SAN FRANCISCO — Psychologist Elizabeth F. Loftus was instantly suspicious when she read about a 17-year-old called "Jane Doe" who purportedly had recovered a memory of her mother sexually molesting her as a child.
The claim, published by two psychiatry professors in a professional journal, was being hailed as proof of "repressed memory," a theory that says the mind avoids intense pain by sealing off recollection of traumatic events. Under the theory, the victim may recover the memory accurately years later, usually in therapy.
The Jane Doe study contradicted everything that Loftus had been saying in lecture halls and courtrooms around the country. A professor at UC Irvine, Loftus is a leading figure in the so-called memory wars, a divisive dispute about whether repressed memory is the biggest fraud to hit psychology in decades or the outcome of careful therapy in which patients are able to heal themselves by finally coming to grips with painful pasts.
Mindful of the power of case studies to spur diagnoses and change therapeutic practices, Loftus decided to investigate. Her "expose" of Jane Doe would ignite a firestorm over the ethics of revealing information about subjects of case studies and a legal battle over privacy rights that has reached the California Supreme Court.
Stepping outside the confines of academia and working with two private eyes, Loftus tracked down the family of Jane Doe and published an article casting doubt on whether the girl had ever been abused. She questioned the methods of the psychiatrist who reported both the initial abuse in 1984 and the recovered memory of it 11 years later and portrayed the accused mother as the true victim.
Even though Loftus revealed no names or hometowns, Jane Doe retaliated, claiming in a lawsuit that she had been abused again, this time by an internationally recognized psychologist probing her private affairs for "professional and commercial exploitation."
Loftus, 60, is tenacious and fearless in her work, though it doesn't necessarily show in a first meeting. Unassuming, with an air of vulnerability, she has shoulder-length dark blond hair and wears rimless glasses. She dresses with a hint of the 1960s, softening a professional black suit with a floppy black hat and calf-high boots.
Scholars have ranked her among the top psychologists of the 20th century. She has been elected to the National Academy of Scientists, won the Grawemeyer Prize -- the largest monetary prize in psychology -- and written 20 books and more than 400 scientific articles.
