Conspiracy Theories and Paranoia: Notes from a Mind-Control Conference

The debate over "recovered" and "false" memories continues to be one of the most contentious issues in the field of psychology today. The debate is extremely polarized with very little amicable communication among members of the opposing camps. While such a dispute may eventually be beneficial to science, in that both sides are clearly being spurred on to produce original research at a frenetic pace, at the moment the clearest manifestation of this dichotomy is miscommunication and friction between factions. Such miscommunication has been exacerbated by a tendency of some theorists on both sides to make sweeping generalizations and use vague terminology. An example of such miscommunication is the use of the term recovered memory therapy, used frequently in books such as Making Monsters by Richard Ofshe and Ethan Watters (1994). The term as they used it is not without its critics (e.g., Dalenberg 1995) who complain that the term is overgeneralized. Conversely, in a televised debate, Charles Whitfield, a trauma therapist, stated that there is no such thing as recovered memory therapy. The true state of affairs likely rests somewhere in between.

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