1288) [T]he practice of uncovering repressed memories, along with the attendant theories of multiple personality disorder and satanic-cult abuse, are fads as widespread and as damaging as any the mental-health field has produced in this century. [...] [R]ecovered memory therapists are not, as they portray themselves, brave healers but professionals who have built a pseudoscience out of an unfounded consensus about how the mind reacts to sexual trauma. In the process they have slipped the ties that bind their professions to scientific method and sound research. Free from any burden of proof, these therapists have created an Alice-in-Wonderland world in which opinion, metaphor, and ideological preference substitute for objective evidence. While claiming to uncover the truth of their clients' past, these therapists have pursued a treatment regime that persuades clients to accept hypnotically generated images, gut feelings, dreams, and imaginings as valid memories. Without an understanding of the damage they have already caused, these therapists have employed methods that blur the already perilously thin line that separates memory from imagination and have unwittingly coerced their patients to mold their beliefs and behaviors to the expectations of their therapy.

Richard Ofshe and Ethan Watters
Making Monsters: False Memories,
Psychotherapy and Sexual Hysteria (1994)

1289) The human mind sees patterns. We tell ourselves stories about why one event might have been the cause of a second event and might therefore be a predictor of a third. In many areas, say religion or economics, we often offer such post hoc reasoning without requiring that the validity of those connections be demonstrated. Astrology, for another example, is an elaborate apparatus for creating the appearance of meaningful connections where none exist. All of us are experts at making such cause-and-effect conclusions within our lives.

Richard Ofshe and Ethan Watters
Making Monsters: False Memories,
Psychotherapy and Sexual Hysteria (1994)

1290) We tell ourselves stories in order to live [...] We interpret what we see, select the most workable of multiple choices. We live entirely [...] by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

Joan Didion
The White Album (1979)
quoted by Richard Ofshe and Ethan Watters in
Making Monsters: False Memories,
Psychotherapy and Sexual Hysteria (1994)

1291) Recovered memory therapists pursue hidden memories for years like archaeologists using dynamite. For months or years they blast away at what they believe are the barriers to memory, unaware that their process destroys the fragile treasure they claim to seek. While this mistake is not new to the field of psychotherapy, recovered memory therapists make it in the most egregious fashion.

Richard Ofshe and Ethan Watters
Making Monsters: False Memories,
Psychotherapy and Sexual Hysteria (1994)

1292) Until hard evidence is obtained and corroborated, the public should not be frightened into believing that babies are bred and eaten, that 50,000 missing children are being murdered in human sacrifices, or that Satanists are taking over America's day care centers or institutions. [...] While no one can prove with absolute certainty that such activity has not occurred, the burden of proof is on those who claim that it has occurred. [...] [It is now] up to the mental health professionals, not law enforcement, to explain why victims are alleging things that don't seem to have happened.

Ken Lanning (FBI Special Agent)
Investigator's Guide to Allegations
of Ritual Child Abuse (1989)
quoted by Richard Ofshe and Ethan Watters in
Making Monsters: False Memories,
Psychotherapy and Sexual Hysteria (1994)

1293) Each [account of plausible Devil worship cited] is accompanied by statements which are anything but plausible [...] To understand why the stereotype of Devil-worshiping sects emerged at all, one must look not at the beliefs or behavior of heretics [...] but into the minds of the orthodox themselves. Many people, and particularly many priests and monks, were becoming more and more obsessed by the overwhelming power of the Devil and his demons. That is why their idea of the absolutely evil and anti-human came to include Devil-worship, alongside incest, infanticide and cannibalism. [...] Stories which contain manifestly impossible elements ought not to be accepted as evidence for physical events.

Norman Cohn
Europe's Inner Demons (1975)
quoted by Richard Ofshe and Ethan Watters in
Making Monsters: False Memories,
Psychotherapy and Sexual Hysteria (1994)

1294) [T]o believe the satanic-cult theories [...] requires that you give up the assumption your neighbor (or your doctor or the teacher who watches over your child) will act decently. If these theories are not true, recovered memory therapists can count themselves responsible for damaging not only individual lives and families but for tearing apart whole communities by eroding the trust the binds people together.

Richard Ofshe and Ethan Watters
Making Monsters: False Memories,
Psychotherapy and Sexual Hysteria (1994)

1295) Reasoned dialogue has a limited ability to withstand an assault by the mythic power of falsehood, especially when that falsehood is rooted in an age-old social and cultural phenomenon [...] Mythical thinking and the force of the irrational have a strange and compelling allure for the educated and uneducated alike. [...] Reasoned dialogue, particularly as it applies to the understanding of history, is rooted in the notion that there exists a historical reality that - though it may be subjected by the historian to a multiplicity of interpretations - is ultimately found and not made. [...] Even a historian with a particular bias is dramatically different from the proponents of these pseudoreasoned ideologies. The latter freely shape or create information to buttress their convictions and reject as implausible any evidence that counters them. They use the language of scientific inquiry, but theirs is purely an ideological enterprise.

Deborah Lipstadt
Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault
on Truth and Memory (1993)
quoted by Richard Ofshe and Ethan Watters in
Making Monsters: False Memories,
Psychotherapy and Sexual Hysteria (1994)

1296) Our growing willingness as a culture to throw history up for grabs - to believe anything is possible and therefore anything might be true - is the cornerstone from which the satanic-cult story is built. We are asked to deny reason in favor of belief.

Richard Ofshe and Ethan Watters
Making Monsters: False Memories,
Psychotherapy and Sexual Hysteria (1994)

1297) While Freud's notions functioned something like a paradigm, his theories were prescientific and based on no empirical evidence. As in prescientific eras of other disciplines, his theories were accepted by consensus - not because of anything resembling empirical proof but because of his magnetism and the seductively broad nature of the ideas. No doubt it was the very arrogance and grandiose application of his theories that was appealing to intellectuals and mental-health practitioners who were happy to claim an understanding of what motivated people - even if they could not actually explain the working of these theories, much less prove their truth or value. Those who adopted his theories and defended his assertions gained by association something of Freud's status, at least vis-a-vis the untutored. Recovered memory therapists in many respects have operated within Freud's pseudoscientific paradigm. In doing so they have become to the study of the mind and behavior what astrologers are to the scientific study of the stars and planets. They have engaged in an enterprise based not on science but on impressionistic insight, myth, metaphor, and the powerful persuasive nature of the therapy setting.

Richard Ofshe and Ethan Watters
Making Monsters: False Memories,
Psychotherapy and Sexual Hysteria (1994)