Memory: Fantasy V.S Reality

Fantasyland by Kurt Andersen Chapters 37 and 38

Close your eyes and think back to your childhood, how do you know those memories are real? It's happened before, a time where mass panic occurred all because of memories people swear were real. Around the 1980’s/1990’s Hypnosis became a very popular tool in recovering “repressed memories”. Now the problem with this is that Hypnosis isn’t an actual tool that is proven to help you recover memories. It is more like it makes your brain more suggested to outside influences. People who can be hypnotized have something called Fantasy- prone personality meaning that they can be led to believe that some fantasy is real.  Have you ever seen those shows that hypnotize people from the audience, to be a chicken or race car? Well, those people weren’t chickens or a car in their past lives or anything. It's just the person who hypnosis them just influences their subconscious into believing something.  

At this time during the 80’s/90’s Sigmund Freud was the leading voice in psychology. He believed that all or at least most of people's psychological problems are caused by childhood sexual abuse whether they remember it or not. Jeffery Masson, a historian of psychoanalysis, wrote that when people told Freud they weren’t assaulted they weren’t technically lying, it was just that they had suppressed those traumatic memories. Now this idea of Masson’s helped lead to a mass panic on satanic cults. Now there were many wheels in motion that lead to this notion of children being kidnapped and raped by satanic cults. Therapists in this time were not so devoted to fact-checking their patients’ stories and more just blindly believing them, because even to them it didn’t matter if it was factually true but that it was true to that individual. Now I am not too sure why therapists believed that it was okay to lead their patients to believe something horrible happened to them when it probably was not the case, money maybe? Maybe it was the influence of society. “One of the most influential recovered memory books, first published in the 1980s, was written by a poet with one of her students who had been a childhood victim of sexual abuse. ….. The Courage to Heal was that if you felt bad about yourself and your life but couldn’t figure out why, it was probably because you were molested or raped and had repressed those crippling memories.” (Andersen 523).  However, with all these theories of repressed memories. “Richard McNally found the opposite to be true “the most distressed survivors exhibited difficulty banishing this material from awareness. This fact was mostly ignored due to people desperate to believe they had formed a movement. “It seems that Americans were having this idea of blaming all their problems on childhood abuse they can’t even seem to remember. It is interesting, it's as if this became away to release yourself of any responsibility for your problems. 

Now the idea of satanic cults abusing children ordinated from a women named Michelle Proby. She went through hypnosis performed by her psychiatrist and future husband Lawrence Pazder. Now it's already a little unethical that her psychiatrist married her, but that just might be my opinion because no one seemed to think anything of it. Through her hypnosis she recalled at the age of five she had been caged and abused by Satan himself. She even could go as far as recalling his tail wrap around her neck. Now there are many reasons to cast doubt on her ‘recovered memories’ because first most people can’t vividly remember things that happened when they were five. There was also no proof that she was ever kidnapped at all left alone held by the devil himself. Despite this she wholeheartedly believed that those memories really did happen to her. She and her husband/ psychiatrist went on to release a book about her story. As her story became more and more popular, more people investigated her story and found that most of her memories were just blatantly false. A reporter ended up asking Pazder if he even cared about factual truth in connection with his wife's story. He agreed that in this case he didn’t really find factual truth relevant, because it was her truth. She remembered it that way, so it was true to her and that’s what matters. I can understand his thinking in this, that it doesn’t matter if it happened that way or not but that’s what she remembers and she believes. I understand that everyone had their own truth with is fine; however, people need to remember there is a difference between personal truth and factual truth. This mass satanic panic could have been avoided if people just understood that. Another thing I have a problem with Pazder just going along with what his wife believed is, why would you want someone you love to think that something awful happened to her when in all likelihood it didn’t. Would you not want to help said person recover and understand that those memories they have aren't real? That was I can’t wrap my head around. Why would you do that to someone?   

The release of Michelle’s story called mass panic to spread in U.S. Many people where now being convinced that they too were kidnapped and abused by satanic cults. People all over the country were now having all these recovered memories brought about by hypnosis of their time being abused by Satanic cults. I think this it an amazing example of how easily people are influenced by our society, even when it is something as negative as being abused by a cult.  

These ideas just spiraled and kept spiraling with no fact around them. All caused by suppressed memories that were created in their minds by the influence of people and hypnosis. But this isn’t the only case in which a large group of people's memories were influenced by others.  In the 80’s conspiracy theories of alien abductions began to spread across America. 

John Mack, a Harvard Professor, lead the way on the idea of alien abductions. In 1987 he attended a conference where he participated in Holotropic Breathwork, after this conference he was told about UFO abductions. Around this same time Whitley Strieber, a horror fiction author recounted his experience of interacting with non-human beings. In his book, Communion, he wrote that people being skeptic of those who were abducted was the same as those who were skeptic of rape victims. I don’t know what led him to say this, but this right here is a big no. Mack believed that otherworldly creatures on Earth were affecting the lives of hundreds of thousands of people.

 

It’s an interesting lead way. It began with a mass of people claiming to have memories of childhood sexual abuse to those same people a few years later believing they were abducted, probed and raped by non-human creatures from the stars. All of this and only a few years apart. When one died down another mass panic of conspiracies erupted. There seems to be a pattern with that doesn't there? Mass panic caused by conspiracies and ideas and people's individual truths. Another example would be the end of the world in 2012. I wonder when the next mass panic caused by people's truths will be?