The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [81]
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.
Another prominent therapist gives his patients his own articles on alien abductions to help them ‘remember’ their experiences. He is gratified when what they eventually recall under hypnosis resembles what he describes in his papers. The similarity of the cases is one of his chief reasons for believing that abductions really occur.
A leading UFO scholar comments that ‘When the hypnotist does not have an adequate knowledge of the subject [of alien abductions], the true nature of the abduction may never be revealed’. Can we discern in this remark how the patient might be led without the therapist realizing that he’s leading?
Sometimes when ‘falling’ asleep we have the sense of toppling from a height, and our limbs suddenly