“There is no such thing as brainwashing. There is no such thing as a cult. At least not as those terms are commonly used. But there are many imaginary things that have played a large and important role in our culture and politics are commonly used. But there are many imaginary things that have played a large and important role in our culture and politics. There is no such thing as a “recovered memory,” but people have been put in prison on “recovered memory” evidence.
There is no such thing as “multiple-personality disorder,” but many people believe there is, thanks to the popular film based on the 1973 book Sybil, written by the psychiatrist Cornelia B. Wilbur and journalist Flora Rheta Schreiber, much of which was fabricated. The term “multiple personality disorder” is no longer used, and there is no psychiatric consensus about whether the rebranded “disassociative identity disorder” exists. Some psychiatrists believe that it is therapeutically induced, and that some patients are especially susceptible to hypnotic suggestion. The problem with that theory is that hypnosis does not exist, either. There is no scientific evidence that a hypnotic state exists. To the extent that the word “hypnosis” refers to an actual phenomenon, it is simply role-playing.
Much of the cultural legacy of Sigmund Freud is pure mythology, based on pseudoscience and fraud. There were no Satanic sex-abuse cults infiltrating the nation’s daycares back in the Reagan era, but people went to prison over it, enabled in part by “recovered memories.” The typical emotional problem associated with trauma is not the suppression of memory or experience but the inability to cease thinking about the trauma and move on.
The intelligent reader will detect a theme in the fictions above: They are all devices for relieving the individual of responsibility for his actions.”
https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/06/brainwashing-myth-literary-cinematic-device/
