Do psychedelics create false memories? 5 Questions with psychologist Samuli Kangaslampi

June 29, 2026 - 20:37

A high-profile legal battle over recovered memories in psychedelic therapy has reignited a decades-old debate in psychology about the nature of memory and trauma.

In the bestselling 2025 memoir "The Tell," billionaire venture capitalist Amy Griffin wrote that MDMA-assisted therapy helped her recover memories of being raped by her middle school teacher. "I knew that these memories were real," she wrote. "My body knew what had happened to me."

After celebrities like Oprah Winfrey and Gwyneth Paltrow praised the book, the New York Times published a story raising doubts about the memories. The Times interviewed one of Griffin's classmates who claimed she was the victim of abuse that sounded oddly similar to Griffin's experience. The classmate sued Griffin for allegedly appropriating her life story. Griffin countersued for defamation.

The controversy centers on a question that has haunted psychology for decades: can traumatic incidents be completely repressed and later recovered? During the "memory wars" of the 1980s and 1990s, patients who initially claimed to retrieve memories later recanted. The woman known as Sybil, who remembered sexual abuse by her mother, was later found to have false memories encouraged by a therapist. Psychologist Elizabeth Loftus demonstrated in experiments how false memories could be induced.

Samuli Kangaslampi, a clinical psychologist at Tampere University in Finland, became interested in psychedelics and memory while reading about LSD-assisted therapy from the 1950s. "It continuously caught my attention, how much memory experiences and recalling your past, especially your childhood and traumatic events, featured in all those papers," he said.

Kangaslampi recently received roughly $800,000 from the Research Council of Finland to study whether psychedelics can bring back memories, and whether those memories can be false.

He noted that while 1950s research considered memory recall a main effect of LSD, modern research talks very little about it. "There's the idea that these more personal experiences, autobiographical experiences, are an initial step that you go through in order to get to the really therapeutic and important part: transcendental or mystical experiences."

Kangaslampi wants to track how often these memory experiences happen in psychedelic therapy. He also wants to know if psychedelics have qualities that make false memories more likely. "As psychedelics increase suggestibility, and the feeling of realness or truth, we could imagine that this could lead to increased susceptibility to false memories."

He plans to use virtual reality scenarios and diary-based methods to test whether people form false memories under the influence of psychedelics.

As for whether it matters if a recovered memory is true, Kangaslampi said that from a purely therapeutic perspective, if a person feels better, maybe it does not matter. "But if it is about something very important that could have happened to that person, and even more so if there's a perpetrator in that memory who did something, I think there are very large personal and even legal repercussions."

He added that there is a strong cultural belief that suffering must have a source located in the past. "If you go searching for it, you can find something. People sometimes joke that in therapy it's never too late to have a happy childhood, but similarly, perhaps it's never too late to have a traumatic childhood if you really go looking for it."