The next memory war
FOR THE PAST four years, the psychologist Elizabeth Loftus has been living an "Orwellian nightmare," as she puts it in the latest issue of Daedalus, the journal of the Cambridge-based American Academy of Arts and Sciences. It's a nightmare that might descend on other academics too, she warns: Important but controversial research is all too easily thwarted by lawsuits and the manipulation of well-intended regulations -- especially when your university, as she sees it, leaves you hanging.
Loftus, one of the nation's best-known academic psychologists, made her reputation as a scourge of the "recovered memory" movement, which is made up of therapists and patients who believe long-buried episodes of familial trauma -- generally incest -- can be resurrected by a caring psychologist. The movement had its heyday in the early 1990s but has since been largely discredited. In 1994, Loftus helped one former Napa Valley executive win a $475,000 judgment against two therapists and a hospital: The therapists had persuaded the man's daughter that he had abused her, and he had lost his job and his family.
Indeed, it was Loftus's debunking exploits that got her into trouble with her school. The saga began in 1984, when a psychiatrist named David L. Corwin videotaped his conversations with a 6-year-old girl at the center of a child-custody war. The girl, identified only as Jane Doe, claimed that her mother had inappropriately touched her genitals during bath-time. The mother lost custody and visitation rights.
Corwin had the chance to interview Jane Doe again 11 years later, by which point the teenager had forgotten making the charges of sexual abuse (although she remembered charges of physical abuse). During her conversation with Corwin, the memories came flooding back. Corwin caught it all on tape, and his subsequent article in Child Maltreatment (yes, there is such a journal) was a sensation. Had he shown that a memory could, in fact, be retrieved?
"This case looked fishy" from the start, Loftus says. With the help of Melvin Guyer, a colleague at the University of Michigan, and a private investigator, she figured out where Jane Doe lived and approached her family and friends to ask about her history. In an article in Skeptical Inquirer in 2002, Loftus, then a professor at the University of Washington, reported that Corwin had omitted quite a lot from his account, including speculations by a social worker and Jane Doe's brother that the accusation of abuse had been concocted as a weapon in the custody war.
In the fall of 1999, however, Jane Doe complained to the University of Washington that Loftus's investigation violated her privacy. A representative of the school's Office of Scholarly Integrity promptly seized Loftus's files. Loftus spent the next 21 months fighting accusations that she had engaged in "human subjects" research without permission or supervision. (Human-subjects rules are supposed to ensure that professors don't exploit the people they study. However, social scientists and even historians have complained that rules largely designed for medical trials and laboratory tests are applied to them with undue rigidity.)
In the end, a committee decided that Loftus wasn't engaged in "generalizable" scientific research, and therefore the human-subjects rules didn't apply. Still, the committee told her that she could no longer contact Jane Doe's mother, who had become a friend, without its permission. And that she should take an ethics class.
Rather than submit to such indignities, Loftus departed in the fall of 2002 for a $155,000-a-year job at the University of California at Irvine. "It was horrible," she recalls. "I left all my friends and a house I had lived in for 29 years." She now brightens when her computer's homepage, set to display the weather, tells her it is raining in Seattle.
But Loftus also faces some potentially hefty legal fees. In March, Jane Doe filed a lawsuit against her, naming the University of Washington, Skeptical Inquirer, and several others as codefendants. Doe, who ironically had to reveal her name, Nicole S. Taus, in order to sue, says Loftus included "identifiable private information" in her article. Taus, now in the Navy, also claims that Loftus libeled her by telling an audience of psychologists that the teenaged Jane Doe had engaged in "destructive" behavior (i.e., sex, drugs, cutting off family ties).
Loftus's former colleagues, such as Ana Marie Cauce, chair of the University of Washington psychology department, watch with mixed feelings. Cauce says she's "immensely sad" that Loftus left. But she also says the university officials who investigated Loftus faced a nearly impossible task. "On the one hand, if they are too strict, it makes it difficult for us to do our work. On the other hand, some universities have had their research funds cut off because of [human subjects] violations." Now it's up to the courts to say whether the university was a good cop or a wildly irresponsible one.
Christopher Shea's column appears in Ideas biweekly. E-mail: critical.faculties@verizon.net.
