Scientists of the mind had long since abandoned the concept of repressed memories, but laypeople were primed to believe. The 1960s and ’70s had taught them to obsess over sex, to credit conspiracy theories, and to believe that anyone who feels like a victim is a victim. Cinema also trained us to believe in repressed memories: a Harvard Medical School psychiatry professor has noted that “the flashback, in which a whole childhood trauma is suddenly recalled,” is a fictional device that makes the fictional idea of repressed memory seem real.
