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By Root 1948 0

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