Poetics of Memory

This essay was the reason I really started to enjoy the sessions, and is helping me to start thinking about my final piece. In fact this essay is the reason my final peice for my degree show is about memory. Memory has always somehow had a hand in all of my work. It was a running theme.

Although very different to the essay on the poetics of cloth, the idea around memory lead me to False memory symdrome.

 

‘A group of families and professionals affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and the Johns Hopkins Medical Institution in Baltimore created the False Memory Syndrome Foundation in 1992 because they saw a need for an organization that could document and study the problem of families that were being shattered when adult children suddenly claimed to have recovered repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse. Across the country, parents had been reporting that they had received phone calls and letters accusing them of committing horrifying acts that allegedly had happened decades earlier. The following letter is typical of many:

Dear First Name and Last Name,
Why am I writing this letter: To state the truth – Dad I remember just about everything you did to me. Whether you remember it or not is immaterial – what’s important is I remember. I had this experience the other day of regressing until I was a child just barely verbal. I was screaming and crying and absolutely hysterical. I was afraid that you were going to come and get me and torture me. That is what sexual abuse is to a child – the worst torture…I needed your protection, guidance and understanding. Instead I got hatred, violation, humiliation and abuse. I don’t have to forgive you…I no longer give you the honor of being my father.
“C”

The same father had previously received letters such as the following:

Mom and Dad, Hi! Just thought I would drop you a line to say hi! I have been so busy lately I have forgotten to tell you guys how much I love you. You two have done so much for me…You have continually supported me, loved me, and helped me work through my various problems and adventures…I just wanted you guys to know that you are appreciated. I seldom tell you how much you guys mean to me…I love you more than words can say.
Love “C”

What had happened in these families and in the lives of the now-adult children that resulted in such terrible alienation?

‘Renowned child psychologist Jean Piaget told the story of his own false memory. He said that his earliest memory was of being kidnapped when he was two years old. He recalled sitting in his baby carriage and watching his nurse defend herself. He saw scratches on her face and a police officer chase the kidnapper away. Others in his family told the story and Piaget was sure it had happened. But it had not. Piaget’s former nurse wrote to his family more than a decade later that she had made up the story. Piaget wrote: “I therefore must have heard, as a child the account of this story…and projected it into the past in the form of a visual memory, which was a memory of a memory, but false.”

http://www.fmsfonline.org

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