All the Lies They Did Not Tell

by Pablo Trincia

“Finding the bad guy restores peace of mind,” Giuliana Mazzoni told me. She is a world-renowned professor of psychology who specializes in mass psychosis. “It restores the ability to live with oneself and not have to say, ‘It’s my fault.’”

What all these experts seemed to overlook was that the children’s stories could have been contaminated in some way. Someone could have planted a seed in their memories. It then blossomed and grew over time until it devoured their real experiences, substituting them with something that was partially or completely artificial. This phenomenon has been studied for a long time in the rest of the world, but it remains underestimated, especially among psychologists who aren’t familiar with the research on the mnemonic functions of the brain.