It would be an error for the reader to assume that I have any less scorn for these medical colleagues than I do for those in other professions who treat children for sex abuse when there is little if any evidence that such abuse took place. This has been very much in vogue during the last few years. Such patients, then, go around the rest of their lives proudly telling others how they learned in their treatment how they were sexually abused as children and that this revelation not only served as an important advance in their treatment but brought about other changes that would not have been possible without the revelation. Such a statement is testimony to the credulity of the human being. No symptom is caused by one event or one type of event.
Symptoms are multi-determined.
Furthermore, insight is only one small part of the therapeutic process. Such scenarios may make good movies and novels, and may make the author a lot of money, but they have nothing to do with real therapy as it takes place in the real world. Interestingly, an even more recent development is the suspicion by patients arising within themselves that they may have been sexually abused and were not aware of it. Here, it was not the therapist who suggested this possibility, but the patient. Like all phenomena, this phenomenon has multiple determinants, which vary with each individual.