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Memory

The University of Chicago Press

Contents

Acknowledgments..................................................................ixIntroduction.....................................................................11 On the Witness Stand...........................................................92 The Making of Truth Serum......................................................333 Memories of War................................................................534 Wilder Penfield and the Recording of Personal Experience.......................755 The Three Lives of Bridey Murphy...............................................1036 Securing Memory in the Cold War................................................1257 Flashbulb Memories.............................................................1578 The Law of Memory..............................................................1799 Frederic Bartlett and the Social Psychology of Remembering.....................19710 Making False Memory...........................................................22511 Reliving and Revising the Past................................................257Notes............................................................................273Index............................................................................311

Chapter One

In January 1906, Elizabeth Martha "Bessie" Hollister, a middle-class married woman in her twenties, went missing in a working-class neighborhood on the North Side of Chicago, now Lincoln Park. Her family circulated a description: brown hair, blue eyes, gray dress. But it was already too late. Her body was found the next morning on a pile of refuse, with wire wrapped around her neck. The next day, police had a suspect: a young carpenter named Richard Ivens, who had found the body in the vacant lot behind his family's workshop on Belden Avenue.

After several hours of questioning, Ivens signed a lengthy confession, recounting his actions and maintaining that he had acted alone. It seemed an open-and-shut case, but after a few weeks he dramatically changed his tune and announced that his confession was false. Yet Ivens did not claim he had consciously fabricated it. The police had used hypnotic techniques, he said—techniques powerful enough that he himself had temporarily come to accept their assertions as his own memories.

Experts readily came forward to agree that Ivens's remarkable allegation could indeed be true. Psychologists from Chicago, the East Coast, and even Europe sent in their opinions, pulling the case into an ongoing controversy about the malleability of memory and the nature of suggestion. One of the foremost of these was Hugo Münsterberg of Harvard. Münsterberg saw in the Ivens case an opportunity to launch a broader campaign to demonstrate the need for expert psychological evaluations of witness testimony in general. His efforts became part of an intensifying discussion about the application of scientific knowledge to social problems. But when it was proposed that science be applied to memory—something that seemed definitively accessible to everyone—this discussion threatened to become acrimonious.

False Confession, False Memory

In the weeks after the Hollister murder, newspapers wasted little ink pondering the killer's identity. They did puzzle over various inconsistencies—for instance, Hollister's gloves and muff were never found, nor could police account for her whereabouts during the hours before they claimed Ivens had targeted her. But there seemed no doubt of his involvement.

It is easy to see why people assumed Ivens's guilt. He initially confirmed his confession to his own father as well as to the police. It was only after several weeks that he recanted, claiming the confession was a "false" memory imposed on him during the police interrogation.

Could the court be made to believe in such a thing? A false confession was hard enough to prove, but it was at least imaginable. A false memory, meaning a good-faith confession that had no basis in experience—this was unheard of. How could one replace one's own memory with a story that belonged to someone else's crime, especially when this would lead to one's own execution? Yet this was the defense's argument.

The trial began on March 6. Bailiff s struggled to keep order as the twelve jurors were sworn in before a throng of spectators. The presenting of evidence began two days later. The confession was immediately the central issue. Should it be admitted? If so, how much weight should it receive? The officer who had initially questioned Ivens testified (for the prosecution) that he had come to police attention almost immediately because he had found the body. He seemed suspiciously reticent, unwilling to answer questions, and very nervous. After some hours of questioning—during which time, the officer claimed, he had neither threatened Ivens nor offered him leniency, Ivens gave a detailed and even expansive confession of how he had sexually assaulted Mrs. Hollister and then strangled her. The defense attorney asked the chief of police whether he had studied hypnosis: he had, though not to secure confessions. Nor, he affirmed when pressed, had he used more subtle forms of suggestive influence.

The defense's own presentation began with Ivens himself. He stated, sounding a little stilted and rehearsed, that he had confessed "under the sweatbox influence of the police." He had been nervous; they had "had me at their mercy." He had denied seeing Hollister before finding her body, but as the interrogation continued he got "excited." His "mind was not clear.... [T]hey asked me questions one right after the other, and I just answered 'Yes' to all of them."

As many as twelve witnesses gave Ivens an alibi, but their consensus was undercut by Ivens's own restatements of his confession. These affirmations would ordinarily have ruled out any claim of coercion. But the defense argued that this was not a case of ordinary coercion: Ivens—who supposedly was "dull" and therefore easily led—had been implanted with a statement that he himself came to believe for a while. The defense maintained that the police had literally placed him under a "hypnotic spell," though it was not clear if this had been done deliberately. The trance had supposedly prevented him from distinguishing "real facts" from "suggestion." Ivens had thus been prevented from speaking for himself, not by the usual technique of being forced into concocted and false statements, but by the subtler means of grafting a false story onto his own memory. This story had temporarily supplanted the true version in his own mind, making his confession an honest statement of an actual falsehood. The ventriloquists of this "confession" were the police. The jury was less impressed with this argument than with Ivens's original confession; he was convicted in March, but this decision only marked the first phase of the debate over his guilt and over the possibility of coercing an individual not only to make a false confession but to believe in it.

The Psychologists

Hypnosis was a fashionable topic among psychologists and psychiatrists in the early 1900s. Conversations about psychology and the law naturally gravitated toward it. In Chicago, J. Sanderson Christison was an outspoken member of a group of aspiring...