You're Wrong About - Quarantine Book Club: “Michelle Remembers” (Week 1)

Episode Date: March 26, 2020

Sarah describes the spark that ignited the Satanic Panic. Our setting is a therapist’s office in 1976 Victoria, B.C., and our digressions include Sybil, scary paperbacks from the 80s and shouting "Fire!" on a crowded theater. This episode describes child abuse.Support us:Subscribe on PatreonDonate on PaypalBuy cute merchWhere else to find us: Sarah's other show, Why Are Dads Mike's other show, Maintenance PhaseContinue reading →Support the show

You know what I was thinking yesterday is that in the sixties and you know in the nuclear age there were like three channels and the twilight zone was on one of them. Welcome to You're Wrong About, the podcast where we discuss old moral panics to convince ourselves that the one we're living through now isn't real. Are we living in a moral panic or a regular panic? That's true. It's like a moral panic but like a good moral panic like a real one. But I don't know if that makes it a moral panic then. I think it would be a moral panic if we had like almost no coronavirus and we were circulating unsubstantiated Facebook memes talking about like fake coronavirus stories. Yeah. But really coronavirus was like this really minor problem.

There were much worse viruses. I've never hoped for a moral panic before but here we are. Yeah, no, we're not going to get that out of this. Damn it. I am Michael Hobbs. I'm a reporter for The Huffington Post. I'm Sarah Marshall and I'm working on a book about the satanic panic and at this very second I'm working on a podcast about the satanic panic right now. And we are on Patreon at patreon.com slash you're wrong about and we did a long intro about our thoughts on how to support us during the virus last week and don't feel obligated to. But you can go back and listen to the last one if you want to refresh your memory on that. Yeah. And so today we're doing something a little bit different. We're kind of doing a you're wrong about book club partly because

I realized recently that a lot of the episodes that I have most enjoyed doing and then I feel like listeners have most enjoyed at least the ones who've been letting me know are the ones where I'm basically reading a book to you in tiny increments and I wanted to do that. Yeah. Today we're doing I mean I guess it's kind of a bonus episode. It's sort of like an addendum to our previous podcast about satanic panic. It's kind of a weird episode because this is about Michelle remembers which is something that I have long classified for years classified to myself as the patient zero of satanic panic texts. It's really fascinating. It's weird. It's dense. It's out of print. And so you don't tend to happen across copies of it that often. I think it's

just such an interesting text in terms of what it helped create in terms of history but also what's going on in the book itself. So yeah. So we're going to go through this book in sort of slow drip narrative style and just kind of talk about as we go along. Let's not say slow drip. That's kind of scary and it sounds like torture. Okay. Let's put it this way. Some of our episodes are really eventful and have twists and turns and you go through a lot and this episode is going to be more like the Pirates of the Caribbean. You're just going around looking at all the little situations saying oh that's wow. So we're going to savor this one. We're going to do it dulcimo because I just watched True Lies. We're going to do this like a tube float down a lazy river.

Oh yeah. That's good. That's the best one. Yes. Let's keep that. Yes. Okay. There we go. Yeah. Tell me. Fair Verona. Let's do this. So Michelle remembers was published in 1980. It was published as nonfiction. It told the story of a woman who had gone into therapy and whose therapist had by regressing her to her childhood helped her recover memories of being tortured by satanic cult that her mother gave her to. And it was published in what I believe to be an earnest attempt on the part of its authors to raise awareness of what they believe to be the reality of satanic cults torturing other little children like the cult that had tortured Michelle. But the issue with Michelle's memories was that they seemed implausible in several

significant ways which included her saying that she had there had been a satanist doctor who had sewed horns and a tail onto her. Oh my god. There were no scars on her and the narrative Michelle remembers explains that she has no scars because the Virgin Mary appears at the end as a character and blesses Michelle and heals and wipes away all of the scars from all of the scar-leaving experimentation and torture. What? Yeah. And so that's the the in-text reason supplied for the plausibility of the story which is just like it's plausible if you believe that the Virgin Mary can intervene in the life of a person and some people do believe that and I think Michelle does but I don't and so it's not persuasive to me. Right. You know our friend

