Abuses Of Science Quotes

Christianity may be good and Satanism evil. Under the Constitution, however, both are neutral. This is an important, but difficult, concept for many law enforcement officers to accept. They are paid to uphold the penal code, not the Ten Commandments … The fact is that far more crime and child abuse has been committed by zealots in the name of God, Jesus and Mohammed than has ever been committed in the name of Satan. Many people don’t like that statement, but few can argue with it.

[The American President] has to take all sorts of abuse from liars and demagogues.… The people can never understand why the President does not use his supposedly great power to make ’em behave. Well, all the President is, is a glorified public relations man who spends his time flattering, kissing and kicking people to get them to do what they are supposed to do anyway.

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan, The proper study of mankind is Man. Placed on this isthmus of a middle state, A being darkly wise and rudely great: With too much knowledge for the Sceptic side, With too much weakness for the Stoic's pride, He hangs between, in doubt to act or rest; In doubt to deem himself a God or Beast; In doubt his mind or body to prefer; Born but to die, and reas'ning but to err; Alike in ignorance, his reason such, Whether he thinks too little or too much; Chaos of thought and passion, all confused; Still by himself abused or disabused; Created half to rise, and half to fall; Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all; Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurl'd; The glory, jest, and riddle of the world! Go, wondrous creature! mount where science guides, Go, measure earth, weigh air, and state the tides; Instruct the planets in what orbs to run, Correct old time, and regulate the sun; Go, soar with Plato to th’ empyreal sphere, To the first good, first perfect, and first fair; Or tread the mazy round his followers trod, And quitting sense call imitating God; As Eastern priests in giddy circles run, And turn their heads to imitate the sun. Go, teach Eternal Wisdom how to rule— Then drop into thyself, and be a fool!

If no one had ever challenged religious authority, there’d be no democracy, no public schools, women’s rights, improvements to science and medicine, evolution of slavery and no laws against child abuse or spousal abuse. I was afraid to challenge my religious beliefs because that was the basis of creation—mine anyway. I was afraid to question the Bible or anything in it, and when I did, that’s when I became involved with PFLAG and realized that my son was a perfectly normal human being and there was nothing for God to heal because Bobby was perfect just the way he was.

The demise of the human race rests mainly on the shoulders of stupidity, and the abuse of power in the hands of those we have elected.

A mode of thought does not become 'critical' simply by attributing that label to itself, but by virtue of its content.

This generation will witness social and economic changes in our societies, that will be irreversible, thanks to AI.

The power of one man’s imagination is infinite. The disinterest of the human race in facing the obvious, is exponentially far greater.

Why do we try so hard to destroy all that our planet gave us to enjoy?” ― Anthony Merrydew

The best way to avoid abuses is for the populace in general to be scientifically literate, to understand the implications of such investigations. In exchange for freedom of inquiry, scientists are obliged to explain their work. If science is considered a closed priesthood, too difficult and arcane for the average person to understand, the dangers of abuse are greater. But if science is a topic of general interest and concern - if both its delights and its social consequences are discussed regularly and competently in the schools, the press, and at the dinner table - we have greatly improved our prospects for learning how the world really is and for improving both it and us.

The abuse of symbolism is like the abuse of food or drink: it makes people ill, and so their reactions become deranged.

Facts do not fall in the face of discomfort.

If I were king, I would redress an abuse which cuts back, as it were, one half of human kind. I would have women participate in all human rights, especially those of the mind.

One could inflict abuses on ethnic and other minorities in the name of science and for the good of society and get away with it.

Consciousness may be seen as the haughty and restless second cousin of morphology. Memory is its mistress, perception its somewhat abused wife, logic its housekeeper, and language its poorly paid secretary

The relativists’ stance is extremely condescending: it treats a complex society as a monolith, obscures the conflicts within it, and takes its most obscurantist factions as spokespeople for the whole.

Where misunderstanding dwells, misuse will not be far behind. No theory in the history of science has been more misused and abused by cranks and charlatans—and misunderstood by people struggling in good faith with difficult ideas—than quantum mechanics.

There should be painless progression, attended by life and peace....Mortals will some day assert their freedom in the name of Almighty God....Dropping their present beliefs, they will recognize harmony and as the spiritual reality and discord as the material unreality. Chapter VII pp. 224 and 228 Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures

[T]he artillery of the press has been leveled against us, charged with whatsoever its licentiousness could devise or dare. These abuses of an institution so important to freedom and science are deeply to be regretted...

We live in truly unbelievable times. Autism is an epidemic in most western countries, western governments are nothing more than corrupt corporations, and corporations are routinely suppressing information regarding the toxicity of many common household items. The result is that many people are unnecessarily suffering from easily preventable developmental problems, sickness and cancer.

More than sixty years of research on living systems has convinced me that our body is much more nearly perfect than the endless list of ailments suggests,” wrote Nobel laureate Albert Szent-Györgyi. “Its shortcomings are due less to its inborn imperfections than to our abusing it.

Movements for animal rights are not irrational denials of human uniqueness; they are a clear-sighted recognition of connection across the discredited breach of nature and culture. Biology and evolutionary theory over the last two centuries have simultaneously produced modern organisms as objects of knowledge and reduced the line between humans and animals to a faint trace re-etched in ideological struggle or professional disputes between life and social science. Within this framework, teaching modern Christian creationism should be fought as a form of child abuse.

Psychological despotism, whether enlightened or not, is gross misuse of psychology. The main purpose of psychology is to acquire insight into, and mastery of, oneself. Not for nothing were what we now call the behavioral sciences originally called the moral sciences and “Know thyself” their main precept. To use psychology to control, dominate, and manipulate others is self-destructive abuse of knowledge. It is also a particularly repugnant form of tyranny.

You know what's wrong with scientific power?... It's a form of inherited wealth... Most kinds of power require a substantial sacrifice by whoever wants the power. There is an apprenticeship, a discipline lasting many years. Whatever kind of power you want. President of the company. Black belt in karate. Spiritual Guru. Whatever it is you seek, you have to put in the time, the practice, the effort. You must give up a lot to get it. It has to be very important to you. And once you have attained it, it is your power. It can't be given away: it resides in you. It is literally the result of your discipline. Now, what is interesting about this process is that, by the time someone has acquired the ability to his with his bare hands, he has also matured to the point where he won't use it unwisely. So that kind of power has a built-in control. The discipline of the getting the power changes you so that you won't abuse it. But scientific power is like inherited wealth: attained without discipline. You read what others have done, and you take the next step... There is no discipline... no mastery: old scientists are ignored. There is no humility before nature... A karate master does not kill people with his bare hands. He does not lose his temper and kill his wife. The person who kills is the person who has no discipline, no restraint, and who has purchased his power in the form of a Saturday night special. And that is the kind of power that science fosters, and permits.

Changing mainstream media will be hard, but you can help create parallel options. More academics should blog, post videos, post audio, post lectures, offer articles, and more. You’ll enjoy it: I’ve had threats and blackmail, abuse, smears and formal complaints with forged documentation. But it’s worth it, for one simple reason: pulling bad science apart is the best teaching gimmick I know for explaining how good science works.

. . . Equality of rights is established by nature; society, far from impairing it, guarantees it against the abuse of power which renders it illusory. [trans. G. Rudé; A Proposed Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen].

Many reviews are useless because, while purporting to condemn the book, they only reveal the reviewer's dislike of the kind to which it belongs. Let bad tragedies be censured by those who love tragedy, and bad detective stories by those who love the detective story. Then we shall learn their real faults. Otherwise we shall find epics blamed for not being novels, farces for not being high comedies, novels by James for lacking the swift action of Smollett. Who wants to hear a particular claret abused by a fanatical teetotaller, or a particular woman by a confirmed misogynist?

With your brain veritably defined by its dynamic neuroplasticity, the cage that holds you back is an illusion. Your brain potential is unlimited.

There is child abuse, and there are such things as repressed memories. But there are also such things as false memories and confabulations, and they are not rare at all. Misrememberings are the rule, not the exception. They occur all the time. They occur even in cases where the subject is absolutely confident - even when the memory is a seemingly unforgettable flashbulb, one of those metaphorical mental photographs.

Survival machines could evolve to be completely selfish and self-centered, but there is something that keeps their pure selfishness in check, and that is the fact that other survival machines are inclined “to hit back” if attacked, to retaliate if exploited, or to attempt to use or abuse other survival machines first.

