Prime Evil
Why Webster Was Wrong, Part Five
Repudiating the afterword to Richard Webster’s Why Freud Was Wrong, “Freud’s False Memories.”
(Part One Part Two Part Three Part Four)
The Usual Suspects
Richard Webster’s afterword to Why Freud Was Wrong is called “Freud’s False Memories: Psychoanalysis and the Recovered Memory Movement.” It confirmed all my worst suspicions about Webster.
Oddly enough, it also anticipated, by a few weeks, an email exchange with Laurent Guyénot, an author whose work I respect. From hints given previously in Webster’s book, I had anticipated, more or less, the kind of argument he makes in his afterword against recovered memories, which was echoed a few weeks later by Guyénot. Fortunately, Webster doesn’t get into “Satanic panic” or the McMartin preschool case of the 1980s, or try to use that as “evidence” for his case. But, like Guyénot, he does cite False Memory Syndrome Foundation affiliates like Elizabeth Loftus with a gullibility that is hard to separate from complicity.1
Along with the usual suspects, Webster cites a book that Guyénot also cited in our exchange, Remembering Satan: A Tragic Case of Recovered Memory. This is a book I read in the mid-90s in my twenties that struck me as a fairly obvious cover-up at the time. It was written by New Yorker staff writer, Lawrence Wright, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2006 for The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. In 2021 he published The Plague Year: America in the Time of COVID. The year before that, in April 2020, one month after the “pandemic” officially hit, he published The End of October, a fiction thriller about a pandemic.
While one should not judge an author by his Wikipedia page, this doesn’t sound like a researcher I would want to put much trust in when it comes to understanding political evils. Despite all the many tells about Wright, Guyénot followed Webster in citing Wright’s book as evidence for his argument: the one that recovered memories are a myth.
False Memory Shilling
To be clear, Webster doesn’t argue that memories cannot ever be repressed, only that any memories that are repressed and then come back into awareness—even if they come up spontaneously—should be regarded with skepticism.
Webster claims there is no evidence at all that any of these recovered memories actually happened. This is based on complete assumption, and it can easily be repudiated by countless cases. (See here for an overview.) Webster is claiming that multiple cases have been proven false, yet he appears to have little familiarity with the charred earth of ritual abuse history (when writing in 1995, at least; I have not read his three books that specifically challenge cases of organized abuse: The Great Children’s Home Panic, 1998, The Secret of Bryn Estyn, 2005, and Casa Pia: Portugal’s high society paedophile ring. Fact or fantasy?, 2011).
In our email exchange, Guyénot argued something similar, though he was only refuting evidence for satanic ritual abuse, not organized, high-level child abuse per se. I personally am not aware of even a single case of ritual abuse that has been categorically invalidated; this is based on analyzing a number of allegedly “debunked” cases which I have found to be anything but. (Ross Cheit’s The Witch-Hunt Narrative offers a plethora of examples of the S.O.P of false debunking.)
So, while there may be some cases of recovered memories (of organized child sexual abuse, ritual or not) that are false: a) I have not yet found one; b) doing so would in no way cancel out the evidence for actual cases. This is not to say falsified charges, maybe even false memories, never occur. But whatever the percentage of true to false—even if it should prove to be 50/50—Webster’s viewpoint grossly misrepresents the reality.
By arguing against recovered memories in so virulent a manner, Webster throws his lot in with the MKULTRA, False Memory Syndrome Foundation camp of cunning perpetrators and disinformation agents, and provides a catastrophic ending to his book. Based on the books he wrote subsequently, it is hard not to deduce that he was knowingly complicit, rather than merely a useful idiot.
Curiously, part of the language Webster uses in his “debunking” is that of feminism, by describing the whole recovered memory syndrome as consistent with “patriarchal oppression,” insofar as it makes women subject to therapists (the rapists?), and to the idea of being victims.
This makes his argument even more dubious, frankly, since it becomes not only sloppily formulated but ideologically tainted.