On the other hand, on the subject of ritual abuse (see item below on ‘false memory”), “A gang of suspected people traffickers which is believed to have smuggled a Nigerian boy into a Britain for a ritualistic killing was arrested during a series of raids in London on Tuesday.

Among the evidence seized by detectives was an animal skull with a nail driven through its head, which may have been used in a ‘black magic’ ceremony. One line of inquiry being investigated is that members of the gang had the boy murdered to bring the criminal enterprise good luck – a procedure that has taken place in West African in the past.” New Zealand Herald

Graduate student Susan Clancy, as it transpired, had no idea what she was getting herself into, wading into the middle of perhaps the hottest controversy in decades in academic psychology when she joined the psychology department at Harvard eight years ago and decided to study “recovered memories”.

At one end of the field of ”trauma memory” were people like her new professors and future co-authors, the clinical psychologist Richard McNally and the cognitive psychologist Daniel Schacter, chairman of the Harvard psychology department and one of the world’s leading experts on memory function. At the other end were Harvard-affiliated clinicians, including Judith Herman, Bessel van der Kolk and Daniel Brown, whose scholarly writing on the psychological effects of trauma remains highly influential.

What the two sides disagree on is whether painful memories of traumatic events can actually be repressed — completely forgotten — and then ”recovered” years later in therapy. Many clinicians say yes: it is how we instinctively protect ourselves from childhood recollections that would otherwise be too dire to bear. Most cognitive psychologists say no: real trauma is almost never forgotten; full-blown, traumatic memories dredged up decades later through hypnosis are almost invariably false.

Clancy decided to do laboratory studies of memory functions in those reporting recovered memories. After listening to the histories her subjects reported, she could not help feeling that they had an air of confabulation about them. In the most extreme cases — the rash of reports of Satanic ritual abuse of a decade or so ago — it has become well-accepted that there can be frankly “false memories.” Clancy guessed that there were a category of people who were psychologically prone to creating false memories and who might demonstrate this tendency in standard laboratory testing of their memory function. In fact, subjects who claimed to have recovered memories of previously repressed abuse were more prone to false memories on her tests than control subjects, and were more prone than subjects who had been incontrovertibly abused and had always remembered, never repressed, memories of that abuse.

The research was criticized by both academic and lay opponents of false memory, the most extreme equating her findings with “cheer(ing) on child molesters” or concluding she was probably a child abuser herself. (Freud was assumed in some circles to have harbored, or perhaps acted upon, incestuous fantasies toward his daughter for revising his earlier theory in which he had taken at face value the memories of his female hysterical patients that they had been victims of incest to conclude that these were fantasies.)

Because of the controversy that surrounded the implications as to the veracity of memories of abuse, Clancy abandoned studying that group in favor of one whose memories are considered to be incontrovertibly fantasies — those claiming to have been abducted by aliens. (Ironically, both her opponents’ ‘camp’ [Judy Herman, Bessel van der Kolk and Dan Brown] vis à vis recovered memories, and the foremost — or perhaps only — academic proponent of alien abduction, John Mack, were/are based at the Cambridge Hospital Dept. of Psychiatry of Harvard Medical School… where I did my training and had my first faculty position. All four were esteemed senior colleagues and friends of mine, despite my clear sympathies in their opponents’ camps on these central issues.) In bowing to the pressure of political correctness by suspending her study of abuse survivors, she thought she could still make a crucial scientific contribution around her hypothesis that there are ‘false-memory-prone’ individuals, further study of whom might help us to understand more about the phenomenon.

But Clancy was in for quite a surprise, as her findings were savaged by the alien abduction proponents as well. ”I can entertain the possibility that there are other life forms out there without accepting your story that a spaceship picked you up!” she was driven in exasperation to reply to one grilling on a talk radio show. Her mistake seems to have been her confidence that there can ever be a consensus that anything no matter how outlandish, particularly in the People’s Republic of Cambridge, can be beyond controversy.

