Memory works like a Wikipedia page: You can go in there and change it, but so can other people. - Elizabeth Loftus

Therapists probably can't ethically do it, and they may have anti-deception provisions in their standards of conduct. But bad governments, bad people, they don't have requirements of conduct. When we recently published a study about planting false memories among U.S. soldiers, I was worried we were putting out a recipe for how you can do horrible things to somebody and then wipe their memory away.

Which would you rather have? A kid with obesity, heart problems, shortened lifespan, diabetes -- or maybe a little bit of false memory?

It is possible not to think about something for a long time, even something unpleasant that happened to you. But what's been claimed in these repressed-memory cases is something, by definition, that's too extreme to be explained by ordinary forgetting and remembering. They're saying that in order to go on in life, you had to wall off this memory, because it would be too painful to live with. Then finally you go into therapy and crack through the repression barrier and out comes this pristine memory. But there really is no credible scientific support for that notion.