wallsofsilence.com

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Dennis:

I'd like to continue here the discussion about what you stated of the Loftus tape in this thread.

I've already seen the tape. Who made it? Why are some passages in Dutch --is it for Dutch TV? Who interviewed Loftus? Did you or someone else actually read the whole sheet of paper which Loftus regretted having written about her past?

The interview pretty much demonstrates what I told Phil a few days ago: real psychology is forbidden in the academia. It's just too painful and so-called psychologists better discuss the minds of other people. As a methodology, it's as stupid as trying to understand love by interviewing lovers instead of --God forbid!-- talking about one's own love affairs the past.

It's outrageous that, when a true psychologist like John Modrow wants to publish his own introspections and extremely painful self-analyses, he had to self-publish. As he told me thru handwritten mail, the whole publishing establishment rejected his manuscript even though Peter Breggin and Theodore Lidz wrote warm endorsements of it.

I finished my fourth book with the statement that deMause and the psychohistorians have a lunatic side beside their brilliant model precisely because (unlike Miller or Modrow) they don't write about their own childhood. The self cannot be approached empirically, as if it were a scientific object like the moon or a rock.

Academic psychology is really fucked: it's one of the stupidest careers I know.

The interview was made by the Dutchman Wim Kayzer for Dutch television. The interview was part of a series of interviews about Consolation and Beauty with Karel Appel, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Catherine Bott, John M. Coetzee, Richard Dufallo, Freeman Dyson, Rudi Fuchs, Jane Goodall, Stephen Jay Gould, Germaine Greer, Gy?rgy Konr?d, Rutger Kopland, Leon Lederman, Gary Lynch, Yehudi Menuhin, Martha Nussbaum, Richard Rorty, Simon Schama, Roger Scruton, Wole Soyinka, George Steiner, Tatjana Tolstaja, Dubravka Ugresic, Steven Weinberg, Edward Witten.

The interview with Loftus was on TV when I was in Holland in 2000 and I really enjoyed seeing how Wim Kayzer exposed Loftus in such a calm and direct way. I knew Kayzer from before when he made a television series in 1993 where he had 6 scientists around a table talking about why people are who they are. The 6 scientists were: Daniel C. Dennett, Freeman Dyson, Stephen Jay Gould, Oliver Sacks, Rupert Sheldrake en Stephen Toulmin. It was really interesting to see these minds interact with each other. I remember Oliver Sacks making a remark close to the end saying something like: 'Or perhaps Alice Miller is right with her claims', refering to her first book when discussing the influence of child rearing.

I haven't read the whole sheet that Loftus wrote.



Well said!

Dennis

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Everything I write here is my opinion, not absolute truths but I don't want to start every sentence with in my opinion...

Cesar Wrote:


Because of the emotional disconnection on the part of academia, they place their efforts on describing and treating mainly what they can see (observe), the symptom, resulting in the misconception of making the symptom the cause. As if the symptom (i.e. neurosis) preceded the illness (repressed trauma). This is like saying that the symptom exists haphazardly and in chaos, which contradicts the scientific laws they hold so close to their heart (clinical mind) and the ?objective views? that they like to broadcast.

They focus more on the classification of symptoms (i.e. ADHD) and believe that by giving, the varied forms of neurosis fancy names, they have gained a ?handle? on the disorder or ?found an (acceptable) cure?. Academia also holds the view that each form of neurosis is a separate entity, believing that they are unrelated and basically different. But if they were honest with themselves, which would require emotion, they would see that neurology shows that they are not much different.

And following the diagnosis of the symptom (neurosis), and prescribing and applying the harmful treatment (abuse in itself), they contribute to spreading new types of neurosis and burying the truth (cause) even further, which is always evading them, all the while assisting the patient in hiding their own personal truth. I would say that today?s quackery (psychology) prefers complexness and superfluous details to simple conscious feelings.

Emotional disconnection makes them blind to the source of illness. If they were to peak over the wall of repression, they would find a storehouse of knowledge waiting to answer, enhance and address their inquiries and study. Ah, but their defenses keep them from taking risks and so they choose otherwise and remain in old, familiar, safe, conventional territory. We are then left with the blind (academia) leading the blind (unconscious).

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The late Loren Mosher, a major psychiatry dissident, stated in an interview:



Mosher was educated in a helping-mode family: a rarity in the U.S. of his time. He was a very humane and candid psychiatrist. But even he, like Theodore Lidz whom I mentioned recently in another thread, was afraid of placing the full burden of guilt on the parents' shoulders.

