Pseudoscience and the Paranormal

queen is automatic in the sense that it takes place without any conscious awareness on the part of the subject. Further, the subject cannot block such activation should he or she wish to do so. This activation process can be likened to a reflex. It simply happens once a word is presented. It takes place extremely rapidly, with some activation demonstrable as soon as 40 milliseconds following word presentation. The activation is also short-lived, lasting no more than a second or so in most situations. So, here is an example of a cognitive process that is unconscious in the sense that the individual is not aware of it and, apparently, cannot become consciously aware of it. Nonetheless, it is a very different type of process than those postulated by Freud to be taking place in the unconscious.

Some psychologists have misinterpreted work in cognitive psychology and the closely related discipline of neuroscience as supporting the existence of an unconscious of the type Freud proposed. Miller (1986), for example, argues that such research “may be rallying to Freud’s support” (p. 60). Some of the research Miller discusses in his article does, in fact, show the existence of an unconscious. None of it, however, supports an unconscious even remotely like that hypothesized by Freud. The argument is seriously flawed that states that because research in cognitive psychology and neuroscience has shown that some mental processes take place outside consciousness, Freud’s specific postulations about the nature of the unconscious have been supported. Such an argument is equivalent to an astrologer pointing out, correctly, that both astrology and astronomy postulate the existence of stars, and then arguing that because modem research in astronomy and astrophysics verifies the existence of stars, that research also shows that astrology is valid.

Recovered Memory and Satanic Ritual Abuse Claims

The Freudian concept of repression was the keystone of one of the most bizarre and damaging episodes in the history of psychotherapy: the repressed (or recovered) memory hysteria that broke out in the late 1980s. While this has now greatly abated, it has not totally passed from the scene. The episode grew out of a concern about a very real and serious problem—sexual abuse of children by parents, relatives, and other caregivers. However, as the legitimate recognition that such abuse had been underappreciated and underreported for years grew, so did fantastical claims that hundreds of thousands, even millions, of people, mostly women, had been abused as children but had repressed the memories of these hideous events. In some cases, the recovered memories included truly horrific accounts of satanic ritual abuse and the killing and eating of children. Several women “remembered” that they had been used as “baby factories” in their adolescence; the babies they gave birth to were then used for ritual torture and cannibalism. Many women, including the actress Rosanne Barr, “remembered” incidents of abuse that occurred with they were less than a year old, three months old in Barr’s case. Another common finding was that the therapist discovered that patients suffered from multiple personality disorder (MPD—now usually termed Dissociative Identity Disorder, or DID). The 1988 publication of the book Courage to Heal by Ellen Bass and Laura Davis brought the recovered memory claims to wide public attention, as it soon became a best-seller. This and similar books stated that not only had millions of women repressed their memories of childhood abuse, but that the unremembered abuse was the cause of numerous psychological problems these women suffered from. In her book Secret Survivor, E. Sue Blume (1990) argued that half of all women were sexually abused as children. Further—and this was the truly damaging and dangerous aspect of the ideology of what became known as “repressed memory therapy”—the only way to deal with and cure these psychological problems was for the patient recover (i.e., bring back to consciousness) memories of the abuse and confront their abuser(s). This therapeutic approach was, in fact, based on fundamental misunderstandings about how human memory worked. As such, when implemented, it was a recipe for disaster.

The debate over repressed memory therapy generated a vast literature. Loftus (1993) supplies much more detail then I have space for here on the issue of the reality of the memories recovered by patients during therapy. Loftus is a leading researcher in the cognitive psychology of memory who has made major contributions to the understanding of how malleable human memory is even under nonextreme conditions. Her book (Loftus and Ketcham 1994) is probably the best treatment of the repressed memory episode yet written. Crews’s (1995) book, also an excellent and chilling read, focuses much more specifically on the role of Freudian psychology in the repressed memory movement.

If a woman had no memory of abuse during childhood, how was she to know that she had been abused? This was supposedly established by the psychological difficulties she suffered from. The first (1988) edition of Courage to Heal includes a checklist of symptoms that is so long and nonspecific that almost anyone reading it could convince herself that she has some of the symptoms indicating that she had been abused. As Crews (1995) points out, these checklists have disappeared from later editions of the work, no doubt because of the serious criticism they engendered. But they were there at the beginning and contributed to the generation of what became a wave of near hysteria. In another early book on the topic, Blume (1990) warned readers that if they “speak too softly, or wear too many clothes, or have ‘no awareness at all’ of having been violated” (quoted in Crews 1995, p. 196), then they probably had been abused. Thus, a memory of a pleasant childhood with no hint of abuse was often a “fantasy” created to help the repression of the horrible actual events.

Often the process of becoming convinced that one’s symptoms were due to unremembered childhood sexual abuse began in a therapist’s office. The patient would seek help for rather common psychological maladies such as depression, anxiety, or general difficulties in getting along with others and end up convinced that previously unsuspected and unremembered abuse was responsible. But at this point, while the patient may have accepted the abuse explanation, there was still no memory of the abuse. If it was the case that, in order to treat the psychological problems, the abuse had to be consciously remembered, this posed a problem—how to get the patient to recover those repressed memories? To accomplish this, techniques were used that, in a different time and place and with different people (specifically, with American POWs in the Korean War), would have been considered torture and would have been banned by the Genevea Convention.

The techniques used included hypnosis, participation in support groups, something called guided imagery, and drugs such as sodium pentathol, also known as truth serum. As noted in the section on claims of UFO abductions (pp. 268–81), hypnosis is not a state that is conducive to obtaining accurate information from memory. Rather, it is a process that can create memories of events that never took place and cause the individual to strongly believe that the false memories are real. Thus, the use of hypnosis by therapists who believe that a patient’s symptoms are due to unremembered sexual abuse will frequently be “successful” in that the therapist will be able to implant memories of abuse that never took place. Hypnosis was often combined with group therapy sessions, where patients who had already accepted the reality of their hypnotically induced abuse memories put pressure on patients who had not yet done so. Such group pressure is very powerful, and was also used by UFO groups to “help” abductees come to accept the reality of their abduction experiences.

One technique not, to my knowledge, ever used on UFO abductees, but widely used to help recover repressed memories, was guided imagery, also known as visualization. In this technique patients are trained in how to form vivid images, in visual, tactile, and other sensory modalities, of incidents of abuse. Consider, for example, a woman who suspects that she was abused by, say, her uncle, but has no specific memories of such abuse. She would be instructed to go home, lie on her bed, and imagine that she is lying on her bed when she was a child. She should then imagine her uncle coming into her room and fondling her, forcing her to fondle him as, maybe, he undresses. She should then imagine the uncle climbing on top of her and entering her. This type of exercise is repeated until the patient is convinced she has a real memory of her uncle’s abuse. In some cases, the imagery takes place in the therapist’s office with the therapist helping, or “guiding,” the scenario. Obviously such a procedure, along with the social pressure of the therapist, a “support” group of patients already convinced that their recovered memories are real, and hypnosis, forms a belief that totally fictitious, albeit truly terrifying, memories are very real. In addition, it is now clear that the cases of MPD reported in patients subjected to recovered memory “therapy” were caused by the same therapeutic techniques. This was especially true for hypnosis, where the hypnotized, and thus highly suggestible, patient had the different personalities encouraged to “come out” and “show themselves.” The effects of such techniques are graphically illustrated in the episode of the PBS documentary series Frontline titled “The Search for Satan,” first broadcast on October 24, 1995.

In some extreme cases, sodium pentathol was used to aid in recovering memories of abuse. This drug can