Memory Warp, , Fraud And Freud Poem by gershon hepner

Desire for coherent narratives may warp
the memory and lead to fraud and Freud,
with data as dishonest as those from a corp-
oration that of honest data is devoid.

You won’t be hauled in front of Congress or a judged
because your story of your life is not correct,
warped memory excuses all the facts you’ve fudged,
and with the help of Freud you may regain respect.

Inspired by an article about memoirs by Daniel Mendelsohn in The New Yorker, January 25,2010 (“But Enough About Me: What does the popularity of memoirs tell us about ourselves? ”) :

As for Freud’s charge that memoirs are flawed by mendacity, it may be that the culprit here is not really the memoir genre but memory itself…[A] seemingly inborn desire on the part of Homo sapiens for coherent narratives, for meaning, warps the way we remember things….We always manage to turn our memories into good stories—even if they aren’t quite true.


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