Emma Eisenberg one of her causes is the fact that non-fiction books are not automatically fact-checked by the publishers. Yes. And so Michelle remembers is a great example of that like a really maybe one of the cardinal examples that it's published as non-fiction. It is then given to social workers in the early 80s who are being trained on how to recognize signs of child abuse and Dr. Pasder speaks at a convention for psychiatrists where he says I treated a patient who was richly abused and repressed the memory and here are the symptoms and maybe you should look for this in your own patients and therapists start looking for signs of this in their own patients and start generating false positives and it's just so interesting to

me that this book that is being marketed as non-fiction and that is being essentially used as a text book is one where the Virgin Mary appears as a character and is thanked in the acknowledgments and again like I don't want to belittle anyone's beliefs because the Virgin Mary is a really important figure to a lot of people and yeah I appreciate that but also like I don't believe that it's responsible to publish as a psychiatric textbook a book where the reason that someone's repressed torture didn't leave the scars that it inevitably would have is a miracle yeah like it has value but maybe not necessarily as a training manual I'm not convinced that it has value but I'm not from what you've said so far I'm really not convinced this has any value okay in

my opinion it does have value not well we'll get to that that's what this that's what this episode is really about but I think I mean my issue with things like this is that we hold non-fiction stories to a completely different set of standards than we hold fiction stories this is why things like James Frey faking his memoir offend us so much because things like a boss running away with his secretary that's the kind of thing that if it happens in fiction you're like uh that's a little bit of a cliche like you can do better than that but if it's happening in a true story you're like well sounds like a cliche but you know it happens so I'm not really gonna hold the author to account for the lack of originality here and so there's just a completely different set of aesthetic and

moral standards that we apply to non-fiction and I think this allows hoaxsters to basically say don't judge me by narrative conventions don't judge me by coherence don't judge me by plausibility because it's true hmm well I think even beyond or below that level of sophistication I think people just are really vulnerable to books like if it's in a book people are like well it's in a book fuck books that is and this is like a mass market paperback like this was a best seller it did very well it got around we trust stuff that that seems brought to us by authority and I think we do treat the publishing industry that way so can you can you walk me through the cultural context of satanic panicness at the time that this book comes out is this a totally unheard of concept yes okay

ritual abuse is a term that laurenz paster the co-author of this coins oh so it didn't exist before this book and before he took it on the road wow and so in 1983 in the mc martin case which is the first satanic panic case in the united states and the case that kicks off a wave of similar cases at other daycares across the nation the social workers because they've been primed by michelle remembers are looking for satanic ritual abuse and because they question the children in a way that it later turns out is accidentally engineered to generate false positives of whatever they suspect is going on for example if a child denies abuse has taken place you take that as a sign that abuse has taken place we're already seeing a bunch of the components of other moral

panics where we've got the raising awareness industrial complex we've got training and we've got the lack of evidence is evidence that's such a good point did this book also popularize the idea of repressed memories or was that around before repressed memories had been around before as a concept okay but this i think certainly gave that a shot in the arm and i think the previous text that had really popularized them as an idea was civil which we talked about in our multiple personality disorder episode but that was before that was before 1980 yeah civil the book was published in 1973 tremendously successful much more so than michelle remembers and civil the tv movie came out in 1976 and was watched by tremendous numbers of americans so this book

michelle remembers is not ceding the idea of satanic abuse and repressed memories like society is already primed yeah society is primed and also michelle is primed i think oh you know because this is this is in a post civil world right because people exist in the world that media creates i always forget the sort of reinforcing loop of how media creates more media yeah like how cops watch cops yeah and so i can't show you my copy because i'm at my parents house and the internet is too slow for us to have video but would you like to google michelle remembers and look at the cover images that you find oh yeah michelle ooh these are good i mean you can tell it's out of print because all of these covers look like

they're from the early 80s there's no like updated like nice helvetica cover right there's no odds yeah michelle remembers i mean the one i'm seeing is she looks it's like a it's a drawing of a little girl who looks like an american girl doll that it's the addition that i have yes and she's holding a little doll and she's surrounded by candles and then above her is like a smiling maniacal demon face like looking down upon her that's satan michael that's i don't want to spoil too much but like it's not just any demon it is literally satan satan is also a character in this and there's also the up on the top it says the shocking true story of the ultimate evil dot dot dot dot dot a child's possession by the devil exclamation point yeah although actually it's interesting