And there are books specifically about sex as a survivor, including Healing Sex: A Mind-Body Approach to Healing Sexual Trauma by Staci Haines and The Sexual Healing Journey: A Guide for Survivors of Sexual Abuse by Wendy Maltz.

The fact is that far more crime and child abuse has been committed by zealots in the name of God, Jesus and Mohammed than has ever been committed in the name of Satan. Many people don’t like that statement, but few can argue with it.

While humans have the propensity to develop a suite of prosocial behaviors, they are also capable of developing antisocial behavior, engaging in substance abuse, experiencing depression, and bearing children at an early age...Young people who develop aggressive behavior tendencies are likely to develop problems with tobacco, alcohol, and other drug use; to fail academically; to have children at an early age; and to raise children likely to have the same problems.

When she was happy and relaxed, she had one set of opinions about herself: self-confident and self-compassionate. When she was overwhelmed, she had an entirely different set of opinions about herself: self-critical and even self-abusive.

To take a specific example, a researcher in the Journal of Traumatic Stress interviewed 129 women with documented histories of child sexual abuse that occurred between the ages of 10 months and 12 years. Of those, 38 percent had forgotten the abuse. Of the remaining women who remembered, 16 percent reported that they had for a period of time forgotten but subsequently recovered their memories. [46] Thus, during that time a "false negative" recorded for those women. These are the sort of distinctions for which Elaine Showalter in Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media fails to account.

From time to time our national history has been marred by forgetfulness of the Jeffersonian principle that restraint is at the heart of liberty. In 1789 the Federalists adopted Alien and Sedition Acts in a shabby political effort to isolate the Republic from the world and to punish political criticism as seditious libel. In 1865 the Radical Republicans sought to snare private conscience in a web of oaths and affirmations of loyalty. Spokesmen for the South did service for the Nation in resisting the petty tyranny of distrustful vengeance. In the 1920's the Attorney General of the United States degraded his office by hunting political radicals as if they were Salem witches. The Nation's only gain from his efforts were the classic dissents of Holmes and Brandeis. In our own times, the old blunt instruments have again been put to work. The States have followed in the footsteps of the Federalists and have put Alien and Sedition Acts upon their statute books. An epidemic of loyalty oaths has spread across the Nation until no town or village seems to feel secure until its servants have purged themselves of all suspicion of non-conformity by swearing to their political cleanliness. Those who love the twilight speak as if public education must be training in conformity, and government support of science be public aid of caution. We have also seen a sharpening and refinement of abusive power. The legislative investigation, designed and often exercised for the achievement of high ends, has too frequently been used by the Nation and the States as a means for effecting the disgrace and degradation of private persons. Unscrupulous demagogues have used the power to investigate as tyrants of an earlier day used the bill of attainder. The architects of fear have converted a wholesome law against conspiracy into an instrument for making association a crime. Pretending to fear government they have asked government to outlaw private protest. They glorify "togetherness" when it is theirs, and call it conspiracy when it is that of others. In listing these abuses I do not mean to condemn our central effort to protect the Nation's security. The dangers that surround us have been very great, and many of our measures of vigilance have ample justification. Yet there are few among us who do not share a portion of the blame for not recognizing soon enough the dark tendency towards excess of caution.

We have seen in this book numerous ambiguous texts that can be interpreted in two different ways: as an assertion that is true but relatively banal, or as one that is radical but manifestly false. And we cannot help thinking that, in many cases, these ambiguities are deliberate. Indeed, they offer a great advantage in intellectual battles: the radical interpretation can serve to attract relatively inexperienced listeners or readers; and if the absurdity of this version is exposed, the author can always defend himself by claiming to have been misunderstood, and retreat to the innocuous interpretation.

If ever a society could be said to meet all the mythological criteria of the next lost civilization – a society that ticks all the boxes – is it not obvious that it is our own? Our pollution and neglect of the majestic garden of the earth, our rape of its resources, our abuse of the oceans and the rainforests, our fear, hatred and suspicion of one another multiplied by a hundred bitter regional and sectarian conflicts, our consistent track record of standing by and doing nothing while millions suffer, our ignorant, narrow-minded racism, our exclusivist religions, our forgetfulness that we are all brothers and sisters, our bellicose chauvinism, the dreadful cruelties that we indulge in, in the name of nation, or faith, or simple greed, our obsessive, competitive, ego-driven production and consumption of material goods and the growing conviction of many, fuelled by the triumphs of materialist science, that matter is all there is – that there is no such thing as spirit, that we are just accidents of chemistry and biology – all these things, and many more, in mythological terms at least, do not look good for us.

I know you're competent and your thesis advisor knows you're competent. The question in our minds is are you really serious about what you're doing?" This was said to a young woman who had already spent five years and over $10,000 getting to that point in her Ph.D. program.

Some indigenous peoples feel that they share their identity with natural phenomena, and as a result they feel that by hurting the natural world they are hurting themselves. However, we feel that the natural world is "other" to us; we can't empathize with it, and so don't have any qualms about abusing it.

Treating Abuse Today 3(4) pp. 26-33 TAT: No. I don't know anymore than you know they're not. But, I'm talking about boundaries and privacy here. As a therapist working with survivors, I have been harassed by people who claim to be affiliated with the false memory movement. Parents and other family members have called or written me insisting on talking with me about my patients' cases, despite my clearly indicating I can't because of professional confidentiality. I have had other parents and family members investigate me -- look into my professional background -- hoping to find something to discredit me to the patients I was seeing at the time because they disputed their memories. This isn't the kind of sober, scientific discourse you all claim you want.

For example, maybe you grew up in a house where no one talked about their feelings, It wasn't encouraged and everyone else became uncomfortable if you tried. You learned pretty quickly that talking about your feelings was clearly against the rules. You weren't abused, you weren't traumatized. But, at the dinner table, you said "My best friend and I had a fight today and I'm really sad and angry," it would elicit a response of "That happens sometimes, dear, please pass the potatoes.

Society reaps what it sows in the way it nurtures its children, because stress sculpts the brain to exhibit several antisocial behaviors. Stress can set off a ripple of hormonal changes that permanently wire a child's brain to cope with a malevolent world. Through this chain of events, violence and abuse pass from generation to generation as well as from one society to the next. Many world leaders who have been disciplined through anger and cruelty go in to treat their own people abominably, or to bully other nations. As long as we continue to discipline children like this, we will continue to have terrible wars on both the family and the world stage. One very powerful study illustrates the point. Researchers tracked down Germans who, in World War II, risked their own lives by hiding a Jewish person in their house. When interviewed, the researchers found one common feature of all these people. They had all been socialized in ways that respected their personal dignity.

Despite this documentation for both traumatic amnesia and essentially accurate delayed recall, memory science is often presented as if it supports the view that traumatic amnesia is very unlikely or perhaps impossible and that a great many, perhaps a majority, maybe even all, recovered memories of abuse are false…Yet no research supports such an implication and a great deal of research supports the premise that forgetting sexual abuse is fairly common. and that recovered memories are sometimes essentially true.

We can have a large impact on the prevention and amelioration of abuse, drug problems, violence, mental health problems, and dysfunction in families.

Discretion can be abused, and rulebooks are important safeguards against that. But the balance has shifted too far in the direction of an obsessive reverence for rules.

It is not too late for the Germans to turn their abusive name into a name of honor by becoming the first un-Christian nation in Europe.

Like all great things which then become fashions, science, as now the universal stamp of approval, probably receives more abuse than any other field of study. Glaze the word itself over whatever vague ideology one may presume ratified, no matter the degree of pseudo-science or lack of scholarly credibility packaged within, and the many will consume it like gravy on a feast. My thought for the time is that as the promise of true science increases, so shall rise its many more superficial counterparts as provided by the agenda-bound trendies and hyper-ambitious laypersons to boot.

Emily supposed the modern world was fortunate in the progress of science. But she could not help but feel at this moment the impropriety of male invasiveness. She knew he was working to save this poor woman, but in her mind, too, was a sense of Wrede's science as adding to the abuse committed by his fellow soldiers. He said not a word. It was as if the girl were no more than the surgical challenge she offered.

Wherever there is abuse there is also corruption. Politics, philosophy, theology, science, industry, any field with the potential to affect the well-being of others can be destroyed by abuse and saved by good will.

