#226: “Denial, Repression and Recollection: The Ice-Bucket Challenge”
A grainy camera-phone video opens with an apprehensive person standing or sitting in the middle ground with familiar surroundings behind them:
“Hey! This is (insert name) here and I’m about to do the Ice-Bucket Challenge for ALS. I’d like to nominate (insert three names). You have a week to do it!”
The camera pulls back to reveal a second person standing over them, smiling, ready with the ice-bucket which they tip over the unfortunate victim. As the water and ice-cubes cascade over their head, they scream…
“Oh my God! Oh my God!”
The video ends.
Ten years ago, almost to the day, I did my last shift in the Elephant and Castle, the Temple Bar restaurant which had served me so well and in which I had served countless baskets of chicken for six and a half years. My reason for leaving was simple (simpler anyway than the three previous times I had left/been fired/asked to leave only to return/be unsacked/asked to return days later because I realised how much I need the money/the restaurant wouldn’t be the same without me/it was hard to get any of the half-decent staff to work brunch shifts). I was finishing my thesis, an unwieldy mass of words (over 70,000 of them!) and punctuation on Hermeneutic Philosophy and I was battling with my professors in UCD over whether my rather odd (half narrative/half academic) approach to tackling the subject even constituted a philosophical work.
The thesis had a rather verbose and pretentious title (consistent with its verbose and pretentious author) but in a nutshell, ‘Estragon’s Boots; A Hermeneutic, Psychoanalytic and Literary Investigation into the Nature of Denial, Repression and Recollection’ examined memory through the lens of hermeneutic philosophers like Hans-Georg Gadamer and Friedrich Nietzsche, psychoanalysts like Donald Winnicott and Sigmund Freud and literary figures like Samuel Beckett and John Millington Synge. Simples!
Human beings have a funny relationship with the past. Human experiences of past events are not precise but are rather coloured by desire, preference, prejudice and the consequences of those past events. A poker player remembers the bad beat that cost him loads of money but suppresses the memory of a poorly played hand in which he dogs his opponent. Cognitive biases are commonplace as individuals would rather create their own subjective social reality from their perception of the input than acknowledge the objective input. Often, this is very understandable as particularly traumatic events can simply be too much with which to deal.
In psychology, this defense mechanism is known as sublimation. Socially unacceptable events are transformed into socially acceptable actions or behaviour. Once transformed though, these socially acceptable actions take on an uncanny (‘unheimlich’) characteristic. They become, in themselves, a frightening thing which could lead us back to that awful unacceptable event which is unconsciously known. When that which previously resided in our unconscious mind is then thrust into our conscious mind, we experience what Freud called the return of the repressed. Or to put it simply, recollection…
A grainy camera-phone video opens with a petrified person standing or kneeling in the middle ground with a barren desert behind them:
“Hello! This is (insert name) and I’m about to pay with my life for America’s unlawful interventions in the Middle East. The following people are also captured and will pay similarly if the demands of ISIS are not met. They are (insert names). You have a week to comply.”
The camera pulls back to reveal a second person standing over them, hooded in black, a knife brandished which they put to the throat of the unfortunate victim.
“Oh my God! Oh my God!”
The video does not end.