Mistakes Were Made - Carol Tavris [124]
12 Michael Conway and Michael Ross (1984), “Getting What You Want by Revising What You Had,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 47, pp. 738–748. Memory distortions take many different paths, but most are in the service of preserving our self-concepts and feelings about ourselves as good and competent people.
13 Anne E. Wilson and Michael Ross have shown how the self-justifying biases of memory help us move psychologically, in their words, from “chump to champ.” We distance ourselves from our earlier “chumpier” incarnations if doing so allows us to feel better about how much we have grown, learned, and matured, but, like Haber, we feel close to earlier selves we thought were champs. Either way, we can’t lose. See Wilson and Ross, “From Chump to Champ,” note 4.
14 The full text of Fragments, along with the true story of Wilkomirski’s life, is in Stefan Maechler (2001), The Wilkomirski Affair: A Study in Biographical Truth (translated by John E. Woods). New York: Schocken. Maechler discusses the ways in which Wilkomirski drew on Kosinski’s novel. For another investigation into Wilkomirski’s life and the cultural issues of real and imagined memories, see Blake Eskin (2002), A Life in Pieces: The Making and Unmaking of Binjamin Wilkomirski. New York: W. W. Norton.
15 The Will Andrews story is in Susan Clancy (2005), Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. On the psychology of belief in alien abduction, see also Donald P. Spence (1996), “Abduction Tales as Metaphors,” Psychological Inquiry, 7, pp. 177–179. Spence interprets abduction memories as metaphors that have two powerful psychological functions: They encapsulate a set of freefloating concerns and anxieties that are widespread in today’s political and cultural climate, anxieties that have no ready or easy remedy; and, by providing a shared identity for believers, they reduce the believers’ feelings of alienation and powerlessness.
16 Maechler, The Wilkomirski Affair, p. 273. See note 14.
17 Maechler, The Wilkomirski Affair, p. 27.
18 Maechler, The Wilkomirski Affair, p. 71. Wilkomirski accounted for having restless leg syndrome by telling a horrifying story: that when he was in Majdanek, he learned to keep his legs moving while he slept or otherwise “the rats would gnaw on them.” But according to Tomasz Kranz, head of the research department at the Majdanek Museum, there were lice and fleas at the camp, but not rats (unlike other camps, such as Birkenau). Maechler, p. 169.
19 On the physical and psychological benefits of writing about previously undisclosed secrets and traumas, see James W. Pennebaker (1990), Opening Up. New York: William Morrow.
20 On imagination inflation, see Elizabeth F. Loftus (2004), “Memories of Things Unseen,” Current Directions in Psychological Science, 13, pp. 145–147; and Loftus (2001), “Imagining the Past,” in Psychologist, 14 (British Psychological Society), pp. 584–587; Maryanne Garry, Charles Manning, Elizabeth Loftus, and Steven J. Sherman (1996), “Imagination Inflation: Imagining a Childhood Event Inflates Confidence That It Occurred,” Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 3, pp. 208–214; Giuliana Mazzoni and Amina Memon (2003), “Imagination Can Create False Autobiographical Memories,” Psychological Science, 14, pp. 186–188. On dreams, see Giuliana Mazzoni, Elizabeth F. Loftus, Aaron Seitz, and Steven J. Lynn (1999), “Changing Beliefs and Memories through Dream