Sometimes I think Earth has got to be the insane asylum of the universe. . . and I'm here by computer error. At sixty-eight, I hope I've gained some wisdom in the past fourteen lustrums and it’s obligatory to speak plain and true about the conclusions I've come to; now that I have been educated to believe by such mentors as Wells, Stapledon, Heinlein, van Vogt, Clarke, Pohl, (S. Fowler) Wright, Orwell, Taine, Temple, Gernsback, Campbell and other seminal influences in scientifiction, I regret the lack of any female writers but only Radclyffe Hall opened my eyes outside sci-fi. I was a secular humanist before I knew the term. I have not believed in God since childhood's end. I believe a belief in any deity is adolescent, shameful and dangerous. How would you feel, surrounded by billions of human beings taking Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the tooth fairy and the stork seriously, and capable of shaming, maiming or murdering in their name? I am embarrassed to live in a world retaining any faith in church, prayer or a celestial creator. I do not believe in Heaven, Hell or a Hereafter; in angels, demons, ghosts, goblins, the Devil, vampires, ghouls, zombies, witches, warlocks, UFOs or other delusions; and in very few mundane individuals--politicians, lawyers, judges, priests, militarists, censors and just plain people. I respect the individual's right to abortion, suicide and euthanasia. I support birth control. I wish to Good that society were rid of smoking, drinking and drugs. My hope for humanity - and I think sensible science fiction has a beneficial influence in this direction - is that one day everyone born will be whole in body and brain, will live a long life free from physical and emotional pain, will participate in a fulfilling way in their contribution to existence, will enjoy true love and friendship, will pity us 20th century barbarians who lived and died in an atrocious, anachronistic atmosphere of arson, rape, robbery, kidnapping, child abuse, insanity, murder, terrorism, war, smog, pollution, starvation and the other negative “norms” of our current civilization. I have devoted my life to amassing over a quarter million pieces of sf and fantasy as a present to posterity and I hope to be remembered as an altruist who would have been an accepted citizen of Utopia.

You might be too enmeshed with the other person, or “codependent,” and you must learn to set better “boundaries.” The basic premise underlying this point of view is that the ideal relationship is one between two self-sufficient people who unite in a mature, respectful way while maintaining clear boundaries. If you develop a strong dependency on your partner, you are deficient in some way and are advised to work on yourself to become more “differentiated” and develop a “greater sense of self.” The worst possible scenario is that you will end up needing your partner, which is equated with “addiction” to him or her, and addiction, we all know, is a dangerous prospect. While the teachings of the codependency movement remain immensely helpful in dealing with family members who suffer from substance abuse (as was the initial intention), they can be misleading and even damaging when applied indiscriminately to all relationships.

Why would I what?” Will asked, wanting another bite of his burger. “Why would you risk your job teaching some stupid fantasy book?” “Because alternative universe literature promotes critical thinking, imagination, empathy, and creative problem solving. Children who are fluent in fiction are more able to interpret nonfiction and are better at understanding things like basic cause and effect, sociology, politics, and the impact of historical events on current events. Many of our technological advances were imagined by science fiction writers before the tech became available to create them, and many of today’s inventors were inspired by science fiction and fantasy to make a world more like the world in the story. Many of today’s political conundrums were anticipated by science fiction writers like Orwell, Huxley, and Heinlein, and sci-fi and fantasy tackle ethical problems in a way that allows people to analyze the problem with some emotional remove, which is important because the high emotions are often what lead to violence. Works like Harry Potter tackle the idea of abuse of power and—” Will stopped himself and swallowed. Everybody at the table, including Kenny, was staring at him in openmouthed surprise. “Anyway,” he said before taking a monster bite of his cooling hamburger on a sudden attack of nerves, “iss goomfer umf.” “It’s good for us,” Kenny translated, sounding a little stunned

The freedom to complain rests on an assurance that the government won’t punish or silence the complainer. The front line in democratization, then, is constraining the government from abusing its monopoly on force to brutalize its uppity citizens.

back in the middle ages they burned unruly women at the stake and out of the ashes of their bones and flesh rose the Enlightenment and Reason fresh and the white men declared there's no such thing as witches they're just crazy psycho-bitches but we certainly can't let them run free lock 'em up and throw away the key yeah they said: lock 'em up and throw away the key cause there's nothing scarier than a woman mad and/or aware of her own magic tragic how much violence is done in the name of science to ensure our silence in Victorian times they located suffering in our uterus in the blood in the soft internal organs took our pain our righteous rage they called it 'hysteria' and then Dr. Freud ignored women's horror stories herstories of abuse and rape and took a justified hatred of the penis and called it envy (he sold more books that way)

selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) and serotonin–norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors (SNRIs) are now used as primary treatments, with benzodiazepines used as adjuncts. Benzodiazepine abuse is rare, usually found in patients who abuse multiple prescription and recreational drugs.

Thomas Kuhn’s book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions has probably been more widely read—and more widely misinterpreted—than any other book in the recent philosophy of science. The broad circulation of his views has generated a popular caricature of Kuhn’s position. According to this popular caricature, scientists working in a field belong to a club. All club members are required to agree on main points of doctrine. Indeed, the price of admission is several years of graduate education, during which the chief dogmas are inculcated. The views of outsiders are ignored. Now I want to emphasize that this is a hopeless caricature, both of the practice of scientists and of Kuhn’s analysis of the practice. Nevertheless, the caricature has become commonly accepted as a faithful representation, thereby lending support to the Creationists’ claims that their views are arrogantly disregarded.

Ingram was, in 1988, Chairman of the Republican Party in Olympia, Washington, the chief civil deputy in the local sheriffs department, well-regarded, highly religious, and responsible for warning children in school assemblies of the dangers of drugs. Then came the nightmare moment when one of his daughters—after a highly emotional session at a fundamentalist religious retreat—leveled the first of many charges, each more ghastly than the previous, that Ingram had sexually abused her, impregnated her, tortured her, made her available to other sheriff’s deputies, introduced her to satanic rites, dismembered and eaten babies

I believe you to be Filidor Vesh," said the dwarf. "You are entitled to your beliefs, however ill-founded," Filidor replied. "No doubt you will wish to search further for this Vesh, rather than impose your presence upon a man called hence by urgent affairs." The dwarf transferred his grip from Filidor's mantle to his arm. His gaze swept quickly over the young man's features. "This belief is supported by the evidence, since you answer to a point the description furnished me." "You are plainly the dupe of some prankster, who abuses the dignity of your years by sending you on a fool's errand," said Filidor. "Were I you, I would seek out the rascal and thrash him.

We now self-righteously condemn the sexually abusive male. Feminist critics find a lot of hypocrisy in this stance. It allows us to conceal from ourselves that the man's behavior is only an extreme form of a more commonplace aggression toward women and children that is condoned and even encouraged, both in popular media and within the economic power structure.

We saw a blatant example of this abuse in mid-2014 when a study published by researchers at Facebook and Cornell University revealed that social networks can manipulate the emotions of their users simply by algorithmically altering what they see in the news feed. In a study published by the National Academy of Sciences, Facebook changed the update feeds of 700,000 of its users to show them either more sad or more happy news. The result? Users seeing more negative news felt worse and posted more negative things, the converse being true for those seeing the more happy news. The study’s conclusion: “Emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness.

To reclaim our dignity and role as guardians of the planet will not be easy. But we can pray for the intercession of His mercy, knowing, according to an ancient promise, that “His mercy is greater than His justice.” There is a real reason that the ancients understood that He is a wrathful God, and made penance and sacrifice to placate Him. We may think that our science and civilization can protect us from this primal power, but the symbol of the dragon as the power of the earth is not without meaning. We have little understanding of the archetypal forces that underlie our surface lives, and of how they are all interconnected and can manifest the will of God. We can no longer afford to be ignorant or think that we can abuse the world as long as we want.

Science has been abused for every conceivable purpose under the sun. Which is all the more reason to deliver the power it grants to as many people as possible, as rapidly as possible, instead of leaving it in the hands of a few. It is not a reason to retreat into fantasy – to declare: knowledge is a cultural artifact, nothing is universally true, only mysticism and obfuscation and ignorance will save us.

he had been ashamed after every long conversation. In some sort of fatal way it came about that he would begin softly, gently, with good intentions, calling himself an old student, an idealist, a Don Quixote, but, unbeknownst to himself, would gradually go on to abuse and slander and, most surprising of all, would quite sincerely criticize science, art, and morals, though it was already twenty years since he had read a single book or gone further than the provincial capital, and in fact he had no idea of what was happening in the wide world. If he sat down to write anything, be it only a congratulatory letter, abuse would appear in the letter as well. And all this was strange, because in fact he was a sentimental, tearful man. Was it some demon sitting in him, who hated and slandered in him against his will?

