We Believe the Children

by Richard Beck

  Dr. Bennett Braun, a founding member of the ISSMP&D, announced in 1984 that some one thousand cases had been identified, and in 1986 he established a unit specifically devoted to dissociative disorders at Chicago’s Rush-Presbyterian St. Luke’s Medical Center, a nationally respected hospital. The movement received an additional infusion of energy from the 1984 publication of The Assault on Truth, Jeffrey Masson’s book-length polemic on Freud’s cowardice in the face of child abuse.23 Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, the book’s prospects were damaged by a two-part magazine profile of Masson that came out around the same time (the profile’s author, Janet Malcolm, portrayed Masson as a charismatic but intellectually shallow womanizer). Nevertheless, The Assault on Truth received a number of high-profile reviews, including an article titled “The 100-Year Cover Up” in the feminist monthly Ms. magazine.24 Masson had given the MPD movement a history, which it needed in order to flourish. Amplifying a critique that had been circulating among many American feminists for more than a decade, Masson described Freud as the architect of a century-long campaign to ignore both the incidence of child abuse, especially sexual abuse, and its psychological effects. His story made the MPD movement, the social workers, the psychiatric nurses, and the therapists working at Children’s Institute International into members of a revolutionary vanguard whose discoveries required not just intellectual daring but also political courage.

  Yet Masson’s argument in The Assault on Truth rests on a very shaky historical foundation. Freud’s patients did not actually tell him that they had been sexually abused. His theory that hysteria was caused by repressed memories of childhood abuse was developed before any of his patients ever reported being victims of incest, and it was Freud who cobbled together the abuse narratives from stray memories and impressions elicited from patients under a mild form of hypnosis.25 “Something has occurred to me now,” one patient told him, “but you obviously put it into my head.”26 Freud admitted as much in his Studies on Hysteria, writing that in some cases of difficult therapeutic resistance he “laboriously forced some piece of knowledge on a patient.”27 Masson’s account also gives the impression that many of the abusers identified by Freud’s female patients were fathers, but this is inaccurate. Most were nursemaids, siblings, servants, and governesses. When patients identified male abusers, they tended to be men who were only slightly older than the patients themselves, such as brothers. Freud does not even mention fathers in “The Aetiology of Hysteria,” the paper in which he publicly outlined his Seduction Theory for the first time.

  Freud was open about his active role in producing his patients’ stories. He made interpretive leaps that his patients would never have made on their own, writing that one patient’s habit of kicking his legs about in bed before going to sleep meant he had previously tried to “kick away the person who was lying on him”—namely, an abusive servant girl.28 Even when patients eventually agreed that abuse must have occurred in the way Freud suggested, they had “no feeling of remembering the scenes” and assured Freud “emphatically of their unbelief.”29 None of this dissuaded Masson and his supporters. Although MPD therapists didn’t know it, one reason they liked the abuse narratives Freud initially claimed to have uncovered was because he uncovered those narratives using coercive therapeutic techniques very similar to their own. As the seduction theory revival gained momentum, the professionalization of the MPD field helped to make therapists’ beliefs more durable. Peer-review made it possible for MPD advocates to put one another’s findings inside a closed loop of citation and validation. In 1986 Cornelia Wilbur wrote an essay in which she cited Steven Marmer as arguing that childhood trauma was a crucial factor in the development of MPD. Marmer’s essay, though, which had been written in 1980, actually did no such thing; instead, Marmer noted that some earlier reports on MPD had suggested a link between the disorder and childhood trauma. He also provided citations—to earlier cases that were first reported by Cornelia Wilbur.30

  Therapists found MPD patients with dozens of alter personalities. Then they found MPD patients with hundreds of alter personalities. As the number of alters increased, so did the supposed violence and brutality of the abuse that had brought them into being. Cornelia Wilbur was one of the first really prominent advocates to talk publicly about the connection between multiplicity and something resembling ritual abuse. At the 1984 meeting of the ISSMP&D, while delivering a paper called “Multiple Personality Disorder and Child Abuse: An Etiologic Overview,” Wilbur described a patient whose family had all been members of a murderous, racist cult: “How would you like to be exposed to multiple murders as an infant and a child, since your grandfather formed the first Klan and your father formed the second Klan and the family literally owned the town? I don’t know how many murders this child saw . . . she tells me that a group of individuals in that part of the United States killed every single black person that came within their purview.”31 Wilbur said the patient had also watched her family kill “whites that were itinerant farm workers, including the children.”

