Cultic Studies Journal, Vol. 14, No. 2, 1997, page 6
information) is a very rare phenomenon. Combined, the two authors of this paper have
more than 50 years of clinical experience in this area we have seen a total of three such
cases.4
Moreover, while psychogenic amnesia is very rare, psychogenic fugues are rarer still.
Multiple personality disorder (MPD), now called dissociative identity disorder (DID), is a
combination of quickly shifting fugues and highly specific amnesias. At present, the disorder
is rarely diagnosed outside of North America and Holland the limited geographic nature of
this disorder is an indication that it occurs only when viewed as a legitimate social role (cf.
Orne &Bauer-Manley, 1991 Spanos, 1996). In this way it is unlike other forms of severe
psychopathology, such as major depression, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder, whose
incidence is relatively the same cross-culturally (Davison &Neale, 1996). Further, the
mental mechanisms DID requires contradict a good deal of what is scientifically known
about memory. Moreover, DID has a very high rate of comorbidity with borderline
personality disorder (BPD) BPD patients tend to welcome melodramatic roles irrespective of
their content. Additional factors are described by Karlin &Orne (1996) and by Spanos
(1996) all lead to the view that the present form of DID is largely, if not entirely,
iatrogenic.
Turning to horrific memories for the remote past, supposedly lost for decades and recovered
in relatively pristine, highly accurate form, we seem to be encountering another largely
iatrogenic phenomenon. Interestingly, such recovered memories have frequently included
stories of satanic ritual abuse, as for example, Ms. Borawick‟s story did. In fact, the Witches‟
Sabots routinely described in such stories are quite similar to descriptions of Sabots current
during the Middle Ages. However, careful scholarship has established that such tales were
fantasies in the Middle Ages as well as now (Mulhern, 1994). Moreover, law enforcement
efforts to track down any satanic cults in question have led to the conclusion that they do
not exist (Lanning, 1991). This, among other reasons, would lead us to believe that fantasy
often plays a major part in the creation of recovered memory narratives.
Based on these and other factors, both the United States District Court, District of
Connecticut and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit refused to admit Ms.
Borawick‟s recovered memories of incest and satanic ritual abuse (Borawick v. Shay, 1995).
In this regard, the Borawick courts acted similarly to the vast majority of courts asked to
admit accounts of memories recovered after long periods of amnesia. With rare exceptions,
our courts have deemed such testimony more likely to lead us away from the truth than
towards it, and therefore inadmissible.
Note that the present authors do not believe that all recovered memories, even all those
elicited with hypnosis, are false. But examining the data with a Bayesian analysis, whose
assumptions lowered the proportion of false positives below realistic expectations, we
computed that of 40 cases of carefully diagnosed recovered memories of sexual child abuse,
between 29 and 35 out of 40 diagnoses would be false positives. This proportion was
consistent with those found in the similarly conservative analyses of Lindsay and Read
(1994) and of Kihlstrom (in press).
We also pointed out that therapy is usually a powerful, but benign process, with effect sizes
ranging from about .8 to 1.1 or 1.2. [In comparison, a 9-month reading program causes a
change of about 0.6 standard deviations in children‟s reading skills (Lindsay &Read, 1994).]
However, diagnoses of DID and of recovered memories of sexual abuse often lead to
lengthy treatments that for the most part seem to often do more harm than good. For
example, in the State of Washington a fund designated for the victims of crime was used to
pay for recovered memory therapy. However, payment was discontinued recently when a
follow-up showed patients getting worse, not better, with intensive, lengthy recovered
memory therapy.

Cultic Studies Journal, Vol. 14, No. 2, 1997, page 7
Similarly, the particular method of treatment of dissociative identity disorder in which
aspects of the self are reified, interacted with, and legitimized as separate entities, is not
only lengthy, intensive, and unimpressive in outcome, but also detrimental to a cohesive
view of self. On the other hand, both of the present authors have had clinical success
treating patients with similar disorders of self using less intensive traditional psychotherapy
and/or cognitive behavior therapy. The core strategy in these less melodramatic successes
involves both overtly and subtly helping the patient assume full responsibility for conflicting
impulses and emotions (Orne &Bauer-Manley, 1991).
Looking at the recent history of psychotherapy, one of the few other ways that therapy has
been harmful occurs when a third party not involved in the therapy is blamed for the
patient‟s problems. Parents have been the consistent target of such accusations, and until
quite recently, mothers were seen as centrally at fault. For example, starting in the late
1940s and continuing into the 1970s, some therapists blamed schizophrenia on mothers
confusing their children with “double bind” communication (cf. Bateson, Jackson, Haley, &
Weakland, 1956). More recently, careful investigation has shown “double binds” to be
entirely unrelated to the etiology of schizophrenia (cf. Davison &Neale, 1996). But picture
the pain created by this kind of accusation. Schizophrenia is a terrible, crippling disorder. It
has about a 10% mortality rate and badly maims the lives of most of those left alive.
Blaming parents for the disorder would be analogous to having family physicians telling
close relatives they are responsible for a patient‟s Alzheimer‟s disease!
Likewise, in the 1960s and 1970s, psychiatrists and psychologists accused mothers of
causing their children‟s disorders with a variety of other “errors” ranging from
overprotectiveness to failure to breast-feed (cf. Cheek, 1975). Again, these accusations
proved largely or entirely baseless. What was seemingly occurring in all these cases is that,
for some therapists, the creation of a coherent narrative routinely requires finding someone
to blame. Mothers and fathers were vulnerable to such accusations as parents were both
salient and not part of the therapeutic dyad involved in narrative creation. We now
understand that the narrative created in therapy is fictive, a subjective history, not an
objective one (cf. Spence, 1994). Unfortunately, if therapists support this particular form of
narrative creation as accurately reflecting real world events, a patient‟s chance of family life
usually is destroyed, cutting him or her off from a major source of emotional and economic
support.
One would think we would have learned from these mistakes seemingly, many have not.
Today‟s victimology largely blames male relatives, usually fathers, for severe psychological
conditions, such as BPD, DID, and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). These are serious
afflictions, and the crimes said to cause them are malignant, most often involving sexual
abuse during childhood. We acknowledge that childhood sexual abuse is a far larger and
worse problem than are false memories of childhood sexual abuse, but we consider the
latter, as well as the former, tragic.
Along with perceiving epidemic levels of childhood sexual abuse, some therapists see their
patients as routinely forgetting traumatic events that these therapists believe must have
occurred. However, studies of memory have shown that the central events in highly
emotionally charged situations are remembered better, not worse, than other memories
(Christianson, 1992 Lindsay &Read, 1994). For example, in the vast majority of cases in
which verifiable, lengthy exposure to severe combat stress results in PTSD, one bothersome
symptom is the intrusion of unwanted memories into both waking and sleeping. In these
cases, it is the inability to forget, not the inability to remember, that is problematic.
Since postulating widespread traumatic amnesia contradicts what we know about the way
memory works, a variety of theories have evolved to describe the unique circumstances that