An eminent psychiatrist here conducts a riveting analysis of the American "recovered memory" wars of the 1980s and 1990s, in which psychotherapists elicited from their patients recollections of sexual abuse and Satanic shenanigans by their parents or relatives. McHugh worked for the defence in some of the resulting lawsuits, testifying that there was no evidence for the underlying theory, while there was increasing evidence that false memories can be easily implanted under hypnosis, and that traumatic experiences, rather than being hard to remember, are actually hard to forget. By the time the movement was discredited, however, he estimates that up to a million Americans had suffered directly from its fantasies, and the comparisons he draws to the Salem witch trials are irresistible. As well as admirably empathetic accounts of troubling case studies and enjoyably subtle demolitions of rival "colleagues", the book offers a polemical primer on competing schools of thought in psychiatry over the last half-century. Lest the abuses he documents irreparably damage the reputation of psychotherapy, McHugh concludes, his profession ought to take a rigorously empirical approach to mental health, and cast out "therapies built on suspicion".