Before Bass and Davis, there was L. Ron Hubbard.

An ex-Scientologist writes:

"...it's a basic form of neo-Freudian pop-psychology.
The over-simplified mental model new recruits are exposed to asserts several key factors:
A) We record all of our experiences with all of our senses, all the way from conception to the moment of death.
B ) All of our memories, whether good or bad, are accessible to the trained counsellor.
C ) Incidents containing unconsciousness mixed with trauma cause mental illness, psychosomatic illnesses and neuroses.
D ) Recovering such buried memories in their totality, and recounting them to the trained therapist erases such aberrational traumas...
Very soon after entering ‘therapy', your idea of what memory actually is begins to get conflated with the notion of imagination.
Gradually, the line between the two gets blurred. Eventually, you come to accept that if you can see a mental picture of something, then you must have seen it before.
The notion quickly occurs to a person that if he recalls something then it is a memory.
You get a ‘mental image picture', and the therapist ‘runs' it as an incident...."

From How to believe in Scientology: http://www.xenu.net/archive/personal_story/funkydonny.html