I don't have the time or inclination to revise this thesis, nor am I fully comfortable with the idea of making my younger self seem as smart (or foolish) as my current self. So I haven't changed anything from the original, apart from correcting typographic errors and the like. On the other hand, I realize there are things that I didn't know back then, or had not read, which might be of interest to the four or five people who are going to bother to read this page. So, as I prepare to upload my site to a new ISP, I've taken the opportunity to add a few comments and afterthoughts.

Things I wish I'd said.

In Chapter 4, I completely forgot to include a discussion of the extraordinary influence the printing press had on the perpetuation and dissemination of the satanist/witchcraft chimera. Until 1450, rote accusations against heretics appeared sporadically in time and place, primarily because they were a literary tradition which depended on hand copied manuscripts.

One inquisitor or polemicist had to hand write his version of the rote accusations, and then that manuscript had to find its way into the hands of another inquisitor. If nobody thought a document detailing all the horrid things the heretics did was worth a valuable sheepskin and hours of hard work transcribing it, then the tradition would not be transmitted. But after 1450, with a little money, any inquisitor could tell the entire world about the vile things accused witches or heretics had confessed to him under torture. The printing press was a very major factor in the consolidation and merging of the various rote accusations into the satanist/witchcraft chimera, and I should have mentioned its role.

Books I wish I'd read.

• When I wrote the thesis, I had not yet been exposed to the deconstruction of Derrida and his followers, or to the virtually identical ideas of Mikhail Bakhtin. If I had, I would have been better able to understand the degree of venom in FMS discourse and the way in which those who do not agree with Satanic abuse believers tended to get labeled as Satanists themselves.
  
  I would have also had better conceptual tools for characterizing the way both camps were reductively and artificially oversimplifying a messy and complex set of problems, then trying to forcibly impose a simple solution.

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• Anne McClintock's book "Imperial Leather" would also have been incredibly useful to me in several ways. Like mine, her project involves bringing the supposedly private and personal issues of psychoanalysis and fetishism into the supposedly public and political realms of social history and Marxist analysis, and likewise of bringing social history and Marxism to the psychoanalytical dinner table. Her book could have informed and improved my overall thesis and sharpened my thinking in many ways.
  
  One extremely useful concept for what I was trying to do that McClintock could have provided me with is her redefining of the fetish. Discarding the Freudian tradition of phallocentric definitions of fetishism, she sees fetishism as the displacement of unbearable and irreconcilable social contradictions that an individual cannot resolve on a personal level onto an object or person (or, I would add, onto a ritual action). The object or person or ritual need not be sexual. By compulsively repeating the ritual or reinvoking and manipulating the object, the individual can then gain a degree of symbolic control over that which they are otherwise unable to face directly.
  
  The key features of a fetish, she says, usually include "a social contradiction experienced at an intensely personal level; the displacement of the contradiction onto an object or person, which becomes the embodiment of the crisis in value; the investment of intense passion (erotic or otherwise) in the fetish object; and the repetitious, often ritualistic recurrence of the fetish object in the scene of personal or historical memory."
  
  So both the FMS supporters and the ritual abuse believers could be seen as engaging in a complex displacement of the contradiction between the actual treatment of children within the family and the cultural ideal of the family onto their chosen fetish/belief system. If both belief systems are seen as McClintockian fetishes, a number of things start making more sense. For instance, the need to constantly reenact or revisit the fetish would explain why the satanic survivors tended to be so obsessed with remembering every single detail of their supposed victimization (one would think, after getting an inkling, they would have decided it was a good thing they had forgotten so much). Likewise the intensely personal force that the social contradiction carries would help explain why the Freyd parents felt compelled to found and run the FMS Foundation simply in order to tell their daughter that she was wrong and that they had not maltreated her, a reaction that otherwise appears to be insanely disproportionate.

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• I also wish I had encountered Karen Armstrong's books "A History of God" and "The Battle for God" before writing this thesis. Armstrong points out that human beings have an intense need and craving for transcendent experience. We desperately need the ineffable experience of myth, symbol, and metaphor, what she labels mythos. Yet in modern capitalist societies, myth, symbol, and metaphor are all denigrated (note how all three terms carry belittling connotations, only a myth, merely a symbol, just a metaphor) in favor of science, logic, and rationality, what she labels logos.
  
  Armstrong repeatedly points that the transcendent experience offered by mythos can be overpowering, terrifyingly so, and that religion is, first and foremost, a way of taming that experience, of interpreting and filtering it so that it becomes effable and comprehensible. Without experienced guidance and direction, she notes, the overpowering nature of a mystical vision can be extremely psychologically dangerous.
  
  Taking off from Armstrong, I would add that the unconscious is the realm of mythos, the ineffable and symbolic. A hypnotic trance, like a mind altering drug, is a less than fully satisfactory way of gaining access to visions of transcendence. A mystic on a spirit quest and a patient undergoing deep hypnosis are accessing very similar realms of experience. The grade fives that Mulhern, Ganaway, and Spiegel describe so pejoratively are simply much more able to enter fully into the ineffable transcendent realm; in another time and place they would have been prophets or seers, now they are just a diagnostic category.
  
  Thus, what is experienced in an hypnotic trance, much like what is experienced in a mystical vision, should not be interpreted in terms of logos, any more than a poem should be interpreted in the terms of a mathematical equation. But people today, especially therapists who undergo a course of scientific training, are seldom able to even recognize mythos when they encounter it, let alone understand it. Thus they see the product of hypnotherapy as "recovered memories" rather than as symbolic representations, as exact recountings of actual events rather than as representations.
  
