Try to Remember: Psychiatry's Clash over Meaning, Memory, and Mind

In the 1990s patients in psychotherapy began accusing parents and other relatives of sexually abusing them in childhood. Most of the accusations were false “recovered memories” implanted by therapists pursuing a new theory of mental illness. Paul R. McHugh saw it all and feared that his profession had done itself in, once and for all.

The public, in losing confidence in psychotherapy and turning solely to medications for psychiatric treatment, abandoned an important healing method just as se...