A Review on an Article - When Photographs Create False Memories

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However, doctoring someone’s memories can have ethical connotations. It could be considered unethical to change someone’s memories even if it is to treat them. Also, it could be used to convince people of something that they’ve never done and they could confess to wrongdoings which they aren’t responsible for. Or, a person could have a false memory of a traumatic experience, that did not actually happen, which could scar them for life.

Conclusion

Memories could be associated with many things like food, smells, places, music, and ofcourse photographs. False memories could be associated to any of these and used to help psychiatric patients. Attaching happy memories, or even false happy memories to any of these could help calm down particularly violent patients.

It could be used as a therapy to help patients get over psychotic episodes in a calm and healthy manner. Patients of depression could also be helped by this method, by helping them to recall happier times.

Although such therapy could go horribly wrong by bringing out repressed memories and having the risk of it latching on to the wrong person. For example, someone who has repressed memories of being abused as a child might think that the perpetrator was a family member when it wasn’t. in 1990, winery executive Gary Ramona was stunned when his then-19 year old daughter Holly confronted him with accusations that he had repeatedly raped her over a lengthy period. Ramona vehemently denied the accusations and the resulting case led to the loss of his executive position, his marriage and his relationship with Holly and her sisters. In the subsequent lawsuit launched by Gary Ramona, he accused Holly’s psychotherapist, Marche Isabella of “implanting” false memories in his daughter while Holly was being treated for bulimia. The lawsuit also named Dr. Richard Rose, chief of psychiatry at Western Medical Hospital in Anaheim, California. At Holly Ramona’s request, Dr. Rose had conducted a sodium amytal session to verify the memories of abuse that had surfaced during therapy.

Although Holly Ramona and her mother insist that the memories of abuse are genuine, Gary Ramona was awarded $500,000 in 1994 setting a legal precedent in the United States. Gary Ramona declared the decision to be a major victory in recognizing the pseudoscience underlying memories of abuse recovered during psychotherapy.

Hence, false memories in psychotherapy, while very effective, might also prove to be controversial.