Fasle memory
Fasle memoryFasle Memory
There are many models which try to explain how memory works. Nevertheless,
we do not know exactly how memory works. One of the most questionable models
of memory is the one which assumes that every experience a person has had is
'recorded' in memory and that some of these memories are of traumatic events
too terrible to want to remember. These terrible memories are locked away in
the sub conscious mind, i.e. repressed, only to be remembered in adulthood
when some triggering event opens the door to the unconscious. And, both
before and after the repressed memory is remembered, it causes physical and
mental disorders in a person.
This view of memory has two elements: (1) the accuracy element and (2) the
causal element. The reason this model is questionable is not because people
don't have unpleasant or painful experiences they would rather forget, nor
is it claiming that children often experience both wonderful and brutal
things for which they have no conceptual or linguistic framework and hence
are incapable of understanding them, much less relating it to others. It is
questionable because this model maintains that because (a) one is having
problems of functioning as a healthy human being and (b) one remembers being
abused as a child that therefore (A) one was abused as a child and (B) the
childhood abuse is the cause of one's adulthood problems.
There is no evidence that supports the claim that we remember everything
that we experience. In fact, there is plenty of evidence to support the
claim that it is impossible for us to even attend to all the perceptual
elements of any given experience, much less to recall them all. There is no
evidence to support the claim that all memories of experiences happened as
they remembered to have happened or that they have even happened at all. And
there is no evidence to support the claim that subjective certainty about
the accuracy of memories or the vividness of memories significantly
correlates with accuracy. Finally, the claim of a causal connection between
abuse and health or behavior does not warrant concluding that ill health,
mental or physical, is a 'sign' of having been abused.
This model is the basis for a number of pseudoscientific works on child
abuse by self-proclaimed experts such as Ellen Bass, E. Sue Blum, Laura
Davis, Beverly Engel, Beverly Holman, Wendy Maltz and Mary Jane Williams.
Through communal reinforcement many empirically unsupported notions,
including the claim that about half of all women have been sexually abused,
get treated as a 'fact' by many people. Psychologist Carol Tavris writes
In what can only be called an incestuous arrangement, the authors of these
books all rely on one another's work as supporting evidence for their...
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