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and there had been no one to help; the fight she'd had with a
lover; the feeling of dejection when a professional journal had turned
down one of her papers.19
Linton was not alone.  The mind also re-writes reality for you
and me.   Elizabeth Loftus, the pioneering University of Washington
memory researcher and author of the superb book Memory, points out
that people remember themselves as much harder workers than office
attendance records show they actually have been.  They recall past
salaries as being much higher than their old paycheck stubs indicate.
They recollect buying fewer alcoholic drinks than they actually did,
and are certain that they gave much more to charity than they ever
have.
They remember, in short, the glory, the positive
accomplishments.  What's more, they exaggerate those triumphs.  But
their minds erase the tiny, daily shames, the manifold humiliations of
which life below the top of the hierarchical ladder consists.  Instead,
says Loftus, the mind erects a comfortingly false picture of the self and
of the past.20
Where do the ugly events and the aspects of ourselves we need
to forget go?  We imagine them as parts of our enemy.
When World War II was at its peak, the American Jewish
Committee commissioned a psychological research project to deter-
mine the causes of the fascist horrors.  Under this program, a team of
behavioral scientists at the University of California at Berkeley
developed a test to probe for the kind of tendencies that may have
helped a Hitler or Mussolini gain power.  And that test--called the F
(for fascism) scale--became one of the most widely used research tools
in the history of modern psychology.
Literally thousands of studies revealed a profile of what the
researchers called "the authoritarian personality."  Generally, this was
an individual raised in a strict home where the father was the clear
holder of power.  The parents  had shown a stern disapproval of hos-
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