, it must have been a legitimate fear! So, there really WERE snipers, and everyone had to jump out of the airplane, and put their heads down, and run! Therefore, she is tough and experienced in combat situations!

Of course this is wild conjecture... or, at least, a little wild. Obviously, I don't know what really happened inside the mind of Hillary Clinton. But I certainly don't buy the "sleep deprivation" explanation that she apparently is now offering...

What do you think? New poll going up today!

Plus, here's a very disrespectful (and funny) video parody of the Bosnia landing...


UPDATE: Here's an excerpt from Nora Ephron's piece about this whole thing:

"When she tells a big lie, like her recent Bosnia episode, I can lose hours trying to figure out why. I mean, why? Was it one of those things that she'd said so often that she'd come to believe it? Was it a story that had worked in the past so she thought she'd gotten away with it? Did she honestly think that no one would rat her out? Does she not understand that if you're famous, there's almost nothing you do that someone doesn't have a picture of? I have no idea what the answer is to any of this because I'm not a liar and she is. (By the way, I don't think she was always a liar, the way some kids are born liars and never get over it. I think she was once a truthful person and her lying skills were forged in the early years of her marriage, forged in the crucible of Bill's infidelities and in her role as point person in dealing with them."

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.

Ferguson Case: Forgetting and Remembering

Here are three of the interesting, and overlapping, issues raised in the case I wrote about yesterday:

· False memories: deliberately implanted, negligently implanted, or self-implanted

· “Repressed” memories, subsequently “recovered”

· Motivated forgetting

Elizabeth Loftus convincingly demonstrated, in a laboratory setting, that it was possible to deliberately implant a false memory in a research subject. This is generally done by using a family member or trusted other person as a confederate; the confederate uses suggestion and persuasion to induce the subject to become convinced that a non-existent event occurred. Following the procedure, the subject will have the strong subjective sense that s/he remembers an event that actually occurred, even though no such thing ever happened. The prototype situation involves a parent or older sibling “reminding” the subject about a time when s/he was “lost in the mall,” and was helped back to family members by a friendly stranger. The “reminding” is done by telling the story, with ample fabricated details, along with the repeated suggestion: “Don’t you remember when this happened?” When this procedure is followed, the subject will (at least sometimes) gradually begin to say, and believe, "Oh yes, I do remember that!"

Here’s a link to more information about this: http://faculty.washington.edu/eloftus/Articles/sciam.htm

The issue of implanted false memories became very significant back in the 1980’s and 1990’s, when there was a near-epidemic of reports by psychotherapy patients that they had suddenly remembered that they had been subjected to horrific abuse during their childhoods, usually by their fathers. It was not always true that these abusive acts had actually taken place, and family members (especially the fathers) were horrified. It became clear that some psychotherapists were unwittingly providing suggestions to their clients that certain symptoms (relationship problems, anxiety, etc.) could be attributed to childhood abuse (especially incest), and that memories of such abuse were frequently “repressed.” The suggestion was also made that the best way to alleviate the presenting symptoms was to “recover” the “repressed” memories of the trauma, and talk about, or "work through" the memories.

During that period of time, I spent a few years working on inpatient psychiatric facilities, where I routinely observed what appeared clearly to be the production of false memories. I worked on units that specialized in the treatment of persons who reported that they had been subjected to sexual traumas. This was the heyday of the “Satanic Ritual Abuse” scare, about which much has been written. What I observed was that patients who heard each other’s stories of “recovered memories” of horrific abuse within satanic cults (and the chief satanists were usually their own parents) very often, and very quickly, recovered similar “memories” of similar events. This process was going on all over the United States, especially in group therapy settings (outpatient and inpatient). The atmosphere on these hospital units was highly suggestive, and the social milieu created by staff and patients obviously contributed to the creation of these “memories.” I have written about his in an earlier blog post:

http://crimlawdoc.blogspot.com/2008/01/some-links-i-posted-yesterday-under-del.html

All of these issues became prominent in the Ferguson trial. Mr. Erickson, the co-defendant who said that he suddenly remembered participating, two years earlier, in a homicide with Mr. Ferguson, entered a plea of guilty and testified against Mr. Ferguson. Mr. Ferguson was convicted, largely (if not entirely) because of Mr. Erickson’s testimony. The question becomes: was Mr. Erickson’s testimony reliable? How could a person “forget” and then, two years later, “remember” participating in a murder? One theory that was mentioned was that Mr. Erickson read a newspaper account about the murder, then had a dream in which he and Mr. Ferguson committed the murder; and then, when he woke up, Mr. Erickson failed to realize that his dream was just a dream. And, in effect, he created a false memory within himself (this is what I am calling a self-induced false memory). Here is a newspaper article outlining the theory that Mr. Ferguson’s lawyers are now using to attack Erickson’s testimony:

http://www.columbiatribune.com/2008/Jan/20080122News001.asp

I don’t know of any research that would indicate that people can self-induce false memories, absent some kind of suggestive or coercive atmosphere. It would be difficult to understand why a person would engage in a mental process within which he would convince himself that he had done something terrible (again, unless some kind of motivation is supplied, such as strong coercion or suggestion). [I note that Ferguson’s lawyers, according the article linked above, mention the possibility of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD); I don’t know of any evidence that the presence of symptoms of OCD would make a significant difference in this type of scenario.]

