On 2 May 2006 Jeff Nagelbush wrote: >Here is an interesting article on repression by >a former professor of mine. http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/Erdelyi-04022004/Referees/Erdelyi-04022004_preprint.pdf
The professor in question is Matthew Hugh Erldelyi. Some comments about an assertion in the abstract: "Also, substantive research since Bartlett demonstrates that memory is reconstructive (elaborative). Bartlettian and Freudian reconstructions are essentially the same, even in name, differing only in motive (cognitive versus emotional)." To say that "Bartlettian and Freudian reconstructions are essentially the same" is erroneous. The claim about Freud's having anticipated Bartlett has long been associated with the misleading (and inconsistent) retrospective accounts that Freud gave of the 1895-1897 seduction theory episode. Freud's patients at that time, the story goes, reported having been sexually abused in early childhood. He came to realize, however, that these reports were not authentic, and that they were patients' fantasies, i.e., they had somehow reconstructed the stories on the basis of non-abusive early childhood events. In recent decades this story has been shown to be false by several researchers who returned to Freud's original papers. The patients did not report having been sexually abused in infancy, on the contrary, they "assure[d] [Freud] emphatically of their unbelief" (Freud, 1896, SE 3, p. 204). For a brief account of this episode, see: "Psychoanalytic Mythology" http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/articleprint.php?num=10 For the purpose of examining Freud's theory of the construction of false memories, however, let's take his later story as given, and examine how he says such patients' "fantasies" arise. In "My views on the part played by sexuality in the aetiology of the neuroses" he writes that these patients' "phantasies (or imaginary memories)" are "mostly produced during the years of puberty" (1905, SE 7, pp. 274-275). So Freud's theory is that there is an infantile event (in this paper it was supposedly infantile masturbation, later it was infantile Oedipal desires) the memory of which is repressed around puberty, and "built out of and over the childhood memories" comes the false memory, in this case (allegedly) of sexual molestation. Freud provides an essentially similar account of false memories of childhood in his "Screen Memories" paper, in that the memories of early childhood here are "formed" around puberty or a little later (1899, SE 3, p. 322). Again, in the "Rat Man" case history he writes that "people's 'childhood' memories are only consolidated at a later period, usually at the age of puberty" (1909, SE 10, p. 206 n.1). It is evident that, rather than seeing inaccurate memories of childhood as the product of a gradual reconstructive process over time, Freud asserted that they were formed at a specific later date (generally around puberty) in the course of a process of repression. (I leave aside here the general incoherence of Freud's theory, e.g., he provides no indication of the psychological mechanism of the process by which, say, repressed memories of infantile masturbation lead to fantasies of sexual molestations. I also leave aside that, contrary to the received story, these 'memories' were unconscious and had to be analytically reconstructed by Freud himself.) So it is erroneous to contend, as Erdelyi does, that "Bartlettian and Freudian [memory] reconstructions are essentially the same". They are in fact very different. As I note elsewhere, for a 19th-century view that does anticipate modern ideas of the reconstructive processes involved in memory we should rather turn to Frances Power Cobbe, who wrote in 1867 that "memory [is] a fingermark traced on shifting sand, ever exposed to obliteration when left unrenewed; and if renewed, then modified, and made, not the same, but a fresh and different mark." Reference: http://www.srmhp.org/0202/review-01.html Allen Esterson Former lecturer, Science Department Southwark College, London [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.esterson.org/ http://www.human-nature.com/esterson/index.html http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/articleprint.php?num=10 http://www.srmhp.org/0202/review-01.html http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/articleprint.php?num=182 --- To make changes to your subscription go to: http://acsun.frostburg.edu/cgi-bin/lyris.pl?enter=tips&text_mode=0&lang=english