because this is not a story of possession at no point did she claim to be possessed by the devil or any demon this isn't an exorcist story but i think maybe it's being marketed as like if you liked the exorcist you might also enjoy this book this is such a crossover event we've got the exorcist we've got repressed memories i'm seeing an excerpt of michael remembers in christianity today yeah i think one of the interesting things about this book is how mainstream it was you know just how far its message got and that also has to do with how undiverse media was at the time and i don't mean in terms of who's being represented even i mean that's true also but i i just literally mean like there were just fewer stories out there so i guess i think that when you look at media

even from 1980 you would have huge swaths of people who would all take in the same story at once yeah so uh yeah where are we where are we starting so as is characteristic of paperback publishing in my experience there is a little preview of the kind of book that this is on the very first page which is the kind of thing you can read while you're like looking through the supermarket rack of paperbacks and then you you open it you're like what kind of book is this oh so in bold letters we have turn the light burn burn burn and then the scene goes the words lingered in the air michelle could feel their pressure and then the horror of it overtook her it's burning it's burning she cried okay so i should say that much of the book is like this it's michelle describing what she's seeing

in her repressed memory to dr paster and she is speaking in the voice of a five-year-old girl which i am not going to do thank you michelle began to look frantically around her moving her head from side to side to watch what was happening the child stood there in a panic choking and gasping and crying suddenly she stiffened yes yes yes i listen yes sir no no don't want to be burned again the leaden voice came from the fire dot dot dot okay personally this is really boring i mean it just sounds like somebody describing their dream that is a thoughtful response it just it just seems like it just seems so outlandishly not true yeah it does feel dreamlike and that's a theme here i'm one of the other interesting things about the book that i'm just going to talk about now

it's hypnosis because hypnosis was very commonly used by therapists as a way to age regress patients to get them to recover what the therapists believe to be repressed memories often of abuse dr cornelia wilbur used it in her treatment of the woman who's who was known to america is civil all right and so michelle remembers never refers directly to hypnosis but it uses a lot of language that suggests michelle is under hypnosis and i don't know if she was but this is my personal theory because it talks about like michelle being in her depths michelle coming back up which feels to me suggestive of her being under hypnosis during all this and making it up without realizing that that's what she's doing and that's what hypnosis does because you go into a state

where you are very focused on what a certain part of your brain is doing you lose certain inhibitions and you are potentially very open to suggestion right you know the way i i have done past life regression hypnosis because i wanted to see what it was like and i was like i don't literally believe that that was my past life like i don't think that i lived a past life that i could coherently recall you know in like an office by the antique mall yeah that i like to go to in like an hour yeah that scenario doesn't make sense to me but i did go into a state that i feel was hypnosis the hypnotizer person the hypnotherapist did sort of like full body relaxation exercise you know wiggly your little toe count backwards from ten i went to an ex gay therapist

you tried to do this on me oh my god i remember this stuff too wait did they try to do gay conversion therapy on you by hypnotizing you i mean not like as aggressively as that but like they were definitely trying to convince me to like be into boobs and stuff but they're using hypnotic techniques yeah yeah it was like count backwards from a hundred huh it was really guided like the guided meditations that you see on youtube right and then like you get super tired and then like they tell you stuff but it didn't work on me and i was completely awake for the entire time oh my god you're still gay yeah shockingly i have an announcement to make they they can relaxation technique unfortunately guided meditation does not make one heterosexual extremely disappointing

it feels like being straight isn't the kind of thing you should have to like concentrate on but what did they what did they suggest to you or like what did what did what was your experience like well so you know we did the thing of like you know you're going down a staircase and with each step you become more relaxed and etc and we did that like three times and actually also there's kind of a lot of stairs in michelle's recovered memories which i tend to think in my theory that there's hypnosis involved i'm like hmm stairs yeah and so at the bottom of the third set of stairs you know she's like you know look down and and see what you're wearing or like where are you standing and i was like i'm on a lawn i'm in a fancy house in michigan it just rained and like where did that

image come from i don't know why am i in michigan why did i decide that yeah and it's just like what's next what's next what's next it's like what do you see next what do you do next you know often you're like i get married or like i have a child or something and then you describe it and i found it very easy to describe image by image this allegorical life so i came out of it and i just felt really peaceful i felt great i feel the way i felt after like a really great yoga class but i mean the hip the hypnosis technique sounds like it's doing what a lot of unrelated activities do they just make you feel more at peace they make you sort of take a break and stop and reevaluate your life but then in the hands of a therapist that needs extreme stories out of you to write