  In 1986 the Washington Supreme Court heard Tyson v. Tyson, the first case based on an adult’s repressed and then recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse at the hands of her father. Although the court ultimately decided to dismiss the case, a dissenting opinion laid out a line of reasoning that many courts would take up in the coming years. “Fundamental fairness,” the dissenting judge wrote, “compels us to extend the discovery rule to adults who suffered sexual abuse as children and then repressed that abuse.”32 By 1987 the ISSMP&D’s national meeting would feature eleven discussion papers on ritual abuse, and in that same year a revised edition of the DSM-III documented just how far MPD had come.33 To begin with, changes in the volume’s categorization system made MPD more prominent, as MPD became the first diagnosis listed under the heading “Dissociative Disorders (or, Hysterical Neuroses, Dissociative Type).” Those comparing the manual’s description of the disorder to the early 1980 version also found that MPD itself had become more exciting. Whereas “classic cases” of MPD still featured “at least two fully developed personalities,” the manual now noted that “in adults, the number of personalities or personality states in any one case varies from two to over one hundred, with occasional cases of extreme complexity.”34 The revised description also displayed increased certainty about MPD’s cause and increased alarm about its prevalence. “Several studies,” the authors wrote, “indicate that in nearly all cases, the disorder has been preceded by abuse (often sexual) or another form of severe emotional trauma in childhood.” In addition, “recent reports suggest that this disorder is not nearly so rare as it has commonly been thought to be.”35

  One thing that didn’t change was the idea that “a quiet, retiring spinster may alternate with a flamboyant, promiscuous bar habitué.” Such an easy and unthinking embrace of the old, sexist Madonna-whore complex—itself an idea first proposed by Freud at his most sexist—might have seemed strange coming out of a professional group that owed so much to feminist thinking about abuse. Also strange, from this perspective, was the fact that women made up 90 percent of those diagnosed with MPD. In the 1960s and 1970s, feminists had complained loudly about psychiatry’s habit of recasting the difficulties women faced in a sexist society as mental health problems for which each woman, individually, was to blame.36 Yet here was another psychiatric disorder just for women, a malady for which the prescribed treatment was both debilitating and lengthy, often requiring months or even years of costly therapy and regular hospitalizations. Because boys make up some 40 percent of child sex abuse victims nationally, a small number of MPD researchers dutifully began looking for the “missing” male multiples, but they didn’t look very hard. Cornelia Wilbur once proposed that you could find them in the prison system, as their childhood traumas would have eventually driven them all to crime.37

  If some aspects of MPD made it a tricky or incongruous feminist project, they also made the diagnosis very appealing to conservatives.
Evangelical Protestants made up a substantial and vocal wing of the MPD community, and in the mideighties this group enjoyed more political momentum and energy than at almost any other time in its history. Fifteen years of grassroots organizing had turned evangelical organizations like Focus on the Family and the Moral Majority into some of the most powerful political groups in the country and mobilized conservative Christians of many denominations around right-wing causes. The threat of satanic cults had been a consuming preoccupation among evangelicals since the early 1970s, with books like Mike Warnke’s The Satan Seller describing a good Christian’s fall into drug-fueled devil worship and subsequent redemption.38 (A Christian magazine exhaustively discredited Warnke’s claims in the early nineties.)39 For some evangelical therapists the connection between MPD and abuse, especially satanic ritual abuse, was irresistible. In the patient’s long road to “integration”—the reabsorption of all alter personalities by the primary personality—therapists saw an analogue to the evangelical’s religious quest, which moved through sin and a difficult spiritual rebirth toward redemption and peace. The threat of ritual abuse also allowed evangelical therapists to view their own work in terms of religious war, with Satan as the enemy and recovered memory therapy as the weapon of choice.

