How We Remember Things Poem by gershon hepner

HOW WE REMEMBER THINGS

We remember things the way that we once told
the so-called facts, and not the way they truly once occurred,
and the opinions on them that we later hold
depend on explanations that we offered, or we heard
from others, at the time. Once have told the story it,
as well as explanations that we give or we have chosen
to accept, is forced in a Procrustean way to fit
our present version of the facts, by explanations frozen.

Inspired by a review of The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind: Hitler, Hess and the analysts, by Daniel Pick, who teaches history at USC ("Whatever Went Wrong", " TLS,9/7/12. Lerner discusses the investigations in the mental state of Rudolf Hess by Dr. Henry Dicks of London's Tavistock Clinic, and points out that he "historicizes psychoanalytic-here broadly defined-perspectives on fascism and shows that psychoanalysts, psychologists and Freudian social scientists were able to speak about Nazism with authority and influence on both sides of the Atlantic." He makes an argument for the continued relevance of psychoanalysis as a mode of social explanation. At the same time as Dicks was studying Hess in the UK, Walter Langer was analyzing Hitler's mind in the US, and submitted his finding to the OSS in 1943, publishing his findings in The Mind of Hitler two decades later. While Lerner concludes that psychoanalysis "can shed a great deal of light on charismatic leaders and the dynamics of their followers, " I feel more skeptical about such an approach, recalling Shlomo Breznitz, a psychology professor at the New School University in Manhattan, who said that he needed half a century of reflection before he could write about his experiences as a child who was placed into an orphanage by his parents when they were taken to Auschwitz. "I remembered the way I told it, not the way it happened. It is something which has a beginning, a middle and an end. The original is covered hopelessly by the reproduction. Once we write it, it is frozen forever" (cited in my poem "Truth's Doppelgänger, The Absurd".

TRUTH'S DOPPELGÄNGER, THE ABSURD


Once the story has been told
leaving what has happened cold,
the story takes a living form.
Despite the words that keep it warm
it freezes and, congealed, assumes
the fate befalling bones in tombs,
existing only as a tale-
a shadow of the words that fail
to tell what really once occurred,
truth's Doppelgänger, the absurd.


Sarah Boxer (NYT, "Giving Memory its Due in an Age of License, " October 28,1998) discusses a symposium held in Boston to celebrate Elie Wiesel's 70th birthday, entitled "The Claims of Memory". Shlomo Breznitz, a psychology professor at the New School University in Manhattan, said that he needed half a century of reflection before he could write about his experiences as a child who was placed into an orphanage by his parents when they were taken to Auschwitz. "I remembered the way I told it, not the way it happened. It is something which has a beginning, a middle and an end. The original is covered hopelessly by the reproduction. Once we write it, it is frozen forever" (see Giving Memory Its Due In an Age of License, " Sarah Boxer, NYT: October 28,1998) . One of the two reasons why the historical record regarding people like Rudolf Hess is frozen is because of their contact with psychologists and psychoanalysts. Today lawyers are also a major cause of the distortion of facts, which become frozen not only when told by their clients but when explained by the lawyers.


11/14/12 #11901