I don't know what he was thinking or what his motivations were. At this time, I believe that even R.C. is probably incapable of definitively deciding the matter. For example, when entering therapy a person may be extremely reluctant to discuss childhood sexual episodes and may deny all memory of such episodes. With time and work, we might be able to recover them. The utility of the fiction, however, must be weighed against the very real danger of therapists implanting false memories of abuse that never occurred.
Memories are unstable and remembering is always at least partly a creative process.
We revise our memories based on later information. We alter our memories to make them consistent with the expectations of people we trust. This is why courtroom eyewitness testimony is so notoriously unreliable. Elizabeth Loftus, in a famous experiment, demonstrated that it is quite easy to implant false memories of events that never occurred. Her experiment involved having the subject's friends and family conspire to implant the false memory of the subject's having been lost in a shopping mall as a child.