Archive

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.