Ulric Neisser is one of the founders of cognitive psychology. “False memories and confabulations are not rare at all,” he said in the 1990s, as those fictional memories were being solicited wholesale. “They are still more likely to occur…where memories can be shaped and reshaped to meet the strong interpersonal demands of a therapy session. And once a memory has been thus reconfigured, it is very, very hard to change.” The neurobiologist James McGaugh, another pioneer in the field, has in his half-century of research seen not “a single instance in which a memory was completely repressed and
...more
