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As we have also noted, hypnosis increases productivity and openness to fantasy decreases
critical judgment and can create believable, vivid, coherent memories of the past de novo.
If these memories are taken as literal renderings of the past, the results can be destructive.
Remember that hypnosis can also create believable “memories” of past lives, and of future
lives as well.
Does combining these two methods of creating subjective history --psychotherapy and
hypnosis --lead to memories that can be relied on in court? Of course not! But cannot
careful hypnotherapists avoid such problems? Unfortunately, even internationally respected
experts cannot do so, as we saw in the AP case of McConkey and Sheehan (1995). While
reviewing the scientific literature on hypnosis and memory, we have been struck, as was
Spanos (1996), by the absurdity of questioning whether hypnotic age regression can create
bizarre, deeply believed memories of impossible events. It has a well-known history of
doing so.
For example, David Cheek (1975), an internationally known obstetrician and hypnotist,
reported a series of more than 2,000 cases in which he traced a variety of psychosomatic
and physical illnesses to negative events during and immediately after birth that were
remembered during hypnotic trance. Of course, such “memories” were not hidden some-
where in the brain they did not exist until Cheek helped create them. Working with Leslie
LeCron, another noted figure in clinical hypnosis in the 1950s and 1960s, Cheek (1975)
reported finding that a whole variety of disorders were related to untoward events
“remembered” as occurring immediately after birth. And, as in current recovered memory
therapy, adult figures were often “remembered” as being to blame for later illness. For
example, Cheek (1975) found that those adult women who were hypnotically age-regressed
to birth and remembered hearing someone stating preferences for a boy at their births often
suffered from a variety of genital complaints. Other well-meaning therapists have produced
similar incredible reports during therapeutic hypnosis, even claiming to have found
independent confirmation of them (cf. Chamberlain, 1986). David Cheek was no fool, but
the notion that hypnosis in therapeutic contexts produces historically accurate memories is
foolish.
Final Thoughts
Crews et al. (1995) have documented at length the blindness of traditional psychotherapists
when asked to see how they contribute to the symptoms they find. An extraordinary
incident, illustrative of this blindness, occurred about 20 years ago, when one of our
esteemed colleagues, a former president of the American Psychiatric Association, was
seriously discussing diagnosis in psychotherapy. He noted that he was frequently making
inferences, analogous to those of an internist, who, on feeling a particular type of distention
in the abdomen, infers a swollen liver. Getting to know the patient better, the internist
gathers more evidence for his view. During surgery or on autopsy, the inference can be
conclusively confirmed. Using this metaphor, our colleague argued that he, as a
psychiatrist, did the same thing. At first, he made a number of inferences about his patients‟
pathologies. Getting to know them better, he usually found these inferences confirmed.
It is possible that this colleague was an extraordinary diagnostician. However, his view has
severe problems for most of us. Put simply, thoughts, feelings, and behavior are not
concrete objects. A liver viewed at autopsy will not be swollen because one expected it to
be. Thus, internists get real feedback pathology is at the heart of medicine‟s feedback loop.
Psychiatrists and psychologists do not usually have access to ground truth.
On the other hand, people frequently interact in a manner that creates self-fulfilling
prophecies (cf. Snyder, Tanke, &Berscheid, 1977). Patients are no exception their
cognitions, emotions, and behavior change, drastically, when the doctor thinks she or he
knows what is wrong. If anything, the influence effects in psychotherapy should be stronger

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than during ordinary interaction. Psychotherapy is by definition a situation in which one
person, the healer, attempts to influence another, the patient, and therapists often view
therapy as successful when the patient comes to agree with their views (cf. Frank, 1973).
Freud, who if he did not invent the “talking cure” was at the least its greatest publicist,
insisted on the scientific nature of his enterprise by distinguishing his procedures from mere
suggestion. Yet, it has become obvious that Freud engaged in highly suggestive practices, a
notion he assiduously denied (Crews et al., 1995). Similarly, it has become absurd to
believe that psychotherapists are either entirely objective or fail to influence their patients
in ways consistent with their beliefs.
While it is difficult to blame someone like Freud, whose intellectual foundations rested in
19th-century neurology, the movement that he engendered and its offspring have all too
frequently denied the role of many social-psychological variables in psychotherapy,
including the role of suggestion and the influence of the therapist in creating the narrative
that emerges (cf. Spence, 1994). In this light, it seems long past time to recognize the role
of influence and suggestion in creating false memories of incestuous child abuse. In the
present case, Ms. Borawick‟s memories included satanic ritual abuse. We cannot, however,
hold patients such as Ms. Borawick responsible for the generation of such beliefs. Patients
do not have the responsibility of delineating the scientific from the ridiculous in this context.
Rather, therapists are responsible for misunderstanding the largely literary, not historical,
memories that emerge in psychotherapy.
There is no question but that, of the two tragedies --child abuse and iatrogenic false
memories of child abuse --the former is by far the greater, more widespread, more
devastating in its effects, and more to be abhorred. But the amount we can do, as
therapists and as scholars of therapy, to prevent child abuse is relatively small, even if we
try at every opportunity.
On the other hand, therapists have been deeply involved in, and in our view, largely
responsible for, the creation of false memories of incestuous child abuse and satanic ritual
abuse and the creation of a particularly destructive version of multiple personality disorder.
We hope that this can be stopped before it irretrievably, deeply, and properly damages the
public view of the psychotherapy enterprise.
Over the past 35 years or so, psychology and psychiatry have developed specific treatments
for specific disorders and the beginnings of an integration of psychopharmacological
approaches with talk therapy. These are real advances. Further, as a profession, we have
begun to condemn some of the more egregious examples of quackery (e.g., past-lives
therapy).
In regard to hypnosis, we have begun to think about and use hypnosis clinically in light of
what we have learned experimentally (cf. Lynn, Kirsch, &Rhue, 1996). We have learned
that hypnosis is a powerful tool, in and out of forensic settings. As a therapeutic technique,
it has demonstrable specific effects (cf. Bowers &Kelly, 1979). It also has a capacity to
create believable illusions. More than that, if people have illusions to begin with, hypnosis is
very likely to give them form and substance, to make them more believable, vivid, detailed,
and firmly remembered. The vulnerable patients seeking help who have developed false
memories of incestuous child abuse are all too often participants in a folie à deux that
requires therapist ignorance about the way the human organism functions and therapist
credulity when provided with simple, plausible explanations. We feel that in order to
preserve good psychotherapy, the practice of creating memories of childhood abuse via
hypnosis and/or psychotherapy must stop. However, this will be an all-too-slow process
unless the relevant professional societies specifically denounce such practices in their ethical
codes.