Susan Clancy interviewed

Reason online has an interview with Susan Clancy, author of Abducted : How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens. I wrote about Susan Clancy here: she is the researcher with controversial experimental results about repressed memories among both alleged victims of child sexual abuse, and alien abductees.

The interview starts with Clancy’s view of how people “recover” memories of alien abduction at the therapist’s office (with all emphasis mine):

Clancy: It doesn't happen overnight. Nobody wakes up and says, "Holy shit, I was abducted last night, they took me, there were rotating vibrating devices and then they extracted my sperm." People say, "I have these weird experiences. I wonder what it could be?" They look for explanations and at some point they'll say, well, maybe I was abducted. …

Reason: And the memories are recovered later on?

Clancy: Either by choice, or because it kind of happens that way, some end up in an abduction researcher's office or a psychotherapists office to talk about their concerns or beliefs. I never met a single subject that had detailed autobiographical memories of what happened to them until they ended up under hypnosis.

Of course, this is fairly standard stuff to skeptics who follow this sort of thing. Perhaps more controversial is Clancy’s view of whether repression (and recovery) of memories happens at all:

Clancy: All of the scientific research shows that repression is just preposterous. But most therapists believe that repression exists. And most people in the world believe that the concept of repression is real. I think that's because of movies and Hollywood, we see it depicted, it's just culturally out there.

Reason: But in the scientific community—

Clancy: It's dead. Dead, dead, dead. For five decades we've known that memory is reconstructive in nature; we've known that memories can be created. The whole issue of repression didn't become a hot topic until the 90s. And for the past ten years scientists have been arguing that repression is preposterous.

Reason: You deny the existence of recovered memories; how do you explain the fact that adults do sometimes suddenly remember being abused, and the accounts turn out to be accurate and traumatic?

Clancy: Ninety-five percent of child sex abuse cases are non-traumatic events, traumatic in the sense of being life threatening or physically painful. If you look at the data, what is most likely to happen to victims involves touching and kissing. It's not something that requires medical attention. The average age of sexual abuse victims is seven. You take a young kid who does not know about sex—no kid under ten is able to understand what sex is—you have a child who doesn't know about sex, and somebody they love and trust is touching them in a way that is not painful. Put yourself in the perspective of the victim. There is no way to understand what is happening to you is a crime. They just don't know. It becomes one of the millions of experiences kids have that they don't understand. And it's not surprising to me that many kids simply don't think about it until later on in life. At some point, later on, when they hit puberty in high school or college, they put two and two together, and they realize that it was wrong. It was abusive. And people refer to that as "I remembered."

I have to admit, I thought that some repressed memories were possible, just that it wasn’t as common as some therapists claim. She seems to be saying it doesn’t work like that. I imagine many therapists disagree with her. Nothing new there then.

Comments

[Eric]

In talking about this with my wife last night, she pointed out something that hadn't occurred to me: If the memory is something that doesn't become traumatic until later (when the person puts two and two together,) then what's the difference whether you call it figuring it out, or "remembered?"

[outeast]

Eric, I think the point is really that (according to Clancy) the original memory was never 'repressed', merely 'forgotten' in the way that ordinary experiences are because the actual experience was not sufficiently significant to be remembered.

This would suggest that memories of the kind of 'non-traumatic' abuse she talks about may well be real (though the sense of this as abuse may be a later construction); but it also implies that the kind of ritual satanic abuse that has figured in many high-profile 'memory recovery' cases is unlikely to be (since severe abuse would be unlikely to be simply forgotten about).

Her claim that much child abuse is 'non-traumatic', though, seems to rest overmuch on a belief that children are unbelievably ignorant and innocence in matters of the body - I'm not at all convinced by her generalization that 'no kid under ten is able to understand what sex is'.

[beajerry]

I agree, she's on the right track, but is too general - kids know when the creepy line is crossed.

I suspect that people who 'remember' 'non-traumatic' abuse are substituting that as an excuse for some other problem.

Before I became a full-fledged skeptic, I worked in a psych hospital and with several "multiple personality disorder" patients (all under the same doctor, go figure), and they all seemed to have highly similar childhood rememberances of ritual satanic abuse. This helped me find my bullshit detector.

