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psychology
August 2008 
Psychology as Literature
Posted on May 24th, 2007
by 
MrTeacup
MrTeacup
This NYT article reports that healthy, well-adjusted people tend to remember bad experiences in the third person, while maladjusted people tend to remember then in the first person. To this, Jason Kottke says:
But things like eating disorders and mental illness aren't external forces and thinking about a bad memory as if it happened to a third party is not the truth.
Perhaps the way to true personal acheivement and happiness is through lying to yourself instead of being honest, loafing instead of practicing, and purposely forgetting information.
But maybe it is the truth. Who is this "I" who had that bad experience? It's not me. There's a historical me, sure... but that's just a collection of memories. The real me exists only in this moment, and never leaves it. Even recalling a memory happens in this moment. Maybe reliving a past experience in the first person, as if it was happening to me right now, is the real deception.
But if the only Me is the now-Me, then telling a fanciful tale of triumph over adversity is also a delusion. All histories are false histories -- biased and altered and filtered and edited by your immediate concerns. It might be better to have the happy story because it keeps you safe from the unhappy story, but if you drop stories altogether, why have a story at all? They are handy if you need to tell someone something about yourself, but you don't have to believe in them, do you?
What if someone asked you about a distant, painful experience, and you told them every detail as you remembered it. But what does it mean, they ask? I don't know. Why interpret it at all? Maybe this is actually what the healthy people are doing. They don't know what it means, but they remember it happened, so they tell you a story drawn from the culture's myths about how they faced down their demons. Its not so much that healthy people have stories with happy endings; they just aren't tied to unhappy stories, they have the flexibility to paint it in a positive light. But this is very different from dissociation, in which case you'd supress your memories of the event.
Access: PublicTagged with: psychology
LOL
~Ww
I agree with most of what you said. There's a difference, though, between falsity and inaccuracy. If a man remembers a car as a darker shade of blue than it really was when it hit him, he's not lying when he tells the story – he's just wrong. History itself isn't what's false, but our attempts at reliving it, because our minds are fallible.
It's kind of scary to think about, because we are made up of the experiences we remember. To remember our experiences inaccurately can do nothing but change who we are. Not that it's necessarily a bad thing, though.
FreeThinks,
Good points. I don't mean history is false in the sense of lying. I mean that we often take our memories to be objective fact, when they are much less than that. So false in the sense of not being a perfect representation of events.
You say ”History itself isn't what's false, but our attempts at reliving it, because our minds are fallible.”
You seem to be drawing a distinction between History on one hand, and our memory of it on the other. But if we had no memory, we would have no History, so it doesn't seem like History really exists independently of our memory at all.
It certainly doesn't seem so. But our inability to recall events doesn't change the fact that they happened, and that the present reality is a direct result of them. For example, we don't remember that dinosaurs once existed, but they did nevertheless.
That's an oversimplification of the point I was trying to make, but meh.
Overall, I like your ideas on history and your objective presentation of them. Particularly, I like the fact that you made me think. High five. =)