by Dreams End » Sat Aug 27, 2005 11:30 pm
According to this link, Elizabeth's husband is named Geoffrey Loftus.<br><br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.dushkin.com/connectext/psy/ch07/bio7a.mhtml">www.dushkin.com/connectex...io7a.mhtml</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><br> <!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>Elizabeth Loftus is professor of psychology at the University of Washington. She has written several books with her husband, Geoffrey Loftus. Her interests continue to focus on understanding how human memory is shaped by perception and experience.<hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><br><br>Indeed, a search of Amazon confirms this...a book on memory and a textbook on statistics.<br><br>This link says that Geoffrey Loftus, a psychologist at U of Washington, is her EX husband:<br><br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.loftusweb.com/lizpsyc.htm">www.loftusweb.com/lizpsyc.htm</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><br>Take a look at this excerpt for a little insight into "Beth"<br><br><!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr><br>Though Beth Loftus is gregarious, warm, and (as one friend states) "always seems to be on a high without the aid of chemical infusion" she burst into tears twice in the first 20 minutes of our interview. We'd walked a few blocks back to her home from her favorite morning haunt, the Surrogate Hostess, pausing outside to lament with a neighbor over Loftus's "schizophrenic" tree, which wasn't growing properly. Her home is on a hill, comfortably furnished, with an eye for open space. Upstairs a loftlike, open-air bedroom offers a spectacular view of Lake Washington, set off with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Out in the garage is a cream-color sporty Mercedes, a quiet testament to the kind of money that can be earned as an expert witness (up to $ 400 an hour).<br><br>After a few minutes of chitchat, I asked her about her mother's death by drowning when Loftus was 14. I was particularly curious because of an amazing anecdote she tells in her book: On her 44th birthday, at a family gathering, an uncle informed her that she had been the one to discover her mother's dead body. Until then, she remembered little about the death itself, suddenly the memories began to drift back, clear and vivid. A few days later her brother called to say her uncle realized he'd made a mistake, that Loftus's aunt had found the body, not Loftus. Therefore, those few days of "recovered" memories were utterly false. "My own experiment had inadvertently been performed on me!" she had written. "I was left with a sense wonder at the inherent credulity of even my skeptical mind." But when I asked about her mother, she began to cry.<br><br>"It's too upsetting to start this way, I think. Couldn't we come back to this later?"<br><br>I steered the conversation to her early career, and we began looking through her photograph albums. We paused over an old picture of her ex-husband, Geoffrey Loftus, who is also a psychologist at the University of Washington. (They are still friends, though he has remarried.) He was on a motorcycle: dark and sensual, a kind of gentle echo of James Dean. Loftus began to cry again. "He was beautiful, wasn't he?'<br><br>A Next to that photo was one of Loftus lying on a towel under the motorcycle, in a miniskirt and ribbed cotton stockings, hair dark and long. Two sexier academics would be hard to find. "I wasn't really fixing the motorcycle, just pretending to," she confided. "But I showed these on the overhead when I introduced him at a meeting of the American Psychiological Society."<br><br>She quickly dried her tears, and explained without embarrassment that she has a hard time hiding her emotion around two subjects: her ex and her mother. "I was in an old abandoned castle in Holland with other memory scientists from around the world, and we were being taped for television. Somewhere in the middle of this the interviewer brought up my mother and I started crying. You know, it's with you forever. My brothers tease me, they say, Don't say the word or Beth will cry.'"<br><br>There is still family speculation about whether her mother's death was a suicide, and just how much her father's emotional coldness might have contributed to it. At 14, just before her mother died, Loftus was happy-go-lucky and boy-mad. But there was a dark undertow: her mother had earlier been sent away to treat her depression.<br><br>"Today, July 10, 59, was the most tragic day of my life," Loftus confided in her diary. "We woke up this morning and...found her in the swimming pool."<br><br>Grief and loss are common enough: Loftus keeps it alive, yet channels it unremittingly into "helper's high." "I miss the idea of having a mother, so I've gone around being a mother." When a friend lost both her sons and mentioned over coffee that she was contemplating suicide, Loftus naturally began to cry and talked to her for several hours, convincing her to remain alive for her only daughter. (The friend's husband confirmed to me that the woman never considered suicide again).<br><br>Her mother's death also drives her involvement with the shattered families she encounters. At 8:45 one morning I found her in her office, talking to a woman from Boise, Idaho, who had seen her on a talk show and called out of the blue. The woman was in hysterics: she claimed she'd had psychotic breakdowns as a result of repressed memories of childhood abuse. Loftus listened sympathetically for 20 minutes, located a Boise therapist on her computer, and suggested the woman use her name as an introduction. (Ever the researcher, she also took notes on her computer as she listened.)<br><br>Such generosity of heart is startling in someone who, ultimately, puts devotion to her work first. In fact, Loftus freely admits that it was her love of work that broke up her marriage. "I did not realize what a workaholic I was going to become." She is clearly and unabashedly sad over separating from Geoff, but at the same time "proud that my marriage lasted as long as it did, 23 years. I'm very proud of that."<br><br><br><hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><br><br>We need to be careful. this only took me about five minutes to find...yet this little non-fact could discredit any article which links John and Elizabeth. Maybe they're siblings or something...but I've found no confirmation. <p></p><i></i>
