Satanic Ritual Abuse: A Question of Memory

Abstract

In spite of reports by thousands of adults who describe satanic ritual abuse in their backgrounds, the Special Issue of the Journal of Psychology and Theologyreveals obdurate skepticism regarding their credibility on the part of several contributors. Some of these disbelievers currently are citing experiments demonstrating extreme malleability for human memory as evidence that survivor accounts, especially those involving delayed memory, are fantasies implanted by incompetent clinicians. However, leading memory researchers such as Dr. Bessel van der Kolk of Harvard Medical School maintain that traumatic memories, which typically are engraved in the sensori-motor processes, are not subject to the same kinds of contamination that can affect normal memory. Traumatic amnesia, described in the DSM-III-R as psychogenic amnesia, is a phenomenon which has been known to mental health professionals for more than 100 years. The clinically observed characteristics of traumatic memory formation and retrieval match precisely the patterns of memory recovery exhibited by SRA survivors, and strongly confirm the reality of their cult abuse.