Confabulation

For years I believed that as a child I had seen JFK in person, maybe at the airport in the neighborhood where I grew up. I held an image of him passing by, waving to the crowds; an image taken, no doubt, from old news reels and documentary footage. My parents may have contributed to this by relating a story in which JFK was mentioned. Maybe they weren't even talking to me, maybe I just overheard it...Later I found out that John F. Kennedy had been dead for a long time before I was even born (in 1964). I was genuinely confused and astounded, so deep was this false memory.  There is also a memory of a real movie which somehow got conflated with the idea of the "pound of flesh" in The Merchant of Venice...in this old film, there was what I thought was a gob of meat or flesh on a scale, and the tortured face of a man in agony who was witness to what was presumably a carnage or atrocity of some kind. I have no idea what this movie was but I am pretty sure it had nothing to do with Shakespeare or the Jews. But the movie image became related in my mind to to Holocaust, and the persecution of Jews in general. Ironically so, since in The Merchant of Venice, it is the (negatively stereotyped) Jewish moneylender who is demanding the pound of flesh from a gentile debtor, and not the reverse. I didn't even know as a youth that the expression "a pound of flesh" was from a Shakespeare play...Again, it must have been something I overheard...But I was already familiar with the Holocaust and so to me, the pound of flesh that was to be taken was taken somehow from the Jewish people or a Jewish person...These are just a couple of the times in my childhood, growing up in a learned and intellectual home (though nightmarish in other ways), certain ideas and visual images got bound together in a way that later was revealed to be nonsensical. I am pretty certain no Hollywood director of the 30's 40's or 50's would depict a literal "pound of flesh" in a movie, certainly not human flesh! 

Years ago in an an intro to criminology class,  I first heard the term "confabulation". The word was defined as the tendency of eye witnesses to "fill in the gaps" of their memories with details they simply make up.  It was explained as a natural human cognitive process by which, if incomplete information exists, the brain will fill in the gaps in order to provide coherence and comprehension if such is lacking. No doubt it is an extremely crucial and indespensible evolutionary function but it is also the reason that eye witness testimony is notoriously unreliable...Our brains also "fill in" missing information in a way shaped by our ignorance, bias, prejudice, and racism. We will "remember" a perpetrator as being Black or Hispanic, we will project our fears based on negative stereotypes,  consciously or most likely, unconsciously...So when I saw a movie with an image I didn't understand, and my father perhaps made a spoken comment about a Shakespeare play, or drew an analogy to the Holocaust, my brain conflated the two, made up a story about it (confabulated) and created a false memory because so much of what went on around me (and happened to me) was incomprehensible and unfathomable. It was a coping mechanism. 

I wonder if I can ever find out what this movie was which had a scene of a scale with something on it and a man's face crumpled in sorrow and despair...I even asked my father, who was mostly responsible for my being both a Judeophile and a cinephile, but he had no idea what movie I was talking about. I am usually pretty good at finding stuff out but this is a pretty tall order...