Chapter 9: Therapy

"It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts."~ Sherlock Holmes

     John Mack is a Harvard University psychiatrist whom Carl has known for many years. John asked Carl if there was anything to this UFO business. Carl told him that there wasn't much going on except of course on the psychiatric side. John looked into it, interviewed abductees, and was converted. Ne now accepts the accounts of abductees at face value. John said if was completely persuasive because of the emotional power of the experiences.
   Aren't powerful emotions a routine component of our dreams? Some of John's patients describe themselves as having hallucinated since childhood. Have the hypnotists and psychotherapist been working with abductees made conscientious attempts to steep themselves in the body of knowledge on hallucinations and perceptual malfunctions. \
     Some alien abduction accounts may conceivably be disguised memories of rape and childhood sexual abuse, with the father, stepfather, uncle, or mother's boyfriend represented as an alien. It is seemed more comforting to believe than an alien abused you than by someone you trusted and loved. Therapists who take the alien abduction stories at face value deny this. Some estimates from opinion surveys range as high as one in four American women and on in six American men having been sexually abused in childhood.
     Both sexual abuse therapist and alien abduction therapist spend months encouraging their subjects to remember being abused. Carl believes that the more he looks into the claims of alien abductions the more similar they seem to report of recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse.
     How much training in scientific method and skeptical scrutiny, in statistics or even in human fallibility have these therapists received? Most therapist contend that their responsibility is to support their patients, not to question, to be skeptical, or to raise doubts.