The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [75]
A century ago, Sigmund Freud introduced the concept of repression, the forgetting of events in order to avoid intense psychic pain, as a coping mechanism essential for mental health. It seemed to emerge especially in patients diagnosed with ‘hysteria’, the symptoms of which included hallucinations and paralysis. At first Freud believed that behind every case of hysteria was a repressed instance of childhood sexual abuse. Eventually Freud changed his explanation to hysteria being caused by fantasies - not all of them unpleasant - of having been sexually abused as a child. The burden of guilt was shifted from parent to child. Something like this debate rages today. (The reason for Freud’s change of heart is still being disputed - the explanations ranging from his provoking outrage among his Viennese middle-aged male peers, to his recognition that he was taking the stories of hysterics seriously.)
Instances in which the ‘memory’ suddenly surfaces, especially at the ministrations of a psychotherapist or hypnotist, and where the first ‘recollections’ have a ghost- or dreamlike quality are highly questionable. Many such claims of sexual abuse appear to be invented. The Emory University psychologist Ulric Neisser says:
There is child abuse, and there are such things as repressed memories. But there are also such things as false memories and confabulations, and they are not rare at all. Misremem-berings are the rule, not the exception. They occur all the time. They occur even in cases where the subject is absolutely confident - even when the memory is a seemingly unforgettable flashbulb, one of those metaphorical mental photographs. They are still more likely to occur in cases where suggestion is a lively possibility, where memories can be shaped and re-shaped to meet the strong interpersonal demands of a therapy session. And once a memory has been reconfigured in this way, it is very, very hard to change.
These general principles cannot help us to decide with certainty where the truth lies in any individual case or claim. But on the average, across a large number of such claims, it is pretty obvious where we should place our bets. Misremembering and retrospective reworking of the past are a part of human nature; they go with the territory and they happen all the time.
Survivors of the Nazi death camps provide the clearest imaginable demonstration that even the most monstrous abuse can be carried continuously in human memory. Indeed, the problem for many Holocaust survivors has been to put some emotional distance between themselves and the death camps, to forget. But if in some alternative world of inexpressible evil they were forced to live in Nazi Germany - let’s say a thriving post-Hitler nation with its ideology intact, except that it’s changed its mind about anti-Semitism - imagine the psychological burden on Holocaust survivors then. Then perhaps they would be able to forget, because remembering would make their current lives unbearable. If there is such a thing as the repression and subsequent recall of ghastly memories, then perhaps it requires two conditions: (1) that the abuse actually happened, and (2) that the victim was required to pretend for long periods of time that it never happened.
The University of California social psychologist Richard Ofshe explains:
When patients are asked to explain how the memories returned, they report assembling fragments of images, ideas, feelings, and sensations into marginally coherent stories. As the so-called memory work stretches out for months, feelings become vague images, images become figures, and figures become known persons. Vague discomfort in certain parts of the body is reinterpreted as childhood rape... The original physical sensations, sometimes augmented by