their book or to confirm their thesis or whatever it can be a much more dangerous technique right and you know my whole experience of this was that i created a story that felt in the moment very real to me like as vivid as some of my real memories probably because they're constructed of pieces of them and it was a story where not me but someone who was like this past life version of me went through an allegorical version of what i was going through and dealing with in my own life and because it was this other figure and not myself i could have this compassion for them for this past version and then bring that radical self-compassion home so it was like a really useful tool for me and i'm glad i did it then it felt good also because i went to a responsible practitioner

who is just like you want to access your past life she had absolutely no agenda because that's not the kind of hypnotherapy that she was practicing i mean you aren't gay anymore so i just want to point out on some level it worked yeah that's true so as a heterosexual every heterosexual has undergone hypnosis that's the only reason there are heterosexuals no that's the way we make straight people that's why there's getting to be a shortage is because it's federally underfunded now yes okay so this book begins with several notes we have the comment of ramy deru bishop of the diocese of victoria british columbia on september 28 1977 ramy deru will later become a character in this book i do not question that for michelle this experience was real in time we will know

how much of it can be validated it will require prolonged and careful study and such mysterious matters hasty conclusions could prove unwise okay i think that this is the most accurate prediction of the satanic panic that anyone uttered before it right he's presaging like what's going to happen like the disaster that this book is going to produce i think he is yeah i think he's like wow this is really interesting it's clear that this feels real to michelle i also think that we should be really careful in our approach to this and i love that his request to not shout fire in a crowded theater is published in like the opening pages of a book called fire yeah then we have a note from the publisher thomas kongdon who basically describes listen i know this book that i'm giving you was

weird but i don't know it seems credible to me okay he says the source material was scrutinized the many thousands of pages of transcript of the tape recordings that dr paster and mrs smith made of their psychiatric sessions were read and digested both the audio and the video are powerfully convincing it is nearly unthinkable that the protracted agony they record could have been fabricated what okay tell me your thoughts on that paragraph i mean it's basically like we know this sounds bananas yeah like it doesn't pass the smell test but there's been all these procedures to verify it it's interesting to me that this is all described in the passive voice like who is viewing these things who is concluding that it is plausible yeah but the essential argument i think

is like listen like this woman seems 100 sincere and if she seems sincere then i just don't know what to do with believe her right which is a logical bind a lot of people are going to find themselves in in the coming years yeah as we've discussed children have not been believed for a long time and so if you're questioning this account you're not believing children all right so we've had our opening pieces and then we have a prologue like if you're sitting if you're standing in a grocery store trying to see if you want to buy this like you're really paging through a lot of stuff so our prologue has michelle and dr paster going to the vatican in february 1978 to petition the vatican to investigate her case of satanic ritual abuse they're getting the vatican to

investigate it they're attempting to do so lol at the idea that the vatican would investigate abuse sure they're real concerned over there in the way they're just gonna run back child is being abused we have to put a stop to this doesn't that speak okay and then this whole book is you know we're we're gonna get this view of the catholic church as like they are the entity we're like if the police don't care if the other authorities don't care like if a child is being abused somewhere like the vatican is on it it's deeply not funny but it's also kind of funny it is the least funny thing in the world and it's therefore funny it's just so indicative of the different world that this was yeah and you know and the place of belief that the people in

this story are coming from also so they have a meeting with a cardinal and they describe michelle's memories and the book tells us as she spoke she saw the cardinals mobile face become grave and then angry impossible he interrupted i know canada it is a civilized country oh my god things could not happen there and then basically they submit michelle's testimony for study and give it to the person in the vatican who's in charge of this and that's the that's the grabber that's the introduction that grabs you into the story like oh the vatican is investigating this is serious and the vatican said so yeah and they've put it in their biggest filing drawer okay chapter one victoria the capital of british columbia is a jewel of a city a tidy metropolis on the

edge of the pacific that in its primness seems more english than canadian many canadians consider victoria a modern garden of eden not so far-fetched a notion if one recalls that there was a serpent in the garden of eden oh my god that's very good it's very good that's like dan brown level yeah it's better than dan brown i would say dan brown would be like renowned serpent satan was in a certain garden um the other weird thing about this book is that it's credited to both dr paster and michelle what and so i believe at the time that it was being published by the time it was coming out and being promoted michelle and dr paster had both left their respective spouses and married each other it was like a giant ethical problem at the center of this book along with all