In my view, this is the main reason why, unlike the women's rights movement of the 1960s along with the blacks and the gays liberation movement, the antipsychiatry movement of the 1960s didn't flourish. Neither Szasz nor Foucault, Lidz, Mosher, Arieti, Laing, Cooper and the other 1960s critics of psychiatry and pioneers of the trauma model of mental disorders broke away totally with the taboo. We are dealing with what I call in my latest book "the foundational taboo of the human species". That's why two books by Miller were my enlightened witness: only when I read Miller did I feel vindicated. As told elsewhere, even deMause goes to psychiatric meetings in spite of the fact that psychiatry abuses millions of children.

In another thread I posted an image of Kubrick's "Star Child". I guess we guys who post in these forums are the first true overmen in mankind's history. And unlike poor Nietzsche's grandeur delusions, I don't think that this "Starchild/overman" conviction is paranoid. It's just a jump of psychoclass. I believe I posted the diagram that our friend Bookish made in Dan's forum. But I don't remember if I posted it here. We already belong to the psychoclass marked in Canary yellow:

Hi Dennis,

Thanks for making the Loftus video available. It was fascinating.

Dennis Wrote:

Yes I agree. I think that he is an outstanding interviewer. But I also felt sadness for Elizabeth; she had so much unresolved pain and trauma. If she were to face her true feelings, she would become a great debunker of the false memory enterprise.

Dennis Wrote:

There is a book about this interview that I would like to read, would you have a copy of this interview on video too?

Thanks again.

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There is some value in Loftus' legacy. She coauthored a book with Colin Ross about tricky abuse memories.

Remember what Daniel said in his forum? Even false memories of sexual abuse are "genuine" in the sense that the child only wants to express that her parents did something horrible (think about the baby in the video that you linked a few days ago).

The same can be said of memories of so-called "Satanic Ritual Abuse": a subject I discussed with Bookish last year in his private forum.

Yes Cesar, I remember what Daniel said on his forum about false memories still being ?genuine? (to a large degree I think). The child only wants to express what he could not understand, intellectualize or make sense of at the time. They have no point of reference, they can only describe according to their abilities. I would think that if a child was unable to describe and express what happened to them, they would in desperation ?improvise? (or substitute events) in order to find the empathy (knowing witness) they were in need of. I doubt very much that children would casually make things up.

In adults, repression of traumatic feelings goes deep. And I think that as one connects to these feelings, the memories can be ?foggy? at first, but as one progresses the memories get clearer (?genuine?).

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Loftus' work is not about memories being wrong, but that there are no such things as repressed memories of abuse (which has been proven without any doubt that they DO exist). She and her False Memory Syndrome Foundation have damaged thousands if not millions of victims of (sexual) abuse. And why? Because she doesn't want to feel her own repression. And like you said, CC, repression is one of the greatest factors in society, that's being protected.

A memory of abuse that hasn't reached the consciousness, can take the form of a 'cover' memory. Just like a person's nightmares, but then in real life. Bad therapy can cause that as well.

When it comes to Satanic abuse, why would that be such a hard thing to understand? There are plenty of fanatic satanists out there, because there are plenty of fanatic Christian parents out there torturing their kids. In Belgium they even found evidence of satanic ritual abuse. One of the factors that makes it so hard to get into their inner circle is that a possible outsider has to perform nasty rituals that any sane person would put a stop to.

Unfortunately I don't have the other TV series by Wim Kayzer, A Glorious Accident. It's available on video in some Dutch libraries, but that doesn't help. I read somewhere it could be ordered on DVD from the TV station at the ridiculous price of 87 Euros.

Dennis

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Everything I write here is my opinion, not absolute truths but I don't want to start every sentence with in my opinion...

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Yes: At 14 I remembered that my mother spanked me before that age. But in my adult life that memory is gone (I only remember that I remembered it at 14!).


There are certainly. But like UFO abduction SRA in the sense of "multiple victims, multiple perpetrators" like the McMartin preschool trial is certainly a myth. When I learnt that deMause promoted SRA beliefs I printed lots of articles that I have now in a special ring binder for the subject of Satanic Ritual Abuse. In our private exchanges Bookish originally sided deMause and the believers. A little research of his own convinced him that deMause was foolish to take those claims at face value. It's important to stress that Colin Ross, who has patients who claim to be victims of SRA originally believed them. After a while he became skeptical and published that book coauthored with Loftus.

In Wikiland I myself have participated a bit promoting the skeptical position about the claims.

