A Hell Map to End Hell Maps?
Why Webster Was Wrong, Part Eight
Repudiating the afterword to Richard Webster’s Why Freud Was Wrong, “Freud’s False Memories.”
(Part One / Part Two / Part Three / Part Four / Part Five / Part Six / Part Seven)
(Art by Michelle Horsley)
Dispatching with Loftus
As mentioned previously, in a footnote to his afterword to Why Freud Was Wrong Webster cites Elizabeth Loftus as a reliable source. Curiously enough, Loftus herself claims to be the victim of sexual abuse as a child, as mentioned in a 1996 interview with Psychology Today:
Scratch the surface and you discover how skeptical she is about the view of sexual abuse as the root of life-long trauma: she herself was molested by a baby-sitter when she was six and shrugs it off. “It’s not that big a deal,” she says candidly.
Webster, like Loftus, makes the claim that recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse might not only be distorted or exaggerated, but confabulated whole-cloth (without being conscious deception). An essential question he doesn’t ask, however, is can a memory really be fabricated, and if so, how?
Loftus’ primary claim for false memories is based on her famous 1995 “Lost in the Mall” memory implantation experiment, in which subjects were (allegedly) persuaded to believe they had been lost in a shopping mall as children. Yet on inspection, the evidence it presents is compromised in a number of ways. This is from “Harvey Weinstein’s ‘False Memory’ Defense and its Shocking Origin Story”:
No published research has been done to test whether it’s possible to “implant” a “false” traumatic memory [since to do so] you’d have to traumatize [the subject]. [Also] subjects were far more likely to believe the mall story if it was told to them by an older relative than if it was told to them by a researcher. This suggests that parents, not therapists, have greater influence to manipulate an individual’s memories. . . . In addition, a study on trauma and memory (Elliott, 1997) showed that, among participants who had experienced delayed recall of a traumatic event, psychotherapy was the least common trigger for memory recall [emphasis added].
What is more, the same year as the experiment, two ethics complaints involving recovered-memory cases were filed against Loftus.
The complaints asked the American Psychological Association (APA) to examine misrepresentations made about two successful civil cases, one brought by Lynn Crook, the other by Jennifer Hoult. . . . The complaints were never investigated because Professor Loftus resigned from the APA shortly after they were filed. The strange circumstances of her resignation—coming by fax, shortly after two complaints were filed—raised questions about whether Professor Lofus [sic] was “tipped off ” about the complaints and given an opportunity to resign before they could be investigated.(Source: https://www.recoveredmemory.org/post/the-rumors-were-true)
A 2025 article, “False Memories Are Harder to Create Than Once Thought,” cites a 2024 analysis of the mall experiment, “Lost in the Mall? Interrogating Judgements of False Memory,” published in Applied Cognitive Psychology, that refutes Loftus’ claims and refers to a replication of the experiment in Ireland:
The article shows that none of the 35% judged to have a false memory in 2023 reported an entirely false memory and many did not even recall being lost. According to the new analysis, half of those judged to have false memories had actually been lost before and were likely to be reporting on real events (albeit at a different time/place). Meanwhile others were so unsure about the suggested details in the fake story that their testimony would have been of little value in court. . . . “People in these studies are cautious in what they claim to remember and seem to be much less likely than the investigators to agree they had a false memory. Experts need to be very careful in how they present research findings so as not to mislead the justice system.”
The report politely leaves out the possibility that misleading the justice system may have been precisely the goal of Loftus’ pseudo-experiment.
Webster Drowning
In the last piece, I considered the damage done by blind denial vs. the damage done by uncritical belief. Clearly, both are regrettable, though the latter is easier to forgive—even if it can also play into the subterfuges of abusers.
Since at least the 1970s, there has been an increasingly widespread acknowledgment of child sexual abuse (see “Modern History of Child Sexual Abuse Awareness: Cycles of Discovery and Suppression”). Not counting the sexual abuse scandals around the Catholic church, it is only in the last fifteen years or so—roughly since Jimmy Savile died—that there has been a mainstream recognition of organized, high-level sexual abuses: Saville, UK child care homes, Penn State, the Boy Scouts, Jeffrey Epstein, Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, Casa Pia, UK grooming gangs, P Diddy, etc.1
While most of these cases do not depend on recovered memories of victims, people who are seriously discussing these subjects tend to allow for such memories as evidence.
In the meantime—or at the same time—there’s a split in the narrative, and in the collective psyche. Insofar as proponents of widespread organized child sexual abuse (including the possibility of recovered memories) are becoming more mainstream, paradoxically, they are also being more marginalized.
Put differently, the margin has now grown so large that it has become a parallel kind of mainstream unto itself, one that is still kept somewhat separate from the first mainstream (hence we have 1st and 2nd matrices). Richard Webster was clearly speaking to the mainstream (in 1995, there wasn’t any alternative), and—based on the reviews he got—he was also embraced by it.
In that realm, while in the mid-1990s there was a necessary acknowledgment of organized child sex abuse in the particulars (because facts were even then coming to light), in the generalities, they were still considered the realm of tin-foil hats and UFOs. And in fact, though the landscape has sufficiently changed that Webster’s “debunking” now looks pretty bad, even from a primary mainstream perspective, there is still a split.2
An awareness of schismogenetics and the architecture of 1st and 2nd matrices requires us to ask if somebody like Webster has done more damage than somebody like Geraldo Rivera or Alex Jones, who have sensationalized and oversimplified, and probably somewhat confabulated, the truth. Are the spray-and-pray conspiracy theories of Jones, David Icke, or Joe Rogan’s platform so much more helpful than the blanket whitewash of The Guardian or The New York Times? Which is doing more damage—the denying and debunking of these truths, or the indiscriminate spreading of dumbed-down versions of them?3
In terms of Webster, it’s clear enough that, as his book proceeds, he wades further and further out of his depth, until by the end, he’s completely submerged: instead of speaking, he’s swallowing water and gasping for air, thinking he is making cogent arguments when really he is drowning, and what comes out is meaningless splutters.
That such vomit can pass for rationality is what makes it so pernicious. The water Webster is submerged in is that of the superculture: he is spewing out supercultural axioms, arguments, and principles without knowing it, referencing Donald Hebb, Elizabeth Loftus, and the False Memory Syndrome Foundation as reliable allies and scientific sources.
What that leaves is a cautionary tale for all writers everywhere.