The pre-panic moment

Two developments converged in the late 1970s to produce the conditions for the panic. The first was the rise of a clinical orthodoxy around recovered-memory therapy: a body of practice holding that traumatic childhood experiences could be repressed and then accessed in adulthood through specific therapeutic techniques, and that such recovered memories should be treated as substantively accurate. The therapeutic position was professionally widespread by the early 1980s; it would be substantively rejected by the American Psychological Association and the broader professional community over the following two decades.

The second was the 1980 publication of Michelle Remembers, a memoir co-authored by the Canadian psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder and his patient Michelle Smith, in which Smith described surviving ritual abuse by a satanic cult in 1950s Victoria, British Columbia. The book’s specific factual claims were never independently corroborated, and were disputed by Smith’s own family in subsequent journalistic investigations. The book itself was nonetheless treated by many therapists and prosecutors of the period as a serious clinical document rather than as a memoir. It established the template — recovered memories of ritual abuse by an organised cult, presented as recovered fact — that recurred throughout the panic.

Within three years a criminal case fitting that template would be filed in Manhattan Beach, California.