Essay Questions

What can the case study of the patient known as “Lisa” teach about lie detection?

Despite decades of continued reliance on the results of professional polygraph examinations to shape and form the nature of law enforcement investigations, there is a reason why these results are still not admissible in court. The processes of lying are so complicated, convoluted, and mysterious that it should really be against the law for anyone to make any claim at to being able to detect when a person is lying. The story of Lisa is one of unbelievable trauma which gives rise to a psychosis manifested in part by violent and destruction outbursts that she is unable to remember. This lack of memory would, inevitably, be viewed by caretakers as conscious manipulation to avoid guilt and responsibility or, put more simply, lying. The business of professional lie detection is huge, generation potentially billions in transaction with especially lucrative salaries for those considered the elite in their field. Lisa’s case is just one single case which illuminates a fact which should be obvious: the human mind is far too complicated machinery to reduce any single behavior to one which can be quantified within an either/or dynamic. If Lisa could quite literally engage in in behavior so extreme that it “terrified her caretakers” and not be capable of taking responsibility because she authentically could not remember doing anything, it should at least raise ethical questions surrounding anyone who earns a living by claiming to be able to know when another person is lying.

How is depersonalization also a concept which calls law enforcement investigative techniques into question?

The case study of a woman named Ute is the book’s primary focus on the psychological response to trauma known as depersonalization. Ute was the passenger in a car being driven by her husband that was just one of eighty-seven vehicles involved in the most horrific chain reaction traffic pileup in Canadian history. While her husband Stan dealt with the aftermath of post-traumatic stress in a highly animated and emotional way, Ute’s recovery took the exact opposite path. Right from the beginning as she still sat in the front seat of the car waiting to be rescued, Ute’s psychological defense mechanism was complete dissociation of emotional detachment and complete lapse into an abyss devoid of any outward demonstration of emotions. This reaction was found to trace back a complicated childhood relationship with a hateful mother. The result was that anyone looking at how Ute responded to questions about the accident would be one easily interpreted as an utter lack of any feelings about it all. Going further, some might interpret her as cold or indifferent or even possibly downright sociopathic in her seeming inability to express any of the outward displays of emotion one would likely expect as natural and “normal.” Depersonalization is also quite obviously an exceptionally complex psychological response to a traumatic event that we naturally expect to produce a more extreme display of emotional rather than an entire absence. And yet, law enforcement investigation remains overwhelming dependent on suspects producing the emotional response that is not just expected but has been deemed the “right” response not just in the immediate aftermath of a crime but even years later inside a courtroom.

What does the experience of the patient identified as Julia suggest about one fundamental aspect of human nature?

Julia is an extreme case: a girl who was raped at gunpoint as a teenager and proceeded to pursue a lifestyle that actively sought opportunities to put herself into similar situations in which she would be humiliated, threatened, and hurt by men more powerful than herself. As extreme as her case is in the details, however, the arc of Julia’s life in response to that initial traumatic experience can be loosely interpreted as almost universal. While it may seem a huge leap from actively choosing to prostitute yourself in a way that—whether consciously or not—replicates psychological framework the rape trauma to binging on an entire carton of ice cream while watching a romantic comedy that mirrors a failed relationship, the two actually related. Freud developed a theory he termed “the compulsion to repeat” which the author rejects in favor of theory using the term “attractors” to describe behaviors that often take the form of replicating unpleasant emotions or, in many cases, actual traumatic incidents. Though not to the same extent as Julia, her experience points to a collective personality trait that partially defines humanity: we all enjoy a certain perverse sort of pleasure in recreating personal misery.