I am an old man, and I here declare that I never knew them to be productive of any good in the worship of God, and have reason to believe that they are productive of much evil. Music as a science I esteem and admire, but instrumental music in the house of God I abominate and abhor. This is the abuse of music, and I here register my protest against all such corruption of the worship of the author of Christianity.

[ Dr. Lois Jolyon West was cleared at Top Secret for his work on MKULTRA. ] Dr. Michael Persinger [235], another FSMF Board Member, is the author of a paper entitled “Elicitation of 'Childhood Memories' in Hypnosis-Like Settings Is Associated With Complex Partial Epileptic-Like Signs For Women But Not for Men: the False Memory Syndrome.” In the paper Perceptual and Motor Skills,In the paper, Dr. Persinger writes: On the day of the experiment each subject (not more than two were tested per day) was asked to sit quietly in an acoustic chamber and was told that the procedure was an experiment in relaxation. The subject wore goggles and a modified motorcycle helmet through which 10-milligauss (1 microTesla) magnetic fields were applied through the temporal plane. Except for a weak red (photographic developing) light, the room was dark. Dr. Persinger's research on the ability of magnetic fields to facilitate the creation of false memories and altered states of consciousness is apparently funded by the Defense Intelligence Agency through the project cryptonym SLEEPING BEAUTY. Freedom of Information Act requests concerning SLEEPING BEAUTY with a number of different intelligence agencies including the CIA and DEA has yielded denial that such a program exists. Certainly, such work would be of direct interest to BLUEBIRD, ARTICHOKE, MKULTRA and other non-lethal weapons programs. Schnabel [280] lists Dr. Persinger as an Interview Source in his book on remote viewing operations conducted under Stargate, Grill Flame and other cryptonyms at Fort Meade and on contract to the Stanford Research Institute. Schnabel states (p. 220) that, “As one of the Pentagon's top scientists, Vorona was privy to some of the strangest, most secret research projects ever conceived. Grill Flame was just one. Another was code-named Sleeping Beauty; it was a Defense Department study of remote microwave mind-influencing techniques ... [...] It appears from Schnabel's well-documented investigations that Sleeping Beauty is a real, but still classified mind control program. Schnabel [280] lists Dr. West as an Interview Source and says that West was a, “Member of medical oversight board for Science Applications International Corp. remote-viewing research in early 1990s.

Just as political tyrannies censor communications and religious tyrannies condemn fiction, the abuser feels threatened by any reading or daydreaming in which the victim may engage and will oppose these forms of communication with the self just as he moves to isolate the victim from other people. However, for those of us not under 24-hour surveillance, reading work (such as feminist science fiction) that nourishes the imagination and therefore moves us toward change, is possible.

You know what's wrong with scientific power?... It's a form of inherited wealth... Most kinds of power require a substantial sacrifice by whoever wants the power. There is an apprenticeship, a discipline lasting many years. Whatever kind of power you want. President of the company. Black belt in karate. Spiritual Guru. Whatever it is you seek, you have to put in the time, the practice, the effort. You must give up a lot to get it. It has to be very important to you. And once you have attained it, it is your power. It can't be given away: it resides in you. It is literally the result of your discipline. Now, what is interesting about this process is that, by the time someone has acquired the ability to kill with his bare hands, he has also matured to the point where he won't use it unwisely. So that kind of power has a built-in control. The discipline of getting the power changes you so that you won't abuse it. But scientific power is like inherited wealth: attained without discipline. You read what others have done, and you take the next step... There is no discipline... no mastery: old scientists are ignored. There is no humility before nature... A karate master does not kill people with his bare hands. He does not lose his temper and kill his wife. The person who kills is the person who has no discipline, no restraint, and who has purchased his power in the form of a Saturday night special. And that is the kind of power that science fosters, and permits.

The moral vacuum we now feel ourselves to be in has always been there, even if we haven’t recognized it Religious people are already entirely accustomed to picking and choosing which texts from holy book they obey and which they reject. There are passages of the Judeo-Christian Bible which no modern Christian or Jew would wish to follow. The story of Isaac’s narrowly averted sacrifice by his father Abraham strikes us moderns as a shocking piece of child abuse, whether we read it literally or symbolically.

Certainly the concept that human CO2 causes warming and climate change was based on unproven theory used by people with an ideology. They used instruments of state to dominate the science. They also attacked and abused anyone who dared to pursue proper science. The small group who controlled the IPCC were unlikely to change their tune. A pattern that was borne out by the release of IPCC Report AR5 in September 2013, which denied the fact that for 17 years global temperature declined slightly while CO2 levels continued to increase.

Trauma isn’t always caused by one specific incident. It can also emerge in response to persistent distress or ongoing abuse, like a relationship where sex is unwanted, though it may be technically “consensual” because the targeted person says yes in order to avoid being hurt or feels trapped in the relationship or is otherwise coerced. In that context, a survivor’s body gradually learns that it can’t escape and it can’t fight; freeze becomes the default stress response because of the learned pattern of shutdown as the best way to guarantee survival.

There is a principle to be learned by studying the biological origins of moral reasoning. It is that outside the clearest ethical precepts, such as the condemnation of slavery, child abuse, and genocide, which all will agree should be opposed everywhere without exception, there is a larger gray domain inherently difficult to navigate. The declaration of ethical precepts and judgments made from them requires a full understanding of why we care about the matter one way or the other, and that includes the biological history of the emotions engaged. This inquiry has not been done. In fact, it is seldom even imagined. With deepened self-understanding, how will we feel about morality and honor? I have no doubt that in many cases, perhaps the great majority, the precepts shared by most societies today will stand the test of biology-based realism. Others, such as the ban on artificial conception, condemnation of homosexual preference and forced marriages of adolescent girls, will not. Whatever the outcome, it seems clear that ethical philosophy will benefit from a reconstruction of its precepts based on both science and culture. If such greater understanding amounts to the “moral relativism” so fervently despised by the doctrinally righteous, so be it.

Woman I is considered to this day to be one of the most anxiety-producing and disturbing images of a woman in the history of art. In this painting de Kooning, who was reared by an abusive mother, creates an image that captures the divergent dimensions of the eternal woman: fertility, motherhood, aggressive sexual power, and savagery. She is at once a primitive earth mother and a femme fatale. With this image, marked by fanglike teeth and huge eyes that echo the shape of her enormous breasts, de Kooning gave birth to a new synthesis of the female. 7.6 The first known female sculpture, the Venus of Hohle Fels, circa 35,000 B.C.

In the Judeo-Christian view--and thus, the dominant Western view--to die by suicide is a sinful, selfish act. This perception has been slow to fade, though the science is clear that suicide has root causes in diagnosable mental disorders and substance abuse. ("Sin" does not qualify for the DSM-5.) The cultural meaning of suicide in Japan is different. It's viewed as a selfless, even honorable act... Outsiders say that the Japanese romanticize suicide, and that Japan has a "suicide culture." But the reality is more complicated. The Japanese view of self-inflicted death as altruistic is more about wanting not to be a burden, rather than fascination with mortality itself.

The aims and ideals of the Soviet revolution inspired the patriotic enthusiasm of millions of people in the 1930s, during World War II, and in the postwar reconstruction period. This explains the Soviet Union's great leap forward, the achievement of a high level of industrial capacity in a very short time, the transformation of the Soviet Union into a major power in terms of science and culture. The historic victory in the Great Patriotic War against Nazism, which was a surprise not only for Hitler but also for the Western democracies is also explained by what we have said above. All this is true. But the historical truth is also that the regime and the system abused the faith of the people in these high ideals, turning them to its own advantage.

Whenever you lose control, someone else always finds it.” These were the words of my high school English teacher Mr. Sologar on our first day of class. They didn’t have anything to do with literature or grammar, but I guess he wanted to kick off the class with a life lesson. It was a good one. If we acted up at home, he explained, control of our lives would swiftly transfer to our parents in the form of lost privileges or being grounded. The same was true at school. If we abused our freedom in the classroom or in the hallways—and we did!—we’d find ourselves in the principal’s office or confined to detention. If we got really crazy and decided to break the law, the legal system would step in to curtail our freedom. “No, control is never truly lost,” he repeated in his thick Indian accent. “If you fail to control yourself, others will control you.

