Systematized Amnesia!
September 6, 2006
Before traveling too far
down this topical path we had better understand where this is headed and
to define the terms at the outset. Here is what the NAMI (National
Alliance on Mental Illness) says about psychological amnesia, which is
what our topic really is about.
Dissociative amnesia:
This disorder is characterized by a blocking out of critical personal information,
usually of a traumatic or stressful nature. Dissociative amnesia, unlike
other types of amnesia, does not result from other medical trauma (e.g.
a blow to the head). Dissociative amnesia has several subtypes:
-
Localized amnesia
is present in an individual who has no memory of specific events that took
place, usually traumatic.
-
Selective amnesia
happens when a person can recall only small parts of events that took place
in a defined period of time.
-
Generalized amnesia
is diagnosed when a person's amnesia encompasses his or her entire life.
-
Systematized amnesia
is characterized by a loss of memory for a specific category of information.
To understand each of the
varieties we should take a look at some examples.
Localized amnesia
is exemplified best by a survivor of a car wreck who has no memory of the
experience until two days later; this is experiencing localized amnesia.
Possibly others could be that same person who initially after a head trauma
recalls everything from before the moment of the trauma, does not recall
the injury itself, and has no memory for a certain number of days post
trauma.
Selective amnesia
is when a sexually abused victim may recall only some parts of the series
of events around the abuse. The person might recall what the
abuser looked like and what they were wearing, where they were, even the
time of day, but has no memory of what form the abuse had taken.
General Amnesia
is the one that seems to garner more awareness, because we hear often about
accident victims that wake up and have no clue to who they are, and how
they got to where they are, nor do they recall any of the persons or things
that were part of their former lives.
A person that may be missing
all memories about one specific family member illustrates the term we are
interested in for this blog, Systematized Amnesia. Perhaps
the person they cannot recall committed an act of abuse or perhaps they
were struck by some implement and later cannot recall its name.
As I embarked on my peripatetic
Internet stroll of course I discovered the above definitions on the NAMI
web site. My initial search string was for selective amnesia and
then I started playing with combinations of a variety of word combinations
based on types of memory loss. You see I believe that over and over
again as a nation we are guilty of attaining various forms of forgetfulness
both in the arenas of domestic and foreign policy.
In a previous blog "Memories"
I referred to the line from a song that reads this way; "What's too painful
to remember we simply choose to forget!" I am sure that there
are some examples that come to your mind just as they pop up in mine, but
that is for another day.
There are likely as many
reasons that our amnesia occurs as there are sand at the beach, but I believe
that our consciousness is jaded by the incredible pace that events occur,
are reported, and moved beyond. Our thirst for knowing all there
is to know creates this mechanically induced loss of memory because we
are living in the moment rather than considering the continuum.
We do it politically when
we allow a politician to seemingly change his values or for sure, his position
on a given issue. He gives us some cock and bull story about how
things have changed, and of course gains our buy-in. The only thing
that may have changed is the date and the fact that his staff polling indicated
he needed to align him with the electorate. Let's see, who might
that be? Oh yeah, the Teflon man, Bill Clinton, who used semantics
and all other forms of linguistic sorcery to always be right where he needed
to be!
Our mutual political intellect
is once again marshalling itself to the momentum of the moment and is busy
memorizing a manufactured mirage of history and I will be qualifying my
meaning sooner than later!
