I thought William James would have had something to say about this so I
accessed Chris Green's copy of Principles of Psychology that he kindly placed
online so when we are at home we have easy access.
In discussing memory formation, here is a quotation from Fechner from his
Psychophysik: "They show that profound rearrangements and slow settlings into a
new equilibrinm are going on in the neural substance and they form the
transition to that more peculiar and proper phenomenon of memory of which the
rest of this chapter must treat."
This is then followed by a long discussion of work cited by Richet in L'Homme
et L'Intelligence which also sounds much like the sentiments expressed by
Cobbe. I don't have any of the dates of publication handy for these works.
James' chapter is my favorite to introduce in the cognitive course because it
is prescient of much of what we know today. Anyway, we are looking at a little
later with Fechner and Richet in the later 1800s but maybe they cite earlier
works?
Annette
Annette Kujawski Taylor, Ph.D.
Professor of Psychology
University of San Diego
5998 Alcala Park
San Diego, CA 92110
619-260-4006
tay...@sandiego.edu
---- Original message ----
>Date: Sun, 20 Sep 2009 02:24:12 -0400
>From: sbl...@ubishops.ca
>Subject: [tips] History of false memory concept (Was: Darwin on animal
>experimentation)
>To: "Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS)" <tips@acsun.frostburg.edu>
>
>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 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).
>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.
>
>
>
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>Stephen L. Black, Ph.D.
>Professor of Psychology, Emeritus
>Bishop's University
> e-mail: sbl...@ubishops.ca
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>Sherbrooke QC J1M 1Z7
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