Posted by pseudoname on April 7, 2006, at 14:11:01
In reply to Re: ****trigger CSA / repressed memory****, posted by special_k on April 6, 2006, at 23:47:56
[**CONTENT WARNING: Incest, Child abuse **]
> re fiction... wouldn't incest have been a juicy topic for shakespeare etc too?????
Yeah! And Shakespeare used it in ‘Pericles’, where the king and his marriage-age daughter are having sexual relations. (“Bad child! Worse father!”) Eventually the gods send fire from heaven to burn up both of them for what they were doing, and the outraged populace storms the palace.
> > The absence of CSA is interesting... Someone must've written papers about this.
>
> i've read ian hacking's "multiple personality and the sciences of memory" and he talks about how definitions of 'abuse' have changed over time [...]I've found a couple papers that appear to document ancient & medieval reports of CSA, but they're in proprietary journals. I'm really interested in this now, so I may have to look them up in 2 weeks when I visit my dentist. (She's in a big university town.)
Your point about changing definitions is important. I think the plethora of reports in sources like Catullus (I was a Latin major for a while…) of catamites –boys routinely sodomized by older men– is significant. The dominant literate culture didn't call it abuse, for the most part, but it was certainly reported. And there are catamite accusations in medieval times, too, when it was regarded as sinful: more an offense against God than against the child.
So we really do have historic accounts of CSA, once we make cultural adjustments to recognize it. Nevertheless, you point out that incestuous CSA was apparently not reported, at least with young children. (There are reports of incest with slightly older girls, like in ‘Pericles’.) Perhaps even if an ancient woman recovered memories of her incestuous CSA, it wouldn't get reported any better than if it had been discovered while it was going on.
It seems to be the case that incestuous CSA is the most common recovered-memory accusation. Perhaps the ancient silence about early-childhood incest would rule out the most common modern type of recovered memory from being historically reported, even if it occurred. I think that is a point worth making, but reports of other instances of recovered memory could still be expected.
> maybe the memories were never 'recovered' because the 'recovered memory' was thought (by the subject) to be fantasy
That's an interesting idea! I like it. But people back then assumed that gods (and God) gave them authentic visions, so it seems less likely to me that they would dismiss much as “fantasy”. It was a credulous era.
> maybe they just didn't want to talk about it (i mean why go through the pain unless there is a theory that going through the pain helps the pain long term?)
That, too, is an interesting point. I wonder if there was any assumption of “talking through it” in the Victorian literature where recovered memory does occur? I've never read ‘Captains Courageous’ (1896), the story Pope/Hudson cite in which the kid recovers the memory of his family drowning. Perhaps there was some assumption in it of talking through the pain.
> i would say absence of therapists and absence of belief in the utility of remembering could come into play quite significantly.
I think the McLean guys would agree. They would just suggest that the “belief in the utility of remembering” may *cause* the memories, not simply make them seem more important.
> how do they measure 'inability to access the memory'?
> that is a very real problem...It doesn't seem like a problem for this contest. It really sounds like any self-report by someone who claims to have recovered a traumatic memory they previously didn't know about would suffice. They accept, for example, the ones in Victorian literature.
I may have to read ‘Captains Courageous’ now.
Always nice to chat with you, _k.
poster:pseudoname
thread:629255
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20060406/msgs/630135.html