the other ethical problems with this book oh my god yes this book is should be called ethical problems the musical i mean and also like it's not mentioned in the book but then as they're promoting it it's like yeah they're married to each other and there's so much media i haven't encountered but i have not found anything from the time that this book was being promoted that's like huh yeah it's kind of like a breach of like the cardinal rule of psychoanalysis to develop a sexual relationship with your patient yeah but apparently in 1980 people were like well you know yes we all have to meet our prince charming somewhere yeah okay but the weird thing about this being credited to these two people as co-writers is that they're both talked about in

the third person and they're both written about in this way that suggests that like each of them is describing this person to whom they are by now married i guess oh and so on the first page we introduced laurence paster who we learn is a handsome man in his early 40s oh my god paster was warm manly soft spoken what people who live elsewhere consider the typical westerner he was lithe and athletic a tennis player and skier and had earned a brown belt and you know i'm sorry oh my god his hair was brown beginning to turn silver on the mid-summer day in 1976 when the receptionist of the fort royal medical center buzzed him to report a call from dr john mccracken there was far less silver than there soon would be oh my god that's actually

pretty good at the end but i love it the rest of it i mean it's like us writing a book together and being like michael hobs was dashingly handsome yeah his small stature concealed his blinding intellect like and then michelle who's going to be introduced very soon is a pretty young woman of 27 with a heart-shaped face a delicate mouth and bountiful brown curls oh god i thought it was going to say bountiful brown breasts thank you so glad it went there not where i thought it was going to go yeah and it's not just that they're flattering descriptions it's that it's like when you describe someone is live yeah it's like you're basically implying that you're attracted to them like i've never heard it's not it's not a neutral descriptor right i'm like

just say the therapist could get it that's shorter yeah he was a zaddy yeah and so the call that dr paster gets on this day you know as he's lively entering his office is from a dr john mccracken who's calling about a former patient of his michelle he says i've had to hospitalize her she's having some trouble with bleeding she had a miscarriage six weeks ago and despite repeated dnc's and medication she continues to hemorrhage not only that but her grief over the miscarriage is extremely severe and persistent i'm beginning to think the problem isn't just physiological i love that this book starts with michelle's doctor being like michelle's really sad about this miscarriage and that's weird yeah and so he calls her former therapist dr paster who goes and visits

her and michelle tells him that she has been hospitalized in the same ward where her mother died of cancer and he thinks has perhaps contributed to this grief response in her and then she says dream last week it was clear to dr paster that this was no ordinary dream she says i dreamed that i had an icky place on my hand and when i scratched it all these bugs came out of where i was scratching it little spider is just pouring out of the skin on my hand as a psychiatrist dr paster had learned how to listen to dreams to gauge the emotional tone to pick up the reference points oh no to discern just how serious the dream was this one was nightmarish but it was more than that it was blatantly symbolic oh god it connected subconsciously to something very important he was

sure of that there was perhaps something wrong about the pregnancy and her acceptance of it there had to be something on that order to produce a dream like this jesus christ okay what do you think about that i'm slightly skeptical of the whole thing of reading dreams anyway because there's a lot of tarot cardy kind of stuff that you can see what you want to see and so it's much more about the person who's interpreting them than any objective classification like that's actually seems like a relatively common dream if you have a phobia of spiders to have your phobia be reflected in your dream it doesn't seem that weird but like if you want to see it as like this was no ordinary dream right if you easily can right like this this isn't an ordinary spider

dream this dream must be about something really important yeah i think that the idea that you can tell from the dream that someone is having about their life whether it's something really severe and significant is going on i think it's a comforting way to believe that therapy and dream analysis works yeah i mean i've read these you know these things about handwriting analysis like you can tell from like the curvature of your lowercase d that like you're a depressive person or whatever i've read studies on this that show that usually what people are doing with that kind of analysis is they're taking what they already know about a person like they give you a little description of someone like she's been hospitalized twice and her mother died last year and all this

other stuff and then you look at her handwriting and it's like she's a sad person and it's like no you're just filtering what you already know about her through this external stimulus and i think that's basically what he's doing that he already knows something about this patient and then he's adding significance to this dream but actually he just he has these preconceptions about her and he's like the dream magically reinforces my preconceptions it's a miracle and also that like maybe this is a way to be like oh like you're clearly going through something like yes this is an important dream like i'm validating your feelings like it can come from a place of good faith but like still not reflect maybe the thing that objectively you're trying to say with it