“Repression” and “Motivated Forgetting”: A competing theory as to how this scenario might come about would be the much more frequent phenomenon of motivated forgetting. This concept is related to the term “repression,” popularized by Freud and his followers. The difference would be that “repression” was usually though to be an automatic mental operation caused by an overwhelmingly traumatic event; an event of motivated forgetting, on the other hand, would imply that some degree of consciousness and effort are involved, either a failure, or refusal to think about the event. One person who described engaging in this process expressed it this way: “I just didn’t want to go there.” Or, as Scarlet O’Hara famously said at the end of Gone With the Wind: “I’m just not going to think about that. I’ll think about it tomorrow. Tomorrow is another day.”

Memory distortions are, of course, notoriously common, and factors such as motivation and suggestion play a huge role in the way we remember, and the way we forget. Here is a link that provides some of the basics of the psychology of memory and memory failure:

http://www.sparknotes.com/psychology/psych101/memory/section3.rhtml

Giving a Deposition

I’m off to give a deposition this morning in an old case that arose out of a homicide in Columbia, MO. One of the editors of the Columbia Tribune was murdered outside the newspaper building, late one night. Nobody was arrested, and there were no good suspects, for a long time. Then, 2-3 years later, after a newspaper article was published about the old unsolved case, one young man began to tell people that he suddenly remembered that he and a friend had committed the murder. Eventually, he pled guilty and his “friend” was put on trial. A major issue in the “friend’s” trial was the reliability (or not) of the co-defendant’s memory about the incident. Elizabeth Loftus, the big-name memory expert, testified, which made the trial even more high-profile than it already was. The jury found the “friend” guilty. I did some consulting on the case, and now there are post-conviction matters being litigated, so the lawyers have asked me to come in and testify about various aspects of the case.

Here’s a link to an article about the case: http://www.columbiatribune.com/Heitholt/

And another article: http://www.columbiatribune.com/2005/Oct/20051018Feat003.asp

The Memory Wars

Some links I posted yesterday under del.icio.us are related to what we once called the “memory wars” in clinical psychology and psychiatry. I found it interesting that they appeared just a few days after I saw a new book at Borders by a psychiatrist who recounts his own memories of his years spent treating a person who, he says, “had” many different personalities. I had hoped that all of this had gone away…

During the heyday of what was formerly known as “multiple personality disorder” (MPD), now much less prominently known as “dissociative identity disorder” (DID), the same bad old days in which free-standing psychiatric hospitals made a fortune “treating” women (they were almost all women) who came to believe that they had been raised in satanic cults, in which their parents and the local police, and ministers, and priests, and judges (etc.) were all satanic cult members; during those days I was in training to become a psychologist. I worked part-time at two of the local free-standing hospitals (only one of them is still operating), and spent many, many 8-hour shifts right smack in the middle of the genuine insanity of that time in our culture. I watched women come into the hospital with a lot of anxiety and depression; and I saw that, by the time they left, weeks later, they were much worse off: they had “discovered” that they were “multiple” and that their whole lives had been spent under the control of satanic cults. They “had memories” of hideous, gory events involving their family members who subjected them to rape, bestiality, torture. Many of them subsequently went on disability, lost their careers and their families. But all along, they were supported by eagerly credulous therapists who “validated” them, every step of the way.

How did it happen? It was an unholy amalgam of all of the following, all at or near the same time:

• In popular culture, novels like Rabbit Howled and Michelle Remembers vividly portrayed some of the atrocities that the “multiples” later “remembered.” Also, there was the supposedly legitimate (and subsequently debunked) multiplicity of “Eve,” with her “Three Faces.”
• A feminist backlash arose against a version of Freudian thinking that held that women who claimed to have been subjected to incest were probably fantasizing the whole thing. This led to a swing of the pendulum in which it was impossible to ever question the plausibility of any woman’s claim that she had been sexually abused, no matter how outlandish the claim might be.
• Some fundamentalist Christians became excited about the phenomenon, which they interpreted as Satan, active and walking around in the world torturing innocent children; they felt that this validated their world view.
• Ego, or the desire to be special: patients who were diagnosed with MPD were thought of as special, exotic, and certainly very interesting. They were much more interesting, for example, than any regular old depressed person could possibly be. And the doctors and other therapists who treated MPD patients automatically became more interesting, too. There was always the possibility of memoirs, journal articles, and even talk show appearances.
• Within psychotherapy groups, both inpatient and outpatient, the MPD patients recruited new members into their fold by telling other patients that their symptoms (depression, difficult relationships, anxiety, etc.) were likely symptoms of repressed memories of incest and/or satanic abuse. And within pop psychology, self-help books proclaimed that anyone who suspected that she had been sexually abused during childhood, probably in fact had been. The idea of “repressed memories” became rampant and widely believed.
• Finally, of course, there is the money factor: the “treatment” of MPD patients was always very lengthy, and required frequent inpatient stays; this meant more money both for outpatient therapists and also for hospitals.

Anyway, this whole thing finally peaked, and then receded from the public eye. Most of the free-standing private psychiatric hospitals closed after the insurance companies got tired of paying out huge sums of money for lengthy inpatient treatment. This was probably a good thing for many women whose lives were in danger of being sucked into the MPD machine; but it also can be a problem for people who genuinely need inpatient treatment for genuine psychiatric problems.

So: a cautionary tale, indeed. For a lot more about all this, check out the web sites linked over under del.icio.us about “repressed memory” and the “McLean Hospital.”