Asked about a specific weekend last year, a patient confidently describes attending a family wedding in detail, an event that, on checking, never took place, with no other explanation offered for the gap in his actual memory of that time. Before revealing the answer: is this retrospective falsification?
No, this is more consistent with confabulation than with retrospective falsification. Retrospective falsification involves a real event being recalled but coloured by mood; here, an entirely fictitious event has been constructed to fill an actual gap in memory, which is the defining pattern of confabulation rather than a mood-driven distortion of something that genuinely happened.
References
- Casey, P. & Kelly, B. (2019). Fish's Clinical Psychopathology, 4th ed. Ch. 5, 'Disorders of Memory'.