As Robert Wilcocks remarks in a brilliant new book, “Surely only Freud (or perhaps Alfred Jarry?) The mavens of recovered memory concern themselves almost entirely with means of reinforcing incest suspicions, not with means of checking them against solid evidence pro or con. Then, with the seduction theory, he adapted the idea of repression to cover the failure of patients to remember molestations that he soon conceded to have been imaginary. I am inclined to distinguish several periods even within it. The odd book out in this respect is Elizabeth Loftus’s, which puts a maximum distance between memory therapy and what she calls Freud’s “spare, elegant theories.” ↩, This passage is cited in a pertinent new article by Russell A. Powell and Douglas P. Boer, “Did Freud Mislead Patients to Confabulate Memories of Abuse?” Psychological Reports, Vol. Did any of her experiments, she was asked in cross-examination, deal with memories that were two decades old? by Erin La Rosa. But this is not to say that psychoanalysis is doomed to stand by helplessly while young fanatics strut upon the stage that Freud built. Throughout the past decade or so, a shock wave has been sweeping across North American psychotherapy, and in the process causing major repercussions within our families, courts, and hospitals. The concept of repression was thus left unchallenged, and the befuddled jury had no recourse but to side with the rival expert witness—the one who boasted intimacy with the dark and subtle workings of the unconscious. Lenore Terr wants us to regard these statements as forgivable “lies” and to put our trust in the more enchanting image of Eileen’s single flashback to the murder scene. The publication of Unchained Memories has been especially cheering to recovery advocates because Terr is not afraid to challenge their bête noire, Elizabeth Loftus. While California weighs the idea of extending the statute of limitations for childhood sexual abuse survivors to come forward in seeking justice, more research supports the idea that adults can accurately recall traumatic events repressed from their childhood—specifically repressed memories of sexual abuse. 17–30; the quotation is from p.17. We continue our look at the Enneagram’s repressed centers of intelligence this week by returning to the Heart. Meanwhile, simple justice demands that prison sentences resting on a combination of delusion and misinformation be overturned. “I have also been a victim since I was five years old,” he told an interrogator, “and I learned very early that the easiest way to handle this was to hide it in unconscious memory….”  ↩, For a reliable account of the way that the mania over “Satanic ritual abuse” has blended with the recovered memory movement, see Jeffrey S. Victor, Satanic Panic: The Creation of a Contemporary Legend (Open Court, 1993). That is just what Loftus, a highly regarded researcher and a professor of psychology at the University of Washington, has done in her own experimental work—and that is also why she has been pilloried by the recovery movement as an enemy to incest survivors. They are hardly the first parties to express misgivings about this staple of Hollywood, sensational TV, and the criminal courts, where “one of my other personalities did it” has become the murderer’s last alibi. Among other recommendations, Pendergrast wants professional associations and licensing boards to stop waffling about repression and to insist that therapists acquaint themselves with what is actually known about memory. This in turn makes it credible that more extensive and systematic insights of the same type can be developed by analysts who probe far more deeply and uncover far more material for interpretation” (Nagel, p. 36). If you have checked the questionnaire items “I neglect my teeth” or “There are certain things I seem to have a strange affection or attraction for,” Renee Fredrickson knows why (Fredrickson, p. 49). Blume, indeed, denies that physical touching need be involved at all. Even those men had to think long and hard about whether they might have unknowingly lived double lives; and Ingram’s wife, Sandy, did conclude that she must have been a secret Satanist. Given that Freud here accepts a “phonographic” memory of an adult conversation recorded when the patient was presumably still struggling to say “mama,” this passage must rank among his most credulous ever. 6 (1994), pp. (2) the revenge of the repressed A frontal attack on the caste of the psychoanalysts, depicted as 'religious zealots, self-help evangelists, sociopolitical ideologues, and outright charlatans who trade in the ever seductive currency of guilt and blame, while keeping the doctor's fees mounting.' How can one count authentic cases of repressed memory when the very concept of repression stands in doubt? Its main intended audience is women who aren’t at all sure