Jesse Lemisch ----- Original Message ----- From: "Yoshie Furuhashi" <critical.montages at gmail.com> To: <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org> Sent: Monday, October 23, 2006 1:13 AM Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Feminism and the False Memory Syndrome
> On 10/23/06, JBrown72073 at cs.com <JBrown72073 at cs.com> wrote:
> > Yoshie writes:
> >
> > >Lastly, when a person makes a statement, how might others take it?
> > >The choice is not either she is telling the truth or she is
> > >consciously lying -- there is a third alternative: she sincerely
> > >believes that what didn't happen actually happened.
> >
> > No, that's my point. You have to claim she's consciously lying in this
case,
> > or telling the truth. You can't claim she sincerely believed what
happened
> > didn't happen because then you can't account for the description of the
> > discussion of it with her father. I suppose you could claim, as you
seem to be
> > suggesting, that she initially truly thought it happened and now is
lying to
> > bolster her story. Either way there's no way you can (patronizingly, I
think)
> > claim she is just honestly mistaken.
>
> It is entirely possible that a person sincerely believes that what
> didn't happen actually happened, be it sexual abuse (abusing another,
> getting abused) or confession of guilt or anything else. It is also
> entirely possible that a person listens to what another says and
> interprets it to mean what the person wants to hear. Memory and
> interpretation are no simple matter, and there is a large area between
> consciously telling the truth and consciously telling a lie.
>
> Stephen Philion raised the myth of spat-upon veterans, the topic of
> Jerry Lembcke's research (cf.
> <http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0430-21.htm>), as an example of
> the unreliability of memory. It is not necessary for us to believe
> that veterans who claim that they were spat upon by anti-war
> protesters are consciously lying. It is much more likely that they
> sincerely believe what they want to believe, without being aware of
> any gap between their belief and reality. Indeed, the image of
> spat-upon veterans would probably not have become a widely held myth
> if those who say they were spat upon or those who say they know
> veterans who have been spat upon had been consciously lying.
>
> Here's an interesting study of the making of a false memory:
>
> <blockquote><http://www.apa.org/monitor/mar00/memory.html>
> Monitor on Psychology
> Volume 31, No. 3, March 2000
>
> New theory on the making of a false memory
>
> A new study finds support for the
> theory that the more sources of perceptual information people have
> about an event--the sight, sound, feel or taste of an experience--the
> more likely they are to believe they actually experienced the event,
> even if they haven't.
>
> In particular, the "realness" of a false memory results from the
> brain's ability to pull together perceptual information from unrelated
> experiences and wrongly read it as a single, authentic memory. This
> "source monitoring" theory of false memories postulates that people
> misattribute perceptual information experienced in a different context
> to support a memory for something that never happened.
>
> The more perceptual information people can connect to the false
> memory, the more likely they are to have that false memory in the
> first place, the study finds. In particular, Linda Henkel, PhD, and
> her colleagues find that study participants were more likely to
> falsely remember seeing an object if they previously imagined the
> object and heard the sound it makes.
>
> In two separate experiments, they had more than 170 undergraduates
> view, imagine or listen to the sound of common, easily recognized
> events, such as a baby crying, a toilet flushing, a hammer hammering
> or a basketball bouncing. And they found that participants were much
> more likely to incorrectly say they saw, for example, a hammer if they
> previously imagined a hammer, or heard a tape of hammering, than if
> they had no previous exposure to anything "hammer-like." And they were
> even more likely to falsely remember the hammer if they visually
> imagined it and, at a different time, heard hammering.
>
> The findings suggest that repeated exposure to certain objects and
> events through sight, sound or just imagination can muddle people's
> memories of where or how they experienced something or even whether
> their experience is real, conclude Henkel, now at the University of
> North Florida, and her colleagues Nancy Franklin, PhD, of the State
> University of New York at Stony Brook, and Marcia Johnson, PhD, of
> Princeton University.
>
> "People commonly have repeated experiences with certain objects and
> events," says Henkel. "And what we're seeing is that similar types of
> memories can get confused and people can mistake one instance for
> another."
>
> In fact, the most compelling false memories may be those in which
> fragments of real experiences--viewing photos, hearing others recount
> events or daydreaming--play a role, the researchers say. Their study
> appears in this month's issue of the Journal of Experimental
> Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition (Vol. 26, No. 2).
>
> --B. AZAR</blockquote>
>
> Those who have false memories are not consciously lying.
>
> > Stephen P. and others are right that there is incredible hysteria about
child
> > sexual abuse in the U.S. But it's important to note that this hysteria
is
> > mainly around non-family members.
>
> The "recovered memory" craze quite often led adults to file lawsuits
> against their parents, grandparents, and other family members. Once
> the craze began to subside, attempts to seek redress started e.g.,
>
> <blockquote>. . . Ramona v. Ramona, in which a father was awarded
> $475,000 by a California court on the grounds that his daughter's
> therapists had negligently induced false memories that he had sexually
> abused her as a child (2). Although clinicians ordinarily are
> responsible only to their patients for their actions, the trial court
> in Ramona decided that the situation presented in the case constituted
> an exception to the usual rule. The therapists, a family counselor and
> a psychiatrist, were charged with negligence for having suggested to
> the patient that her bulimia must have been due to sexual abuse,
> misrepresenting to her that an amobarbital interview had confirmed her
> recovered memory of having been raped by her father. They encouraged
> her to confront her father and participated in the confrontation. As a
> result of the confrontation, the father lost his job, his marriage
> collapsed, and his daughter filed a civil suit against him.
> (Paul S. Appelbaum, _Law & Psychiatry: Third-Party Suits Against
> Therapists in Recovered-Memory Cases_, Psychiatr Serv 52:27-28,
> January
2001<http://www.psychservices.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/full/52/1/27>
)</blockquote>
>
> --
> Yoshie
> <http://montages.blogspot.com/>
> <http://mrzine.org>
> <http://monthlyreview.org/>
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