In the last decade, reports of incest have exploded into the national consciousness. Magazines, talk shows, and mass market paperbacks have all jumped into the fray, as many Americans primarily women have come forward with graphic and true stories of sexual and psychological abuse. Many of these stories, however, have emerged from recovered memory therapy, a process by which the therapist leads the patient to recall longburied memories. Now the Pulitzer Prizewinning social psychologist Richard Ofshe and Mother Jones writer Ethan Watters demonstrate that these recovered memories can be false, fabricated in the highly charged atmosphere of therapy, usually through questionable techniques such as hypnosis. Ofshe and Watters not only take to task poorly trained therapists and in many states no real clinical experience is required to practice they also show how the mental health establishment has actually added to the confusion. Ofshe and Watters trace the problem back to its source Sigmund Freud and illuminate how and why the debate about recovered memories will drive psychology in the future. Making Monsters is groundbreaking science with powerful stories. It comes at a time when parents and friends of recovered memory patients, wrongly accused of violent physical and emotional abuse, are banding together, searching for real answers to difficult questions. Timely and controversial, this book exposes a profound social and psychological crisis, and will curb a popular craze that is destroying thousands of families. Its message cannot be ignored.

Originally published: New York : Charles Scribner's, c1994

Includes bibliographical references (p. 343-352) and index

The myths ofmemory -- Effort after meaning -- Symptoms of pseudoscience -- Creation of the abuse narrative -- Investment in belief -- Life with father -- Hypnosis and the creation of pseudomemories -- Two cases of hypnotic story creation -- Reason and darkness: The strange stories of Satanic abuse -- Multiple personality disorder: The creation ofa sickness -- Therapy of a high priestess -- The murder, the witness, and the psychiatrist -- Deaths in the family

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