The "Satanic Panic" of the 1980s and Recovered Memories
Last update: 08 Dec 2024 12:02First version: 12 December 2018
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This is a weird intersection of my interests: psychoceramics, conspiracy theories, the cognitive science of memory, the history of American culture, possession and multiple personality disorder, and, of course, my own childhood (especially Dungeons & Dragons).
- Recommended:
- Frederick Crews et al., The Memory Wars
- Elaine Showalter, Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media
- Richard Ofshe and Ethan Watters, Making Monsters: False Memory, Satanic Cult Abuse, and Sexual Hysteria [I have always found cranks and kooks and lunatics and the deluded morbidly fascinating, and up to a point I take a certain mean pleasure in seeing just how corrupt human thought can be; but beyond that point it's no fun any more, simply appalling and stunning. This book is full of people so far beyond that point that after reading it I feel like welcoming a garden-variety Shakespeare-wrote-Bacon man as a comrade in arms. Detailed, horses-mouth descriptions of how "therapists" create memories of abuse, the destruction of families and communities, people who sincerely confess to crimes they couldn't possibly have committed, medical, legal and scholarly incompetence, no complicity on an all-too-credible scale, sadistic "re-experiencings" of supposed abuse, the forcible creation of multiple personalities by supposed therapists, nonsensical conspiracies, and everywhere an abysmal absence of logic and reason and light. And we dare say the Dark Ages have ended! --- The above was written in the mid-1990s; I leave it intact as a reminder to myself of what my style used to be.]
- Elaine Showalter, Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media
- Yuri Slezkine, The House of Government [Contains, among many other things, a long case-study of this episode]
- To read:
- Robert Baker, Hidden Memories
- Richard Beck, We Believe the Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980s
- David Frankfurter, Evil Incarnate: Rumors of Demonic Conspiracy and Satanic Abuse in History
- Megan Goodwin, Abusing Religion: Literary Persecution, Sex Scandals, and American Minority Religions
- J. S. La Fontaine, Speak of the Devil: Tales of Satanic Abuse in Contemporary England
- Elizabeth Loftus, Witness for the defense
- Debbie Nathan and Michael Snedeker, Satan's Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt
- Henry Otgaar, Mark L. Howe, Lawrence Patihis, Harald Merckelbach, Steven Jay Lynn, Scott O. Lilienfeld, and Elizabeth F. Loftus, "The Return of the Repressed: The Persistent and Problematic Claims of Long-Forgotten Trauma", Perspectives on Psychological Science 14 (2019): 1072--1095
- Harrison Pope, Psychology Astray: Fallacies in Studies of "Represssed Memories" and Childhood Trauma
- Jeffrey S. Victor, Satanic Panic: The Creation of a Contemporary Legend
