Memory can play tricks
Callahan, Sidney
A CELEBRATION FOR EDWARD S. SKILLIN'S 90th Birthday! marking his 60 years of service to Commonweal and the beginning of Commonweal's 70th year of publication Join us on Thursday, January 20,...
...When an accusation of serious moral failure is leveled against such a person it provokes sadness, or angry indignation on their behalf, but little doubt about their innocence...
...Come to think of it, some deeply significant affirmations, invitations, promises, dramas, and blessings, consist of three words: "So Abram went...
...Her Majesty's limitation, which at first had seemed so arbitrary and unreasonable--so ungenerous--began to appear almost recklessly extravagant...
...The new studies of complex human memory processes also reveal that persons can selectively forget actual events and only remember them later...
...Desolation as well seems to fit into quintupled phrases: the devastating "and they all forsook him" could be a Holy Week meditation all by itself...
...Joseph's Church 371 Sixth Avenue between Waverly & Washington, New York City Lunch to follow ($15 contribution) For additional information call 212-732-0800 To reserve your place at the luncheon send a check for $15 (per person) made payable to the Commonweal Foundation to: Anniversary Celebration 15 Dutch Street, Room 502 New York, NY 10038-3760 Seating is limited...
...Good persons reveal themselves to be integrated, self-consciously mature, and self-controlled as they abide by their own moral standards of worth in all the situations of their lives...
...RSVP by January 3, 1994 Admonitions seem naturally to lend themselves to pentamerous compression: Scripture positively brims with fiveleaved proverbs and aphorisms: "Go and sin no more," "Serve the Lord with gladness...
...as of course could Jesus' cry from the cross: "Why hast Thou forsaken me...
...Similarly, some of the most poignant prayers in the Bible consist of five words: "Lord have mercy upon me...
...But here too, therapists, interrogators, lawyers, or worried parents may be innocent of any conscious intent to produce false testimony...
...Granted, anything is possible, but not everything is equally probable...
...There is a lesson for my loquacious spirit here, a deep learning about fasting and feasting, about self-discipline, about simplicity and silence...
...Since dissociated memories of sexual abuse can be recovered, long-beThe Paraclete Book Center Over forty years of service to our customers throughout the world A wide variety of thoughtfully selected titles Among them: CREDO--Kfing 9 THE GREAT CHURCH YEAR--Rahner AGE OF FREEDOMS--Kilcourse 9 CULTURE OF DISBELIEF--Carter PAUL VI--Hebblethwaite 9 HERE COMES EVERYBODY!--Unsworth THE FIRST JESUITS--O'Malley 9 SHOOTING STAR--Sister Thea Bowman EMBRACED BY COMPASSION--Fiand Prompt, careful attention to your phone and gift orders Special orders welcome Gift certificates available We ship worldwide Visa & MasterCard accepted Holiday Hours: Tuesday - Saturday 10 - 6 Closed December 24-27 146 East 74th Street, New York, NY 10021 (212) 535-4050 lated accusations by victims may be true...
...But when the record of some past experience is dissociated or separated off from ongoing awareness--because of pain, fear, shock, stress, or an altered state of consciousness-then it may be possible to recover the memories...
...Many false memories of past sexual abuse appear to have been created in response to leading questions put by overeager therapists or aggressive lawyers...
...And Thomas' s unforgettable, utterly unambiguous, "My Lord and my God...
...I believe: help my unbelief...
...those falsely accused suffer and have their good name besmirched...
...Most sex abusers repeatedly victimize others...
...When the cause of forgetting or amnesia is organic brain damage or disease, no recovery of memories is possible...
...One reasonable approach to the probable truth of an allegation against a person is provided by the pattern of the accused person's life...
...Evidence comes in many forms...
...Innocent victims suffer and have their lives ruined...
...You may never obtain absolute certainty in any judgment, but you can achieve virtual certainty...
...We trust them because over and over we have seen them act faithfully to fulfill their own high moral standards...
...They are reconstructed narratives of the past, subject to many personal vicissitudes...
...marking his 60 years of service to Commonweal and the beginning of Commonweal's 70th year of publication Join us on Thursday, January 20, 1994 12:10 Mass at St...
...Not all claims and accusations of sexual abuse, pedophilia, or incest, are true...
...Subtle cues can be inadvertently conveyed and social reinforcements provided by interrogators operating with a biased set of expectations...
...Or two...
...Where does this leave us when confronting a particular accusation of past sexual abuse, or for that matter, when any contradictory account of past events is being alleged and denied, as in the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings...
...After all, so many powerful sayings were compact in four words--Mother Julian's visionary "All shall be well," for instance...
