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

Therapy
children in social assemblies of the dangers of drugs. Then came
the nightmare moment when one of his daughters - after a highly
emotional session at a fundamentalist religious retreat - levelled
the first of many charges, each more ghastly than the previous,
that Ingram had sexually abused her, impregnated her, tortured
her, made her available to other sheriff's deputies, introduced her
to satanic rites, dismembered and ate babies . . . This had gone
on since her childhood, she said, almost to the day she began to
'remember' it all.
Ingram could not see why his daughter should lie about this,
although he himself had no recollection of it. But police investigators,
a consulting psychotherapist, and his minister at the Church
of Living Water all explained that sex offenders often repressed
memories of their crimes. Strangely detached but at the same time
eager to cooperate, Ingram tried to recall. After a psychologist
employed a closed-eye hypnotic technique to induce trance,
Ingram began to visualize something similar to what the police
were describing. What came to mind were not like real memories,
but something like snatches of images in a fog. Every time he
produced one - the more so the more odious the content - he was
encouraged and reinforced. His pastor assured him that God
would permit only genuine memories to surface in his reveries.
'Boy, it's almost like I'm making it up,' Ingram said, 'but I'm not.'
He suggested that a demon might be responsible. Under the same
sort of influences, with the Church grapevine circulating the latest
horrors that Ingram was confessing, and the police pressuring them,
his other children and his wife also began 'remembering'. Prominent
citizens were accused of participating in the orgiastic rites. Law
enforcement officers elsewhere in America began paying attention.
This was only the tip of the iceberg, some said.
When Berkeley's Richard Ofshe was called in by the prosecution,
he performed a control experiment. It was a breath of fresh
air. Merely suggesting to Ingram that he had forced his son and
daughter to commit incest and asking him to use the 'memory
recovery' technique he had learned, promptly elicited just such a
'memory'. It required no pressure, no intimidation - just the
suggestion and the technique were enough. But the alleged
participants, who had 'remembered' so much else, denied it ever
153