By Mary Smith.
SAFE (Voluntary Organisation)
ISBN 0954474007
£5
This little book is sad evidence that misguided psychotherapy
encouraging people to "remember" being abused in mythical satanic
ritual abuse cults is still being practised in the UK, even though
there is no evidence that such sadistic ritual abuse cults ever
existed.
Therapy veteran Mary Smith recovered her "memories" three years
ago when she was in her fifties. She discovered that her parents
and extended family had "practised gang-rape, torture, often with
electric shocks, murder, mutilationÉ Pornographic movies were
taken, girls held in underground captivity when pregnant and babies
taken from them - this happened to me at 14".
Smith recalled all of this, along with her multiple
personalities, by interpreting her dreams in therapy. Then she
would "scrawl long semi-poems that depict horrific scenes" and
believe them.
The book and its bad poetry will indeed make caring readers cry
in sympathy, but not for the reasons Smith may think. She cut off
contact with her family. "The pressure to return and see my old
father, especially over a lonely Christmas, was almost
unendurable," she writes. But now: "I'm no longer torn into pieces
by feeling I should help the old man, who I now see as a major
criminal."
Mark Pendergrast is the author of Victims of
Memory, 1996.