Repressed Memory


The first thing I learned when I studied Ericksonian hypnosis was that the past is a fiction. When I first heard that it seemeed like it couldn't be true, because, after all, I remember the past. Was everything I remembered false? A few years later I would hear the same premise in the words of the Master of Assassins, Hassan i'Sabbah: "Nothing is true, everything is permitted." Of course that statement is false on the face of it. ; )

As I began to get a more nuanced view of things I understood that a person doesn't remember things the way they really happened, they remember their interpretation of events. So for example a memory from when you were eleven is something interpreted through the understanding of an eleven-year-oid. The basis of the inner child work, which I mocked yesterday, is that there are things the child knows but is afraid to bring to consciousness because they are overwhelming to the child's limited grasp of the situation. And the reason for bringing the material to consciousness is so that the child can be relieved of the burden of the secret, and the split off complex can be healed.

That's the idea, but there's no real evidence that material which is edited out of the child's sense of continuity was edited out by mistake. There's a lot of talk about how unfortunate it is that so much of what makes a child beautiful and open is forced into the shadow, but if the child did not experience disapproval and rejection of those parts, they wouldn't be rejected. Ma Barker's boys didn't repress their joie de vivre.

What seems to be more likely is that one's remembered life is a story, and it gains in complexity as you continue to work with it. For example, when I was a child, the Spring House was a sensual experience. I went down the great stone slab steps into the underground room made of stones hewn from a quarry just down the mountain, and fashioned by slave labor into the terraces and stone structures on the property. It was an experience of the coolness of it, the taste of the water from the deep cistern, the minnows darting back and forth in the more shallow minnow pool. It was the feel of the gourd dipper, and the feeling of being alone, unseen by any other people. With time this image is connected to the archetypal power of the Spring, and of a communion with the daemon of the Spring House. Superfluous details are pared away because they can't survive time's ending; the only thing that survives is what is irreducible. The story begins to form over the archetypal core snugly enough to weather a storm.

This is the basic formula Don Juan is teaching Carlos, about sorcery. He says, "The sorcerer is an empty man except for a collection of stories with a universal application."

If this is the goal, to become archetypal by doing away with what is destructible, material is approached differently than if the goal is to solidify a memory. For example, if I am seeing a therapist and I recall the Spring House, and the feeling of privacy there, the therapist might ask, "And why did you feel like you needed privacy? Was somebody watching you?"

"I don't think so. I mean, people are around, you know, when you're playing out in the yard."

"What people? Who lived next door?"

"This old lady. She lived alone and she had a television, so I'd get to watch television there. She had a son and my dad used to laugh when he came to our house because he said, 'He didn't come to see me, Ruby, he came to see you.'"

"Did this man ever look at your ... wee wee?"

"One time I was pissing on his fence and he was watching me, and he said, 'You shouldn't do that.'"

"Did you think it was, unusual, for an adult to watch you ... wee wee?"

Well, you see where this is going. It leaves the Spring House and begins to search for sexual material, and it can always be found because it is an integral part of life, and that is where children live. They simply ignore the sexuality all around them for the most part, but they have their sexual experiences, too. I was greatly excited once when I was stripped naked and thrown, complaining bitterly, into a pile of hay with a naked little girl. I still see her dark, Italian eyes, impossibly round with wonder when we looked at each other. We were probably three, thrown in together by some older girls as a kind of curiosity. "What do you think they'll do?"

"So," I said, in broken English, "you live around here?" I probably didn't say anything and have no evidence at all she was Italian. All I remember is the moment of contact between us, solidified by an erotic jolt.

The moment is retained at which there was a shock of pleasure in being naked with that little girl. There is much more to the memory in the mind of the therapist, because it is not her memory. She wants to know who the older girls were. "Your sister did that to you? And how did that make you feel about your sister?" You begin to see how quickly the recall shifts from an actual memory into what is essentially the story that you put around it. You use information and logic to fill in the missing memory and it seems like it is the same as the un-cued memory. But on examination, much of it is cued by the question, and is essentially made up from thoughts, not memory. In this way somebody who is presented with a Spring House and begins looking around the neighborhood for something with prurient flavor, will find it, because it's everywhere. It's one of the unfortunate aspects of being raised by animals, even if they do shave and dress.

So one person might have this theory of bringing the child out as a good thing, and somebody else might say, "Am I bringing out a child or a creative exercise by an adult? And if it is the latter, what scenario am I engaging with this person?" As often as not, the scenario is one in which being the child is code for having innocence, that is to say, releasing all responsibility, and being the therapist is code for being the parent, who contains the child in a protective and nurturing framework until such time this child doesn't need parenting.

