Frontline: Divided Memories

This is the place where you can discuss things completely Off Topic.
Post Reply
User avatar
Joel
Level 34 Illuminated
Posts: 7043

Frontline: Divided Memories

Post by Joel »

This is a PBS Frontline documentary by Ofra Bikel originally aired April 1995 that was interesting to watch. Dealing with the phenomenon of ”repressed memory,” in which people claim to remember physical or emotional abuse years after it supposedly occurred, this two-part Frontline interviews wrecked, anguished families-and leaves you to decide who the victims and the victimizers are. By asking straightforward questions, producer Ofra Bikel exposes some therapists in this genre as manipulating, psychobabbling charlatans. ”Why would somebody make up something like that?” people ask. Bikel’s report tries to answer.
In this clip there is even a person dealing with trauma from a memory of being stuck in the fallopian tube before they were born and other people deal with trauma from a different past lives.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Frontline's Ofra Bikel and others discuss her documentary "Divided Memories" on the Today Show April, 1995.

User avatar
David13
Level 34 Illuminated
Posts: 7072
Location: Utah

Re: Frontline: Divided Memories

Post by David13 »

The problem with the therapy is that it can be or is suggestive.
In some instances the therapist has said "the children are afraid to say that they were molested, so we have to tell them to say they were molested."
And thus the children then begin to (or adults in later life) begin to say they were molested and make up horrendous and ridiculous claims of not only sexual abuse but satanic ritual and other nonsense.
All without corroboration or any evidence thereof.
None of that is to say that there are no such true cases, supported by evidence and corroborated, but is to say that there is a bandwagon that all too many "victims" (they itch to find some excuse for themselves) like to jump on.
dc

User avatar
Joel
Level 34 Illuminated
Posts: 7043

The 5th Estate - Satanic Ritual Abuse

Post by Joel »

Canadian news program examines claims of Satanic Ritual Abuse in Saskatchewan and in California. Features Ted Gunderson, Jackie McGauley, Louise Edwards, Lawrence Pazder, Michelle Smith, and Roland Summit.

Originally aired January, 1993

JohnnyL
Level 34 Illuminated
Posts: 9830

Re: Frontline: Divided Memories

Post by JohnnyL »

It's quite easy for some hypnotists to implant false memories. I think there was a show about it. Some studies came out, within 8 years or so, talking about it.

User avatar
Joel
Level 34 Illuminated
Posts: 7043

Re: Frontline: Divided Memories

Post by Joel »

JohnnyL wrote: It's quite easy for some hypnotists to implant false memories. I think there was a show about it. Some studies came out, within 8 years or so, talking about it.
If you find a link to it I would be interested in looking at it.

User avatar
Joel
Level 34 Illuminated
Posts: 7043

Re: Frontline: Divided Memories

Post by Joel »

Woman with recovered memories of abuse appearing on Jane Whitney Show -- compared to same woman's appearance on PrimeTime Live a year earlier.

Cookies
captain of 100
Posts: 618

Re: Frontline: Divided Memories

Post by Cookies »

See? Barbaric and corrupt, just like Tom Cruise said! :ymsmug:

User avatar
Joel
Level 34 Illuminated
Posts: 7043

Re: Frontline: Divided Memories

Post by Joel »

Cookies wrote: See? Barbaric and corrupt, just like Tom Cruise said! :ymsmug:

did Tom Cruise say that before or after he entered the closet?


User avatar
Joel
Level 34 Illuminated
Posts: 7043

Re: Frontline: Divided Memories

Post by Joel »

How Canada tricked the world into believing murderous Satanists were everywhere

Michelle Remembers, published in 1980, temporarily convinced the world that society was in the grip of murderous Satanist cults

A two-decade nightmare just ended for Texas’ Dan and Fran Keller.

The couple, who owned a daycare, spent 22 years in prison on the utterly baseless charges that they had served blood to children under their care, forced them to witness infant murders and flown them to Mexico to be raped by soldiers.

Although they were released in 2013, only this week was the couple officially declared innocent and granted $3.4 million USD from a state fund.

“No more nightmares,” said Fran Keller, now 67.

And the Kellers’ case was not unique. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, hundreds if not thousands of other innocent people would fall to varying degrees of similar fates.

British Prime Minister Edward Heath was falsely accused of being a member of an underground cult that murdered and ate 16 children.

A California daycare was shut down and its staff arrested after police received false reports that children had been forced to witness ritualistic killings of animals and babies.

In the small town of Martensville, Saskatchewan, more than a dozen people were formally charged as the members of a Satanic cult that locked children in cages and forced them to witness brutal murders.

