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

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD
the majority of those who report abuse are women. And in all
three classes - with the exceptions mentioned - there is no
physical evidence. So it's hard not to wonder whether alien
abductions might be part of some larger picture.
What could this larger picture be? I posed this question to Dr
Fred H. Frankel, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical
School, Chief of Psychiatry at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston, and
a leading expert on hypnosis. His answer:
If alien abductions are a part of a larger picture, what indeed
is the larger picture? I fear to rush in where angels fear to
tread; however, the factors you outline all feed what was
described at the turn of the century as 'hysteria'. The term,
sadly, became so widely used that our contemporaries in their
dubious wisdom . . . not only dropped it, but also lost sight of
the phenomena it represented: high levels of suggestibility,
imaginal capacity, sensitivity to contextual cues and expectations,
and the element of contagion . . . Little of all of this
seems to be appreciated by a large number of practicing
clinicians.
In exact parallel to regressing people so they supposedly retrieve
forgotten memories of 'past lives', Frankel notes that therapists
can as readily progress people under hypnosis so they can
'remember' their futures. This elicits the same emotive intensity as
in regression or in Mack's abductee hypnosis. 'These people are
not out to deceive the therapist. They deceive themselves,'
Frankel says. 'They cannot distinguish their confabulations from
their experiences.'
If we fail to cope, if we're saddled with a burden of guilt for not
having made more of ourselves, wouldn't we welcome the professional
opinion of a therapist with a diploma on the wall that it's
not our fault, that we're off the hook, that satanists, or sexual
abusers, or aliens from another planet are the responsible parties?
Wouldn't we be willing to pay good money for this reassurance?
And wouldn't we resist smart-ass sceptics telling us that it's all in
our heads, or that it's implanted by the very therapists who have
made us happier about ourselves?
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