that they were molested, and its purpose is to convince them of that fact and embolden them to act upon it. It’s totally his fault!” And she was eagerly looking forward to full-throttle survivorship in what she called “the days of being powerfully angry” (Prozan, Technique, pp. If Terr is right about the special character of real-world trauma, we may have to fall back on sheer stories after all. Tone color definition is - timbre. Demanding and untrusting in relationships. Terr omits any mention of George’s second “murder” committed in Eileen’s presence, but she does cite the equally implausible memories of incest scenes. ↩, This is not a fanciful example. What could be more psychologically damaging than being raped by one’s father? Yes, but most of them also persisted far beyond it. The Dialectics of Stalinism and Titoism 5. Moreover, Ingram, who is now serving a twenty-year term in prison after having confessed to six counts of child molestation, came close to being joined there by others who were caught in a widening net of lunacy—and at least two of them, who were in fact jailed briefly and then kept under house arrest for five months each, will never recover their reputations. He himself has lost his grown daughters to the recovery movement. ↩, In recently redesignating MPD as “dissociative identity disorder,” the American Psychiatric Association has started to back away from the syndrome’s more lurid implications. ↩, It must be admitted, however, that no one has yet approached Freud’s level of ingenuity in turning his own punning associations into knowledge about his patients’ histories. They are quite justified in that opinion. Exiting psychoanalysis at age forty-nine, Penelope was still smoking, drinking, and binge eating—the behaviors she had entered treatment to bring under control. Aha! Although Penelope never did recall any molestation, Prozan wasn’t fazed; as she reminds us, “[t]he phenomenon of not remembering…is in itself a symptom indicative of a severe traumatic experience.”30 As an appointed termination date loomed, the frantic Penelope surrendered at last to Prozan’s thirteen-year insistence that her dreams—of setting fires, of a van crashing into a house, of being shot by a man, of sex with Prozan herself—admitted of no other explanation than the enduring of anal rape by a family friend when she was nine years old. References: 1. Smarting from criticism of their earlier checklists, Bass and Davis adopt a warier posture now; nevertheless, they still leave the implication that if you “feel different from other people,” incest is a likely cause. Everything that we experience is preserved in either conscious or unconscious (repressed) memory; “even things that seem completely forgotten are present somehow and somewhere…” (SE, 23:260). Consequently, a therapist’s methodologically informed study of symptoms and dreams can lead (through however many detours) to faithful knowledge of an originating trauma. In other instances, draconian sentences are being served and plea bargains are still being coerced in the face of transparently clear signs that the charges are bogus. seek revenge and the results are disastrous for everyone. Freud writes in the essay about doubles and mirrors, and about downstairs spaces. To lay bare not just its nature but also its causes, both proximate and remote, is a socially urgent task. by William R. Mattox, Jr. USA Today, February 11, 1999 Sigmund Freud said they suffer from an “obsessional neurosis” accompanied by guilt, suppressed emotions and repressed sexuality. But Terr’s account is not the only one available. Dec 10, 2020 #3 Makes sense. Cancer: Deep hurt. RELEASED SEPTEMBER 4, 2012 ℗ … Critics of recovered memory have remarked on the movement’s puritanical alarmism, whereby a mere touch or look gets invested with traumatic consequences that supposedly remain virulent for thirty years and more. Former Saturday Night Live comedian Dana Carvey satirized them as uptight prudes who believe sex is downright dirty. Revenge of the Heart. In contrast, the junior partner in Making Monsters, Ethan Watters, was the first journalist to sound an alarm about the recovered memory movement, and the book casts him as a full collaborator; that is why I will refer to “Ofshe and Watters” below. While this, too, is guesswork, the fact that it can’t be ruled out renders Cheit’s case useless as a demonstration. They wanted to see if Ahsoka "worked" in the Mandalorian, and based on the youtube reactions people are really excited to see her live. (February 2017), Other key movement documents include Renee Fredrickson, Repressed Memories: A Journey to Recovery from Sexual Abuse (Fireside/Parkside, 1992); E. Sue Blume, Secret Survivors: Uncovering Incest and Its Aftereffects in Women (Wiley, 1990); and Patricia Love, The Emotional Incest Syndrome: What To Do When a Parent’s Love Rules