Making Monsters: False Memories, Psychotherapy, And Sexual Hysteria - Softcover

Ofshe, Richard; Watters, Ethan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0520205839 ISBN 13: 9780520205833

Publisher: University of California Press, 1996

Synopsis

In the last decade, reports of incest have exploded into the national consciousness. Magazines, talk shows, and mass market paperbacks have taken on the subject as many Americans, primarily women, have come forward with graphic memories of childhood abuse. Making Monsters examines the methods of therapists who treat patients for depression by working to draw out memories or, with the use of hypnosis, to encourage fantasies of childhood abuse the patients are told they have repressed. Since this therapy may leave the patient more depressed and alienated than before, questions are appropriately raised here about the ethics and efficacy of such treatment.

About this title

About the Author

Richard Ofshe, a Professor of Social Psychology at the University of California at Berkeley, is one of the nation's foremost authorities on tactics of coercion and a co-recipient of the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for public service reporting. Ethan Watters, a freelance journalist, published one of the first articles on pseudo-memory in the popular press.

Reviews

"The descriptions [the] authors give of the 'therapeutic' practices by which memories are recovered are a frightening indictment of at least some members of the burgeoning therapy industry, of its heads-I-win and tails-you- lose approach to moral rectitude, and of its capacities for self- delusion."

Edition details

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0520205839
• ISBN 13: 9780520205833
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 360