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

Therapy
Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse, 1988) give illuminating advice
to therapists:
Believe the survivor. You must believe your client was
sexually abused, even if she doubts it herself . . . Your client
needs you to stay steady in the belief that she was abused.
Joining a client in doubt would be like joining a suicidal client
in her belief that suicide is the best way out. If a client is
unsure that she was abused but thinks she might have been,
work as though she was. So far, among the hundreds of
women we've talked to and the hundreds more we've heard
about, not one has suspected that she might have been
abused, explored it, and determined that she wasn't.
But Kenneth V. Lanning, Supervisory Special Agent at the
Behavioral Science Instruction and Research Unit of the FBI
Academy in Quantico, Virginia, a leading expert on the sexual
victimization of children, wonders: 'Are we making up for centuries
of denial by now blindly accepting any allegation of child
abuse, no matter how absurd or unlikely?' 'I don't care if it's true,'
replies one California therapist reported by The Washington Post.
'What actually happened is irrelevant to me . . . We all live in a
delusion.'
The existence of any false accusation of childhood sexual abuse
- especially those created under the ministrations of an authority
figure - has, it seems to me, relevance to the alien abduction issue.
If some people can with great passion and conviction be led to
falsely remember being abused by their own parents, might not
others, with comparable passion and conviction, be led to falsely
remember being abused by aliens?
The more I look into claims of alien abduction, the more
similar they seem to reports of 'recovered memories' of childhood
sexual abuse. And there's a third class of related claims,
repressed 'memories' of satanic ritual cults - in which sexual
torture, coprophilia, infanticide and cannibalism are said to be
prominently featured. In a survey of 2,700 members of the
American Psychological Association, 12 per cent replied that
they had treated cases of satanic ritual abuse (while 30 per cent
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