In my opinion, this is one of the reasons why trauma model advocates are not taken seriously. "We must be perfect as our Father in the Heavens is perfect". What the hell do I mean? That people that belong to the Canary yellow psychoclass in the above graph cannot commit mistakes or the lower psychoclasses will focus in our blunders only, and not in our discoveries.

For example, Miller's latest book translated to English is The Body Never Lies. Remember that book-review that Daniel rebutted: a hostile woman reviewer of this book? In The Body Never Lies Miller over-focused somatization of dissociation into diseases: a bit speculative in my view. Daniel stated that that review was the only attack he knew on Miller by another professional. Well: that happened because she got a bit speculative: otherwise Miller's discoveries are unassailable. And it's much worse with some of deMause's bizarre theories (with the exception of the above graph: a giant discovery).

The new "Canary yellow" generation, post-Ross, post-Miller, post-deMause and post-Janov et al cannot believe in a single lunacy.

Dennis Wrote:
Well said Dennis. Also, Loftus could not believe in her fallacy (no such thing as repressed memories of abuse) without first discrediting repressed memories of abuse. She has to make memories wrong in order to support her claim. Loftus supports her conclusion by ridiculing memories and saying that they are wrong.

Dennis Wrote:Yes, her intolerance to painful memories makes them wrong, so she concludes that they don?t exist.

Do these so called pundits (of non existent repressed memory of abuse) question and investigate happy or pleasant repressed memories when they return to their consciousness after some instrumental experience sets them-off? Are the happy repressed memories wrong too? If they are ?loyal? and stand true to their philosophy (otherwise they are hypocrites), it would mean that long lost (but now surfaced) happy memories are false too. This is pitiful!

Oh repression, a friend to the child but now a foe.

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OK, CC: but that's not my point.

To use another example. There is stupendous and shocking footage in Church of Scientology CCHR's DVD against psychiatry. But because of going astray, "behind every crisis after world crisis you'll find the handiwork of psychiatry", the DVD didn't make any substantial impact in the secular world, as can be seen in this article:

http://sameritech.com/tribunearchive/3-22-07.pdf

Something that often gets missed in debates about repressed memories is that there are at least two distinct types of memories. There are higher brain images, which most people call memories, but there are also lower brain feeling memories.
Prior to my own healing journey, many of my childhood memories (the images), were missing their associated feeling components. That is what left me with an impaired feeling capacity. I have also recovered many image memories.
But these things are hard to prove scientifically. I don't know if there is any proof of repressed memory that wouldl satisfy scientists.
What can happen in bad therapy is that strong feeling memories are accessed in a disconnected way. Thats when the person may start unintentionally inventing images to be able to handle the pain: satanic abuse, abduction by aliens, past lives etc.
Its easier to "remember" these things than the reality of our own childhoods.

Phil

Cesar Wrote:Sorry Cesar, I think I lost your point. I do that sometimes.

Hi Phil,

Phil Wrote:Yeah, I think that Janov refers to these as 3rd line and 1st line memories, and they are based on age. I may be wrong though. But nevertheless, repression is involved in all levels of memory which is the main defense to trauma.

Phil wrote:I believe you are talking about awareness and knowledge (of the images) in contrast to consciousness (associating and connecting the feelings to the images). Are you saying that the images kept you (impaired you) from feeling?

Phil wrote:Not necessarily. I think that there is enough evidence in the field of neurology to support that trauma repression (repressed memory) is the cause of illness, neurosis and other psychosomatic sickness, which suggests the existence of repressed memory. It doesn?t satisfy scientist because they are repressed, ego warped and have a financial interest in not accepting this.

Phil wrote:Sad but true. But then, I don?t believe in any therapist anyway. I think that the best therapy is self therapy and access or support from friends (knowing witnesses) when you have them. And you don?t need bad therapy to access strong feeling memories in a disconnected way. We do it all the time. That?s repression.

Phil wrote:Although these are extreme examples, repression takes many forms.

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The fact that there are two types of memories; image and feeling, is different but related to Janov's 1st, 2nd, and 3rd lines.

The truth is, for me, most of the feeling component of my childhood was missing, prior to therapy. I had images, but no recall of how that incident made me feel at that time.
Then there were many other incidents, totally missing from memory.

Recovering image memories does not seem to be as important as recovering the feelings. Thats why it's helpful for people to connect with "memories" of alien abductions etc.
But connecting with the correct memory will have people feeling better, and thinking clearly and making sense. Because the memories of their lives makes sense.

Phil

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My father accepts that he hit me. And he accepts that my mother surreptitiously poured drugs in my meals when I was a teenager. What he doesn't accept is how I felt about it --even if he sees me crying when I confront him about those happenings.