Discovered Memory
Who? we said.
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Pendergrast told us he’s hired a press agent out of his own pocket. “I’ve never written anything more important,” he said, with some anger in his voice. “Reading this book can save people’s sanity. It can save them years of therapy. They should be aware that the whole idea that your unhappiness in life, your ambivalence toward your parents, can be explained only by the idea you’ve been sexually abused by your parents and then forgot about it is being thoroughly discredited.”
“It’s an antifeminist form of therapy,” Pendergrast said. “It continues what’s been done to women for hundreds of years in Western culture. First, the religious establishment convincing them they’re witches and demons. And then the medical establishment convincing them they’re hysterics. [His previous book, the acclaimed For God, Country and Coca-Cola, noted that Coke was first sold as a treatment for “neurasthenia,” a fashionable diagnosis for late-19th-century women.] And now they’re incest survivors. And guess what? Every one of these diagnoses convinces women they’ve been harmed and must depend on authorities for years to come or they won’t get better.”
Victims of Memory may call too much into question for its own good. As law-abiding citizens we all believe in the scrupulosity of prosecutors, who wouldn’t bring criminal charges based on the fantasies of three-year-olds unless something were there. We all believe in sworn testimony and even more strongly in the confession; American jurisprudence would fall apart if we the people understood, as Pendergrast does, that in a courtroom permeated by delusion a person wrongly accused might wrongly confess.
And in mitigation, your honor, may I submit this insightful Mike Royko column on other athletes with “character flaws,” among them one loathsome brute who jerked off after games: “So we shouldn’t be surprised that O.J. has turned out to be something less than a church deacon. And regardless of what he has done, it should be remembered that his teammates didn’t mind sharing a shower with him.”
