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

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD
Might the competition among therapists for patients, and the
obvious financial interest of therapists in prolonged therapy, make
them less likely to offend patients by evincing some scepticism
about their stories? How aware are they of the dilemma of a naive
patient walking into a professional office and being told that the
insomnia or obesity is due (in increasing order of bizarreness) to
wholly forgotten parental abuse, satanic ritual, or alien abduction?
While there are ethical and other constraints, we need something
like a control experiment: perhaps the same patient sent to specialists
in all three fields. Does any of them say, 'No, your problem isn't
due to forgotten childhood abuse' (or forgotten satanic ritual, or
alien abduction, as appropriate)? How many of them say, 'There's a
much more prosaic explanation'? Instead, Mack goes so far as to
tell one of his patients admiringly and reassuringly that he is on a
'hero's journey'. One group of 'abductees' - each having a separate
but similar experience - writes
[S]everal of us had finally summoned enough courage to
present our experiences to professional counselors, only to
have them nervously avoid the subject, raise an eyebrow in
silence or interpret the experience as a dream or waking
hallucination and patronizingly 'reassure' us that such things
happen to people, 'but don't worry, you're basically mentally
sound.' Great! We're not crazy, but if we take our experiences
seriously, then we might become crazy!
With enormous relief, they found a sympathetic therapist who not
only accepted their stories at face value, but was full of stories of
alien bodies and high-level government cover-up of UFOs.
A typical UFO therapist finds his subjects in three ways: they
write letters to him at an address given in the back of his books;
they are referred to him by other therapists (mainly those who also
specialize in alien abductions); or they come up to him after he
presents a lecture. I wonder if any patient arrives at his portal
wholly ignorant of popular abduction accounts and the therapist's
own methods and beliefs. Before any words are exchanged, they
know a great deal about one another.
Another prominent therapist gives his patients his own articles on
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