Your Life (Bantam, 1990). As many studies have shown, small children can be readily induced to believe that they have experienced just about any fictitious occurrence. A Freudian’s predictable way of handling all such embarrassments will be to say that they predated the birth of psychoanalysis. Gilman believes in creativity without restraints and argues that the narrator’s repressed imagination is the fundamental cause of her psychotic breakdown. An older and a younger sister have also refuted this claim. Save 50% off the regular rate and 75% off the cover price and receive a free 2021 calendar! These authorities then disconcert the toddlers with rectal and vaginal prodding, with invitations to act out naughtiness on “anatomically correct” dolls with bloated genitals, and, of course, with leading questions that persist until the child reverses an initial denial that anything happened and begins weaving the kind of tale that appears to be demanded. Awkwardly, however, her research interest in actual cases of repressed memory was quite new; it seems to have postdated the writing of her 1990 book, Too Scared to Cry, which contains no index entry for “repression” and which reports on cases of continuously remembered rather than forgotten trauma.7 Terr’s expertise on sudden recall, moreover, dated from her first interview with Eileen Lipsker herself—and was then swelled by a flood of highly dubious anecdotes about other women’s therapeutically prompted visions of incest. Although these refinements brought about an ominous problem of their own—in the full labyrinth of hermeneutic possibilities, how can we ever know which is the true path back to the supposedly originating scene?—they do militate against Bass and Davis’s model of extracting repressed truths from the unconscious like so many bills from an automatic teller. World War II3. For one thing, it overlooked the fact, later acknowledged in Unchained Memories, that Eileen had always remembered her father’s violence around the house. When all this is said, however, there remains an important core of shared assumptions between psychoanalysis and its hyperactive young successor. The case, in which Terr herself served as an expert witness “to explain,” as she says, “‘repression’ and ‘the return of the repressed,'” came to national attention in 1989 with newspaper and television reports of Eileen Franklin Lipsker’s long-buried but amazingly lucid recollection of the way her father, in her terrified presence in 1969, had raped her eight-year-old best friend in the back of his Volkswagen bus and then shattered the girl’s skull with a rock and covered the body on a wooded hillside south of San Francisco. In this respect, however, they do not stand fundamentally apart from their elders. He assured Eileen at the time that it “wasn’t important… whether her visualizations were real or not,” and that they could “sort that out later.” In and out of therapy the details slowly cohered into a narrative. For one thing, it transcribes his numerous interviews with therapists, “survivors,” “retractors,” and accused “perpetrators,” allowing the cruel unreason of the recovery movement to be voiced with a minimum of editorial mediation. (Lenore Terr, incidentally, put in her customary court appearance, offering an expert opinion that Holly Ramona’s current aversion to pickles and bananas confirms her childhood trauma of forced oral sex.) That, however, was four years ago, when no one yet had an explanatory handle on the burgeoning plague that still besieges us. Revenge of the Heart. As the therapist pushes to find more hidden memories, the client, who is already trained in the process, often comes up with still more accounts of having been abused…. See, e.g., the letter of 1899 in which he tells Fliess about a patient who “deflowers” women because he failed botany and who, as a teen-ager, once masturbated in a contorted position so that he could keep the Jungfrau in view (Freud-Fliess Letters, p. 346). As for genuine victims, the comfort they are proffered may look attractive at first, but it is of debatable long-term value. They have in mind the pre-psychoanalytic Freud, the one who supposedly took pity on his hysterical patients, found that they were all harboring memories of early abuse, “listened and understood and gave them permission to remember and speak of these terrible events,”11 and cured them by unknotting their repression. So long as “Freud’s permanent revolution,” as Nagel calls it, retains any sway, the voodoo of “the repressed” can be counted upon to return in newly energetic and pernicious forms. Once the bizarre and sinister features of the recovery movement are widely known, sophisticated readers will not hesitate to distance themselves from it. As Mark Pendergrast shows in Victims of Memory, if we put together the number of licensed American psychotherapists (roughly 255,000) with survey results about their beliefs and practices, it appears that well over 50,000 of them are now willing to help their clients realize that they must have endured early molesta-tion. “Why would you want to put yourself through it? 303, 308). 