If this sounds suspiciously like S&M you win the cigar which is however just a cigar, sometimes. Moving right along, I'm not talking about all therapists, because I've known some very good psychologists who know how easy it is to cue material from somebody who wants to please them, or create a drama to obscure the real source of anxiety, which often as not is a great dark secret in the collective unconscious. That means everybody has the same secret, which makes it hardly worth keeping secret. In many cases there is no cure because there is no illness. There is just a gradual acceptance of the human condition, and a loss of innocence. Often the problem is more the fear of breaking what is perfect -- the mother child oneness -- and suffering the guilt involved, commonly called, "the fall," than having been marked for life by what was behind the woodshed door.

There might be some families that burn black candles and rape the children instead of watching The Daily Show and walking the dog, but that is mostly confined to the aristocracy. Every family has patterning that reaches back generations and will reach forward generations. The most useful way of dealing with the energy is what the unconscious process is trying to do by itself. This is to say, if you believe in evolution, you look for the direction that the unconscious is trying to move, and move with it.

Deeply unconscious material is often linked to the sexual energy in the form of fantasy because that is the way it can come to consciousness. It begins as a fantasy, the origins of which the person, adult or child, is not aware because it is unconscious. That doesn't mean you sort of know about it. It is not part of the conscious ego. So to come to consciousness it attaches itself to the sex drive, which reaches down into the deep instinctual body and grows outward on a stalk about yea long or opens up into a tropical flower. The fantasy material rides the sex drive up like taking an elevator and then there's an observation deck and a table with a cigarette, a gold lighter, and a snifter of brandy.

Eventually, the fantasy, like a dream, will become more clear and the pattern behind it will be available. The conscious mind does not grasp a dream, or a fantasy, until it can deal with the pattern that is at its foundation. The reason it doesn't grasp it is that it is shut out of the loop, because if it saw too much too quickly, a resistance would be set up and the process would be derailed.

I can give an example from Milton Erickson of how the unconscious will withhold information for a long term gain. When Erickson was a child, in grade school, he had several perceptual problems. He was dyslexic, tone deaf, and crippled from polio. So he was sort of left alone to follow his own course, and his "problems" made it understandable that he did not grasp the concept of alphabetical order.

When he wanted to find a word, he didn't grasp that he could go straight to it. He started at the front of the dictionary and began to look for it. He had to go through a lot of words to find it. One day the unconscious decided he had completed one piece of a long term plan it was carrying through, and it gave him the concept in a flash of light. It hit him with a blinding revelatory power. By that time, as you can imagine, he had developed an extensive and powerful vocabulary, which was the foundation of his work as the world's greatest medical hypnotist.

If someone had interfered enough that process could have been jeopardized. But the person trying to "correct" it would be certain that it was out of love and a desire to help a handicapped kid keep up with the other kids. In fact, it was his unique way of perceiving that allowed Erickson to "see" in the language of the body so well. For instance, if somebody wore a tool belt much of the time, his arms would allow for it when moving to the sides or swinging. He could see that kind of thing, much like Sherlock Holmes making his elementary deductions, based on a finely tuned perception of what is invisible to most everyone else.

As a hypnotist, or more accurately, as someone who studied hypnosis, I began to find certain underlying tenets that guided my communication, or relationships. Some of them come from Erickson, and one of my favorites is: "The meaning of any communication is the response that it gets. There is no other meaning. The impression that there is other meaning is in your head, and is not part of the communication."

"Nothing is true, everything is permitted," took a little while for me to accept as an underlying tenet. My first tricky thought was that it is self-negating, because if nothing is true then the statement that nothing is true is not true. But that's just a word game, the same as saying that if it is true it is nothing. That is a logical conundrum. "The past is always fiction" doesn't rattle my head as much. It is important to know that what a client presents as a factual past is not a factual past. It is a perceived past, filtered not just through personal perceptions, but through collective patterns.

The endogenic pattern was a form of family marriage in small groups or bands where everyone is related. The symbol was the cross with a circle around it, and it is one of the most ancient of symbols. It shows the separation into four quadrants. The son cannot marry into his father's direct lineage, so he can marry his mother's brother's daughter. His sister can marry her brother.

This forms the basis of the incest taboo. The right to marry inside the family left consciousness by the route things normally take; the divine right of kings is the last exit. That is the last stop. But once they are outside of consciousness, they don't just go away. They cause disturbances which reflect the tabooed material, such as sexual relations with parents or siblings, which comes up in fantasy. Should this fantasy be allowed to develop it would eventually depotentiate the disturbance. That doesn't mean a memory of having sex with your brother is a fantasy, but it means if it just shows up as dream material, or active imagination, it isn't reliable as a memory of an event in your brother's reality. Somebody with schizophrenic tendencies can't put a border around what is collective, outer experience, and what is inner experience. Somebody calling out the inner child as a dissociated personality is inviting schizophrenic tendencies to manifest.

