The Mail

Rachel Aviv describes the way Elizabeth Loftus's psychology research has established the fallibility of personal memory, and shows how her testimony in court has helped to exculpate innocent defendants ("Past Imperfect," April 5th). The fact that there is limited experimental evidence for the emergence of memories of trauma long after it occurs does not prove that such memories are a fiction, of course. The malleability of memory, which Loftus's research has demonstrated, suggests that it is just as likely that memories can be forgotten and later remembered as it is that they can be implanted or distorted. In Aviv's account, Loftus's repudiation of unconscious repressed memories comes across as motivated as much by personal bias as by anything else. When Aviv astutely notes that it's "hard to avoid the thought" that Loftus's career was "shaped by the slipperiness of [the] foundational memory" of her mother's tragic death, Loftus vehemently denies it.