yeah and so then we get into michelle's history we learned that she is the child of two parents who had really wanted a boy they wanted to name her michael and instead named her michelle it says the birth was apparently very disturbing for jessica whose michelle's mother she became emotionally exhausted and developed medical complications the child was taken away and lived with the grandparents for the first six months of her life the strain on the maternal bonds was perhaps very great her parents marriage was a stormy one there were nights when her father erupted and drunk and rages and beat her mother michelle used to cower in her bed frightened that he might kill her mother feeling that she had to stop him knowing that she could not and then we learned there's periods where

her father is just away um off somewhere and that this is where she has increased closeness with her mother who's apparently at times emotionally present and at times emotionally absent so she's growing up in this unstable and abusive household right and instead of dealing with the quotidian trauma that she's experienced we're dealing with this exotic trauma that she's experienced yeah and so according to the book her mother dies abruptly of cancer when she's 14 her father disappears she goes to live with her mother's parents they send her to a catholic boarding school um despite the fact that she's not catholic oh no and then within the next few years her grandparents this is according to the book they're conflicting accounts from elsewhere but we will talk about

that later okay and so she seeks therapy to essentially try and you know to the for the reasons people seek therapy being like oh hey i have been through some stuff she should seek therapy it sounds like she had a really rough childhood mm-hmm yeah so she starts seeing dr paster who apparently has rarely seen a patient so motivated okay they do therapy together for four years wow and during that period she meets a guy named dug and gets engaged and gets married and they start building a forest dream home by shanagan lake which is 30 miles from victoria which is where dr paster is practicing and dr paster's feeling is like well we worked through all your issues when you were in therapy before boom that's how therapy works fixed yeah we've

talked about it all bam the book says he felt that in the earlier four-year analysis he had dealt with all the issues of any significance during her therapy he had been impressed with the unusual detailing consistency of her childhood memories they had traced all the threads and unraveled all the knots how could they have missed a matter of sex apparent consequence there was nothing to do but look again to review what they had previously covered to take inventory to see if they'd missed something so the evidence that she needs more therapy is it like she still wants therapy that's it right yeah well it's not the evidence that she needs therapy it's the evidence that there's some part of her life that they don't know about yet and that must be the reason that she needs more

therapy and it's not that people just determine their own need for therapy yeah he's like but we already talked about everything is this peak psychoanalysis time because we need to do an episode on this at some stage i want to say peak psychoanalysis time is the 50s and 60s i think mid-century was when it really but yes we do i mean that's certainly a part of all this so what is what what kind of therapy does she go through do we know i don't know what what dr paster is calling the particular type of therapy he's practicing i mean it's talk therapy that seems directly influenced by Freudian analysis if it is not technically that okay so it's Freud but not Freud necessarily yeah it's for it's at least Freud yeah and so after he visits her in the hospital michelle

starts seeing dr paster again and she comes in to a session and says i know there's something i want to tell you but i don't know what it is okay do you think that the thing she wants to tell him is that he's live and also that he's not going gray he's going silver he's getting sober okay she says i sit up at night wishing i could write you a letter i actually try to write the letter to put it down on paper but then i look at what i've written and there's nothing there just slash marks with the pencil she suddenly took dr paster's hand in both of hers and squeezed desperately hard he was astounded dr paster himself was quite at home with touching he had been reared in a warm and tactile family with plenty of hugging and kissing and in his work he freely

offered an arm around his shoulder it was part of his personal and professional style but michelle hadn't asked for that type of reassurance during the four years of sessions now she was clutching his hand and shaking it i know there's something there she said beginning to cry i'm feeling this pressure that is so much worse than any pressure i've ever felt before this is going to be one of those stories where it's like somebody clearly is in need of actual help and then somebody takes advantage of her because despite all of our tittering like this isn't funny and like she clearly needs someone to something but what she doesn't need is for somebody to go shoveling around in her subconscious for some made up ritual abuse and i think what's interesting too is that unlike

the therapist who will be influenced by this work dr paster doesn't set out looking for abuse or for ritual abuse i mean according to him right right that's true that's true according to this book which does have factual inconsistencies that we do know about so yeah it's possible because in my work i'm like i had no idea when i looked into this that elon musk would be such a dickhead you don't write that though you wouldn't write a book and be like i had no idea that elon musk was a robber baron destroying our future i mean i do think there's like a writerly non-fiction trope that you have to have this blank slate going in right and publishers want that like deep down apparently what we all secretly want is rob schneider thought he had it all

