The phenomenon of individuals recovering (traumatic) memories under the effects of psychedelics and/or MDMA has been increasingly discussed recently, and for good reason. I’ve talked about this too in some conference presentations and am writing several scientific articles that relate to the topic to various degrees.
The immense popularity of the best-selling, Oprah’s Book Club* memoir The Tell is one factor contributing to the topical nature of this conversation. The book, for those not familiar, describes how the author, billionaire venture capitalist Amy Griffin, underwent MDMA-assisted therapy and under the influence recovered vivid, detailed memories of being repeatedly raped by a schoolteacher some 30 years earlier. She reports she was never aware of this having happened to her before, nor was anyone else, and that these detailed memories appeared completely de novo to her.
I read the book some two months ago, and, as a trauma, memory, and psychedelics researcher, had very mixed feelings. Yesterday, a New York Times article on the book and the experiences it describes was published, which certainly further complicates my already complicated feelings about the book and its impact.
Now, even after this NYT investigation into the details surrounding the book and Griffin’s experiences, I don’t have any clear reason to doubt that what the author describes remembering in that book happened to her. Some details in the way the story is presented and some that this investigation uncovered do cast doubt on whether things happened exactly as the author describes her memories in the book. But no memories are ever totally accurate representations of the past, and there are several potential explanations for how the author may have come to remember what she does. In any case, what really happened mostly matters to the author herself and the accused person (who is still alive and was identified by NYT).
However, what is concerning to me about The Tell is that its enormous popularity may be further feeding into the idea that MDMA and/or psychedelics are tools to discover the hidden source of your suffering, to recover the forgotten trauma that must exist in your past to explain why you are distressed or unhappy today. The idea of psychedelics recovering repressed memories has a long history (See my recent talk at Breaking Convention for some examples), and currently appears to be quite prevalent in some psychedelic, perhaps especially ayahuasca and MDMA, circles. It further often problematically combines with the belief that “the medicine will show you what you need to see”. Thus, people go into therapeutic sessions or ceremonies with the specific purpose of trying to recover memories of what happened to them (typically as small children) and some facilitators appear to encourage this. And when they do recover something, they are very convinced that what they now remember must be true.
In psychotherapy, it may never be too late to have a happy childhood. But recovered-memory therapies of past decades showed us that it’s also never too late to have a traumatic childhood. What I mean is, if you really try hard to recover terrible, traumatic memories from your childhood, and especially if you find a therapist/facilitator/guide who believes in this and uses suggestive techniques to help you do so, you may well find such memories, regardless of whether anything traumatic actually ever happened to you.
The phenomenon of recovered memories is complex and its nature is somewhat contested. We do know that people can recover memories both spontaneously and in therapy. And we can say with some confidence and evidence that sometimes such memories are real in the sense that they are fairly accurate reflections of real events that had happened to the person in question, sometimes they are false memories in the sense that such an event did not happen to this person, and sometimes they are somewhere in between, e.g., partially inaccurate or combine details from different sources.
This is also true for memories recovered under psychedelics. Sorry to say, but there’s no benevolent plant spirit or hidden intelligence inherent to these substances that guarantees what you seem to remember under their effects reflects reality. Whether psychedelics may enhance the potential for forming false memories (this remains unclear), there is at least no evidence to suggest they reduce such potential. So, if anything, we should be a little more skeptical about the veracity of a memory if it is recovered under psychedelics than if it is recovered sober, rather than less skeptical.
* Incidentally(?), Michelle Remembers (1980), another book about recovering memories of abuse, later totally discredited, and in part responsible for starting the Satanic ritual abuse panic, was also promoted by Oprah Winfrey…