  

  Aside:Once again I should say that this in no way means that all recovered memories are symbolic, but rather that, at least with regard to what someone says in a trance, the details and specifics should be seen as attempts to articulate the victim's ineffable feelings of degradation and violation, rather than as rational recitations of the forgotten events, most of which will probably never actually be remembered.

  
  
  So on the one hand, we have a lot of patients who are unwittingly accessing a realm of ineffable and transcendent experience, but under the guidance of a therapist who more likely than not hasn't the faintest idea of what is actually going on.
  
  

  Aside: With regard to recovering memories of alien abduction, I remember reading that some supposed abductees find their recovered memory of encountering aliens to be an uplifting, revelatory, and deeply religious experience, while others report horribly traumatizing experiences of being violated, vivisected, and raped by the aliens. I also seem to recall that some therapists tend to have patients whose memories are uplifting and others tend to have patients who feel they were tortured. The obvious corollary to good and bad LSD trips, or to competent and incompetent spirit guides, should be obvious.

  
  
  And, to take the insights of Armstrong in the opposite direction, if the scientifically trained therapists are simply unable to comprehend the non-scientific, non-rational nature of what their entranced patients are saying, and if their incompetent guidance is causing their patients to interpret their ineffable experience as memories of torture, it is hardly surprising that the entranced patients tend to inject their religion into what they have to say about their abuse. With hypnosis, they are being given access to the realm of mythos which is so foreign to modern society (and thus so seldom visited by modern people) but which is at the same time so deeply craved by all of us as human beings.

New developments: Satanism.

A few new personal accounts of satanic abuse have been published in the past seven years; two, plus a new book by Judith Spencer ("Suffer the Child") are listed below. To the best of my knowledge, Laura Buchanan's narrative, which I obtained from the author in manuscript, has never been published. Satanic abuse seems to no longer be the horror du jour, and publishers have moved on to other issues, like abduction and abuse by aliens (NB: The X-files TV series was only starting to air its first season as I wrapped up my research).

Beckylane, "Where the rivers join: A personal account of healing from ritual abuse," Press Gang Publishers, (1995)

Anna Richardson, "Double vision: A travelogue of recovery from ritual abuse," Trilogy books, (1997)

J. Spencer, A. Fowler, "Satan's high priest," a true story," Pocket Books, (1998)

Outside of therapists who have come to specialize in multiple personality disorder, belief in the practice seems to have declined (the number of scholarly journal articles on the subject peaked in 1992 and 1993, and has gone down significantly since then). A 1994 study by the US government's National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect surveyed over eleven thousand clinicians and agencies. While 69% of the clinicians and 77% of the agencies reported no incidents of ritual abuse, around 2% of each group reported over 100 cases each (the remaining respondents usually reported one or two suspected incidents). Clearly belief in ritual abuse is concentrated among a small group of professionals who are finding in their patients what they expect to see. Details of the study can be found on the ReligiousTolerance.org web site, which also has a number of other pages on ritual abuse.

Also of note: Bob and Gretchen Passantino, the Christian investigative journalists who published a number of skeptical articles, including an in-depth expose of the fraudulent nature of Lauren Stratford's book, have a web site which has the full text of their articles on Satanism and other topics.

New developments: FMS.

Just a few months after I finished the thesis, a number of books on False Memory Syndrome were published, most of them by members of the FMS Foundation's Advisory board. While they did present research findings on memory and its fallibility in popular form, all of the books I examined continued the Foundation's tradition of making heavy use of personal stories by parents who claimed to have been falsely accused. This was the tail end of the FMS Foundation's media blitz, however, and since then they appear to have been relegated to the category of "old news" by news journalists. Which does not mean that the Foundation is defunct or that its influence has faded.

The research (as opposed to anecdote or straw man attacks on Freud's theory of repression that ignore modern understandings of the causes of traumatic amnesia) behind one of the major pro-FMS books (Elizabeth Loftus's "The Myth of Repressed Memory," NY: St. Martin's Press, 1994) has been heavily criticized in the journal Ethics & Behavior, volume 9 issue 1 (abstracts).

A 1997 Columbia Journalism Review article on the FMS foundation goes into detail on how the Foundation managed, intimidated, and manipulated the news media's coverage of child abuse issues and of the Foundation itself.

The Foundation has also earned itself a number of devoted critics. Anti FMS web sites include http://fmsf.com and http://idealist.com/memories. This page has a plethora of anti-fms links, some of them to professional sources, others to amateur pages.

An extremely revealing article about the Freyd family, both the parents who founded the FMS Foundation and their daughter, whose accusations they deny, has also been published. Most interesting in how it reveals the extraordinary degree of spite and distortion that the Freyd parents used in their characterization of their daughter's accusations and behavior toward them.

Finally, in 1994 I had been unable to find published studies validating the reality of forgetting and then recovering memories of child abuse. Linda William's study had been circulated but not yet published in a peer reviewed journal. Since then, the existence of the FMS foundation has caused a number of scholars to document such forgetting and recovery. Jim Hopper has a page devoted to such studies, most of which are dated 1994 or later.

Most notable is indeed the one conducted by Linda Williams, who searched 17 year old hospital records for cases of girls treated for sexual abuse, then successfully located and interviewed 129 of the now adult women, asking them general questions about their sexual histories. One third did not mention the incident that landed them in the hospital, even when reporting other incidents of sexual abuse. One in ten reported that they had initially forgotten about the abuse until something caused them to remember that it had happened. These were working class women who for the most part had not been to therapy (Abstracts). The study spawned two articles:

Williams, L. M. (1994). Recall of childhood trauma: A prospective study of women's memories of child sexual abuse. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 62, 1167-1176.

Williams, L. M. (1995). Recovered memories of abuse in women with documented child sexual victimization histories. Journal of Traumatic Stress, 8, 649-673.