Sometimes if you keep searching, digging, and sifting, you’ll find a nugget that is bigger than anything you expected. That happened to us when we looked for additional evidence to refute a questionable claim of Francine Shapiro, founder of a treatment for posttraumatic stress disorder. In the September/October 2024 issue of Skeptical Inquirer, we had considered several controversies surrounding eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR), a strategy developed by Shapiro that induces eye movements to process traumatic memories (Rosen and Pankratz 2024).
In addition to concerns that eye movements were an unnecessary and implausible part of the treatment, we challenged Shapiro’s stated “origin story.” Shapiro had claimed that she came upon the idea of using eye movements during a walk in 1987, at which time she noticed her eyes moving in multi-saccadic fashion as distressing thoughts lost their disturbing qualities. We pointed out the mythical nature of this origin story; specifically, research has shown that people are unable to perceive these particular eye movements (e.g., Clarke et al. 2017).
We cited evidence that Shapiro’s interest in eye movements did not emerge from her alleged walk in the park. Rather, she had an earlier devotion to a pseudoscientific approach called neurolinguistic programming (NLP), which has a strong emphasis on observing eye-movements for clues about mental states. Newspaper articles from 1985 and an article by Shapiro herself documented her conducting NLP workshops. When Grimley (2014) first pointed out these conflicting details, Shapiro denied any meaningful involvement with NLP and continued to promote her origin story about the walk in the park. Therefore, we continued our own efforts in the hope of establishing Shapiro’s background more definitively.
We got lucky when we found a newspaper article (Stein 1985) showing a picture of Shapiro that provided what Henri Cartier-Bresson (1952) called the “decisive moment:” when a single picture is “a whole story in itself.” This photograph stands in stark contrast to Shapiro’s response to Grimley’s charges when all she conceded was that NLP may have been a methodology she evaluated in the 1980s.
We recorded this photo and other difficulties with EMDR (and NLP) in a recent journal article (Rosen and Pankratz 2026), but we report it here in the hope that it does not get lost in the maze of professional publications. A wider dissemination to the public might force mental health professionals and public sources (such as Wikipedia) to portray Shapiro’s background with better accuracy. Shapiro’s fanciful tale of a chance discovery is a false story. Once this foundational point is accepted, Shapiro’s other extraordinary claims of EMDR’s therapeutic effectiveness can be revisited with the full degree of scrutiny they deserve.
References
Cartier-Bresson, H. 1952. The Decisive Moment. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.
Clarke, A.D.F., A. Mahon, A. Irvine, et al. 2017. People are unable to recognize or report on their own eye movements. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 70: 2251–2270.
Grimley, B. 2014. Origins of EMDR—a question of integrity? The Psychologist 27: 561.
Rosen, G.M., and L. Pankratz. 2024. Eye movement therapies, purple hats, and the Sagan Standard. Skeptical Inquirer 48(5) (September/October).
———. 2026. A “Decisive Moment” confirms the origins of EMDR and draws attention to other claims. Journal of Contemporary Psychology (February 3): 1–10.
Stein, P. 1985. NLP touted as means of achieving success in all endeavors. North County Times (January 22): 6. Online at https://www.newspapers.com/image/1097904115/.