Overview

Marilyn Foster was a philosopher and former psychoanalyst known for her fringe academic work relating to consciousness and memory. She created and led the Xeno-Organism Research Group (XORG) in 1994. She was taken into custody in 2006 in reaction to suspected involvement with the disappearance of her daughter, Elizabeth Foster. After several of her communications with an anonymous source were found by investigators, she received the death sentence, which was carried out in 2013. The contents of these communications have not been made public.

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Writings

Foster was known for her extensive journaling, owning several stacks of notebooks, filled front to back with barely legible notes and esoteric diagrams. Most of these notes have been privately confiscated, but some of them have been released for the public.

A common subject of her writing is the manipulation of memory through controlled emotional stimulation. She discusses the way that the mind is influenced by trauma, particularly in its ability to process new information, and recognize familiar faces. One of her notebooks is solely dedicated to dissecting the hypothetical process of fully convincing a child that their parents are not their own, specifically through the extraction and interchange of memories between multiple subjects.

Her model of the mind has been described as, in her own words, a "take-apart and put-back-together toy". She discusses the role of emotions in the storing of memories, and from there extrapolates a broader theory of the ability for emotions to store memories both inside and outside of the body. This leads her to speculate that parts of the mind, or even the entire mind, can be "torn away" from the brain and held within arbitrary media.

These ideas have been dismissed by the broader academic discourse as unscientific and lacking in evidence. It is thought that her ideas may have stemmed from undiagnosed mental illness.

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Gallery