130116DyrendalJan. 16, 2013

“Therapists diagnosing Satanic Ritual Abuse as the cause of their patients’ troubles… often belonged to a subculture within the therapeutic community, where focus on dissociation and multiple personalities were more important than among other clinicians.

“This small minority were involved in the vast majority of ritual abuse allegations with a therapy background. Nevertheless, many elements of the ideas, and some of the practices that seem to have been important in creating SRA-narratives were common among therapists of all kinds: belief in the concept of repression, a view of memory as analogous to a video-tape or computer and (confidence) that hypnosis could be an important tool in unearthing forgotten abuse. This view of memory and memory recovery has been largely dismissed among the community of cognitive psychologists.”

– From “Psychology and the Satanic Ritual Abuse Controversy. A Brief Research Review” by Asbjørn Dyrendal in Skepsis (March 2, 2007)