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

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD
teenagers. Rape victims are ten times more likely than other
women to use alcohol and other drugs to excess. The problem is
real and urgent. Most of these tragic and incontestable cases of
childhood sexual abuse, however, have been continuously remembered
into adulthood. There is no hidden memory to be retrieved.
While there is better reporting today than in the past, there
does seem to be a significant increase in cases of child abuse
reported each year by hospitals and law enforcement authorities,
rising in the United States ten-fold (to 1.7 million cases) between
1967 and 1985. Alcohol and other drugs, as well as economic
stresses, are pointed to as the 'reasons' adults are more prone to
abuse children today than in the past. Perhaps increasing publicity
given to contemporary cases of child abuse emboldens adults to
remember and focus on the abuse they once suffered.
A century ago, Sigmund Freud introduced the concept of
repression, the forgetting of events in order to avoid intense
psychic pain, as a coping mechanism essential for mental health. It
seemed to emerge especially in patients diagnosed with 'hysteria',
the symptoms of which included hallucinations and paralysis. At
first Freud believed that behind every case of hysteria was a
repressed instance of childhood sexual abuse. Eventually Freud
changed his explanation to hysteria being caused by fantasies - not
all of them unpleasant - of having been sexually abused as a child.
The burden of guilt was shifted from parent to child. Something
like this debate rages today. (The reason for Freud's change of
heart is still being disputed - the explanations ranging from his
provoking outrage among his Viennese middle-aged male peers,
to his recognition that he was taking the stories of hysterics
seriously.)
Instances in which the 'memory' suddenly surfaces, especially
at the ministrations of a psychotherapist or hypnotist, and
where the first 'recollections' have a ghost- or dreamlike quality
are highly questionable. Many such claims of sexual abuse
appear to be invented. The Emory University psychologist
Ulric Neisser says:
There is child abuse, and there are such things as repressed
memories. But there are also such things as false memories
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