3 June 2009: "Sometimes I just want to float away…"

This post is about recovered memories. Carles begins by hazily recalling the plot of the film Forrest Gump, a movie that itself is about the false memories of nostalgia that affected the Baby Boomer generation in the 1990s. Carles highlights the aspects of the film that most parallel the substance of the so-called recovered memories induced by charlatan therapists and other dubious mental health practitioners: incest, the fundamental social taboo.

I remember in the popular movie Forrest Gump,
Tom Hanks and Jenny say ‘make me a bird, so I can fly far, far away’
as Jenny tries to escape from her father’s physical and sexual abuse
Eventually she ‘becomes a slut’ when she grows up
and in a way she sort of became a bird
and flew far, far away from ‘innocence’ [via dying of AIDS]

With the image he has selected, Carles highlights the motif of "floating away" as an objective correlative for both the experience of processing trauma and repressing it.

Is forgetting a "healthy" response to traumatic experience? Or is it a dangerous evasion, a means of circumventing the necessary work for healing? Moreover, is the pressure to remember a inadvertent means of grounding the real in fiction, of demanding the manufacture of trauma to provide the working material for the construction of mental health? Overzealous therapists would have us cast all adult experience as a kind of fall from grace, a flight from innocence, so that it can be "healed" by their ministrations into invented, paradigmatic experiences from childhood. Using various hypnotic and autosuggestive techniques, such therapists can call forth archetypal but entirely contrived memories, conforming those unfortunates in whom these memories are planted to established labile personality types. These unwitting conformists Carles is in the practice of calling "alts."

Just want to be a lite lil alt
and float away while holding some balloons
and have the balloons represent some sort of ‘guiding force’
or maybe something that helps me 2 ‘escape’

Here, of course, the guiding force is the therapist, and behind the therapist is the collective force of the entire normative mental-health establishment, and behind that is the state itself, ever vigilant in pursuing ever more innovative techniques for the formation of a more docile populace. The escape into false memories that then can themselves be purified through the therapist's intervention, with transforms the underlying personality structure tout court.

As a consequence of the social promise of recovered false memories, individuals become lazy about generating their own authentic memories, expecting instead that society will perpetually supply a steady stream of synthetic ones that will make everyone feel unique in their life experience, what they have endured.

I know that I can escape from the status quo of my life
but I do not want 2 work hard 2 get there
Even though I feel like I am entitled to a better life
I wish it would just fall in my lap

Many of us may feel exempt from this disturbing method of personality structuration, but the nature of recovered memories, once granted an iota of credibility, is that anything any individual believes he or she knows about themselves can be called into question by a perceived therapeutic authority. A state-sanctioned psychologist can always tell you what you must remember and what you must know to be true about yourself. As Carles darkly suggests, "All we are are alts in the wind…"