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Duncan Smith's avatar

For some reason, this reminds me of the 'recovered memories' craze of the 1990s. Some therapists persuaded their clients to 'remember' things that never happened.

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Janice Fiamengo's avatar

Exactly. Feminism similarly persuades women to remember things that never happened.

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Duncan Smith's avatar

I just googled it, here's one interview with a women who 'remembered' the abuse then later recanted https://www.salon.com/2010/09/20/meredith_maran_my_lie_interview/

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Janice Fiamengo's avatar

Thanks for this. I had two friends at university, both of whom were working hard to remember, in their 20s, that their fathers had done things to them. Two narcissistic, troubled women, causing trouble.

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Derpetology101's avatar

I do believe that people repress memories, but only consciously. It's the thing that people do when they just decide to stop dwelling on something and move on. I also believe that people can be in denial of reality, both internally and externally, but the idea that an existent traumatic memory could somehow be inaccessible and then 'recovered' in therapy makes no sense.

These so-called 'recovered memories' are almost certainly 'implanted memories'. Elizabeth Loftus studied implanted memories and her research shows very convincingly that it's quite easy to make people 'remember' things that can be verified to have never happened. For this she was once assaulted by a woman on an airplane with a rolled up magazine. The woman believed that recovered memories were real and that Loftus was denying justice to victims.

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Notorious P.A.T.'s avatar

That craze was also fully supported by the feminist movement:

https://culteducation.com/group/1255-false-memories/6420-feminism-fanaticism-and-false-memories.html

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