In 1962, Daniel Offer, a young resident in psychiatry, and his colleagues interviewed seventy-three teenage boys about their home lives, sexuality, religion, parents, parental discipline, and other emotionally charged topics. Offer and his colleagues were able to re-interview almost all these fellows thirty-four years later, when they were forty-eight years old, to ask them what they remembered. “Remarkably,” the researchers concluded, “the men’s ability to guess what they had said about themselves in adolescence was no better than chance.” Most of those who remembered themselves as having
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