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Lauren Slater

Lauren Slater Biography

Psychologist

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“Well before she became famous — or infamous, depending on where you cast your vote — Loftus's findings on memory distortion were clearly commodifiable. In the 1970s and 1980s she provided assistance to defense attorneys eager to prove to juries that eyewitness accounts are not the same as camcorders. "I've helped a lot of people," she says. Some of those people: the Hillside Strangler, the Menendez brothers, Oliver North, Ted Bundy. "Ted Bundy?" I ask, when she tells this to me. Loftus laughs. "This was before we knew he was Bundy. He hadn't been accused of murder yet." "How can you be so confident the people you're representing are really innocent?" I ask. She doesn't directly answer. She says, "In court, I go by the evidence.... Outside of court, I'm human and entitled to my human feelings. "What, I wonder are her human feelings about the letter from a child-abuse survivor who wrote, "Let me tell you what false memory syndrome does to people like me, as if you care. It makes us into liars. False memory syndrome is so much more chic than child abuse.... But there are children who tonight while you sleep are being raped, and beaten. These children may never tell because 'no one will believe them.'" "Plenty of "Plenty of people will believe them," says Loftus. Pshaw! She has a raucous laugh and a voice with a bit of wheedle in it. She is strange, I think, a little loose inside. She veers between the professional and the personal with an alarming alacrity," she could easily have been talking about herself.”

TruthLawMurderSexual AbuseRapeJudgeSexual AssaultSurvivorsLegalVictimsSerial KillersMisrepresentationTed BundyFalse MemoryFalse Memory Syndrome FoundationFalsely AccusedFmsfAbuse DeniersFalse AccusationsConvictedDefense ExpertExpert WitnessCourt CaseElizabeth LoftusElizabeth F LoftusFalse ImpressionsLoftusSocietal DenialRichard Ofshe
Book:Opening Skinner's Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century
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“But then, not long after, in another article, Loftus writes, "We live in a strange and precarious time that resembles at its heart the hysteria and superstitious fervor of the witch trials." She took rifle lessons and to this day keeps the firing instruction sheets and targets posted above her desk. In 1996, when Psychology Today interviewed her, she burst into tears twice within the first twenty minutes, labile, lubricated, theatrical, still whip smart, talking about the blurry boundaries between fact and fiction while she herself lived in another blurry boundary, between conviction and compulsion, passion and hyperbole. "The witch hunts," she said, but the analogy is wrong, and provides us with perhaps a more accurate window into Loftus's stretched psyche than into our own times, for the witch hunts were predicated on utter nonsense, and the abuse scandals were predicated on something all too real, which Loftus seemed to forget: Women are abused. Memories do matter. Talking to her, feeling her high-flying energy the zeal that burns up the center of her life, you have to wonder, why. You are forced to ask the very kind of question Loftus most abhors: did something bad happen to her? For she herself seems driven by dissociated demons, and so I ask. What happened to you? Turns out, a lot. (refers to Dr. Elizabeth F. Loftus)”

MemoryNonsenseChild AbuseDemonsWitchesSexual AbuseRapeDissociationHysteriaSurvivorsExpertIncestVictimsFalse MemoriesSalemWitch HuntFalse MemoryRepressed MemoryFmsfFalse AccusationsMemory WarsDefense WitnessSocial DenialElizabeth LoftusElizabeth F LoftusFalse Memory Syndrome SocietyWitch TrailsProtecting Abusers
Book:Opening Skinner's Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century
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“I am a child of Western medicine. I am a cynic, a skeptic, which is the attitude underlying so much of Western medicine. I don't believe in inherent goodness. I don't believe that nature will never lead you astray. I believe there are more than one hundred billion cells in the body and if, at any moment, one of them is not becoming cancerous, it's only your good luck, the whimsy of your god that has spared you. Natural childbirth proudly announces, "All pain has a purpose," which is a wonderful view, an utterly romantic view, straight out of the mind of Shelley or Byron; those thoughts are not mine. I live in a world of random events, unseen collisions, and sudden swerves. The beauty, for me, lies not in knowing there is an underlying purposeful pattern but in facing, with some sort of grace, the impenetrable vista.”

Western Medicine
Book:Love Works Like This: Moving from One Kind of Life to Another
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“Your pathology report shows that your tumor is consistent with hepatoma, which is, uh, which is liver cancer." Already I am struggling: Does "consistent with" mean they think that but they don't really know it? No, those are just scientific weasel words they use in pathology reports. (A pathologist, I will learn, would look at your nose and report that it is consistent with a breathing apparatus.) 248 Marjorie Williams”

Weasel WordsMedical Language
Book:The Best American Essays 2006
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“Are psychiatric crises so overwhelming to the mind that they inhibit the presence of ethics? Is depression at root an amoral phenomenon, its focus on the self preventing any other from really counting? Perhaps. Sometimes. Sometimes, even when we are two we are really only one; we can feel nothing but our own bones, our own difficult breaths.”

FeelsMindTwoSelfSometimesDifficultFocusDepressionEthicsRootsBreathsCrisisIllnessBonesMental IllnessPhenomenonOverwhelmingCountingPreventingPsychiatric
Author:Lauren Slater
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“Mistrust is the fuel for so much mental pain, so many mental disorders. I am not talking here about the suspicions we sometimes have of one another, the distant but lurking sense that perhaps our lover lies to us, our best friend whispers behind our back. I am talking about a belief that betrayal inundates the atoms of the universe, is so woven into the workings of the world that every step is treacherous, and that below the rich mud lies a mine.”

WorldSometimesPainLyingUniverseBeliefBehindsTalkingStepsRichMinesLoversBetrayalFuelDisorderAtomsSuspicionMudWovenEvery StepNot TalkingMistrustTreacherousLurkingMental DisorderMental Pain
Book:Welcome to My Country
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“Much has been said about the meanings we make of illness, but what about the meanings we make out of cure? Cure is complex, disorienting, a revisioning of the self, either subtle or stark. Cure is the new, strange planet, pressing in. The doctor could not have known. And that made me, as it does every patient, only more alone.”

DoeHas BeensMadeSaidSelfKnownStrangePlanetsDoctorsComplexesPatientIllnessCuresSubtleStarksMake Out
Book:Prozac Diary
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