Why does it matter? The concept of ‘truth’ as something dependent upon facts largely outside human control has been one of the ways in which philosophy hitherto has inculcated the necessary element of humility. When this check upon pride is removed, a further step is taken on the road towards a certain kind of madness – the intoxication of power which invaded philosophy with Fichte, and to which modern men, whether philosophers or not, are prone. I am persuaded that this intoxication is the greatest danger of our time, and that any philosophy which, however unintentionally, contributes to it is increasing the danger of vast social disaster. (Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy, 1961a, p. 782) Why spend so much time exposing these abuses? Do the postmodernists represent a real danger? Certainly not for the natural sciences, at least not at present.

Treating Abuse Today 3(4) pp. 26-33 The national discussion regarding the veridical truth of memories of childhood abuse will have a beneficial effect. Therapists will be reminded that dire consequences can ensue from poor practice, careless technique, and unchecked countertransference and parallel process. Hopefully, it will also stimulate legitimate research into the nature of traumatic memory. Unfortunately, the polemic often has been hysterical, scapegoating, accusatory, speculative, rumor driven, biased and antiempirical. Since many members of the FMSF, Inc. Scientific Advisory Board are frequent professional witnesses for the defense in cases of alleged sexual abuse, we questioned whether the organization was acting more as an advocate for a previously determined position or whether it was truly taking a scientific approach to determining the veridical truth of recollections of child abuse.

no matter how you look at the issue, prevention is a fundamentally preferable and more cost-effective way to promote health and longevity. Most people agree that we invest insufficiently in prevention, but they would also surmise that it is difficult to get young, healthy people to avoid behaviors that increase their risk of future illness. Consider smoking, which causes more preventable deaths than any major risk factor (the other big ones being physical inactivity, poor diet, and alcohol abuse). After prolonged legal battles, public health efforts to discourage smoking have managed to halve the percentage of Americans who smoke since the 1950s.19 Yet 20 percent of Americans still smoke, causing 443,000 premature deaths in 2011 at a direct cost of $96 billion per year. Likewise, most Americans know they should be physically active and eat a healthy diet, yet only 20 percent of Americans meet the government’s recommendations for physical activity, and fewer than 20 percent meet government dietary guidelines.20 There are many, diverse reasons we are bad at persuading, nudging, or otherwise encouraging people to use their bodies more as they evolved to be used (more on this later), but one contributing factor could be that we are still following in the footsteps of the marquis de Condorcet, waiting for the next promised breakthrough. Scared of death and hopeful about science, we spend billions of dollars trying to figure out how to regrow diseased organs, hunting for new drugs, and designing artifical body parts to replace the ones we wear out. I am in no way suggesting that we cease investing in these and other areas. Quite the contrary: let’s spend more! But let’s not do so in a way that promotes the pernicious feedback loop of just treating mismatch diseases rather than preventing them. In practical

All inquiries carry with them some element of risk. There is no guarantee that the universe will conform to our predispositions. But I do not see how we can deal with the universe—both the outside and the inside universe—without studying it. The best way to avoid abuses is for the populace in general to be scientifically literate, to understand the implications of such investigations. In exchange for freedom of inquiry, scientists are obliged to explain their work. If science is considered a closed priesthood, too difficult and arcane for the average person to understand, the dangers of abuse are greater. But if science is a topic of general interest and concern—if both its delights and its social consequences are discussed regularly and competently in the schools, the press, and at the dinner table—we have greatly improved our prospects for learning how the world really is and for improving both it and us.

Treating Abuse Today 3(4) pp. 26-33 Freyd: The term "multiple personality" itself assumes that there is "single personality" and there is evidence that no one ever displays a single personality. TAT: The issue here is the extent of dissociation and amnesia and the extent to which these fragmentary aspects of personality can take executive control and control function. Sure, you and I have different parts to our mind, there's no doubt about that, but I don't lose time to mine they can't come out in the middle of a lecture and start acting 7 years old. I'm very much in the camp that says that we all are multi-minds, but the difference between you and me and a multiple is pretty tangible. Freyd: Those are clearly interesting questions, but that area and the clinical aspects of dissociation and multiple personalities is beyond anything the Foundation is actively... TAT: That's a real problem. Let me tell you why that's a problem. Many of the people that have been alleged to have "false memory syndrome" have diagnosed dissociative disorders. It seems to me the fact that you don't talk about dissociative disorders is a little dishonest, since many people whose lives have been impacted by this movement are MPD or have a dissociative disorder. To say, "Well, we ONLY know about repression but not about dissociation or multiple personalities" seems irresponsible. Freyd: Be that as it may, some of the scientific issues with memory are clear. So if we can just stick with some things for a moment; one is that memories are reconstructed and reinterpreted no matter how long ago or recent. TAT: You weigh the recollected testimony of an alleged perpetrator more than the alleged victim's. You're saying, basically, if the parents deny it, that's another notch for disbelief. Freyd: If it's denied, certainly one would want to check things. It would have to be one of many factors that are weighed -- and that's the problem with these issues -- they are not black and white, they're very complicated issues.

Although psychoanalysts, including Freud, tended to acknowledge sexual trauma as tragic and harmful (Freud, 1905b, 1917), the subject seems to have been too awful to consider seriously in civilized company. One notable exception, Sandor Ferenczi, presented a paper entitled “Confusion of Tongues between the Adult and the Child: The Language of Tenderness and of Passion” (1955), to the Psychoanalytic Congress in 1932. In this presentation he talked about the helplessness of the child when confronted with an adult who uses the child’s vulnerability to gain sexual gratification. Ferenczi talked with more eloquence than any psychiatrist before him about the helplessness and terror experienced by children who were victims of interpersonal violence, and he introduced the critical concept that the predominant defense available to children so traumatized is “identification with aggressor.” The response of the psychoanalytic community seems to have been one of embarrassment, and the paper was not published in English until 1949, 17 years after Ferenczi’s death (Masson, 1984).

Quantum uncertainty and chaos theory have had deplorable effects upon popular culture, much to the annoyance of genuine aficionados. Both are regularly exploited by obscurantists, ranging from professional quacks to daffy New Agers. In America, the self-help ‘healing’ industry coins millions, and it has not been slow to cash in on quantum theory’s formidable talent to bewilder. This has been documented by the American physicist Victor Stenger. One well-heeled healer wrote a string of best-selling books on what he calls ‘Quantum Healing’. Another book in my possession has sections on quantum psychology, quantum responsibility, quantum morality, quantum aesthetics, quantum immortality and quantum theology. Chaos theory, a more recent invention, is equally fertile ground for those with a bent for abusing sense. It is unfortunately named, for ‘chaos’ implies randomness. Chaos in the technical sense is not random at all. It is completely determined, but it depends hugely, in strangely hard-to-predict ways, on tiny differences in initial conditions. Undoubtedly it is mathematically interesting.

Gods do not decide who goes to Heaven or who goes to Hell. That is for the Cosmic Forces to decide. You are as close to being like a God than you ever will be. Gods are the creators and if they are proud of their work they will remain as silent watchers. This isn’t like the ancient times when Gods would interfere in the affairs of man, or whatever creatures they created. They became arrogant and selfish in their deeds, only concerned with their own private agendas and using their creations as tools of blackmail and spite. It got so they were completely shaping the destinies of worlds just to seduce a sibling into practicing explicit acts of intercourse. They were incestuous monstrosities who were given far too many liberties, and they abused the power bestowed upon them. Eventually the Cosmic Forces intervened and limited the powers of the Gods. These days Gods are not born and they do not perform sex. The few that are left are merely prisoners of the Cosmic Forces, free to roam across the Multiverse and create, but unable to indulge in their own egotistical fantasies. They have become tortured souls, much like their creations.

Reversive blockade: Emphatically insisting upon something which is the opposite of the truth blocks the average person’s mind from perceiving the truth. In accordance with the dictates of healthy common sense, he starts searching for meaning in the “golden mean” between the truth and its opposite, winding up with some satisfactory counterfeit. People who think like this do not realize that this effect is precisely the intent of the person who subjects them to this method. If the counterfeit of the truth is the opposite of a moral truth, at the same time, it simultaneously represents an extreme paramoralism, and bears its peculiar suggestiveness. We rarely see this method being used by normal people; even if raised by the people who abused it; they usually only indicate its results in their characteristic difficulties in apprehending reality properly. Use of this method can be included within the above-mentioned special psychological knowledge developed by psychopaths concerning the weaknesses of human nature and the art of leading others into error. Where they are in rule, this method is used with virtuosity, and to an extent conterminous with their power.

