Susan A. Clancy is a cognitive psychologist and associate professor in Consumer behaviour at INCAE as well as a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard University.
Many cognitive psychologists, on the other hand, argued that true trauma is almost never forgotten, and that memories brought up years later through hypnosis are most likely false.
[2] In 2003, Clancy remarked to Bruce Grierson of the New York Times that "nobody was doing research on the group that was at the center of the controversy -- the people who were reporting recovered memories.
Her data strongly suggested that some people are more likely to "remember" seeing similar words to those on the lists that weren't an exact match, more so than a control group.
Additionally, she received letters suggesting that even conducting this kind of research at all "cheers on child molesters" and ridicules the suffering of children.
[6] Published by Harvard University Press in 2005, Susan Clancy's book Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped By Aliens was met with strong positive reviews.
[3] The book explores what mainstream experts believe to be the sources of abduction stories, such as sleep paralysis and the use of hypnosis techniques to "recover" forgotten memories.
[7] Clancy finds that previous interest in the paranormal and emotional investment also play a role in creating abduction memories.
Carey's take away is that, "in this sense, abduction memories are like transcendent religious visions, scary and yet somehow comforting and, at some personal psychological level, true.
"[3] Paul McHugh, of The Wall Street Journal also points out that, no matter how bad the experience, none of the abductees regret it happening.
[9]This book, published in 2010, got its beginning when Clancy was working on her graduate research project in the mid-1990s and she began interviewing adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse.
Much to her surprise, she found that most of the victims of childhood abuse did not feel trauma, in the usual sense of the word, until they grew old enough to really understand what had happened.
These survivors are often ashamed of their behavior and that they did not fight back, they blame themselves and often do not speak about the events or even believe that what happened to them can be considered abuse.
[4] According to an interview with Susan Pinker, writing for The Globe and Mail in 2010, Clancy makes it clear through her book "that children are never at fault, that sexual abuse is always a crime and that the blame always rests with the adult.