The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

Content Warning: This chapter addresses the topics of rape and childhood sexual abuse.

Sagan discusses John Mack, a Harvard university psychiatrist he has “known for many years” (153). Mack was originally skeptical of alien abductees, but now accepts their accounts at face value. Therapists who accept such accounts uncritically are denying the more rational possibility that the "recovered" memories they are recounting are more likely vestiges of more prosaic repressed incidents, particularly of rape and childhood sexual abuse. Recent trends in therapeutic treatment are focused on accepting the claims of patients; not believing them—whether they claim alien abduction or sexual abuse—is considered harmful to patients and to their relationships with their therapists. While he can appreciate the humaneness of this approach, Sagan suggests that it creates a lot of false data and reinforces false beliefs in patients, including several instances of false accusations of childhood sexual abuse.

As a case study in the willingness to believe in therapeutically recovered memories, Sagan turns to accusations of sexual abuse involving satanic ritual cults. According to a 1994 study at the University of California, 12,000 claims of sexual abuse at the hands of satanic cultists were evaluated—an episode of cultural history we now know as the Satanic Panic—and none were found to have merit, leading scholars to conclude that the most common cause of cult-related memories is a “mutual deception between the patient and the therapist” (161).