Susan Clancy: recuerdos reprimidos

Creemos cosas rara, incluso rarísimas. Y en ocasiones creemos cosas francamente imposible. Susan Clancy estudia el fenómeno de los supuesto recuerdos reprimidos en el contexto de los supuestos abducidos por extraterrestres. En esta entrevista habla, sobre todo, de cómo llegamos a creer real lo que simplemente no ha pasado:

Reason: You’re convinced that most people who believe they’ve been abducted by aliens are normal people, and that every one of them with vivid memories got them in therapy. How does that happen, exactly?

Clancy: I do think these people are fundamentally normal. The belief in alien abduction is much less weird when you consider the process by which the belief is acquired. It doesn’t happen overnight. Nobody wakes up and says, «Holy shit, I was abducted last night, they took me, there were rotating vibrating devices and then they extracted my sperm.» People say, «I have these weird experiences. I wonder what it could be?» They look for explanations and at some point they’ll say, well, maybe I was abducted. I know it sounds weird but it’s just like what Whitley Strieber wrote about, or it’s just like what happened to Betty and Barney Hill. There are a lot of people out there who believe aliens are real and a lot of people who believe aliens have been on earth-look at the Roper polls and the Time/CNN polls-and it’s not that weird that some people would say, maybe I’ve been abducted.

Reason: And the memories are recovered later on?

Clancy: Either by choice, or because it kind of happens that way, some end up in an abduction researcher’s office or a psychotherapists office to talk about their concerns or beliefs. I never met a single subject that had detailed autobiographical memories of what happened to them until they ended up under hypnosis.

Es autora del libro Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped By Aliens que quiero leer un día de estos.

(vía Skeptico)