Anna Weiss, Boxer Rebellion Theater. In a healthy American culture (if you can imagine such a thing) the “recovered memory” phenomenon of the late 80s and early 90s would have been laughed off as a particularly bizarre bit of psychosexual kitsch. One more way in which we turn anxiety into sex into TV. But a nation gets the pathology it deserves, and so it wasn’t laughed off. People–the overwhelming majority of them young women–went on talk shows to tell how they finally got to the bottom of their eating disorders when they underwent hypnosis and recovered the deeply repressed memory of their fathers, mothers, neighbors, and/or family friends practicing the most horrific perversions on them, subjecting them to sexual abuse and torture, often in the context of satanic rites. Before the hysteria had run its course, these damaged souls were conjuring scenes of suburban pagans killing babies for their blood. And they were believed.
