Monkey Business
"By now it is well known that 'Fragments: Memories of a
Wartime
Childhood' -- put forward as the recovered memories of a child's Holocaust experience-- is
a fraud. But at the time it was published, 'Fragments' was widely hailed as a masterpiece
of Holocaust writing, and the author, then known as Binjamin Wilkomirski, became an
emblematic hero: the victim who survived." NY Times, Feb 26, 2002
You may have noticed all those cases of child sexual abuse by priests in the United States. Nothing new. Ireland and Canada have also had major scandals, and I'll bet Australia and Poland have had theirs as well.
But now you are going to have to draw a reasonable conclusion about "recovered" memories. Either they don't exist at all -- they are constructions provoked by emotional instablity or something-- or they only happen to women.
Not a single one of the men pressing the charges against the priests -- and there are hundreds of them-- is claiming to have "recovered" the memories of the sexual abuse. Not one. The memories were always there. They never lost them. They were vivid, because the experiences were awful.
I suppose one could argue that women experience abuse more intensely and thus have stronger urges to "repress" the memory. But you realize that that would open doors, don't you? That women really are different. That women's testimony in court should be regarded differently, about things recalled from memory, then men's testimony. That women are weaker emotionally.
I don't think we want to go there. So we should do the sensible thing and start treating "recovered" memories as "constructed" memories. They are strange creatures of imagination and anxiety and perceptual dysfunction.
Copyright © 2002 Bill Van Dyk All rights reserved.
