Mistakes Were Made - Carol Tavris [40]
True Stories of False Memories
In Germany in 1995, Binjamin Wilkomirski published Fragments, a memoir of his horrifying childhood experiences in the concentration camps of Majdanek and Birkenau. An account of a small child’s observations of Nazi atrocities and his eventual rescue and move to Switzerland, Fragments received extravagant praise. Reviewers compared it to the works of Primo Levi and Anne Frank. The New York Times said the book was “stunning” and the Los Angeles Times called it a “classic first-hand account of the Holocaust.” In the United States, Fragments received the 1996 National Jewish Book Award for autobiography and memoir, and the American Orthopsychiatric Association gave Wilkomirski its Hayman Award for Holocaust and genocide study. In Britain, the book won the Jewish Quarterly Literary Prize; in France, it won the Prix Mémoire de la Shoah. The Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington sent Wilkomirski on a six-city United States fund-raising tour.
Then it turned out that Fragments was a confabulation from start to finish. Its author, whose real name was Bruno Grosjean, was not Jewish and had no Jewish ancestry. He was a Swiss musician who had been born in 1941 to an unmarried woman named Yvonne Grosjean and been adopted several years later by a childless Swiss couple, the Dössekkers. Nor had he ever stepped foot in a concentration camp. His story was drawn from history books he had read, films he had seen, and Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird, a surrealistic novel about a boy’s brutal treatment during the Holocaust.14 (Ironically, Kosinski’s claim that his novel was autobiographical was later revealed to be fraudulent.)
Let’s shift from Switzerland to a wealthy suburb of Boston, where Will Andrews lives. (This was the name given him by the psychologist who interviewed him.) Will is a handsome, articulate man in his forties, happily married. Will believes that he was abducted by aliens, and he has vivid memories of having been experimented on medically, psychologically, and sexually for at least ten years. In fact, he says, his alien guide became pregnant by him, producing twin boys, now eight years old, whom, he says sadly, he will never see but who play a large emotional role in his life. The abductions, he said, were terrifying and painful, but overall he is happy that he was “chosen.”15
Are these two men guilty of fraud? Did Bruno-Binjamin Grosjean-Dössekker-Wilkomirski make up his story to become world famous, and did Will Andrews concoct memories of having been abducted by aliens to get on Oprah ? We don’t think so, and we don’t think that they were lying, either, any more than Tom Brokaw was lying, if on a smaller scale. Well, then, are these men mentally ill? Not at all. They have led perfectly reasonable lives, functioning normally, holding good jobs, having relationships, paying their bills. In fact, they are representative of the many thousands of people who have come to remember accounts of terrible suffering in their childhoods or adulthoods, experiences that were later proved beyond reasonable doubt to have never happened to them. Psychologists who have tested many of these individuals report that they do not suffer from schizophrenia or other psychotic disorders. Their mental problems, if they have any, fall within the usual range of human miseries, such as depression, anxiety, eating disorders, loneliness, or existential anomie.
So, no, Wilkomirski and Andrews are not crazy or deceitful, but their memories are false, and false for particular, self-justifying reasons. Their stories, so different on the face of it, are linked by common psychological and neurological mechanisms that can create false memories that nonetheless feel vividly, emotionally real. These memories do not develop overnight, in a blinding flash. They take months, sometimes years, to develop, and the stages by which they emerge are now well known to psychological scientists.
According to the Swiss historian Stefan Maechler, who interviewed Wilkomirski,