Ten years from now, Susan Clancy may remember 2003 as a year of agreeable spadework in the trenches of academic inquiry. But if she does, it will be a false memory. The truth is that Clancy’s research, which she hoped might mend fences — at least partly vindicating both sides’ positions — has managed to tick off just about everyone: sexual-abuse survivors, therapists, experiencers, even a creationist or two.

Daniel Brown, the trauma therapist, is convinced that there’s a ”political agenda” to Clancy’s abduction study. As he told one reporter, ”It’s all about spin.” Her own brother — a corporate lawyer for a top New York firm — has ripped into her about the abduction study for assuming outright that none of the abductions occurred.

One of the more telling critiques of Clancy’s work came from people who felt it undermined the admissibility of recovered memories of torture in international war crimes tribunals. Perhaps in penance, Clancy getting out of the frying pan of Cambridge academic controversy to take a visiting professorship at the Harvard-affiliated Central American Business Administration Institute in Managua, Nicaragua, where she will study the effects of “verifiable life-threatening events: diseases, hurricanes, land mines.” Time will tell whether this is indeed an escape route from the flames… NY Times Magazine

Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, excerpt:

“‘Many assumptions about politics were destroyed along with the World Trade Center, and Borradori seized the opportunity to ask Habermas and Derrida how their theories fared. These men represent two central strands of European philosophy—the one building on Enlightenment notions of universal rationality, the other suspicious of the commitments often hidden in its language. . . . But Habermas sees the outbreak of terror mainly as a failure of communications, and Derrida sees it above all as a failure to develop a concept of world hospitality to replace what he thinks is the outmoded Christian notion of a toleration that is really only charity. Despite their theoretical convictions, they seem here to see the problems more as philosophical than as a failure to integrate economics and the social sciences or develop a strategy against misery and poverty.”

And: The mixed-up debate over the new European patriotism:

“The Iraq War has made for some strange bedfellows, in philosophy no less than in politics. On May 31, Jrgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida issued a joint declaration, ”After the War: The Rebirth of Europe,” in Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and France’s La Libration. In it, the great theoretician of communication and consensus and the doyen of deconstruction put aside their considerable intellectual differences to call for a unified European response ”to balance out the hegemonic unilateralism of the United States.” But what they were really after was the creation of ”a European identity,” a sense of patriotism to rival that which, for better or worse, has dominated the United States since Sept. 11.” Boston Globe

Blissed Psychedelic Freaks Bequeath Skykissing Guitars to Industrial Autopsy Aesthetes:

“Thesis: Industrial music, in its original late-’70s incarnation, was the second flowering of an authentic psychedelia. (‘Authentic’ meaning non-revivalist, untainted by nostalgia). There was the same impulse to blow minds through multimedia sensory overload (the inevitable back-projected, cut-up movies behind every industrial performance—attempts at “total art” only too redolent of 1960s happenings and acid-tests). And industrial, like psychedelia, believed “no sound shalt go untreated”; both adulterated rock’s “naturalistic” recording conventions with FX, tape splices, and dirty electronic noise.” The Village Voice

“When the World Transhumanist Association met for a conference at Yale last month, they discussed the future rights of those who will be half-man, half-machine. Erik Baard looks at uploading consciousness, bio-Luddites, and that nagging question: Who are we? ” The Village Voice

“Take a snapshot of philosophy in Britain today, and you’ll get a picture that is recognizable not only to North American philosophers but also to academics in other disciplines in the humanities. Many agree that the field is becoming more diverse, more interdisciplinary, and more relevant to the concerns of wider society. Look closer, however, and the British philosophical landscape is significantly different from that in North America. Examining these differences is instructive, not only for philosophers but for anyone working in the humanities, and perhaps for some of their scientific colleagues as well.” The Chronicle of Higher Education

“General John Abizaid, the new commander of Centcom, on July 16 became the first senior US official to acknowledge that what the coalition faces in Iraq is a ‘classical guerrilla campaign’.

A study on guerrilla warfare in Iraq by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a Washington think-tank, blames bad planning by the US administration and the low priority given to ‘conflict termination’ and nation-building strategies by the Pentagon.

CSIS military specialist Anthony Cordesman says the US has not learned the lessons of past conflicts, that ‘even the best military victories cannot win the peace’.

