Thus one never has a way of reliably judging the truth of any anecdote. Secondly, the therapeutic session is not a scientific experiment. There are no rules of evidence. Patients almost always confirm the pet theories of their therapists. The power of suggestion is immense.
Patients wish to please their therapists.
Most people operate with a demonstrably false theory of how memory operates. We think that something like a videocassette recorder operates in our brains, capturing and storing visual and audio details. But memory operates quite differently from this simplistic model most of us share. Many of us still see our memories as a series of family pictures stored in the photo album of our minds. We all forget things, and long-forgotten memories can be recovered by appropriate triggers.