Making
Monsters: False Memories, Psychotherapy, and Sexual Hysteria
by Richard Ofshe, Ethan Watters
(Contributor)
An Excellent Book
A reader from Salt Lake City, UT, June
4, 1999
This book is a scary venture into the deep
dark disturbing world of recovered memory. It's a world in which if you
feel it happened, then it did. A world in which lives are destroyed by
mental-health care professionals who then eschew all responsibility.
A must read for anyone considering therapy.
Reviews
Steven Rose, Washington Post Book World
"The descriptions [the] authors give of
the 'therapeutic' practices by which memories are recovered are a frightening
indictment of at least some members of the burgeoning therapy industry,
of its heads-I-win and tails-you- lose approach to moral rectitude, and
of its capacities for self- delusion."
Booknews, Inc., February 1, 1995
Ofshe (social psychology, UC Berkeley) and
Watters demonstrate that memories recovered from memory therapy can be
fabricated through questionable techniques such as hypnosis. The authors
show how the mental health establishment has added to the confusion, trace
the problem back to its source, Sigmund Freud, and discuss the creation
of pseudo-memories, multiple personality disorder, and recent research
in the field. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.
Midwest Book Review
Thousands of people nationwide have been
victims of therapies which promote false 'recovered memories': that's the
message of a social psychologist and a writer who provide numerous case
histories and arguments attacking the latest trend in psychotherapy. This
is certain to prove a controversial and highly charged title, as it attacks
popular contentions and shows how therapists can induce and misuse recovered
memories through hypnosis and other techniques.
From Booklist, October 1, 1994
If you haven't heard of false memory syndrome
and the controversy it engenders, you haven't seen a talk show recently.
In the last decade, there has been a veritable explosion of cases in which
(mostly) women in therapy remember being sexually abused by their parents.
In many instances, the memories escalate, and the patients eventually exhibit
symptoms of multiple personality disorder or recall being victims of satanic
cults. Ofshe, a social psychologist, and Watters, a Mother Jones
writer, examine this psychological phenomenon and offer two explanations
for its current prevalence: either recovered-memory therapists have achieved
a breakthrough in the understanding of the human mind, in which case much
that is fundamental about our understanding of psychology will need to
be reinterpreted, or the practice of uncovering repressed memories has
been built into a pseudo-science by therapists who have created "an Alice-in-Wonderland
world in which opinion, metaphor, and ideological preference substitute
for objective evidence." Firmly supporting the latter view, the authors
offer a thoughtfully written, restrained (even a bit dry), and generally
persuasive examination of what false memory syndrome reveals about society
as well as ourselves. Ilene Cooper
Copyright© 1994, American Library
Association. All rights reserved
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