Let’s take a hard look at your hypothesis for this article:
“I have concluded that there is one outstanding theme that runs through every person with an eating disorder whom I have encountered….people with eating disorders have experienced, on a sustained basis, relentless boundary invasion on every level.”
Allow me to draw your attention to some very interesting developments in the realm of legal psychology. ‘Research on memory fallibility is now front and center, in the context of police investigations and jury verdicts. …Although juries and decision-makers place great reliance on eyewitness identification, they are often unaware of the danger of false memories.’
“Several studies have been conducted on human memory and on subjects’ propensity to remember erroneously events and details that did not occur. Elizabeth Loftus performed experiments in the mid-seventies demonstrating the effect of a third party’s introducing false facts into memory.” This study clearly demonstrated…”The introduction of false cues altered participants’ memories.” …”Courts, lawyers and police officers are now aware of the ability of third parties to introduce false memories to witnesses.”
“So what is an "original memory?"6 The process of interpretation occurs at the very formation of memory—thus introducing distortion from the beginning.”… “Every act of telling and retelling is tailored to a particular listener; …The act of telling a story adds another layer of distortion, which in turn affects the underlying memory of the event. This is why a fish story, which grows with each retelling, can eventually lead the teller to believe it.”
“Experiments conducted by Barbara Tversky and Elizabeth Marsh corroborate the vulnerability of human memory to bias.” Their research showed that “Memory is affected by retelling, and we rarely tell a story in a neutral fashion. By tailoring our stories to our listeners, our bias distorts the very formation of memory—even without the introduction of misinformation by a third party."
I’ve quoted liberally from this article: http://agora.stanford.edu/sjls/Issue%20One/fisher&tversky.htm
Your hypothesis is built on anecdotal experience, patients telling you what you expect to hear. The longer you base your practice on the assumption that “boundary invasion” is the key to understanding eating disorders, the greater the likelihood you’ll miss all evidence to the contrary. Of all people, I would expect you to understand how easily a therapist can influence a patient’s perceptions of their own past.
When we believe every problem is a nail, we never learn how to use anything but a hammer.
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Let’s take a hard look at your hypothesis for this article:
“I have concluded that there is one outstanding theme that runs through every person with an eating disorder whom I have encountered….people with eating disorders have experienced, on a sustained basis, relentless boundary invasion on every level.”
Allow me to draw your attention to some very interesting developments in the realm of legal psychology. ‘Research on memory fallibility is now front and center, in the context of police investigations and jury verdicts. …Although juries and decision-makers place great reliance on eyewitness identification, they are often unaware of the danger of false memories.’
“Several studies have been conducted on human memory and on subjects’ propensity to remember erroneously events and details that did not occur. Elizabeth Loftus performed experiments in the mid-seventies demonstrating the effect of a third party’s introducing false facts into memory.” This study clearly demonstrated…”The introduction of false cues altered participants’ memories.” …”Courts, lawyers and police officers are now aware of the ability of third parties to introduce false memories to witnesses.”
“So what is an "original memory?"6 The process of interpretation occurs at the very formation of memory—thus introducing distortion from the beginning.”… “Every act of telling and retelling is tailored to a particular listener; …The act of telling a story adds another layer of distortion, which in turn affects the underlying memory of the event. This is why a fish story, which grows with each retelling, can eventually lead the teller to believe it.”
“Experiments conducted by Barbara Tversky and Elizabeth Marsh corroborate the vulnerability of human memory to bias.” Their research showed that “Memory is affected by retelling, and we rarely tell a story in a neutral fashion. By tailoring our stories to our listeners, our bias distorts the very formation of memory—even without the introduction of misinformation by a third party."
I’ve quoted liberally from this article: http://agora.stanford.edu/sjls/Issue%20One/fisher&tversky.htm
Your hypothesis is built on anecdotal experience, patients telling you what you expect to hear. The longer you base your practice on the assumption that “boundary invasion” is the key to understanding eating disorders, the greater the likelihood you’ll miss all evidence to the contrary. Of all people, I would expect you to understand how easily a therapist can influence a patient’s perceptions of their own past.
When we believe every problem is a nail, we never learn how to use anything but a hammer.
June 9, 2009 - 3:49pmThis Comment
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