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: [email protected]
2600 College St.
Sherbrooke QC J1M 1Z7
Canada
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