He writes: ‘Unless this situation changes soon, and radically, the United States may end up fighting a third Gulf war against the Iraqi people . . . It is far from clear that the United States can win this kind of asymmetric war.'” Financial Times

“This report is intended to provide accurate information to U.S. servicemen and women stationed in Iraq. Our pledge to you is that this report will contain only fact. We will not embellish. This is the straight story. Please forward throughout the ranks.”

“President Bush and his Republican Party are facing a political backlash from an unlikely group – retired veterans.

Normally Republican, many retired veterans are mad that Bush and the Republican-controlled Congress are blocking remedies to two problems with health and pension benefits. They say they feel particularly betrayed by Bush, who appealed to them in his 2000 campaign, and who vowed on the eve of his inauguration that ‘promises made to our veterans will be promises kept.'” San Jose Mercury

Poetry website goes from bad to verse: “A new program allows a poem to evolve, to see if people can collectively create attractive verse – the early signs are not pretty.” New Scientist

The Last Word: “Christopher Alexander, an architect who was born in Vienna, raised in England and now lives in California, … something of a prophet without honor in his own profession, …produces the kind of books every serious reader should wrestle with once in a while: fat, challenging, grandiose tracts that encourage you to take apart the way you think and put it back together again. Depending on whom you talk to, they’re either canonical or completely off the reservation; among architects, he has some devoted followers and plenty of scornfully dismissive critics, particularly among the champions of the avant-garde. A Pattern Language and The Timeless Way of Building, two seminal works he wrote with five colleagues, have continued to sell well since they were first published in the 1970’s, but despite his position as emeritus professor of architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, their influence on his profession (outside the continuation of some of his ideas in the New Urbanism movement) has faded. Instead, laypeople use A Pattern Language to design their own homes, and The Timeless Way of Building has been a major influence on, of all things, a school of software engineering called object-oriented programming.” NY Times

Pentagon Prepares a Futures Market on Terror Attacks: “The Pentagon office that proposed spying electronically on Americans to monitor potential terrorists has a new experiment. It is an online futures trading market, disclosed today by critics, in which anonymous speculators would bet on forecasting terrorist attacks, assassinations and coups.

Traders bullish on a biological attack on Israel or bearish on the chances of a North Korean missile strike would have the opportunity to bet on the likelihood of such events on a new Internet site established by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

The Pentagon called its latest idea a new way of predicting events and part of its search for the ‘broadest possible set of new ways to prevent terrorist attacks.’ Two Democratic senators who reported the plan called it morally repugnant and grotesque. The senators said the program fell under the control of Adm. John M. Poindexter, President Ronald Reagan’s national security adviser.” NY Times

“They are called smart pills or brain boosters or, to use the preferred pharmaceutical term, cognitive enhancers.

But whatever the name given to compounds created to prevent or treat memory loss, drug companies and supplement producers — eager to meet the demands of a rapidly growing market — are scrambling to exploit what they view as an enormous medical and economic opportunity.

…

Much of the excitement among pharmaceutical companies, which have dozens of drugs in development, stems from advances in clarifying some of the brain processes and biochemical pathways that can hinder or help memory storage and retrieval, said Dr. Paul R. Solomon, a professor of psychology at Williams College…

But it will probably be at least five years before any of those drugs meet the standards for approval by the Food and Drug Administration, researchers said.

Clearly, the market for memory enhancers is growing with the aging of the population.

Dr. Steven T. DeKosky, a professor of neurology and psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, says he has noticed a marked increase in anxiety among baby boomers, who are watching their parents descend into Alzheimer’s and hoping that new medicines will help them avoid the same fate…

Even among those who are already suffering memory loss, Alzheimer’s is far from the only source. An estimated four million Americans have it, but millions more suffer from other disorders that can lead to dementia, including Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, stroke, head trauma and schizophrenia.

Experts estimate that an additional four million people have a syndrome called mild cognitive impairment, which may progress to Alzheimer’s. People with the impairment can function on their own but have gaps in their memories.” NY Times