Remembering Satan (22 page)
The accusers were adult children, 90 percent of them daughters. Most of the accusers had read
The Courage to Heal.
In 11 percent of the cases, siblings echoed the allegations, although 75 percent of the time the siblings did not believe the charges. Most strikingly, the accuser was a single child in only 2 percent of the families; larger families were predominant, with 3.62 children being the mean. Eleven percent of the families contained 5 children—the size of the Ingram household.
In almost every case, the allegations arose in therapy. It is difficult to know what part therapy may have played in the Ingram case. Julie was briefly in therapy before she made her outcry in her letter to her teacher. Ericka told the defense attorneys, “I’m going to a counselor and she’s helping me to remember,” but she would not elaborate or disclose the counselor’s name. She also told Karla Franko, the speaker at the Heart to Heart camp, that she had gotten counseling, and she sought Franko’s counseling over the phone.
Many people who feel themselves to be falsely accused believe that their children were coaxed or bullied into bringing charges by therapists or counselors who used their authority to persuade vulnerable clients that the complex problems they experience in adult life can be attributed to a single, simple cause: childhood abuse. Like their children, some of these aggrieved
parents have taken their complaints to the courtroom by filing lawsuits against their children’s therapists. There have also been cases brought by former clients who have recanted their stories of remembered abuse and charged their therapists with a form of mind control. Judges and juries all over the country are struggling with the concept of repression and the reality of recovered memories.
“In Salem, the conviction depended on how judges thought witches behaved,” notes Paul McHugh, who is director of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Johns Hopkins University. “In our day, the conviction depends on how some therapists think a child’s memory for trauma works.” McHugh contends that “most severe traumas are not blocked out by children but are remembered all too well.” He points to the memories of children from concentration camps and, more recently, to the children of Chowchilla, California, who were kidnapped in their school bus and buried in sand for many hours. They remembered their traumatic experience in excruciating, haunting detail. These children required psychiatric assistance “not to bring out forgotten material that was repressed, but to help them move away from a constant ruminative preoccupation with the experience,” McHugh says.
McHugh finds a parallel between the recovered-memory phenomenon and an episode involving hysterics in nineteenth-century France. The distinguished neurologist and psychiatrist Jean-Martin Charcot was Freud’s teacher at the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris. At one time, the hospital reorganized its patients and happened to place the hysterics in the same ward with epileptics. The hysterical patients began to display odd attacks that were similar to epileptic seizures, but different enough that Charcot believed he had discovered a new disorder, which he named “hystero-epilepsy.” With his usual exactitude, he began to study this new condition. “Strangely, the patients
became more and more disturbed, had more spells, and progressively more intriguing kinds of fits,” McHugh relates. Audiences of doctors and the Parisian intelligentsia gathered to view this enthralling phenomenon. Finally, one of Charcot’s students suggested that the great doctor had induced this behavior out of his own authority and enlarged it through his interest. Unless the doctor changed his approach to the patients, the student suggested, they would not improve.
As it developed, the student was correct. Two new methods of treatment were employed. First, the hysterics were isolated from the epileptics; and second, they were given a counter-suggestion, which offered the patients a different view than the one they currently held—that their condition was fascinating to Charcot. Instead of focusing on their condition, the staff began to turn to the question of the hysterics’ life condition and the circumstances that had brought them into care into the first place. “This was the beginning of psychotherapy,” writes McHugh in a paper titled “Historical Perspectives on Recovered Memories”:
How does this set of events relate to repressed memories? Charcot showed that just as there was epilepsy, it was also possible to create a pseudo-epilepsy. If one had a pseudo-epilepsy and focused on its counterfeit manifestations, they would worsen. If the patient remained amongst groups with both epilepsy and pseudo-epilepsy, she would not improve. The patient does improve when diagnostically distinguished from the actual epileptics and a common-sense management then devised.
In the contemporary era patients who were sexually abused and those with pseudo-memories of sex abuse are often placed together by therapists in “incest survival” groups. The patients with the pseudo-memories tend to develop progressively more complicated and even quite implausible memories of their abusive childhood. Particular ideas seem quite contagious and spread throughout the group—such as satanic-cult explanations for parental excesses and vile abuse including cannibalism. The patients often do not get better. Years of therapy continue to keep many of these repressed-memory patients angry, misinformed. The lesson from Paris is that it is crucial in practice to differentiate the incest-injured from those with false memories.
In 1987, Judith Lewis Herman and Emily Schatzow of the Women’s Mental Health Collective in Somerville, Massachusetts, published a study of fifty-three female participants in a therapy group for incest survivors, such as McHugh describes. The paper was titled “Recovery and Verification of Memories of Childhood Sexual Trauma,” and it is often cited by those who believe that abuse that has been remembered through recovered-memory therapy is just as real as abuse that has never been forgotten. The object of the study was to determine the link between traumatic childhood memories and symptoms in later life, and “to lay to rest, if possible, the concern that such recollections might be based on fantasy.” Finally, the authors wished to explore the therapeutic effect of recovering and validating memories of early trauma.
All of the patients either reported having been sexually abused by a relative or else strongly suspected that was the case but could not remember. The sexual experiences the women described ranged from indecent exposure and propositions, which involved no actual physical contact, to vaginal or anal rape. Seventy-five percent named their fathers or stepfathers as the abusers. “In Freud’s time, these women would undoubtedly have been diagnosed as suffering from hysteria,” the authors stated. “They would readily have recognized their own afflictions in the anxiety attacks, the bodily disgust, the ‘mental sensitiveness’ and hyperactivity, the crying spells, the suicide attempts, and the ‘outbursts of despair’ that Freud described
in his hysterical patients almost a century ago.” In modern-day terminology, the women had received a variety of diagnoses, the most common being dysthymic disorder, which is a tendency to be despondent. Their backgrounds strongly resembled the family profiles described by the False Memory Syndrome Foundation survey.