The BFMSS [British False Memory Syndrome Society] The founder of the 'false memory' movement in Britain is an accused father. Two of his adult daughters say that Roger Scotford sexually abused them in childhood. He denied this and responded by launching a spectacular counter-attack, which enjoyed apparently unlimited and uncritical air time in the mass media and provoke Establishment institutions that had made no public utterance about abuse to pronounce on the accused adults' repudiation of it. p171-172 The 'British False Memory Syndrome Society' lent a scientific aura to the allegations - the alchemy of 'falsehood' and 'memory' stirred with disease and science. The new name pathologised the accusers and drew attention away from the accused. But the so-called syndrome attacked not only the source of the stories but also the alliances between the survivors' movement and practitioners in the health, welfare, and the criminal justice system. The allies were represented no longer as credulous dupes but as malevolent agents who imported a miasma of the 'false memories' into the imaginations of distressed victims. Roger Scotford was a former naval officer turned successful property developer living in a Georgian house overlooking an uninterrupted valley in luscious middle England. He was a rich man and was able to give up everything to devote himself to the crusade. He says his family life was normal and that he had been a 'Dr Spock father'. But his first wife disagrees and his second wife, although believing him innocent, describes his children's childhood as very difficult. His daughters say they had a significantly unhappy childhood. In the autumn of 1991, his middle daughter invited him to her home to confront him with the story of her childhood. She was supported by a friend and he was invited to listen and then leave. She told him that he had abused her throughout her youth. Scotford, however, said that the daughter went to a homeopath for treatment for thrush/candida and then blamed the condition on him. He also said his daughter, who was in her twenties, had been upset during a recent trip to France to buy a property. He said he booked them into a hotel where they would share a room. This was not odd, he insisted, 'to me it was quite natural'. He told journalists and scholars the same story, in the same way, reciting the details of her allegations, drawing attention to her body and the details of what she said he had done to her. Some seemed to find the detail persuasive. Several found it spooky. p172-173

The Positive Paradigm is: . . . a new, inclusive reality map, one people worldwide can easily comprehend and agree upon. It is equally compatible with scriptures and science, bridging the gap between them. It fulfills Einstein's intuited search for the Unified Field Theory, picturing how all parts of creation are related, interwoven and interdependent. Working with the Positive Paradigm empowers the "substantially new manner of thinking," which, Einstein said, is necessary "if mankind is to survive." For thousands of years, this genesis formula, the very heart of the creative process, was hidden as the secret treasure of initiates. Its knowledge was transmitted exclusively to qualified students in the inner circles of monastic schools. When Einstein intuited the theory of relativity and made it available to the general public, its long-foreseen abuse materialized. To Einstein's horror, it was misused to explode atomic bombs. This context justifies making the positive application of Einstein's inspired vision equally public now. For in its traditional context, this three-part formula is an essential piece of the knowledge puzzle. It has the powerful potential to offset earlier abuse with opposite and equally unifying results. A timely shift to the Positive Paradigm could tip the scales of history in favor of human survival. p. 11.

If you can’t make a good prediction, it is very often harmful to pretend that you can. I suspect that epidemiologists, and others in the medical community, understand this because of their adherence to the Hippocratic oath. Primum non nocere: First, do no harm. Much of the most thoughtful work on the use and abuse of statistical models and the proper role of prediction comes from people in the medical profession.88 That is not to say there is nothing on the line when an economist makes a prediction, or a seismologist does. But because of medicine’s intimate connection with life and death, doctors tend to be appropriately cautious. In their field, stupid models kill people. It has a sobering effect. There is something more to be said, however, about Chip Macal’s idea of “modeling for insights.” The philosophy of this book is that prediction is as much a means as an end. Prediction serves a very central role in hypothesis testing, for instance, and therefore in all of science.89 As the statistician George E. P. Box wrote, “All models are wrong, but some models are useful.”90 What he meant by that is that all models are simplifications of the universe, as they must necessarily be. As another mathematician said, “The best model of a cat is a cat.”91 Everything else is leaving out some sort of detail. How pertinent that detail might be will depend on exactly what problem we’re trying to solve and on how precise an answer we require.

The history of another country, one Americans don’t much like comparing themselves with, illustrates the grave dangers of yoking political ideology to dubious science. In the 1930s under Joseph Stalin, the quack “scientist” Trofim Lysenko, who promoted himself through party newspapers rather than rigorous experiments, rose to prominence and took control of Soviet biological, medical, and agricultural research for several decades. Lysenko used his power to prosecute an ideologically driven crusade against the theory of genetics, which he denounced as a bourgeois affront to socialism. In short, his political presuppositions led him to embrace bogus scientific claims. In the purges that followed, many of Lysenko’s scientist critics lost their jobs and suffered imprisonment and even execution. By 1948 Lysenko had convinced Stalin to ban the study of genetics. Soviet science suffered immeasurable damage from the machinations of Lysenko and his henchmen, and the term “Lysenkoism” has since come to signify the suppression of, or refusal to acknowledge, science for ideological reasons. In a democracy like our own, Lysenkoism is unlikely to take such a menacing, totalitarian form. Nevertheless, the threat we face from conservative abuse of science—to informed policymaking, to democratic discourse, and to knowledge itself—is palpably real. And as the modern Right and the Bush administration flex their muscles and continue to battle against reliable, mainstream conclusions and sources of information, this threat is growing.

Psychoanalysis has suffered the accusation of being “unscientific” from its very beginnings (Schwartz, 1999). In recent years, the Berkeley literary critic Frederick Crews has renewed the assault on the talking cure in verbose, unreadable articles in the New York Review of Books (Crews, 1990), inevitably concluding, because nothing else really persuades, that psychoanalysis fails because it is unscientific. The chorus was joined by philosopher of science, Adolf Grunbaum (1985), who played both ends against the middle: to the philosophers he professed specialist knowledge of psychoanalysis; to the psychoanalysts he professed specialist knowledge of science, particularly physics. Neither was true (Schwartz, 1995a,b, 1996a,b, 2000). The problem that mental health clinicians always face is that we deal with human subjectivity in a culture that is deeply invested in denying the importance of human subjectivity. Freud’s great invention of the analytic hour allows us to explore, with our clients, their inner worlds. Can such a subjective instrument be trusted? Not by very many. It is so dangerously close to women’s intuition. Socalled objectivity is the name of the game in our culture. Nevertheless, 100 years of clinical practice have shown psychoanalysis and psychotherapy not only to be effective, but to yield real understandings of the dynamics of human relationships, particularly the reality of transference–countertransference re-enactments now reformulated by our neuroscientists as right brain to right brain communication (Schore, 1999).

To understand why it is no longer an option for geneticists to lock arms with anthropologists and imply that any differences among human populations are so modest that they can be ignored, go no further than the “genome bloggers.” Since the genome revolution began, the Internet has been alive with discussion of the papers written about human variation, and some genome bloggers have even become skilled analysts of publicly available data. Compared to most academics, the politics of genome bloggers tend to the right—Razib Khan17 and Dienekes Pontikos18 post on findings of average differences across populations in traits including physical appearance and athletic ability. The Eurogenes blog spills over with sometimes as many as one thousand comments in response to postings on the charged topic of which ancient peoples spread Indo-European languages,19 a highly sensitive issue since as discussed in part II, narratives about the expansion of Indo-European speakers have been used as a basis for building national myths,20 and sometimes have been abused as happened in Nazi Germany.21 The genome bloggers’ political beliefs are fueled partly by the view that when it comes to discussion about biological differences across populations, the academics are not honoring the spirit of scientific truth-seeking. The genome bloggers take pleasure in pointing out contradictions between the politically correct messages academics often give about the indis​tingu​ishab​ility of traits across populations and their papers showing that this is not the way the science is heading.

