Koontz book update

Thanks to Amazon.com’s Search Inside the Book feature I’ve found this interesting bit:

From Psychiatry in Law/Law in Psychiatry, Volume 2 by Ralph Slovenko
Bruner-Routledge, 2002, Chapter 12: Regulation of the Practice of Psychotherapy, p889

In the popular novel False Memory, Dean Koontz wrote, ‘A therapist without finesse can easily, unwittingly implant false memories. Any hypnotized subject is vulnerable. And if the therapist has an agenda and isn’t ethical…’ Koontz’s psychiatrist is an utterly evil character with no sympathetic qualities whatsoever. Koontz clearly wished to portray him as a modern Satan (and he signals that at the outset by naming him Dr. Ahriman, the name of the Zoroastrian devil). He is the most frightening villain in any of Koontz’s novels. But the problem is not utterly evil characters; they are found out – much more difficult are the legions of well-intentioned therapists who unwittingly create the environments that foster false memories or other inept psychotherapy. In response to my inquiry, Koontz said:

Indeed, there is need to set standards for those
that want to use the term “psychotherapist.” But
there should also be meaningful peer review and
discipline for those erring practitioners who then
meet the standards. Of course, the peer review and
policing in the medical profession is all but an
abject failure, so I’m not sure there is an easy
solution. My feeling is that society needs to be
weaned away from the dependency and blind trust in
“experts” of all kinds, and that the average person
needs to be better educated and then encouraged to
trust more in his common sense.

In 1910 Freud published a paper attaching what he called “wild analysis.” He expresses concern that the use of psychoanalytic theories by those untrained in psychoanalysis would cause harm…