[pvandck]

I certainly think Susan Clancy is pretty much correct in her assertions. I also think that we adults are way too keen to attribute interpretations about bodily function and sexuality to children that are completely outside their sphere of experience – because their state of physical and emotional development is incomplete and still evolving rapidly. We, as adults, tend to forget what it was like to be a child (thoughts, feelings etc.) so we superimpose our own, more recently acquired and developed adult values which are actually inappropriate.
With regard to people suddenly deciding that an event from the past was traumatic, this has always seemed to me as preposterous and dishonest. But of course, in a "get rich quick" society where Doctors and Lawyers are willing to accept good money to promote and defend the idea, no-one should be surprised.

[Julian Malcovich]

Dear Dr Clancy

First of all, what is the idea of generalizing about such a complex subject?

What a simple way of evaluating “abductees”…Don’t get me wrong but,is very comfortable for someone like you to merely simplify this phenomena by just repeating like a parrot the same ideas that you have learnt in the academic world, in which brain damage is self inflicted by academia and “free thinking” is and utopia.

Have you ever think the possibility that you might be wrong? You might fell very proud of your assertions; however, you are just one more on the list of ape irrationality... Oh yea! We have data!

Before saying things like:

-I never met a single subject that had detailed autobiographical memories of what happened to them until they ended up under hypnosis-
Make sure about hundreds of others all over the world, in which this is not simply the case .

Thus, I invited you to navigate in the vast regions of human mind and behaviour in a more pragmatic and neutral way... A piece of advice, KEEP ON SEARCHING MORE ALTERNATIVELY.

Sincerely

Profesor Julian markovich

Switzerland

[Matt Graeber]

Dear Dr.Clancy,

I should have mentioned that I'm a legally blind person, so please do not be too distrated by any typos I may have inadvertantly made in my previous post.

I had one hell of a time deciphering that control imagery.

[mick]

Hello, this is for Dr clancy hope she gets it, last night i saw a tv programme about alien abuction, just like to say she is very wrong, very few people have know about me or my abuction which was not at night but 10 oclock on sunday morning when i was meant to be in church but decided to hide in some bush,or woods till the service was over and walk home on this nice day when i saw people starting to come out, and then no one would know and wouldn't get into trouble, met three of them and was taken for aprox 3 hours, i was 11 or 12 lived in a rural town and know nothing of ufo,s or aliens up till then i had only a little tv up till then and sure nothing on there to influence me,the police and others had been looking all over for me,to cut the story short i woke up sitting down behind a large tree not far from where i had contact where anyone driving down the road could see me, knew more than a hour had gone by and walked home which wasnt far,i had a splitting headache and recalled everything,the policeman and others were on the steps asked where i had been for hours and why did i look as white as a ghost, i just said i have to go to the toilet and was violently sick and was put to bed, i have never had a headache or been sick prior to that or to this day, but i couldnt tell anyone what truely happened,last thing i needed was to be checked to see i was insane, believe me as sane as anyone, level headed and not taken to flights of fancy,when you see someone or something like that when fully awake you dont forget it, as vivid today as then, please explain, you cant neither can i,the truth is the truth and it always will be which was i met physical beings, communicated and they touched me and took me,im sorry to tell you this but how about looking into people like myself that have had experience in daylight not waking up from sleep, thankyou sincerely mick.

[Skeptico]

Mick:

Nice story but it is what we skeptics call an “anecdote” – an unverifiable story that would not be considered even poor evidence. What did you experience then? I don’t know but I could suggest:

1. You did actually fall asleep while lying in wait on this nice day
2. Possibly your experience was heightened by sunstroke (which would also explain the headache and the sickness).

Of course no one will ever know what happened, but I do know your story is not evidence of aliens. Sorry.

[mick]

Yes the part about seeing communication and physical contact with out of this world being i agree i agree i cannot verify, the aproximitly three hours of missing time i can, it was reported and was written down,as for falling asleep as if i would 10 oclock sunday morning in my sunday best, and really heatstroke on roughly 22degree day under a canopy of trees get real, look im not trying to convince you or anyone i really dont care , my experience is mine alone, as a dont agree with the fodder given by Dr clancy,just like to say this and not trying to degrade you, but anyone with normal intelligence can understand how far we have come in the last hundred years,donkeys to rocket ships,heard many a mathematician and physicists say there are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on every beach in this world, only need planets the rite distance from these suns to create live, now we are talking billions, intelligent life now taking millions,1000 plus years more advanced than us talking 100 of thousands, so please dont debase yourself by saying light years away, or say we havnt been visited now or in the future,was it not einstein that said it would be a great waste of space otherwise, only appreciate those that show some sort of intelligence, the others i feel sorry for like Dr clancy and none showen here so out of here, cheers mick.