Word: psychologist
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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William Cone, a psychologist in Newport Beach, California, who specializes in treating alleged abductees, finds similarities between some of his patients and people who recover memories of satanic-ritual abuse. Both have "organizing personalities" -- a loose sense of self given to paranormal experiences like seeing ghosts. Many are also highly suggestible. "They are highly functioning, intelligent people and truly believe that this happened," says Cone. "I try not to believe or disbelieve. I just sit and listen and try to help...
...Recovered-memory therapy will come to be recognized as the quackery of the 20th century," predicts Richard Ofshe, a social psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley. And in the process, Emory University psychiatry professor George Ganaway fears, it may "trigger a backlash against ((legitimate charges of)) child abuse. As these stories are discredited, society may end up throwing the baby out with the bath water -- and the hard- earned credibility of the child-abuse-survivor movement will go down the drain...
...wish I could say the debate just involves a few kooks," says Stephen Ceci, a Cornell University developmental psychologist who is a member of the American Psychological Association's work group. "It's much broader than that, happening among the cream of the crop of psychiatrists and clinical psychologists." The battle could not have come at a worse time, says Ceci; some professionals are currently pushing for increased coverage of mental health in the President's proposed national health plan. "It's not a good time for us to be airing our dirty laundry...
...Psychologist Ofshe is particularly disdainful of the concept of what he calls "robust" repression: the instantaneous submergence of any memory of sexual abuse. Recovered-memory therapists, he says, "have invented a mechanism that supposedly causes a child's awareness of sexual assault to be driven entirely from consciousness." According to these therapists, Ofshe explains, "there is no limit to the number of traumatic events that can be repressed, and no limit to the length of time over which the series of events can occur." Belief in robust repression, he concludes, "can be found only on the lunatic fringes of science...
...Jung broke off abruptly in 1914, with profound consequences for the discipline they helped create. There would henceforth be Freudians and Jungians, connected chiefly by mutual animosities. Why did a warm, fruitful cooperation end in an icy schism? In A Most Dangerous Method (Knopf; $30), John Kerr, a clinical psychologist who has seen new diaries, letters and journals, argues that the growing philosophical disputes between Freud and Jung were exacerbated by a cat-and-mouse game of sexual suspicion and blackmail. Freud believed an ex-patient of Jung's named Sabina Spielrein had also been Jung's mistress; Jung...