  MPD’s evangelical therapists were mostly nonphysicians. Psychiatrists working on the disorder were more secular, and as a result they regarded the papers and presentations connecting MPD to ritual abuse with suspicion or overt hostility. Like Kenneth Lanning at the FBI, they must have known that by allowing these paranoid conspiracy theories to share conference programs with their own, comparatively pedestrian findings, they would only be inviting intensified scrutiny and skepticism later on. That the ritual abuse “true believers,” as they were sometimes called, remained at the center of the MPD movement for so long makes little sense from an academic perspective; medicine is supposed to test new theories and dismiss the ones that don’t manage a passing grade, and MPD could have been dismissed rather easily.

  Medicine, however, is also a profession with political interests and considerations like any other, and the persistence of ritual abuse within the MPD world may best be understood as a doomed attempt to cope with a tough set of political pressures and changes. By the time Ronald Reagan won the presidency, these pressures were also changing how the feminists who had done much of the initial mobilizing against sex abuse talked about the issue. In the 1970s feminists had talked much more about rape than about child abuse. Rape, according to Susan Brownmiller and scores of other writers and activists, was a message from a patriarchal society to women. It told women they were a subordinate class, it reminded them that men understood access to women’s bodies as a natural right, and it served as a punishment for women who stepped outside their prescribed social role. Conservatives objected to this description—they preferred to understand rape as a crime committed by mentally ill deviants—but when Susan Brownmiller published Against Our Will in 1975, all fifty states had laws on the books that said rape within a marriage was impossible, sex being just another of the housewife’s lifelong obligations. After 1975 those laws began to change, and sexual harassment in the workplace became legally actionable as well. Feminists were able to say these things, in part, because of the extraordinary cultural and political momentum at their backs, a whole wave of liberation movements that had been upending the country’s sexual and racial hierarchies since the 1960s.

  The political situation looked very different in the mid-1980s. Conservative resistance to the women’s movement was hitting its organizational stride. Focus on the Family and the Moral Majority were flourishing, and evangelical Christians, for whom social issues like homosexuality and the preservation of the nuclear family were crucial, imbued the antifeminist backlash with enormous energy. In Ronald Reagan these groups had a president whose administration was more open to evangelical influence than any other in the country’s history. Legislators no longer wanted to hear, for example, about the role played by race and class in the incidence of sexual violence against adult women, nor did the culture want to hear about the way society’s hierarchies tolerated or even condoned rape and other forms of abuse so long as it didn’t happen to the wrong people or in the wrong place.

  What legislators and pundits were still willing to hear, to the exclusion of almost everything else on the feminist agenda, was that the country’s children were at risk. Over the course of the 1970s conservatives made the endangered child into a kind of political and rhetorical abstraction, a way of thinking about the country and its citizens that could help advance a wide range of policy initiatives. They opposed the counterculture on the grounds that rock and roll caused adolescents to lose respect for family life. They promoted the War on Drugs with racially tinged morality tales about addicted inner-city mothers and, crucially, the “superpredator” “crack babies” to whom those mothers supposedly gave birth. (That particular epidemic was later shown to be a myth.)40 And when Anita Bryant led a campaign to allow Dade County to discriminate against homosexuals in hiring teachers for public schools, she named the effort “Save Our Children.” The fear that tied all of these campaigns together was of the ease with which children could be victimized or else corrupted and turned against the society that was supposed to nurture them. Even without its connection to ritual abuse, MPD would have been attractive to many conservative antifeminists: it was a diagnosis that ignored all the circumstances of a woman’s adult life by claiming that what really mattered were the events of her childhood.