i mean you want an arc right like an arc you want an arc for the writer and an arc for the character as well and so you couldn't start a book with like i was pretty sure this was some satanic stuff yes although subsequent other books will start that way so clearly that is a publishable narrative okay and it's also what we talked about with kitty jenovies and this thing of like why didn't anyone call 911 and it's like well 911 was invented partly because of how much difficulty people had connecting with the police to report her screams yeah so this also i think could be in a similar vein to that where like he might have not gone in looking for satanic ritual abuse because he invented the concept of satanic ritual abuse ah okay so it could be

faker it could be legit okay so at this point you know michelle comes in she's clutching his hand she's like there's something i need to tell you but i just can't and he says i'll tell you what realizing that he was about to go farther than he usually did with a patient he firmly believed that problems should be solved during the office sessions and that the psychiatrist who allowed a patient to break into his schedule or into his private life was risking the development of an unhealthy manipulation of a doctor by a patient but michelle was different and her plight was alarming he told her seriously i'll be available if things get really bad give me a call i'll make time for you right away so he clearly is attracted to her she's attracted to him right i mean the question

at this point is are they aware that they are attracted to each other not whether the attraction is there and he's like you know call me anytime for your lover's lover's alibi call me thank you and then four days later michelle calls and says she was watering her plants when all of a sudden she suddenly had this epiphany which is an experience i very identify with and so she comes in for their session dressed in all black and passers like i've never seen her wear black before and i like to think it's like when luke skywalker shows up in return of the jedi you're like oh yeah and the book says it seemed an unmistakable sign to him that something was up so did her demeanor she was somber ready her eyes were right there he thought and her manner was

serious no small talk she was like a high diver standing at the edge of the board on tiptoes and so then she lies on the sofa which he says she's never done before she did she's like not a fan of touch previously and not a fan of the sofa previously and now she's doing both and i mean what do you think of this i'm just very uncomfortable in this scene are you like feeling like oh like something bad is going to happen like don't go in the basement yeah because we both know what's going to happen next but it's like it just seems like the ethicalness of like these two people that are attracted to each other and she comes in wearing different clothes and she like lies down and he's like oh she's like a diver and he's live i don't know it just seems like a fucking ethical

minefield what's happening right now i will tell you that like nothing sexual between michelle and dr paster happens in the book yeah yeah if that did happen during this period they are not telling us about it so we're not going to get any of that content yeah but yeah we're talking about someone taking advantage of their power over someone else yeah that is what the story is yeah so basically michelle lies there looking terrified and can't say anything okay and he's like okay i'm here for you i'm ready to hear it whenever you're ready to talk to me it's good will hunting the first 20 minutes of good will hunt and he's like tomorrow saturday so like let's not leave this a whole week like come in tomorrow like we'll come back to this let's you know i wouldn't

normally do this but i'm doing it for you not good this is going to be torture for you i'm sorry and then on the next page it says he had the strongest sense that he and michelle were about to embark on something significant and then he calls her and asks if he can bring a tape recorder the next day because he wants to be more fully present and she says i'm glad of that i think i'm going to need you he says it's sort of like going back to a haunted house you can't go back all alone and she says it's safe with you i feel very safe with you it's like porno movie dialogue it's like i'm scared doctor i'll come in in the morning it'll be just the two of us and the tape recorder i don't know so that's chapter one chapter two she comes back in for

another session and this is the one where she starts talking she comes in and she initially says i was going to try to talk about my weight a bit because up until the last three weeks i'd been able to keep it under control oh my god and then she's saying that she's been eating more and putting on weight that's fine i let her wear sweatpants and hang out it's fine but this is somehow somehow this is the thing that leads them into all of this material which is really like this is the door somehow so she says when i think about being overweight i just get a knot so it really makes me uptight somehow it's connected with being small like there's something back then that is really bugging me something that's unresolved it's so hard to tell you how i felt then and she

basically wants him to come closer and so he does and then he comes and sits closer to her and she just lies there screaming for 25 minutes i don't know i don't know how much to believe of this this is weird i've never tried screaming for 25 minutes i don't know if my throat could sustain it i mean we have a tape so that does seem of all the things in this book this is one of the more plausible i will say that jesus christ we're in dark territory now i mean does that set off alarm bells for you specifically 25 minutes is a really long time to be screaming it's a it's a kind of a malleable phrase too like that doesn't mean she has to be screaming every second like maybe she like she screams and then she cries and then she screams and then she's so uncomfortable with