Treating Abuse Today (Tat), 3(4), pp. 26-33 Freyd: I see what you're saying but people in psychology don't have a uniform agreement on this issue of the depth of -- I guess the term that was used at the conference was -- "robust repression." TAT: Well, Pamela, there's a whole lot of evidence that people dissociate traumatic things. What's interesting to me is how the concept of "dissociation" is side-stepped in favor of "repression." I don't think it's as much about repression as it is about traumatic amnesia and dissociation. That has been documented in a variety of trauma survivors. Army psychiatrists in the Second World War, for instance, documented that following battles, many soldiers had amnesia for the battles. Often, the memories wouldn't break through until much later when they were in psychotherapy. Freyd: But I think I mentioned Dr. Loren Pankratz. He is a psychologist who was studying veterans for post-traumatic stress in a Veterans Administration Hospital in Portland. They found some people who were admitted to Veteran's hospitals for postrraumatic stress in Vietnam who didn't serve in Vietnam. They found at least one patient who was being treated who wasn't even a veteran. Without external validation, we just can't know -- TAT: -- Well, we have external validation in some of our cases. Freyd: In this field you're going to find people who have all levels of belief, understanding, experience with the area of repression. As I said before it's not an area in which there's any kind of uniform agreement in the field. The full notion of repression has a meaning within a psychoanalytic framework and it's got a meaning to people in everyday use and everyday language. What there is evidence for is that any kind of memory is reconstructed and reinterpreted. It has not been shown to be anything else. Memories are reconstructed and reinterpreted from fragments. Some memories are true and some memories are confabulated and some are downright false. TAT: It is certainly possible for in offender to dissociate a memory. It's possible that some of the people who call you could have done or witnessed some of the things they've been accused of -- maybe in an alcoholic black-out or in a dissociative state -- and truly not remember. I think that's very possible. Freyd: I would say that virtually anything is possible. But when the stories include murdering babies and breeding babies and some of the rather bizarre things that come up, it's mighty puzzling. TAT: I've treated adults with dissociative disorders who were both victimized and victimizers. I've seen previously repressed memories of my clients' earlier sexual offenses coming back to them in therapy. You guys seem to be saying, be skeptical if the person claims to have forgotten previously, especially if it is about something horrible. Should we be equally skeptical if someone says "I'm remembering that I perpetrated and I didn't remember before. It's been repressed for years and now it's surfacing because of therapy." I ask you, should we have the same degree of skepticism for this type of delayed-memory that you have for the other kind? Freyd: Does that happen? TAT: Oh, yes. A lot.

The physical shape of Mollies paralyses and contortions fit the pattern of late-nineteenth-century hysteria as well — in particular the phases of "grand hysteria" described by Jean-Martin Charcot, a French physician who became world-famous in the 1870s and 1880s for his studies of hysterics..." "The hooplike spasm Mollie experienced sounds uncannily like what Charcot considered the ultimate grand movement, the arc de de cercle (also called arc-en-ciel), in which the patient arched her back, balancing on her heels and the top of her head..." "One of his star patients, known to her audiences only as Louise, was a specialist in the arc de cercle — and had a background and hysterical manifestations quite similar to Mollie's. A small-town girl who made her way to Paris in her teens, Louise had had a disrupted childhood, replete with abandonment and sexual abuse. She entered Salpetriere in 1875, where while under Charcot's care she experienced partial paralysis and complete loss of sensation over the right side of her body, as well as a decrease in hearing, smell, taste, and vision. She had frequent violent, dramatic hysterical fits, alternating with hallucinations and trancelike phases during which she would "see" her mother and other people she knew standing before her (this symptom would manifest itself in Mollie). Although critics, at the time and since, have decried the sometime circus atmosphere of Charcot's lectures, and claimed that he, inadvertently or not, trained his patients how to be hysterical, he remains a key figure in understanding nineteenth-century hysteria.

Treating Abuse Today 3(4) pp. 26-33 TAT: I want to move back to an area that I'm not real comfortable asking you about, but I'm going to, because I think it's germane to this discussion. When we began our discussion [see "A Conversation with Pamela Freyd, Ph.D., Part 1", Treating Abuse Today, 3(3), P. 25-39] we spoke a bit about how your interest in this issue intersected your own family situation. You have admitted writing about it in your widely disseminated "Jane Doe" article. I think wave been able to cover legitimate ground in our discussion without talking about that, but I am going to return to it briefly because there lingers an important issue there. I want to know how you react to people who say that the Foundation is basically an outgrowth of an unresolved family matter in your own family and that some of the initial members of your Scientific Advisory Board have had dual professional relationships with you and your family, and are not simply scientifically attached to the Foundation and its founders. Freyd: People can say whatever they want to say. The fact of the matter is, day after day, people are calling to say that something very wrong has taken place. They're telling us that somebody they know and love very much, has acquired memories in some kind of situation, that they're sure are false, but that there has been no way to even try to resolve the issues -- now, it's 3,600 families. TAT: That's kind of side-stepping the question. My question -- Freyd: -- People can say whatever they want. But you know -- TAT: -- But, isn't it true that some of the people on your scientific advisory have a professional reputation that is to some extent now dependent upon some findings in your own family? Freyd: Oh, I don't think so. A professional reputation dependent upon findings in my family? TAT: In the sense that they may have been consulted professionally first about a matter in your own family. Is that not true? Freyd: What difference does that make? TAT: It would bring into question their objectivity. It would also bring into question the possibility of this being a folie à deux --

Rape has been described by victim advocate and former police officer Tom Tremblay as “the most violent crime a person can survive.”10 Those who have not been sexually assaulted can perhaps most clearly understand the experience of a survivor by thinking of them as having survived an attempted murder that used sex as the weapon. Sexual violence often doesn’t look like what we think of as “violence”—only rarely is there a gun or knife; often there isn’t even “aggression” as we typically think of it. There is coercion and the removal of the targeted person’s choice about what will happen next. Survivors don’t “fight” because the threat is too immediate and inescapable; their bodies choose “freeze” because it’s the stress response that maximizes the chances of staying alive . . . or of dying without pain. Trauma isn’t always caused by one specific incident. It can also emerge in response to persistent distress or ongoing abuse, like a relationship where sex is unwanted, though it may be technically “consensual” because the targeted person says yes in order to avoid being hurt or feels trapped in the relationship or is otherwise coerced. In that context, a survivor’s body gradually learns that it can’t escape and it can’t fight; freeze becomes the default stress response because of the learned pattern of shutdown as the best way to guarantee survival. Each person’s experience of survival is unique, but it often includes a kind of disengaged unreality. And afterward, that illusion of unreality gradually degrades, disintegrating under the weight of physical existence and burdened memory. The tentative recognition that this thing has actually happened incrementally unlocks the panic and rage that couldn’t find their way to the surface before, buried as they were under the overmastering mandate to survive. But survival is not recovery; survival happens automatically, sometimes even against the survivor’s will. Recovery requires an environment of relative security and the ability to separate the physiology of freeze from the experience of fear, so that the panic and the rage can discharge, completing their cycles at last.

Treating Abuse Today 3(4) pp. 26-33 TAT: I see the agenda. But let's go back: one of the contentions the therapeutic community has about the Foundation's professed scientific credibility is your use of the term "syndrome." It seems to us that what's happening here is that based solely on anecdotal, unverified reports, the Foundation has started a public relations campaign rather than a bonafide research effort and simply announced to the world that an epidemic of this syndrome exists. The established scientific and clinical organizations are taking you on about this and it's that kind of thing that makes us feel like this effort is not really based on science. Do you have a response to that? Freyd: The response I would make regarding the name of the Foundation is that it will certainly be one of the issues brought up during our scientific meeting this weekend. But let me add that the term, "syndrome," in terms of it being a psychological syndrome, parallels, say, the rape trauma syndrome. Given that and the fact that there are seldom complaints over the use of the term "syndrome" for that, I think that it isn't "syndrome" that's bothering people as much as the term "false." TAT: No. Frankly it's not. It is the term "syndrome." The term false memory is almost 100 years old. It's nothing new, but false memory syndrome is newly coined. Here's our issue with your use of the word "syndrome." The rape trauma syndrome is a good example because it has a very well defined list of signs and symptoms. Having read your literature, we are still at a loss to know what the signs and symptoms of "false memory syndrome" are. Can you tell us succinctly? Freyd: The person with whom I would like to have you discuss that to quote is Dr. Paul McHugh on our advisory board, because he is a clinician. TAT: I would be happy to do that. But if I may, let me take you on a little bit further about this. Freyd: Sure, sure that's fair. TAT: You're the Executive Director of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation - a foundation that says it wants to disseminate scientific information to the community regarding this syndrome but you can't, or won't, give me its signs and symptoms. That is confusing to me. I don't understand why there isn't a list.

