Making Monsters: False Memories, Psychotherapy, and Sexual Hysteria

Richard Ofshe, Ethan Watters

University of California Press, Jan 1, 1996 - Social Science - 360 pages

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 long-buried memories. Now the Pulitzer Prize-winning 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.

Contents

• The Myths of Memory: 15
• Effort After Meaning: 45
• Symptoms of Pseudoscience: 65
• Creation of the Abuse Narrative: 83
• Investment in Belief: 107
• Life with Father: 123
• Hypnosis and the Creation of Pseudomemories: 139
• Two Cases of Hypnotic Story Creation: 155
• The Strange Stories of Satanic Abuse: 177
• The Creation of a Sickness: 205
• Therapy of a High Priestess: 225
• The Murder the Witness and the Psychiatrist: 253
• Deaths in the Family: 273

About the author

Richard Ofshe, a Professor of Social Psychology at the University of California at Berkeley, is one of the nation's foremost authorities on tactics of coercion and a co-recipient of the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for public service reporting. Ethan Watters, a freelance journalist, published one of the first articles on pseudo-memory in the popular press.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Making Monsters: False Memories, Psychotherapy, and Sexual Hysteria
• Authors: Richard Ofshe, Ethan Watters
• Edition: reprint
• Publisher: University of California Press, 1996
• ISBN: 0520205839, 9780520205833
• Length: 360 pages
• Subjects: Law / General; Psychology / General; Social Science / Sociology / General