In the 1980s and 1990s, the newly emerging evidence of the sexual abuse of children and women set off two unintended hysterical epidemics. One was the phenomenon of recovered-memory therapy, in which adults went into therapy with no memory of childhood trauma and came out believing that they had been sexually molested by their parents or tortured in Satanic cults, sometimes for many years, without ever being aware of it at the time and without any corroboration by siblings, friends, or physicians.
