Haga of the First Water

I wish I could remember where I read the suggestion -- Dad29 only hints at it -- but sometime around Friday I read someone who suggested that the Kavanaugh accuser would turn out to have had first made the accusation in a therapy session, many years after the fact. The idea is that 'recovered' (but actually false) memories in psychology work are a known issue, and this was likely enough to turn out to be one.

Now it may be that the accusation is true, although both of the people she names as having been there deny that it or anything like it ever happened. But the psychotherapy-created-memory idea doesn't sound implausible to me given the facts. For one thing, it did in fact first come up in a therapy session in 2012, when she and her husband were having trouble and she needed a way to try to right that ship. But also:
She did tell someone about this years before Kavanaugh was nominated — but never mentioned his name. She doesn’t remember where or even when exactly the incident happened, but she does remember the names of two other people who were allegedly there. (Neither responded to WaPo’s request for comments.) She passed a polygraph test administered by a former FBI agent but her own therapist had notes saying four boys were involved, not two, which Ford blames on a misunderstanding.
All of that is explicable if the hypothesis is correct. The fuzziness on exactly where and when this happened arises from the fact that it never did happen, as does the fuzziness on just who was responsible or how many people were present at the time. But also the polygraph: she could readily pass one, per hypothesis, because she isn't lying. She's telling the truth of what she thinks she remembers.

(UPDATE: Paragraph removed due to inaccurate source. I regret the error.)

I wouldn't be surprised to learn that this was in fact the truth. Kavanaugh has passed six FBI background checks, none of which turned up anything like this; there's no pattern of behavior, as you'd expect if this accusation were true. But that doesn't mean she is lying, not in the strict sense. She is quite possibly telling the truth as she believes she understands it.

Defenders might say that a good reason for being unstable is having suffered a rape attempt in your young adulthood, and perhaps that's fair. In the end, both hypotheses are possible. We just have to decide which one is more plausible. Or maybe not even that; a 17 year old's bad behavior, even if proven at law rather than being alleged after the statute of limitations had passed seven times over, would normally be sealed in juvenile records just because we wouldn't want it to prevent them from reforming and living a responsible life as an adult. By all indications, he has led a responsible life as an adult. Maybe we don't have to decide what is true about the one allegation from 35 years ago to know the right way to proceed now.

All of that involves taking this accusation seriously. It leads us to the same place we would get to if we didn't take it seriously at all, as well we might not given the way the Democratic leadership sat on the thing for a month until they could raise it at the last minute to cause chaos. I'm open to the idea that we shouldn't given them an inch given how they've behaved; but a lot more is at stake than punishing Sen. Feinstein for her perfidy. I'm willing to take the matter seriously. All the same, I think that absent any new evidence or additional accusers, the course is clear.

7 comments:

E Hines said...

Jeff Flake has decided on a combination of his hatred of Trump and his decision of guilty on the basis of a woman's accusation to block Kavanaugh's confirmation. https://www.king5.com/article/news/nation-now/sen-jeff-flake-not-comfortable-voting-for-brett-kavanaugh-without-hearing-from-accuser/465-79107622-cdbc-4531-8592-a466eada1a4b

What he actually said is that he wants to hear from the woman, now that she's decided to speak publicly at this carefully chosen time, but this is Flake.

This is just another Democrat Anita Hill and another attempt at a public lynching, with Feinstein bringing forward the role of Kennedy from an earlier public lynching. My vote is to hold the committee vote on the 20th as scheduled and the floor vote without delay.

Eric Hines

Dad29 said...

*Cough*

It is also the case that memories of 30-, 40-, or 50-year old events degrade, resulting in confusing "who was there" with someone who was most certainly NOT there. Also, timelines become fuzzy, even on events which are only 5-10 years distant.

As to your mention that people in psychology/psychiatry professions are there because they, themselves, need treatment--well.....we live near a well-known psychiatric treatment facility and I've met a number of the professionals who work there. Your observation is dead-on.

E Hines said...

It's also well-known in the psych profession--and carefully ignored by the NLMSM--that repressed memories that are "restored" with the "help" of therapists are notoriously unreliable, and so wholly useless as evidence of anything, however helpful they might (might) be in a therapeutic setting.

Eric Hines

Assistant Village Idiot said...

Polygraph tests are not that useful.

In memories that far back, they are unreliable either way unless there are concrete bits of evidence to keep resetting the clock. Things that we remember over and over again change imperceptibly each time. We are not remembering an event from 1982, we are reconstructing from the last time we remembered it. Over time, we force memories into narratives, which as Grim noted, we really believe, but are not reliable. Old journals and letters, class and family reunions, rediscovered photographs, and newspaper clippings bring us up short, as we encounter strong proof that the trip to Chicago was actually in 1974, not 1973, and your favorite cousin was not along then, that was the trip to NYC in 1975. That is true of all of us. Recovered memories are likewise unreliable. Most did not happen, and those that did are barely recognisable. The story rules the memory.

Next, trauma from a single event is not impossible, but it is unusual. I got beaten up a couple of times as a kid, once by an older and quite frightening person. We also had a knife-wielder enter the house when no parents were home. I can't identify any ill effects from any of those, though I was badly shook at the time. Repeated abuse or trauma is more likely to affect the personality. A woman who showed up for therapy identifying her mistrust of men and relating that strongly to such a remote incident that didn't end badly would raise huge red flags for a therapist.

There are also the 65 women who signed a letter saying Kavanaugh was a high school gentleman. I don't think I could dig up 65 myself, and I went to a large school.

As for taking the accusation seriously, one could argue that Feinstein didn't take it seriously, or she would have brought it forward as important evidence long ago. On the contrary, she knew it was weak and only pulled it out as a flier when all else was lost.

douglas said...

He even got two ex girlfriends to vouch for him.

Douglas2/Unknown said...

That "Rate my professors" page is for a different person at a different university.

At one big-state university where I taught, there was another person with my firstname/lastname in my department, and my surname isn't nearly as common as Ford.

Grim said...

Thanks for the heads-up. It was widely circulated, but these days you can never assume the accuracy of anything in the public square. I've removed the relevant paragraph and noted my error in the text.