There wasn’t a lick of proof to back up any of this: No photos, no guilt-ridden former Satanists stepping forward to confess their crimes, no forensic evidence of the thousands of purported human sacrifices murdered by these cults.

It was, quite simply, a case of temporary global insanity. And it all started with a single lurid Canadian book.

“You never see him all at once—he’s always distorted and he’s not quite substantial, more like a vapor … It turns to look at me and it’s all uhhh l-l-l-like all black …I’m scared! Scared. I’m scared!” goes the passage in Michelle Remembers describing Michelle Smith’s encounter with Satan.

Published in 1980 and written by Smith’s psychiatrist, Lawrence Pazder, it is the purported “true story” of Smith’s childhood as the prisoner of a Satanic cult in Victoria in the mid-1950s.

The entire book comes from 600 hours of Smith’s testimony in Pazder’s office, delivered in the voice of a child while she was in a trance-like state.

In halting half-sentences, Smith told Pazder of being driven into a Satanic cult by her mother at five years old.

“You’re not mine anymore, Michelle. You belong to the Devil,” her mother reportedly says.

Over months of imprisonment, she is forced to drink urine, eat cannibalized flesh, bathe in the blood of dismembered babies, participate in ritual murders and endure a cage filled with snakes and spiders.

In the climax, Smith encounters Satan himself in a “Feast of the Beast” organized by her oppressors, but is ultimately saved by the direct intervention of the Virgin Mary.

The book even came complete with a statement from Remi De Roo, bishop of the Catholic diocese of Victoria.

“I do not question that for Michelle this experience was real,” wrote De Roo. But in a chilling warning, De Roo added “in such mysterious matters, hasty conclusions could prove unwise.”

Unfortunately, the world quickly decided not to take De Roo’s advice.

What followed is now known to history as the “satanic ritual abuse” panic.

Soon, hundreds of similar “Michelles” across the Western world were similarly recalling bone-chilling details of Satanic ritual murder and abuse. It would largely be the fault of a phenomenon known as “false memory syndrome,” in which patients under hypnosis can be led into fabricating elaborate false memories.

Parents. Daycare providers. Teachers. Police officers. Nobody was safe from the sudden accusation that they were guilty of unspeakable crimes.

A common investigative pattern emerged. Children suspected of being Satanic abuse victims would be interviewed and asked leading questions by investigators. As the number and intensity of the interviews progressed, children were led into delivering ever-more elaborate stories of witchcraft, blood-drinking, secret tunnels and ritual murder.

In one case in Rochdale, England, all it took was a small boy to tell his teachers he had been dreaming of ghosts. Soon, social service workers were taking children from their parents in the misguided belief that they were breaking up a Satanist abuse ring.

“One afternoon in 1990 I got a call from my wife telling me our three kids had been taken away because of witchcraft and satanic abuse … I still can’t believe this has happened,” one of the parents, John Herstell, told the Guardian in 2006.

Saskatoon police officer John Popowich was one of the adults falsely accused of running a Satanist underground in Martensville, Saskatchewan.

“Nobody can understand what we’ve gone through and what we’re going through — nobody can … One minute you’re well respected, the next minute, you’re an alleged molester,” he told CBC in 1994.

Geraldo Rivera hosted a late 1980s claiming that the United States was in the grip of a Satanist underground counting more than one million members. “The odds are it’s happening in your town,” Rivera told viewers.
Willi Gutowski, a psychiatrist with Chilliwack General Hospita told the Vancouver Sun in 1989 that Satanist abusers could be found in the ranks of “mayors, lawyers, police, church people – upstanding citizens.”

There was indeed no physical evidence of Satanic murders, but Gutowski brushed it off as a consequence of cults going to “extreme detail in covering up the remains of people that are murdered, especially of babies.”

Michelle Remembers includes accounts of a Satanic cult hosting rituals in Victoria’s Ross Bay Cemetery.

Victoria is a city of retirees; spotting suspicious behavior is one of its strong suits. And yet, Pazder never questions how crowds of cloaked figures ripping kittens apart in an urban graveyard didn’t attract a single call to the police.

Even as his book brutally defamed Smith’s dead mother, Pazder never appears to have contacted Smith’s surviving family, even though the family home was a short walk from his office.

The events of Michelle Remembers describe a teenage girl and an adult woman being murdered, as well as at least six stillborn babies being dismembered in rituals.

No records or press reports from the era describe any missing persons or stolen babies matching the description of the purported victims.

