These beliefs did not pop up overnight in the cultural landscape, like mushrooms. They came from mental-health professionals who disseminated them at conferences, in clinical journals, in the media, and in bestselling books, and who promoted themselves as experts in diagnosing child sexual abuse and determining the validity of a recovered memory. Their claims were based largely on lingering Freudian (and pseudo-Freudian) ideas about repression, memory, sexual trauma, and the meaning of dreams and on their own confidence in their clinical powers of insight and diagnosis. All of the claims these
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