Making Monsters: False Memories, Psychotherapy, and Sexual Hysteria

This is the most thoroughgoing and powerful critique to date of the use of recovered memories in psychotherapy. Many retrieved memories of childhood sexual abuse, the authors argue, are fabrications generated in a coercive, highly charged atmosphere using questionable therapeutic techniques such as hypnosis, dream analysis, artwork and the constant revisiting and rewriting of vague early memories. Ofshe, a social psychology professor at UC Berkeley and a Pulitzer-winning reporter, and freelance writer Watters extend their analysis to include alleged sufferers of multiple-personality disorder and people who claim to have been abused or tortured by satanic cults that engage in sacrificial murder and rape. The authors name names, attacking therapists, experts and writers, and they cover such well-publicized cases involving recovered memories as the 1990 San Francisco murder trial that convicted George Franklin on the basis of his daughter Eileen Lipsker's accusation that he had killed her childhood friend Susan Nasson 20 years earlier. This report is certain to escalate a heated public debate. (Oct.)