Blaming therapy, social work and other caring professions for the confabulation of testimony of 'satanic ritual abuse' legitimated a programme of political and social action designed to contest the gains made by the women's movement and the child protection movement. In efforts to characterise social workers and therapists as hysterical zealots, 'satanic ritual abuse' was, quite literally, 'made fun of': it became the subject of scorn and ridicule as interest groups sought to discredit testimony of sexual abuse as a whole. The groundswell of support that such efforts gained amongst journalists, academics and the public suggests that the pleasures of disbelief found resonance far beyond the confines of social movements for people accused of sexual abuse. These pleasures were legitimised by a pseudo-scientific vocabulary of 'false memories' and 'moral panic' but as Daly (1999:219-20) points out 'the ultimate goal of ideology is to present itself in neutral, value-free terms as the very horizon of objectivity and to dismiss challenges to its order as the "merely ideological"'. The media spotlight has moved on and social movements for people accused of sexual abuse have lost considerable momentum. However, their rhetoric continues to reverberate throughout the echo chamber of online and 'old' media. Intimations of collusion between feminists and Christians in the concoction of 'satanic ritual abuse' continue to mobilise 'progressive' as well as 'conservative' sympathies for men accused of serious sexual offences and against the needs of victimised women and children. This chapter argues that, underlying the invocation of often contradictory rationalising tropes (ranging from calls for more scientific 'objectivity' in sexual abuse investigations to emotional descriptions of 'happy families' rent asunder by false allegations) is a collective and largely unarticulated pleasure; the catharthic release of sentiments and views about children and women that had otherwise become shameful in the aftermath of second wave feminism. It seems that, behind the veneer of public concern about child sexual abuse, traditional views about the incredibility of women's and children's testimony persist. 'Satanic ritual abuse has served as a lens through which these views have been rearticulated and reasserted at the very time that evidence of widespread and serious child sexual abuse has been consolidating. p60

her that when he had first raised the idea, I hadn’t known he was sick. Almost nobody knew, she said. He had called me right before he was going to be operated on for cancer, and he was still keeping it a secret, she explained. I decided then to write this book. Jobs surprised me by readily acknowledging that he would have no control over it or even the right to see it in advance. “It’s your book,” he said. “I won’t even read it.” But later that fall he seemed to have second thoughts about cooperating and, though I didn’t know it, was hit by another round of cancer complications. He stopped returning my calls, and I put the project aside for a while. Then, unexpectedly, he phoned me late on the afternoon of New Year’s Eve 2009. He was at home in Palo Alto with only his sister, the writer Mona Simpson. His wife and their three children had taken a quick trip to go skiing, but he was not healthy enough to join them. He was in a reflective mood, and we talked for more than an hour. He began by recalling that he had wanted to build a frequency counter when he was twelve, and he was able to look up Bill Hewlett, the founder of HP, in the phone book and call him to get parts. Jobs said that the past twelve years of his life, since his return to Apple, had been his most productive in terms of creating new products. But his more important goal, he said, was to do what Hewlett and his friend David Packard had done, which was create a company that was so imbued with innovative creativity that it would outlive them. “I always thought of myself as a humanities person as a kid, but I liked electronics,” he said. “Then I read something that one of my heroes, Edwin Land of Polaroid, said about the importance of people who could stand at the intersection of humanities and sciences, and I decided that’s what I wanted to do.” It was as if he were suggesting themes for his biography (and in this instance, at least, the theme turned out to be valid). The creativity that can occur when a feel for both the humanities and the sciences combine in one strong personality was the topic that most interested me in my biographies of Franklin and Einstein, and I believe that it will be a key to creating innovative economies in the twenty-first century. I asked Jobs why he wanted me to be the one to write his biography. “I think you’re good at getting people to talk,” he replied. That was an unexpected answer. I knew that I would have to interview scores of people he had fired, abused, abandoned, or otherwise infuriated, and I feared he would not be comfortable with my getting them to talk. And indeed he did turn out to be skittish when word trickled back to him of people that I was interviewing. But after a couple of months,

he importance and influence of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection can scarcely be exaggerated. A century after Darwin’s death, the great evolutionary biologist and historian of science, Ernst Mayr, wrote, ‘The worldview formed by any thinking person in the Western world after 1859, when On the Origin of Species was published, was by necessity quite different from a worldview formed prior to 1859… The intellectual revolution generated by Darwin went far beyond the confines of biology, causing the overthrow of some of the most basic beliefs of his age.’1 Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin’s biographers, contend, ‘Darwin is arguably the best known scientist in history. More than any modern thinker—even Freud or Marx—this affable old-world naturalist from the minor Shropshire gentry has transformed the way we see ourselves on the planet.’2 In the words of the philosopher Daniel C. Dennett, ‘Almost no one is indifferent to Darwin, and no one should be. The Darwinian theory is a scientific theory, and a great one, but that is not all it is… Darwin’s dangerous idea cuts much deeper into the fabric of our most fundamental beliefs than many of its sophisticated apologists have yet admitted, even to themselves.’3 Dennett goes on to add, ‘If I were to give an award for the single best idea anyone has ever had, I’d give it to Darwin, ahead of Newton and Einstein and everyone else. In a single stroke, the idea of evolution by natural selection unifies the realm of life, meaning, and purpose with the realm of space and time, cause and effect, mechanism and physical law.’4 The editors of the Cambridge Companion to Darwin begin their introduction by stating, ‘Some scientific thinkers, while not themselves philosophers, make philosophers necessary. Charles Darwin is an obvious case. His conclusions about the history and diversity of life—including the evolutionary origin of humans—have seemed to bear on fundamental questions about being, knowledge, virtue and justice.’5 Among the fundamental questions raised by Darwin’s work, which are still being debated by philosophers (and others) are these: ‘Are we different in kind from other animals? Do our apparently unique capacities for language, reason and morality point to a divine spark within us, or to ancestral animal legacies still in evidence in our simian relatives? What forms of social life are we naturally disposed towards—competitive and selfish forms, or cooperative and altruistic ones?’6 As the editors of the volume point out, virtually the entire corpus of the foundational works of Western philosophy, from Plato and Aristotle to Descartes to Kant to Hegel, has had to be re-examined in the light of Darwin’s work. Darwin continues to be read, discussed, interpreted, used, abused—and misused—to this day. As the philosopher and historian of science, Jean Gayon, puts it, ‘[T]his persistent positioning of new developments in relation to a single, pioneering figure is quite exceptional in the history of modern natural science.

Treating Abuse Today (Tat), 3(4), pp. 26-33 Freyd: You were also looking for some operational criteria for false memory syndrome: what a clinician could look for or test for, and so on. I spoke with several of our scientific advisory board members and I have some information for you that isn't really in writing at this point but I think it's a direction you want us to go in. So if I can read some of these notes . . . TAT: Please do. Freyd: One would look for false memory syndrome: 1. If a patient reports having been sexually abused by a parent, relative or someone in very early childhood, but then claims that she or he had complete amnesia about it for a decade or more; 2. If the patient attributes his or her current reason for being in therapy to delayed-memories. And this is where one would want to look for evidence suggesting that the abuse did not occur as demonstrated by a list of things, including firm, confident denials by the alleged perpetrators; 3. If there is denial by the entire family; 4. In the absence of evidence of familial disturbances or psychiatric illnesses. For example, if there's no evidence that the perpetrator had alcohol dependency or bipolar disorder or tendencies to pedophilia; 5. If some of the accusations are preposterous or impossible or they contain impossible or implausible elements such as a person being made pregnant prior to menarche, being forced to engage in sex with animals, or participating in the ritual killing of animals, and; 6. In the absence of evidence of distress surrounding the putative abuse. That is, despite alleged abuse going from age two to 27 or from three to 16, the child displayed normal social and academic functioning and that there was no evidence of any kind of psychopathology. Are these the kind of things you were asking for? TAT: Yeah, it's a little bit more specific. I take issue with several, but at least it gives us more of a sense of what you all mean when you say "false memory syndrome." Freyd: Right. Well, you know I think that things are moving in that direction since that seems to be what people are requesting. Nobody's denying that people are abused and there's no one denying that someone who was abused a decade ago or two decades ago probably would not have talked about it to anybody. I think I mentioned to you that somebody who works in this office had that very experience of having been abused when she was a young teenager-not extremely abused, but made very uncomfortable by an uncle who was older-and she dealt with it for about three days at the time and then it got pushed to the back of her mind and she completely forgot about it until she was in therapy. TAT: There you go. That's how dissociation works! Freyd: That's how it worked. And after this came up and she had discussed and dealt with it in therapy, she could again put it to one side and go on with her life. Certainly confronting her uncle and doing all these other things was not a part of what she had to do. Interestingly, though, at the same time, she has a daughter who went into therapy and came up with memories of having been abused by her parents. This daughter ran away and is cutoff from the family-hasn't spoken to anyone for three years. And there has never been any meeting between the therapist and the whole family to try to find out what was involved. TAT: If we take the first example -- that of her own abuse -- and follow the criteria you gave, we would have a very strong disbelief in the truth of what she told.