Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

Therapy
How much training in scientific method and sceptical scrutiny, in
statistics, or even in human fallibility have these therapists received?
Psychoanalysis is not a very self-critical profession, but at least
many of its practitioners have MD degrees. Most medical curricula
include significant exposure to scientific results and methods. But
many of those dealing with abuse cases seem to have at best a
casual acquaintance with science. Mental health providers in
America are more likely by about two-to-one to be social workers
than either psychiatrists or PhD psychologists.
Most of these therapists contend that their responsibility is to
support their patients, not to question, to be sceptical, or to raise
doubts. Whatever is presented, no matter how bizarre, is accepted.
Sometimes the prompting by therapists is not at all subtle. Here
[from the False Memory Syndrome Foundation's FMS Newsletter,
vol. 4, no. 4, p. 3, 1995] is a hardly atypical report:
My former therapist has testified that he still believes that my
mother is a satanist, [and] that my father molested me ... It
was my therapist's delusional belief system and techniques
involving suggestion and persuasion that led me to believe
the lies were memories. When I doubted the reality of the
memories he insisted they were true. Not only did he insist
they were true, he informed me that in order to get well I
must not only accept them as real, but remember them all.
In a 1991 case in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, a teenager, Nicole
Althaus, encouraged by a teacher and a social worker, accused her
father of having sexually abused her, resulting in his arrest. Nicole also
reported that she had given birth to three children, who her relatives
had killed, that she had been raped in a crowded restaurant, and that
her grandmother flew about on a broom. Nicole recanted her allegations
the following year, and all charges against her father were
dropped. Nicole and her parents brought a civil suit against the
therapist and psychiatric clinic to whom Nicole had been referred
shortly after she began making her accusations. The jury found that
the doctor and the clinic had been negligent and awarded almost a
quarter of a million dollars to Nicole and her parents. There are
increasing numbers of cases of this sort.
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