Just over a quarter of the women reported severe memory deficits, which meant that they recalled little of their childhoods but were recovering or trying to recover memories of abuse. These patients stood out from the others. “Often they described almost complete amnesia for childhood experiences but reported recurrent images associated with extreme anxiety. Attempts at sexual intimacy often triggered flashback images of the abuser and panic states. These women were preoccupied with obsessive doubt over whether their victimization had been fantasized or real. Some had previously sought treatment with hypnosis or sodium amytal.” When their memories erupted, they were often of a violent, sadistic, and grotesquely perverse character.
The authors claim that three-fourths of the women were able to obtain confirmation of their abuse from another source. They did not specify whether the fourth who were not able to do so was the same fourth with severe memory deficits—a significant omission, given their bold conclusion. The confirmations came from the perpetrator himself or other family members or from physical evidence, such as diaries or photographs. “The presumption that most patients’ reports of childhood sexual abuse can be ascribed to fantasy no longer appears tenable,” the authors asserted. “No positive evidence was adduced that would indicate that any of the patients’ reports of sexual abuse were fantasized. In light of these findings, it would seem warranted to return to the insights offered by Freud’s original statement on the etiology of hysteria, and to resume
a line of investigation that the mental health professions prematurely abandoned 90 years ago.…
“Massive repression appeared to be the main defensive resource available to patients who were abused early in childhood and/or who suffered violent abuse.”
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Following up on the Herman-Schatzow study, John Briere, of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Southern California School of Medicine, and Jon Conte, of the School of Social Work at the University of Washington, surveyed 420 females and 30 males who described themselves as having been sexually abused. They had been recruited by their therapists to respond to the study. “During the period of time between when the first forced sexual experience happened and your eighteenth birthday, was there ever a time when you could not remember the forced sexual experience?” the questioners asked. Nearly 60 percent responded yes. That figure is now being used as a benchmark for measuring the size of the population of people who were abused but repressed that memory, versus the number of those who were abused and never forgot.
However, there was no attempt to verify the abuse; the fact that the respondents remembered it was taken as sufficient evidence that it occurred. “It is likely that some significant proportion of psychotherapy clients who deny a history of childhood sexual victimization are, nevertheless, suffering from sexual abuse trauma,” the authors concluded. They proposed that clinicians continue to entertain the hypothesis that their clients have been abused, even when there are no memories.
Briere and Conte also found, along with Herman and Schatzow, that the abuse recalled by those who claimed to have been amnesiac was far more violent than the abuse that had never been forgotten. But wouldn’t more violent experiences also be more memorable? The theory that many have used to explain this paradox is that violence increases the level of repression; that subjects “dissociate” during the experience—that is, they mentally go away in order to protect themselves, then bury the pain in another part of their psyche, even in another personality. But if that is so, why don’t children who experience other extreme forms of cruelty, such as life in a concentration camp, repress those memories or turn into multiple personalities? In one study, not a single child aged five to ten who had witnessed a parental murder had forgotten it. Why is it specifically sexual memories that are so often forgotten?
People often do forget details of traumatic events, especially when they are physically injured. Prosecutor Gary Tabor was in a traffic accident in college, but he can’t remember a thing about it, except what people have told him. Sheriff Gary Edwards fell out of a tree he was pruning and lost the memory of the experience for ten years, until he was persuaded to take a bungee jump for a charitable event. Just before he jumped, the whole awful memory returned. In both cases, however, they knew something terrible had happened to them. Traumatic amnesia often accompanies combat or savage rapes, but
the people who have suffered those experiences know what they’ve been through. It’s the details that escape them.
Despite the common acceptance of the concept of repression, some clinical researchers, such as Loftus, make the point that repression has never been demonstrated experimentally. David S. Holmes of the University of Kansas has reviewed sixty years of attempts at proving the existence of repression. Early tests concentrated on subjects’ ability to recall pleasant versus unpleasant memories. Unpleasant memories were less available, and this was taken as evidence of repression; but the same data also demonstrated that the more intense the memory, the more likely it was to be remembered, whether it was pleasant or unpleasant. Holmes himself conducted a study demonstrating that emotional intensity attached to unpleasant experiences declined over time at a greater rate than was the case with pleasant ones, thereby making unpleasant memories less memorable. Learning experiments were conducted in stressful versus nonstressful environments; when subjects were less able to remember the materials that they studied under stress, that, too, was taken as evidence of repression. However, those tests are better understood in terms of the difficulty of learning under stress. Other experiments presented insoluble problems to various personality types, with the hypothesis that certain individuals would be more likely to repress their failures. “The only consistent finding in this line of research was that subjects with a high need for achievement recalled more incompletions under high stress than low stress,” Holmes reported. “They persisted in working on or thinking about their failures rather than repressing them. Not only do these findings fail to provide support for the concept of repression, but they are the opposite to what would be predicted on the basis of repression.” Holmes concluded that it might be time to abandon the theory of repression. Of course, without the concept of repression, the edifice of psychoanalysis collapses.
Even if repression does function in the way that therapists who work with recovered memory suppose, is it possible to repress repeated, long-term abuses, some of which began in infancy and lasted well into adult years? This certainly goes far beyond what Freud had in mind. Richard Ofshe terms this new, aggrandized version “robust repression.” The awkwardness of explaining this mechanism is evident in the answers that members of the Ingram family gave to investigators and defense attorneys. After Ingram had described a mass rape of his family by Rabie and Risch, Schoening asked, “They leave; then what—you as a family do what?”