  Slowly, some feminists hoping to stay politically relevant in the Reagan era adopted these conservative ways of speaking as their own. In the 1970s, feminist antipornography groups began to stage protests and publish articles denouncing the representation of women in sexually explicit media as well as the treatment of women who worked in the sex industry as performers. Women Against Pornography (WAP), founded in 1979 and based in New York City, became the most famous of these groups, thanks both to its roster of celebrity feminist supporters and its notorious guided tours of porn theaters and peep shows in Times Square. Despite WAP’s public identification with radical feminist causes and beliefs, their office began to receive hundreds of letters from conservative Christian groups offering praise, soliciting advice on opposing pornography in other cities and towns, or looking to schedule a tour in New York. “Dear All You Wonderful People,” Florence Rush wrote in reply to members of a South Carolina Methodist denomination that barred gays and lesbians, “Thank you so much for your interest and support. A letter like yours makes all our hard work worthwhile.”41 These overtures to the right wing alarmed some feminists inside the antipornography movement, and for feminists who thought targeting pornography was a mistake altogether, they validated many fears. But the Reagan administration, which had coasted into office on a wave of evangelical support, had stymied many of feminism’s legislative efforts. WAP seemed to believe they needed all the friends they could get.

  These uneasy alliances came into full view as antipornography groups around the country started trying to pass laws restricting explicit media. As Kathleen Morris’s sex ring investigation was gearing up in late 1983, feminist lawyer Catharine MacKinnon, working out of the University of Minnesota along with the writer and activist Andrea Dworkin, drafted legislation allowing women to sue pornography’s vendors and producers for civil rights violations. The Minneapolis Government Operations Committee held public hearings on the proposal over a few days in December. “We are proposing for your consideration,” MacKinnon said in her opening remarks, “a statutory scheme that will situate pornography as a central practice in the inequality of the sexes, in specific, as a practice that is central to the subordination of women.”42

  Similar events followed in Indianapolis, in Massachusetts, and in Los Angeles, where the antipornography hearing was conducted just a few city blocks from the ongoing McMartin preliminary hearing. The antipornography movement was not directly involved with those
investigating and prosecuting the sex ring and day care trials, but the two groups had many interests in common. In Minneapolis the Committee heard testimony from Sherry Arndt, a moderator and trainer with the Illusion Theater, which had put on plays about “good touch” and “bad touch” for the children of Jordan’s elementary schools.43 Jeffrey Masson appeared in Los Angeles to describe his work on Freud’s seduction theory and to say “that pornography in my opinion is the expression of sexual abuse, no more a fantasy than sexual abuse is a fantasy. Thank you very much.” He also modified the feminist slogan, “pornography is the theory, rape is the practice.” According to Masson, “pornography is already the practice.”44

  The federal government took up the issue when the president appointed Attorney General Edwin Meese to study pornography and its effects on society. The Meese Commission, as it came to be known, was organized just fifteen years after the Johnson administration had conducted its own porn investigation. To the surprise of many, the original 1970 Report of the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography had found porn’s corrosive social effects to be largely nonexistent. The commission found “no evidence to date that exposure to explicit sexual materials plays a significant role in the causation of delinquent or criminal behavior among youths or adults,” nor could they find evidence that porn had any effect on citizens’ “established attitudinal commitments regarding either sexuality or sexual morality.”45 The commission recommended that all laws restricting the sale of sexually explicit material to adults be repealed—a recommendation that was singled out as especially egregious when the Senate rejected the commission’s findings by a 60–5 vote. The Reagan administration’s opinion of the original commission’s work was no kinder. Meese began work under the basic assumptions that porn was bad for people and that it needed to be more strictly controlled. His stated objectives were “to determine the nature, extent, and impact on society of pornography in the United States, and to make specific recommendations . . . concerning more effective ways in which the spread of pornography could be contained.”46