Our sense of identity is a stable construct that represents, among other things, the summation of all of our memories and experiences. The paradox is that, as has become increasingly apparent to Neuroscience, our memories are not only extraordinarily unreliable but also extraordinarily plastic. This is noticeable at all levels, from the individual in intensive Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis to the institutional memory of our largest societal structures.
An attractive, very bright young woman entered into an intensive Psychotherapy to deal with issues related to her chronic insecurity, her tendency to get involved with unsuitable and disappointing men, and her chronic unhappiness. Early on a pattern became apparent. She tended to heavily idealize new men she met, as long as they met certain threshold criteria (particularly in terms of their looks, intelligence, and job prospects.) For the first month or two of dating, the new relationship would be all I heard about in her sessions. Nothing else mattered in her life and all efforts to engage her in reflection about the man in question (about whom she often offered very early signs that all was not as rosy as she believed) were met with an angry accusation that I didn't want her to be happy. In fact, she would continue, this man was the answer to all her problems and I didn't want it to work out because if it did, she wouldn't need my help anymore and I wouldn't get her money!
[I might add that she was paying a very low fee at the time, and she knew, from previous therapy and from friends, that she was paying a very low fee.]
She would fantasize about marriage and their future together for several sessions and then, without apparent warning, he would disappear from her sessions. Upon my inquiry, she would mention that she had stopped seeing him because he was a loser.
Her ability to explore what had happened was very limited for quite a while but eventually we were able to understand what typically happened.
After several iterations, my patient met the "perfect man."
He was extremely talented and very good looking; he was quite well known in his field. In addition, he was as excited by her as she was by him. She blandly mentioned that, though he (and she) were both in their 30s, he still lived with his mother. Further, until he met her (so he told her) he had only dated women younger than 21.
Either of these facts, on their own, would be sufficient to at least wonder whether this man had the requisite emotional health and maturity for a long term relationship. Furthermore, because I was quite aware of her tendency to use important others as "self objects" (ie, as means for stabilizing a positive sense of herself) I had some reason to expect he had a similar level of self-pathology. In such cases, as soon as the important other disappoints, they lose their value as external buttresses for the damaged person's self-esteem. Such people, which includes but is not limited to Narcissistic and Borderline characters, tend to "split" objects into all-good and all-bad. When an all-good object fails them, the person's rage at the disappointment and sense of shame causes the object to shift to become all-bad. Usually the relationship ends at that point. (This is one of the difficulties in conducting therapy with such people; disappointments are inevitable in every human interaction and maintaining the therapy in the face of such reactions is a difficult technical problem.)
For the purposes of this discussion, the salient aspect is that once the inevitable disappointment occurred, a transformation in my patient's emotional life took place that was a marvel to witness. Not only was he a terrible disappointment and a loser but he had always been a terrible disappointment and a loser. She insisted she had always known that he was inappropriate ("how could someone who still lives with his mother at 35 be much of a man") but had chosen to overlook his shortcomings, knowing it wouldn't last, because she had enjoyed dating him.
It is important to recognize that not only did the ex-boyfriend become, in the present and the past, a different person, but she experienced herself as a different person as well. She had been deeply in love, ready to make th move into marriage, family, an entire new aspect of her life was about to unfold. Her future husband was flawless and so was she. In fact, he needed to be imagined as perfect in order for her to feel that she was perfect. When he failed her (by dating an 18 year old while they were supposedly in love) the disappointment meant that if he remained perfect, she would have to accept that she was deeply flawed. Her rage would not tolerate such an outcome (which would have led to a serious depression) so she devalued him; he became worthless and she maintained her protective sense of herself as without flaws. In order to protect herself from knowing of her obviously flawed choice, she had to change her memory to "remember" that he had always been a poor choice.
It took many years of work before she was able to tolerate recognizing her own imperfections and she had to negotiate significant depression and rage to arrive at some comfort with a more accurate picture of herself, flaws and all.
I was reminded of this patient by an interview on NPR this morning. The subject was Douglass Feith, one of the architects of the Iraq War regularly demonized as an evil neocon. The lie that has metastasized back through time to infect the origins of the Iraq War is that Douglass Feith, among others, had spun the intelligence, if not overtly lied us into war. The radio host, in a mildly hostile tone, pointed out that he had been accused of ignoring those who had raised questions about the rationale for the war and of having spun the Intel. Feith rather indignantly challenged the host. He said that at the time, no one in the intelligence community, no one, had doubted that Saddam Hussein was a threat. Saddam Hussein had a history of use of WMD, he had extensive WMD programs, (though the extent of the programs were unknown, and in hind sight, obviously much less than expected), and he had ongoing relationships with terrorist groups. In the post-9/11 world, no one suggested he was not a threat to use his WMD against us.
I would add that the various 9/11 commissions have concluded that there was no administration attempt to "spin" Intel and there exists no evidence that anyone in the Bush administration lied about WMD. Yet the lie, that "Bush lied", persists.
Our Senators almost universally supported the war to remove Saddam Hussein. As time has passed and the war has proven to be more difficult than anyone expected (though admittedly there were some voices raised suggesting it would be an error) the need for some to prove that they were, and are, truly smart and wise and morally good, has caused memories to shift. If they foolishly voted for war, their sense of themselves as smart and wise solons must be questioned since the war is so obviously (to them) a disaster. Only by changing the past, joining with all those others who have turned against the war in the only way acceptable to their self-esteem, by imagining they were lied to, can they preserve such an image of themselves. The war has been twisted by the left into something evil and immoral, foolish at best, criminal at worst. To avoid the taint of having voted for such an effort and the terrible blot it would impose on their escutcheon, it is easier to preserve self-esteem by finding they were lied to than by accepting responsibility for their own actions.
Changing the past is a time honored way to escape responsibility. It should be shameful but, unfortunately, it works only too well.
George Orwell would not be surprised.
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