...Cardinal Bernardin's goodness and integrity of life give his testimony to the world...
...Think of how we can gradually realize that we have read a book before and then remember the rest of the plot...
...Unreliable false accounts, even 6:17 December 1993 Commonwealhighly distorted eyewitness reports can emerge as though truly remembered...
...Once you know about false memories and the unreliability of accounts, especially on the part of children, have you solved the problem of remembered sexual abuse...
...But at the same time, "false memories" also exist as a psychological fact of life...
...Jesus is Lord...
...One party may be consciously lying, or one or another party may also be in the throes of sincere self-deception, accessing their falsely reconstructed memories...
...OF SEVERAL MINDS Sidney Callahan MEMORY CAN PLAY TRICKS AND SO CAN THERAPISTS he recent allegation of sodomy leveled at Cardinal Joseph Bemardin has raised questions about the phenomenon of recovered memory...
...Perhaps certain psychological findings can help sort through the present morass...
...You exercise doubt, test different hypotheses, control for your own biases, and examine the pattern of converging evidence--including baseline data and what isn't there...
...I could as soon believe Bemardin guilty of sexual abuse as countenance the claim that Mother Teresa secretly tortures animals, or that the pope is plotting to restore communism to Poland...
...This phenomenon is called hypermnesia...
...For my money no better method of applied reasoning exists than an approximation of the scientific method...
...Go in peace...
...I predict that this particular crown of thorns and public scourging will not end in a public crucifixion...
...As when Sherlock Holmes noticed that the dog didn't bark...
...After all, character is displayed by consistent habitual behavior, over time and across different situations...
...You collect information, work to uncover your own expectancies, and avoid jumping to conclusions...
...Perhaps Emily Dickinson summed it up when she observed that "the banquet of abstemiousness effaces that of wine" (even if it did take her eight words to say it...
...Clerical pedophilia, clerical sexual abuse, and incest occur and cause horrible pain and psychological suffering for their victims...
...Just as a memorable meal can be prepared from a few simple ingredients, so can a feast of meaning be conveyed by an apparent dearth of words...
...For that matter, didn't one word often say what most needed to be said...
...Yet the sorrow and pity of sexual abuse among Christians remains...
...A recovery may come about because certain cues are newly present, or a previous state of altered consciousness is reexperienced, or an effort is made to attend more carefully to heretofore unnoticed personal experiences...
...DEBORAH SMITH DOUGLAS Deborah Smith Douglas is a writer, wife, and mother who has been weighing her words on a sabbatical in Scotland...
...By no means...
...It is important to realize that what psychologists have called "confident confabulations" are not the same thing as malicious lies which are consciously devised to deceive or harm others...
...He is risen !" "Come and see...
...The first fact we have to confront is that persons who appear to be normal or even moral can secretly indulge in acts of sexual victimization of those in their care...
...By the end of the week (much of which I spent secretly counting the words of, and lamenting the excesses of, telephone conversations, newspaper headlines, and public service announcements on the radio), I was convinced that five words--or four, or three, or even two--can speak volumes...
...And how could Peter have borne another syllable in Jesus' piercing "Do you love me...
...To resolve a specific dilemma we have to employ practical reasoning processes to the particular case...
...Of course people do lie and knowingly bear false witness, but persons can also be sincerely mistaken in their memories...
...I recalled how moved I had been, on the remote Hebridean Isle of Iona, by the inscription on the watchtower of the lonely abbey church: "Stand fast...
...over time a person can remember more and more of the past...
...The more I browsed, the more I came up with handfuls of fives...
...The human mind and memory do not process information like a computer in which discrete data go into storage and can be retrieved, intact, on command...
...Make haste to help me...
...Good persons are predictably moral and reliable...
...Human memories are much more complex...
...Weak, evil, mentally ill, or addicted persons continue to display disturbed patterns of behavior...
...As psychologists study the processes of human perception, imagination, emotion, and cognition, it has become clear that illusory memories of past events can be constructed...
...Surely "Alleluia" and "Amen" are all we really need most of the time...
...And for me, one of the most perfect visual brushstrokes in the Gospels is the detail from the story of the disciples on the Emmaus road: "They stood still, looking sad...
...ts the cun'ent epidemic a modern replay of the Salem witchhunts...
...Moreover, once a false memory has been created, the imagined reconstruction may be elaborated, rehearsed, and heavily invested in as a true account...
...Commonweal 17 December 1993:7...
...Even the fact that the facts have been forgotten is also forgotten...
...What compressed sorrow lies in "Jesus wept," what immensities of self-offering are implied in "Yes, Lord...
Vol. 120 • December 1993 • No. 22
