Michelle Remembers

Michelle Remembers is a discredited 1980 book co-written by Canadian psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder and his psychiatric patient (and eventual wife) Michelle Smith. A best-seller, Michelle Remembers relied on the discredited practice of recovered-memory therapy to make sweeping, lurid claims about Satanic ritual abuse involving Smith, which contributed to the rise of the Satanic panic in the 1980s. While the book presents its claims as fact, and was extensively marketed on that basis at the time, no evidence was provided; all investigations into the book failed to corroborate any of its claims, with investigators describing its content as being primarily based on elements of popular culture and fiction that were popular at the time when it was written. Michelle Remembers chronicles Pazder's therapy during the late 1970s with his long-time patient Smith. In 1973, Pazder first started treating Smith at his private psychiatric practice in Victoria, British Columbia. In 1976, when Pazder was treating Smith for depression (related to her having had a miscarriage), Smith confided she felt that she had something important to tell him, but could not remember what it was. Soon thereafter, Pazder and Smith had a session where Smith purportedly screamed for 25 minutes non-stop and eventually started speaking in the voice of a five-year-old. According to Pazder, during the next 14 months he spent more than 600 hours using hypnosis to help Smith recover seeming memories of Satanic ritual abuse that occurred when she was five years old in 1954 and 1955 at the hands of her mother (Virginia Proby) and others, all of whom Smith said were members of a "satanic cult" in Victoria. The book chronicles therapy sessions between Pazder and Smith and alleged recovered memories of satanic rituals she claims she was forced to attend. Pazder stated that Smith was abused by the "Church of Satan," purportedly a worldwide organization predating the Christian church.