Recovered memories or confabulation?

There are, however, many who doubt DID really exists. The most serious worry concerns the way in which therapists bring alters to the surface. The deep philosophical question here is most evident when you consider the memories of childhood trauma that therapists elicit: how could anyone possibly know if what the client says about childhood abuse is a real memory or a confabulation? It is important here to remember that confabulation in this sense has nothing to do with deliberately lying or making things up. The mind confabulates any time that it comes up with a story of an event which didn’t actually happen. As we saw in Chapter Three when we looked at memory, the human mind is a prolific confabulator. What’s more, it is remarkably easy to elicit specific confabulations, as we saw from Elizabeth Loftus’s Bugs Bunny experiments.

Saved 23 April 2015

#dissociation #memory #psychology