Remembering Satan

by Lawrence Wright

  When the mistake had been cleared up, the path to the study of the sexual life of children lay open.

  This momentous shift in Freud’s perceptions was the turning point in his thinking and in the history of the psychoanalytic movement. It is important to note in his statement above that he never repudiated the reality of child abuse and its—admittedly, more modest—role in psychopathology. In his new understanding, Freud realized that his patients’ fantasies were masking their own childhood sexual longings, and that what they were repressing were not actual seductions but their wishes for the same.

  Freud compared the function of repression to that of a watchman who stands guard between the large entrance hall of the unconscious mind and the small drawing room in which consciousness resides. The watchman is a censor, examining mental impulses to determine whether they will be allowed to enter further. “If they have already pushed their way forward to the threshold and have been turned back by the watchman, then they are inadmissible to consciousness; we speak of them as repressed,” Freud wrote. Such an impulse, for instance, might be the desire of a young girl for her father. The watchman would certainly frown on that; and although the image would be pushed back into the entrance hall, that doesn’t mean that it is banished forever. Years, even decades, later, the forbidden desire might return, but this time in a clever and frightening disguise. In its exile from consciousness, the forbidden desire has become an unconscious fixation, enlarging itself on fantasies. “It ramifies like a fungus, so to speak, in the dark and takes on extreme forms of expression,” Freud wrote in 1915, “which when translated and revealed to the neurotic are bound not merely to seem alien to him but to terrify him by the way in which they reflect an extraordinary and dangerous strength of instinct.” In this way, Freud accounted for the bizarre nature of the fantasies his hysterical patients produced. The shameful sexual desire of a young girl for her father is reexperienced as her father’s desire for her; her fantasy of sexual union is recast as a remembered assault.

  An unfortunate consequence of Freud’s rejection of his seduction theory was that society took a more skeptical stance toward all reports of child abuse, not merely those that had been achieved through recovered memories. That state of affairs began to change in the 1970s, as feminist writers began to speak up about the issues of rape and incest. The question of recovered memories did not arise; indeed, it was the persistence of memory, and not its repression, that was seen as the hallmark of childhood trauma.

  Several forces produced the vector that we may call the recovered-memory phenomenon. Among them was the publication in 1980 of Michelle Remembers, which not only awakened popular interest in satanic-cult activity but also established the notion of massive repression, such that an entire secret life could be hidden away in the unconscious, waiting to be coaxed into consciousness by a caring, believing therapist. No longer ruled by psychiatry, the counseling profession itself was undergoing an informal deregulation. Psychologists and social workers were at least trained to practice, but increasingly counselors of varying ability and experience were simply being certified, or—as in Washington State—registered for a small fee, with no credentials required. Undersheriff Neil McClanahan, who has a bachelor’s degree in human behavior from Evergreen State College, is a registered counselor; Pastor John Bratun is not registered, nor does he need to be unless he charges for his services. Bratun never even took a course in psychology in college; he was trained to be an art instructor, which is what he did before taking up counseling. The lack of credentials is not at all unusual. In New York, for instance, anyone can call himself a psychotherapist. This trend has left the profession prey to fads and malpractice.

  At the same time, the field of psychotherapy was under attack within its own ranks. In 1984 two books appeared that challenged Freud’s abandonment of the seduction theory: Alice Miller’s Thou Shalt Not Be Aware: Society’s Betrayal of the Child (which had been published in German three years earlier) and Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson’s The Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory. These books struck a deep chord, coming at a time when child abuse suddenly seemed to be far more prevalent than society had ever been willing to recognize. A number of counselors began to wonder whether Freud had been right the first time; perhaps trauma—specifically, childhood sexual assault—really was at the root of most neurotic behavior, as Freud originally had claimed. (This revisionist theory quickly became so entrenched with some practitioners that they began calling themselves “traumatists” rather than therapists.) Using the same techniques that Freud himself renounced, particularly hypnosis, therapists and other counselors began uncovering memories of abuse which had apparently been repressed for most of the patient’s life. In some cases, the patients reported abuse that had continued well into their teen or adult years, without being consciously acknowledged. Many of these patients were diagnosed as suffering from multiple-personality disorder.

  Soon the discoveries in the counseling offices spilled out into the families and the communities, as patients were encouraged to confront their abusers, notify the police, or bring suit. “You cannot wait until you are doubt-free to disclose to your family,” admonished Renee Fredrickson in her 1992 book, Repressed Memories: A Journey of Recovery from Sexual Abuse. “Avoid being tentative about your repressed memories. Do not just tell them; express them as truth. If months or years down the road, you find you are mistaken about details, you can always apologize and set the record straight.”

  Whether truthful or mistaken, recovered memories have had the effect of breaking apart thousands of families. A 1991 civil suit in Orange County, California, is characteristic of hundreds of cases that have flooded the legal system. Two adult daughters and a granddaughter accused their elderly mother/grandmother of gross, ritualistic crimes over a period of twenty-five years. The daughters contended that they had been tortured, sexually abused, and forced to kill babies in caves and church basements in Southern California. The women said that they had repressed the abuse until just a few years before, when the older daughter entered therapy after the breakup of her third marriage. In therapy she learned that she was a multiple personality, and she began remembering satanic-ritual abuse. Soon she brought her sister and her daughter (who was eleven when the trial began) into treatment with the same therapist, and they began having similar memories. Eventually all three were diagnosed as multiple personalities. They sought half a million dollars in damages. The defendant, who was a wealthy woman, contended that none of this abuse had ever happened. She believed that her older daughter was after her money, while her younger daughter and granddaughter were simply trying to please her older daughter. The jury decided that the defendant had neglected her daughters but had not intentionally harmed them. No damages were awarded. These claims have become sufficiently routine that some attorneys have standardized forms for their clients, in which the accusations of rape, torture, sodomy, and ritual abuse are already specified.

  In 1992, in reaction to the rise of charges and lawsuits, a number of accused parents formed the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, in Philadelphia. By June of 1993, more than four thousand families had come forward (including the parents of Roseanne Arnold). The foundation discovered that these people had much in common. Most of their marriages—about 80 percent—were still intact, and usually only the husband had been accused, although wives had also been accused in nearly a third of the cases. The couples were also financially successful, with a median annual income of more than sixty thousand dollars. The majority had college educations. Most of them reported having frequently eaten meals together as a family and having gone on family vacations. More than half reported being active or very active in religion. About 17 percent of the accusations involved satanic-ritual abuse.

  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 bel
ieve 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 indic
ate 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.”*

  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.