What's especially interesting to me is the way that people study the subject of false memories. Loftus in particular pioneered (or at least made famous) the practice of, essentially, convincing people that they had had a relatively common traumatic experience (e.g. being lost in a shopping mall) and then claiming that the fact that this *sometimes* works has *anything* to do with recovered memories of severe and unusual trauma.
Basically, my problem with MOST memory research that claims to have any relevance to the stupid false memory debate is that source confusion has no damn relevance, and they all want to rely on it! Loftus' own "false memory" is a perfect example. Somebody told her that she had been the one to find her mother's body, then she had a memory of seeing her mother's body in the pool, police cars everywhere and so on, and then a few days later the rest of her relatives told her it was actually Aunt Pearl who discovered the body.
If you apply the rest of Lotfus' logic to this, it should mean that her mother didn't even die. She had an apparently false memory of finding her mother's body - she must not have experienced ANY of this trauma. That's the argument that people use around false memories of *abuse*. Why not here?
I think it's very interesting that she automatically (from what I've read) writes off the memory entirely as a result. Why on earth does her not having been the first one to find her mother's body mean that she couldn't have been at the scene and seen the body in the pool and the police cars? There isn't actually anything in what I've read that even claims her memory was of discovering it, just of seeing it. Anyway, it pisses me the fuck off.
And I wrote far too much about it, so now I have to post it in several comments. Sigh!
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2006-09-07 09:21 pm (UTC)Basically, my problem with MOST memory research that claims to have any relevance to the stupid false memory debate is that source confusion has no damn relevance, and they all want to rely on it! Loftus' own "false memory" is a perfect example. Somebody told her that she had been the one to find her mother's body, then she had a memory of seeing her mother's body in the pool, police cars everywhere and so on, and then a few days later the rest of her relatives told her it was actually Aunt Pearl who discovered the body.
If you apply the rest of Lotfus' logic to this, it should mean that her mother didn't even die. She had an apparently false memory of finding her mother's body - she must not have experienced ANY of this trauma. That's the argument that people use around false memories of *abuse*. Why not here?
I think it's very interesting that she automatically (from what I've read) writes off the memory entirely as a result. Why on earth does her not having been the first one to find her mother's body mean that she couldn't have been at the scene and seen the body in the pool and the police cars? There isn't actually anything in what I've read that even claims her memory was of discovering it, just of seeing it. Anyway, it pisses me the fuck off.
And I wrote far too much about it, so now I have to post it in several comments. Sigh!