The book also claims that Satanic initiation required cult members to remove a finger. Here again, Pazder did not seem to care that Victoria wasn’t awash in people all missing the same finger.

When Pazder sent Smith for medical examinations to corroborate her tales of constant abuse, specialists found only that she’d likely banged a tooth as a child. A rash that Smith claimed had been caused by the “tail of Satan” was found by a dermatologist to be a reaction to a toxic weed likely aggravated by Lifebuoy soap.

“It simply wasn’t the kind of thing you fabricated if you were crazy or hysterical” was how Pazder justified his belief that a patient of his had met and defeated Satan.

Upon the publication of Michelle Remembers, Macleans’ magazine dispatched a writer to Victoria, who found childhood friends and family of Michelle who were shocked at the characterization.

Ten years later, just as the ritual abuse panic broke in England, Britain’s the Mail on Sunday similarly sent investigators to Victoria. There again, they found a family utterly embittered by the outlandish lies of Michelle Remembers.

“The book took me four months to read, and I cried all the time,” Smith’s father, Michelle’s father, Jack Proby, told them. “I kept saying to myself: ’Dear God, how could anyone do this to their dead mother?’”

There’s no telling how many lives Michelle Remembers damaged, or how much real abuse it precipitated.

In the wake of so many false accusations, law enforcement had to completely rewrite their procedures for identifying and investigating legitimate child abuse cases. No longer could the mere testimony of a child be trusted.

But if there’s one positive legacy of Michelle Remembers, it’s to serve as a guide to everything a psychiatrist should not do.

Faced with obvious delusions from a patient, Pazder embarked on a manic quest to corroborate them — alienating the patient from her family in the process.

Then, he published a lucrative book about it. As Macleans’ reported, Pazder earned a $342,000 USD advance for the book, a sum that is equal to $1.2 million CDN in 2017.

Throughout the pages of Michelle Remembers, Pazder frames himself as the benevolent saviour of a troubled woman. He describes himself as “lithe and athletic” and “warm, manly, soft-spoken.”

The book’s dedication, in fact, almost seems as if it’s an ode to himself. It credits “all who have the heart to hear the cries of children.”

And in a final breach of medical ethics, Pazder would go on to marry his psychiatric patient.

Although it’s never mentioned in Pazder’s account of the triumph of Biblical dogma over evil, Smith and her psychiatrist abandoned their respective families and got married.

When the Mail on Sunday found Michelle, she was now working as the front desk receptionist for Pazder, who had since become a highly sought-after consultant on satanic ritual abuse.

Before reporters could confront Michelle with the evidence that her Satanic past was false, however, Pazder quickly intervened.

“For Michelle to go on talking about these things is too painful. She is totally free of Satan today,” he told them.

User avatar
David13
Level 34 Illuminated
Posts: 7072
Location: Utah

Re: Frontline: Divided Memories

Post by David13 »

Well "Geraldo" is nothing but an opportunist huckster. In previous years he would have been selling snake oil at the county fair.
It's comical, how they say "oh, the children could never lie". "How could the children make this up?"
Easy, kids, some kids, lie like crazy. They for one thing are people pleasers and want to tell you what you want to hear. And frequently make things up. Much like actors, or sci fi writers, or fiction novelists.
It's just sad the hear that these people were still in prison based on this nonsense witch hunt.
Global temporary insanity, much like many years ago in Salem MA
dc

JohnnyL
Level 34 Illuminated
Posts: 9830

Re: Frontline: Divided Memories

Post by JohnnyL »

Yes, memories can be implanted. That means psychs implanting bad false memories, and psychs implanting good false memories to cover up the bad--goes BOTH ways. There's a lot going on here. I'll share some McMartin stories that have probably disappeared from the internet.

And as PizzaGate (have we forgotten so quickly??) and so much more showed, there's a lot more of the second than the first. There have been plenty of articles over the years on pedophile rings in the upper levels, and it's nothing new. Bohemian Grove hints at it; gnosticism (religion) does, too.

Pre-natal memories? Here, again--Peak States Institute. And there are questionnaires that support certain nightmares being caused by difficult birth.

User avatar
Joel
Level 34 Illuminated
Posts: 7043

Re: Frontline: Divided Memories

Post by Joel »


Juliet
captain of 1,000
Posts: 3701

Re: Frontline: Divided Memories

Post by Juliet »

This is why in order to correctly discern the truth you need your mind and your heart and the Holy Spirit. The brain can be deceived and emotions can be manipulated. But through the Holy Spirit we can know the truth of all things. And what I do, is when I feel I know the truth, I look for God to send me a second witness.

Post Reply