4 … The idea may be true, but it is consistent with too many eventualities to be falsifiable—that is, amenable to scientific assessment. With the help of several excellent new critical works, we will explore that ground in the concluding portion of this essay. Factually impoverished, it came down to little more than a twelve-person referendum on the photographic return of the repressed. Former Saturday Night Live comedian Dana Carvey satirized them as uptight prudes who believe sex is downright dirty. As Thomas Nagel innocently puts it, each doubtful hypothesis “has to find its empirical support in countless other applications to other patients in other settings.” That is exactly the home-team approach to validation that produces abundant support for “facilitated communication,” Satanic mind control, UFO abductions, previous incarnations, and telepathy—this last a favorite pastime of Freud’s. It is little wonder that Ofshe and Watters regard him as having “cut the very figure of a recovered memory therapist.”15 Listen to Freud’s own words: The work keeps on coming to a stop and they keep on maintaining that this time nothing has occurred to them. All are astute, scientifically informed, and compassionate toward the movement’s casualties; all contain wrenching accounts of sudden accusation and insult, alienation, family grief, false imprisonment, and death without reconciliation. Still later, it covered fantasies (and some events) whose existence could be known only by positing the action of repression itself. In the coming days and weeks, they will be transported to penal colonies to serve their sentences. Help, help. This is a feeling I have. This sanctioned prurience is the thread that Mark Pendergrast traces from witch persecutions through mesmerism to hypnotherapy to psychoanalysis itself and, full circle, to the detection of Satanic abuse. On the contrary, Franklin’s junked van from 1969, located and microscopically studied by police investigators, bore no trace of the twenty-year-old crime. The original film won an Oscar for its production design - … The exorcist’s fervor has passed into coarser and more passionate hands such as those of Bass and Davis. Even today, our criminal justice system is just beginning to erect safeguards against the error that makes such outrages possible: the assumption that children are still reliable witnesses after exposure to their parents’ and inquisitors’ not-so-subtle hints that certain kinds of revelations are expected of them. With the relaxation exercises and the free-association techniques, these memories often became more detailed during their hour-and-a-half meetings…. There remains, however, the one striking detail that captivated both the jurors and, I am sure, the early readers of Terr’s book: the bleeding bald spot that was said to have marred Eileen Franklin’s pate for five straight years after the murder. 63 (Winter 1994), pp. I may have told the children that they needed to learn the sex acts and how to do them right…. by Elizabeth Loftus and Katherine Ketcham. Whether the treatment approach is hypnotherapy, psychodynamic psychotherapy, existential therapy, CBT, DBT or, for that matter, exorcism, some adequate affective expression of repressed … The Bharatiya Janata Party’s rule came with an attack on Dalits and the minorities. In Renee Fredrickson’s words, “You may be convinced that your disbelief is a rational questioning of the reality versus unreality of your memories, but it is partially a misguided attempt to repress the memories again” (Fredrickson, p. 161). 220, 223, and SE, 3:215. But Terr is a thoroughly trained Freudian, and as such she felt qualified, after all, to offer the Franklin jury what she calls “an education” in the reality of repressed memory and its retrieval. Best of The New York Review, plus books, events, and other items of interest, Unchained Memories: True Stories of Traumatic Memories, Lost and Found, The Myth of Repressed Memory: False Memories and Allegations of Sexual Abuse, The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse (3rd edition), Making Monsters: False Memories, Psychotherapy, and Sexual Hysteria, Victims of Memory: Incest Accusations and Shattered Lives. Now both daughters have taken different last names, and in concluding his book with a poignant letter to them, Pendergrast further protects their identities by assigning them fictitious first names as well. They feel compelled to advise results are disastrous for everyone confused the normal fading of individual instances repeated... 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