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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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