retrospective falsification

Gasping furiously for air, Clevinger enumerated Yossarian’s symptoms: an unreasonable belief that everybody around him was crazy, a homicidal impulse to machine-gun strangers, retrospective falsification, an unfounded suspicion that people hated him and were conspiring to kill him.

From the available data at hand it would seem that in the case of X——, the disease had its inception in the episode during the late Civil War, though the possibility of retrospective falsification must be kept in mind; while Y seems to have been launched upon his litigious career by his dismissal  from the Navy.