���On 19 September 2009 Stephen Black wrote on Frances Cobbe's remarkably modern account (1867) of how false memories occur: >Having a fascination with firsts, I wonder whether this is >the earliest that anyone has described these concepts. >My own quick Google search turned up nothing to dispute >this conclusion, although it is not an easy topic for a >search. Perhaps Freud could be credited with a particular >form of it in his (1897? 1906?) contention that his patients >confabulated stories of "seduction" [rape] by an adult, which >he belatedly claimed were merely fantasies. (Someone >named Esterson (2001) takes exception to how Freud tells >this story, BTW).
Stephen cites the following (small correction made! ) >Esterson, A. (2001). The mythologizing of psychoanalytic >history: Deception and self-deception in Freud´s accounts of the >seduction theory episode. History of Psychiatry, 12, 329-352. On the issue of "firsts", it was Frank Cioffi in a BBC Radio 3 broadcast in 1973 who first pointed out the numerous discrepancies in Freud's ever-changing accounts of the "seduction theory" episode (article published in The Listener, 7 February 1974 under the title "Was Freud a Liar?"). As Cioffi argued, "Freud did not base his seduction theory on stories of infantile seduction related by his patients. In any case, his patients did not tell him any fictitious seduction stories." The subtitle of my artic le cited by Stephen indicates my view that that although self-deception along the lines suggested by Cobbe (how "liars come to believe their own lies") played a significant role in Freud's road to the traditional story, there is abundant evidence that he also practised deliberate deception to conceal the truth about his supposed clinical "findings" proclaimed in 1896 as the solution to the aetiology of hysteria and obsessional neurosis. My article could well have been subtitled "How he got away with it"!: http://www.esterson.org/Mythologizing_psychoanalytic_history.htm A caveat to Stephen's comments. He indicates that in that Freud's retrospective explanation of the 1896 sexual abuse claims the term "seduc tion" was equivalent to "rape". This needs amplification. Misled by Jeffrey Masson's tendentious accounts, many people think that Freud's 1896 clinical claims were about incest. In fact rape scarcely figured in the seduction theory papers, and fathers not at all. All Freud's theory required was some kind of sexual excitation in early childhood, and it would better have been described as the "sexual molestation" theory. In his final accounts of the episode Freud used the term "seduction" without specifying what he meant, and since by then he had implicated fathers (to accord with his Oedipal theory), it has often been interpreted to mean rape. Reference Cioffi, F. (1998 [1974]). "Was Freud a=2 0Liar?" In *Freud and the Question of Pseudoscience*, Open Court. Allen Esterson Former lecturer, Science Department Southwark College, London http://www.esterson.org ---------------------------------------------------------- [tips] History of false memory concept (Was: Darwin on animal experimentation) sblack Sat, 19 Sep 2009 Allen Esterson wrote, in drawing attention to an exchange of letters between Darwin and the Irish feminist Frances Cobbe: > My knowledge of Cobbe previously did not extend beyond her > perspicacious remarks on memory, which rebutted the contemporary idea > of memory and also provided an explanation for false memories: Allen cited her work "The Fallacies of memory" (1867) as the source of her comments on memory as reprinted in _Embodied Selves_,1998) [Googling suggests the essay may have first appeared a year earlier]. Cobbe's comments ("memory a finger marked traced on shifting sand") appear remarkably prescient of modern research on false memory and its malleability, which started, as far as I know, in the early 1990's with Elizabeth Loftus, and with the founding of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation. Having a fascination with firsts, I wonder whether this is the earliest that anyone has described these concepts. My own quick Google search turned up nothing to dispute this conclusion, although it is not an easy topic for a search. Perhaps Freud could be credited with 20a particular form of it in his (1897? 1906?) contention that his patients confabulated stories of "seduction" [rape] by an adult, which he belatedly claimed were merely fantasies. (Someone named Esterson (2001) takes exception to how Freud tells this story, BTW). However, Cobbe's treatment of false memory is more general and more compatible with current scientific knowledge, and still beats Freud by around 30 years. Anyone have anything earlier? Stephen Esterson, A. (2001). The mythologizing of psychoanalytic theory: Deception and self-deception in Freud´s accounts of the seduction theory episode. History of Psychiatry, 12, 329-352. Stephen L. Black, Ph.D. Professor of Psychology, Emeritus Bishop' s University e-mail: sbl...@ubishops.ca 2600 College St. Sherbrooke QC J1M 1Z7 Canada ----------------------------------------------------------- [tips] Darwin on animal experimentation Allen Esterson Sat, 19 Sep 2009 TIPSters may be interested in a public exchange of letters between Darwin and the Irish feminist Frances Power Cobbe on animal experimentation that I've just chanced upon: http://timesonline.typepad.com/timesarchive/2009/02/video-ben-macin.html (Hold down left hand side of your mouse and drag to see complete letter.) My knowledge of Cobbe previously did not extend beyond her perspicacious remarks on memory, which rebutted the contemporary idea of memory and also provided an explanation for false memo ries: Memory is for ever likened by poets and rhetoricians to an engraved tablet, treasured in the recesses of mind, and liable only to obliteration by the slow abrasion of time, or the dissolving heat of madness. We venture to affirm that such a simile is not in the remotest degree applicable to the real phenomena of the case, and that memory is neither an impression made, once for all, like an engraving on a tablet, nor yet safe for an hour from obliteration or modification, after being formed. Rather is memory a finger mark 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. […] Again, by this theory of memory, we obtain an available hypothesis, to account for the notorious but marvellous fact, that liars come in time to believe their own falsehoods. The warping of the original trace of the story, albeit voluntary and conscious, has, equally with unconscious dereliction, effected the end of obliterating the primary mark, and substituting a false one, which has assumed the place of a remembrance. Without conscious falsehood, the same thing happens also occasionally when we realize strongly by imagination some circumstance which never happened, or happened to another person… Frances Power Cobbe, “The Fallacies of Memory” (1867) (Embodied Selves: An Anthology of Psychologic al Texts, pp. 151-152, OUP, 1998) Allen Esterson Former lecturer, Science Department Southwark College, London http://www.esterson.org --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
