The diva of disclosure

Loftus has spent most of her life steadily amassing a clear and brilliant body of work showing that memory is amazingly fragile and inventive. Her studies on more than 20,000 subjects are classics that have toppled some of our most cherished beliefs. She has shown that eyewitness testimony is often unreliable, that false memories can be triggered in up to 25 percent of individuals merely by suggestion, and that memory can be interfered with and altered by simply giving incorrect post-event information.

Because her work raises doubt about the validity of long-buried memories of repeated trauma in particular--though it in no way disproves them--she has found herself asked to testify in some of the more famous trials of our time. In fact, Loftus has been called as an expert witness in more than 200 trials, from that of mass murderer Ted Bundy to accused child-killer George Franklin; has appeared on countless talk and news shows, from 60 Minutes to Oprah; has published 19 books and innumerable papers; and in 1995 received the Distinguished Contribution Award from the American Academy of Forensic Psychology.

Perhaps her voluminous mail says it best. One anonymous letter from an incest survivor concludes, "Please consider your work to be on the same level as those who deny the existence of the extermination camps during WWII." Another, from a jailed minister accused of mass child molestation, begins, "Your dedication and compassion for the innocent have earned my deepest admiration" Yet another, from a confused therapy patient, reads: "For the past two years I have done little else but try to remember. I have been told that my unconscious will release the memories in its own time and in its own way . . . . And I need to know if I am really remembering. The guessing has become unbearable"

The war over memory is far from academic. In the mid-'80s an extravaganza of child-abuse cases swept this country, often directed at day-care workers, all of them based on testimony of children who often at first did not "remember" abuse, but when coached and asked suggestive questions, began to unravel a tapestry of magnificently horrific memories: preschoolers raped with knives, forced to drink urine, assaulted in networks of underground tunnels, tied naked to trees, and forced to watch their caretakers torture animals.

These notorious cases were quickly followed by a second wave, equally fantastic, involving adults who claimed they had recovered memories of sexual and/or satanic ritual abuse they had repressed during childhood. More than 800 lawsuits have been reported to date. Yet a third wave might have followed if we could prosecute extraterrestrials, for scores of Americans began to claim they had been abducted by UFOs and had long repressed those memories.

At the root of these claims is the belief that memory is always accurate, and that memories can be repressed--that one can bury traumatic experience in some crypt of the brain, forget it consciously, and then recover it in pristine form years or decades later. This two-pronged view of memory, imported (and distorted) from Freud into the popular culture, has been embraced by a whole sector of America, from therapists to police detectives to the tens of thousands of adult women who read The Courage To Heal, often dubbed the bible of the recovered memory movement.

Uniquely, the war over memory has galvanized and mesmerized both high and low culture. It is the subject of earnest scientific research utilizing the most sophisticated tools of biology and psychology, and it is also battled out in lurid court cases covered intensively by the mass media. It is a war that has placed everyone from Roseanne to Cardinal Bernadin on the firing line. It has powerfully shaped and reshaped legislation, in a massive see-sawing of legal and public opinion.