The existence of a highly sceptical FBI report on the general subject of satanic abuse (Kenneth V. Lanning, ‘Investigator’s Guide to Allegations of “Ritual” Child Abuse’, January 1992) is widely ignored by enthusiasts. Likewise, a 1994 study by the British Department of Health into claims of satanic abuse there concluded that, of 84 alleged instances, not one stood up to scrutiny. What then is all the furore about? The study explains,
The Evangelical Christian campaign against new religious movements has been a powerful influence encouraging the identification of satanic abuse. Equally, if not more, important in spreading the idea of satanic abuse in Britain are the ‘specialists’, American and British. They may have few or even no qualifications as professionals, but attribute their expertise to ‘experience of cases’.
Those convinced that devil cults represent a serious danger to our society tend to be impatient with sceptics. Consider this analysis by Corydon Hammond, PhD, past President of the American Society for Clinical Hypnosis:
I will suggest to you that these people [sceptics] are either, one, naive and of limited clinical experience; two, have a kind of naivete that people have of the Holocaust, or they’re just such intellectualizers and sceptics that they’ll doubt everything; or, three, they’re cult people themselves. And I can assure that there are people who are in that position . . . There are people who are physicians, who are mental health professionals, who are in the cults, who are raising trans-generational cults … I think the research is real clear: We got three studies, one found 25 percent, one found 20 percent of out-patient multiples [multiple personality disorders] appear to be cult-abuse victims, and another on a specialized in-patient unit found 50 percent.
In some of his statements, he seems to believe that satanic Nazi mind control experiments have been performed by the CIA on tens of thousands of unsuspecting American citizens. The overarching motive, Hammond believes, is to ‘create a satanic order that will rule the world’.
In all three classes of ‘recovered memories’, there are specialists – alien abduction specialists, satanic cult specialists, and specialists in recalling repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse. As is common in mental health practice, patients select or are referred to a therapist whose specialist seems relevant to their complaint. In all three classes, the therapist helps to draw forth images of events alleged to have occurred long ago (in some cases from decades past); in all three, therapists are profoundly moved by the unmistakably genuine agony of their patients; in all three, at least some therapists are known to ask leading questions – which are virtually orders by authority figures to suggestible patients insisting that they remember (I almost wrote ‘confess’); in all three, there are networks of therapists who trade client histories and therapeutic methods; in all three, practitioners feel the necessity of defending their practice against more sceptical colleagues; in all three, the iatrogenic hypothesis is given short shrift; in all three,
the majority of those who report abuse are women. And in all three classes – with the exceptions mentioned – there is no physical evidence. So it’s hard not to wonder whether alien abductions might be part of some larger picture.
What could this larger picture be? I posed this question to Dr Fred H. Frankel, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, Chief of Psychiatry at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston, and a leading expert on hypnosis. His answer:
If alien abductions are a part of a larger picture, what indeed is the larger picture? I fear to rush in where angels fear to tread; however, the factors you outline all feed what was described at the turn of the century as ‘hysteria’. The term, sadly, became so widely used that our contemporaries in their dubious wisdom … not only dropped it, but also lost sight of the phenomena it represented: high levels of suggestibility, imaginal capacity, sensitivity to contextual cues and expectations, and the element of contagion . . . Little of all of this seems to be appreciated by a large number of practicing clinicians.
In exact parallel to regressing people so they supposedly retrieve forgotten memories of ‘past lives’, Frankel notes that therapists can as readily progress people under hypnosis so they can ‘remember’ their futures. This elicits the same emotive intensity as in regression or in Mack’s abductee hypnosis. ‘These people are not out to deceive the therapist. They deceive themselves,’ Frankel says. They cannot distinguish their confabulations from their experiences.’
If we fail to cope, if we’re saddled with a burden of guilt for not having made more of ourselves, wouldn’t we welcome the professional opinion of a therapist with a diploma on the wall that it’s not our fault, that we’re off the hook, that satanists, or sexual abusers, or aliens from another planet are the responsible parties? Wouldn’t we be willing to pay good money for this reassurance? And wouldn’t we resist smart-ass sceptics telling us that it’s all in our heads, or that it’s implanted by the very therapists who have made us happier about ourselves?
How much training in scientific method and sceptical scrutiny, in statistics, or even in human fallibility have these therapists received? Psychoanalysis is not a very self-critical profession, but at least many of its practitioners have MD degrees. Most medical curricula include significant exposure to scientific results and methods. But many of those dealing with abuse cases seem to have at best a casual acquaintance with science. Mental health providers in America are more likely by about two-to-one to be social workers than either psychiatrists or PhD psychologists.
Most of these therapists contend that their responsibility is to support their patients, not to question, to be sceptical, or to raise doubts. Whatever is presented, no matter how bizarre, is accepted. Sometimes the prompting by therapists is not at all subtle. Here [from the False Memory Syndrome Foundation’s FMS Newsletter, vol. 4, no. 4, p. 3, 1995] is a hardly atypical report:
My former therapist has testified that he still believes that my mother is a satanist, [and] that my father molested me … It was my therapist’s delusional belief system and techniques involving suggestion and persuasion that led me to believe the lies were memories. When I doubted the reality of the memories he insisted they were true. Not only did he insist they were true, he informed me that in order to get well I must not only accept them as real, but remember them all.
In a 1991 case in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, a teenager, Nicole Althaus, encouraged by a teacher and a social worker, accused her father of having sexually abused her, resulting in his arrest. Nicole also reported that she had given birth to three children, who her relatives had killed, that she had been raped in a crowded restaurant, and that her grandmother flew about on a broom. Nicole recanted her allegations the following year, and all charges against her father were dropped. Nicole and her parents brought a civil suit against the therapist and psychiatric clinic to whom Nicole had been referred shortly after she began making her accusations. The jury found that the doctor and the clinic had been negligent and awarded almost a quarter of a million dollars to Nicole and her parents. There are increasing numbers of cases of this sort.
Might the competition among therapists for patients, and the obvious financial interest of therapists in prolonged therapy, make them less likely to offend patients by evincing some scepticism about their stories? How aware are they of the dilemma of a naive patient walking into a professional office and being told that the insomnia or obesity is due (in increasing order of bizarreness) to wholly forgotten parental abuse, satanic ritual, or alien abduction? While there are ethical and other constraints, we need something like a control experiment: perhaps the same patient sent to specialists in all three fields. Does any of them say, ‘No, your problem isn’t due to forgotten childhood abuse’ (or forgotten satanic ritual, or alien abduction, as appropriate)? How many of them say, ‘There’s a much more prosaic explanation’? Instead, Mack goes so far as to tell one of his patients admiringly and reassuringly that he is on a ‘hero’s journey’. One group of ‘abductees’ – each having a separate but similar experience – writes
[S]everal of us had finally summoned enough courage to present our experiences to professional counselors, only to have them nervously avoid the subject, raise an eyebrow in silence or interpret the experience as a dream or waking hallucination and patronizingly ‘reassure’ us that such things happen to people, ‘but don’t worry, you’re basically mentally sound.’ Great! We’re not crazy, but if we take our experiences seriously, then we might become crazy!
With enormous relief, they found a sympathetic therapist who not only accepted their stories at face value, but was full of stories of alien bodies and high-level government cover-up of UFOs.
A typical UFO therapist finds his subjects in three ways: they write letters to him at an address given in the back of his books; they are referred to him by other therapists (mainly those who also specialize in alien abductions); or they come up to him after he presents a lecture. I wonder if any patient arrives at his portal wholly ignorant of popular abduction accounts and the therapist’s own methods and beliefs. Before any words are exchanged, they know a great deal about one another.