Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts

by Carol Tavris

Where do epidemics go when they die? How come celebrities have not been turning up on talk shows lately to reveal their recovered memories of having been tortured as infants? Where are all the multiple personality cases? Have all the sadistic pedophiles closed down their daycare centers? Most of the teachers who were convicted have been freed on appeal, but many teachers and parents remain in prison, are confined to house arrest, or must live out their lives as registered sex offenders. Many lives were shattered and countless families have never been reunited. But cases of recovered memories of abuse in childhood still appear in the courts, in the news, in films.6 If you look closely at these stories, many involve a therapist who helped the person “recover” his or her memories. As for MPD, the clinics were eventually closed by successful lawsuits against the psychiatrists who had been inducing vulnerable patients to believe they had the disorder, and MPD began to fade from the cultural scene. In 2011, investigative journalist Debbie Nathan published a biography of Sybil showing that Cornelia Wilbur had virtually concocted the whole story to promote herself and sell books. Sybil did not have a childhood trauma that caused her personality to fragment; she generated her so-called personalities in response to pressures, subtle and coercive, by Wilbur, whom she wanted desperately to please—and who threatened to stop giving Sybil the drugs Wilbur had been prescribing for her and...