This may be one of the areas where therapists use hypnosis with what they do not understand, and thus believe they are recovering memories which are more likely disturbances from the unconscious endogenic complex, now completely covered over by the modern exogenic system of acceptable mating choices. Keep in mind that there are hypnotists with popular followings who specialize in past life regressions, and bring forward what is accepted by them and their clients as real events. You can't prove someone didn't have a past life in the same way that you can't prove you don't have weapons of mass destruction. You can't prove a negative.

There is an interesting film which shows how this can operate at at a scapegoating level, in which there is an emotional tendency or desire on the part of adults to molest children, which results in a community shadow situation, where they take on the huge community shadow around this most feared of shadow material, and are sacrificed in order to clear it from the collective. It is one of the strangest films on this subject, and one which was made in large part as home movies by the family which was accused of horrific acts of child exploitation and sexual abuse. The film is "Capturing the Friedmans."

(When I say that it operating at the scapegoating level, I don't mean that some innocent person is sacrificed. I mean that the person takes on a deeply unconscious and rejected energy from the collective, and is subsequently destroyed as a way to remove the shadow from the collective. This is a time honored way to remove the shadow from the collective, and is certainly the basis for putting all the shadow onto the Christ figure and then crucifying him, then rebirthing him for the next year's ritual. It is a way to control the collective shadow with ritual, instead of actually sacrificing human members of the collective through ritual murder.)

Mr. Friedman, who went to prison, was big on home movies, and there was extensive footage of the family as this investigation began to tear it apart. There was evidence that he was in fact a pedophile, but the evidence that he acted on it was as I recall primarily interviews with the children, One of the people interviewed pointed out that if what they described had really happened, there would have been a lot of physical damage and certainly a lot of screaming and pain. "It would have been a scene out of Dante's Inferno," she said. Yet people were dropping off their kids and picking them up without noticing anything untoward.

So at the end of the movie, I, at least, was left knowing that neither side was true. The perception by the police and prosecution was a scene that couldn't have happened, but they clung to it because it was presented as true by children, who were given at least minimal cueing for what the adults were looking for from them. Yet Friedman did have these desires, and did attract the fantasies. In some way, by taking them on, he was like the junior officer in "Master and Commander," who had to jump overboard clutching a cannonball to remove the shadow he had taken on from the collective. He was to some extent guilty, but he couldn't have done what he was accused of doing. The film ends with no resolution. There is no truth to be gleaned from either side of the argument.

The more despised any behavior is, the more dangerous it becomes in the shadow, and the more need there is to find the scapegoat to put it onto. An easy way to see that is to look at the sentence recently given a man for having illegal photographs and literature depicting child molestation. He had no actual accuser except the state and there was no charge that he actually hurt anybody. His sentence? Well, the prosecution asked for 340 years, but the judge whittled that down to 200 years. That is so out of proportion to the crime that one has to conclude that this is not part of the actual justice system, which doesn't give a murderer that much time. It is part of a deeper and hidden system of shadow transfer.

I am like most people, and find the subject disturbing. I tried to watch "The Woodsman," about a child molester, and I didn't get through it. I had to shift to The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, which I watch about every month or so. But at the same time I know that there are a lot of normal people who are classed as sex offenders because of a statutory offense, like he was twenty and she was seventeen, and there are a lot of people who are targeted as having done something which was fantasy material from the endogenic pattern in the collective unconscious. A repressed memory may be fictional, or it may not be. But there is a great danger in assuming it is an accurate recall of a past event.

If there is one area where I see hypnosis has not been so benign as the teachers claim it to be, it is here. And that is why somebody who knows how to induce a trance doesn't necessarily know enough to evaluate the material that might come up. This is especially true if there is transference, for example when the hypnotist is dealing with an issue and transfers it onto other people, unconsciously. By asking leading or suggestive questions, or through minimal cueing, repressed desires, attaching to the sexual drive in fantasy form, can be confused with memories of actual events.

That was the first thing I learned, when I was twenty-one, and hypnotized my wife after reading a how-to book. She was telling me a memory of a man chasing her. She was not presenting it as a dream, and I was thinking it was a real event. But there were things in it which were not logically possible, and I determined it to be dream image registering as a memory. Somebody else might have ignored the logical problems as a child's confusion. I didn't think that there was no basis for the memory, but I know that the reason we tell children fairy tales about monsters and witches and trolls is that they are real, and children see them. By telling them the fairy tales we assure the children that they are not crazy.

Posted: Fri - April 6, 2007 at 06:15 PM