History-as-Therapy - by Frank Furedi

An article about fake memoirs and pure fiction in autobiografis. The articles also deals with the special status assigned to accounts of abuse. 

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”Indeed, fairytale Holocaust memoirs seem like respectable factual accounts when compared with some of the bizarre, hysterical memoirs of abuse suffered at the hands of satanic ritual abuse cults. In 1980, Michelle Remembers became a best-seller, and encouraged a significant section of the American media to report and treat seriously the idea that satanic cults were preying on the nation’s children. Michelle Remembers was written by a Canadian psychiatrist and Michelle, the patient whom he later married. The book describes in almost pornographic detail the torture, humiliation and degradation that Michelle suffered as a child at the hands of a satanic cult in Canada. There were no wolves in this story, just satanists. And despite the absence of any forensic evidence, dozens of cases of ritualistic abuse were reported in the American press in the 1980s and 90s. Numerous families were broken up by zealous therapists and social workers happy to assist the comeback of a medieval superstition about satanic abuse.”

Read the whole article at: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/4721/