Memory construction is a phenomenon that has become intuitive to the experimental psychologist. In recent years, researchers have found that misleading postevent information can alter actual or reported memories of observed visual events (Loftus, Miller, & Burns, 1978; McCloskey & Zaragoza, 1985), particularly among young children (Ceci & Bruck, 1993) and adults under hypnosis (McConkey & Sheehan, 1995). Recent studies suggest that it is possible as well to implant false recollections of words in a list (Roediger & McDermott, 1995) and isolated childhood experiences-such as being lost in a shopping mall-that supposedly had been forgotten (Loftus, 1993). Despite the apparent ease with which experimenters have been able to tinker with minor recollections of their subjects, this research did not, and indeed could not, prepare us for the kinds of wholesale manipulations of autobiographical memory de Rivera describes. The case studies he presents-of four former psychotherapy patients who recovered "memories" of prolonged child abuse only later to retract these memories-seem incredible, as do the mind-control and narrative models he offers to explain these cases. As de Rivera himself admits: