In the 1990s patients in psychotherapy began accusing parents and other relatives of sexually abusing them in childhood. Most of the accusations were false “recovered memories” implanted by therapists pursuing a new theory of mental illness. Paul R. McHugh saw it all and feared that his profession had done itself in, once and for all.
The public, in losing confidence in psychotherapy and turning solely to medications for psychiatric treatment, abandoned an important healing method just as several psychiatrists, including McHugh, were teaching what had gone wrong in psychotherapy and putting it right. Everyone—the public and professionals—should appreciate how psychiatry lost its way on this occasion so as to guarantee that discredited ways of searching memory for sources of disorder do not reappear in some new garb.
The recent uptick in popular interest, for example, HBO’s "In Treatment," suggests that Americans may be ready to give psychotherapy another chance. McHugh wants them and their therapists to get it right this time. In Try to Remember, he describes his battles against “recovered memories,” multiple personality and the excessive diagnosis of PTSD to explain the difference between good treatment and bad and to draw urgent lessons for therapists and patients alike.