this entire scene this is the most comfortable you are ever going to be for the rest of this book can you believe i know there is a nice little part where they just talk about christmas for like three pages but i just i mean she's clearly she's feeling messed up somehow she's needing to process something she's suffering the human condition in some way yeah i do wonder i have zero evidence but i do wonder if he's like coaxing her to get this more extreme stuff out rather than relatively every day like my parents were weird about food and i have body issues like things that are work-onable yeah it's it's interesting that you take it in that direction because my assumption has always been that it's it's totally plausible that she could be in this

much of a state when she comes in yeah and could need to just do this screaming and i think one of the things i find interesting too kind of researching recovered memory therapy and mpd therapy and this kind of therapeutic wave that we are seeing in this book and then because of this book is it a key part of it seems to be at times being able to be just beside yourself and going through almost this primal scene of like screaming or crying or just losing control like a baby and having this therapist give you this kind of parental love and unconditional positive regard by just being like okay you have to scream and cry and just that's fine like just get it out you know it's just this is the place to do it and so i i think that i can understand

a scenario where she just comes in and needs to do this and needs to fall apart and certainly has reason to you know like we all have reasons to fall apart and we know that she's just had a miscarriage and that's a traumatic event that i think the trauma of is under recognized now and so think about how seriously people took it in 1976 yeah yeah so i can see her doing this all without any prodding from him but we are going to see you know yeah some of the the kind of steering he does with this is right there on the page but it is after this screaming session that michelle first begins to describe sort of things or ideas of things that are going to gel into the visions and i want to wrap up for today by talking about that tell me tell me tell me tell

me okay i'll read you this next passage after 25 minutes the screaming began to ebb michelle was shaking uncontrollably almost convulsively as the cries died away he could see that she was struggling to speak she was straining to get words out he hoped the struggle would be a kind of birth and then we have transcription of michelle saying oh god help me oh god help i don't know what to do i feel so sick i feel like my heart's going to stop oh i hate this i'm on the bed i'm in the air i'm in the air and i'm upside down there's this man and he's turning me around and around who is the man dr paster asks softly it's malachi oh is that like a demon person we will find out next time oh do you what do you think was actually going on with her because i'm assuming you don't

think that she was actually like ritually sacrificed in a satanic cult so what do you think this was to me you know the only way to answer that question is to go through the rest of this book but i mean i guess my broad answer to that is that i think that she had a need for care and for filling some kind of emotional void and that this therapeutic relationship was a way for her to do that and that part of the way that she ended up as the main character of the story is that there was someone that she could get what she needed from but the way to get it was to have some dramatic past trauma that he didn't know about yet i mean a lot of us have need for care i suppose we all do but that's the kind of thing as we've learned so many times on

the show that that is the kind of thing that can be taken advantage of very easily yeah especially for people who have their antenna up for those types of people and those types of needs i don't i don't see dr paster as a self-consciously predatory figure at all right i think that one of the really interesting things about the satanic panic and about this book and about so many of the other building blocks of this is a phenomenon is that no one has to have malicious intentions and no one has to think that they're doing anything but being a crusader for what's good in order to obtain a very bad result right and that's going to be the story of this book also i gotta say i'm suspicious of this live silver fox already i may have a darker view of this live

gentleman of live silver foxes yeah i mean i don't know i just don't even the transcripts i don't know how much to believe of all this just because there's i mean i have no evidence of anything obviously i've only heard of this book like this morning but but you have to comment on the incentives that there's an incentive for the doctor to embellish some of these early sessions just because we're talking about a best-selling book here yes yeah and i would again add that all of this can have taken place without either of the authors of this book even having wanted to write a best-selling book as a primary goal or even as a significant goal like they might have yeah that's true gone through all of this and as they claim at the end of it been like oh my god there's this terrible

problem with satanism we must raise awareness about it we must write a book about it i'm not saying that's what happened but i think that is on the bingo card you're right i'm assuming that they set out to write a bestseller when 99 of people who write bestsellers do not set out to do that i think that you tend to assume a cynical motive in people and i tend to assume that people are like well-intentioned idiots who just accidentally you know destroy the world and we're both right like i think we are probably both right an equal number of times that's because i have cynical motives for everything that i do because i'm a well-intentioned idiot but you're also very live so i forgive you well you have a delicate mouth

i'm hanging that's the most offensive thing you've ever said you