by Richard Beck
Chapter 9
Therapists and Survivors
The final collapse of the McMartin trial dealt a serious blow to the day care and ritual abuse panic’s legal and political fortunes. In 1983 prosecutors and reporters had quite reasonably seen McMartin as the kind of case that could launch a whole career; now it stood as one of the great judicial debacles in California history. District attorneys slowly began to shy away from similar cases, or at least to pursue them with slightly less enthusiasm—the risks they presented often seemed to outweigh the potential benefits. However, a social panic doesn’t only reside in a society’s legal and political institutions; it also lives in the private mental experiences of individuals and the tools people use to make sense of those experiences, which is to say that a panic is also a matter of psychology. As day care prosecutions receded into the middle distance, Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD) and the recovered memory therapists who championed it came fully into their own. These therapists’ successes made what had been a rare and fantastic diagnosis into a kind of national shorthand for the effects of childhood sexual trauma on people’s adult lives.
Ellen Bass, a poet by training who studied with Anne Sexton at Boston University, was one of the most important advocates for recovered memory therapy and MPD. She first became aware of child abuse in 1974, when a student in her creative writing workshop submitted a thinly veiled autobiographical account of her childhood experiences of incest. Over the next few years Bass encountered many women with similar stories, and she guided them as they tried to turn their experiences into poetry and prose. In time she began to collect these accounts. She had in mind a book that would bring them together and demonstrate to survivors that they were not alone.
In 1983 Bass published an anthology called I Never Told Anyone: Writings by Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse.1 By this point she was also working as a counselor to groups and individuals, and she wanted to provide survivors with a practical guide to the healing process. Again she solicited stories and poems, and she took on Laura Davis, one of her clients, as a coauthor. Together the pair produced a handbook for adult women who wanted to acknowledge, work through, and repair the psychological damage done to them in childhood. The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse, was published in 1988.2 In the preface, Bass admitted and even emphasized her lack of formal training. “None of what is presented here,” she wrote, “is based on psychological theories.” The book would go on to sell more than a million copies and is currently available in its fourth edition.
The Courage to Heal became the recovered memory movement’s indispensable text, and Bass’s disclaimer notwithstanding, it was obviously based on the same psychological theories that had begun to circulate at MPD conferences earlier in the decade. Assuming a vulgarized Freudian model that replaced the psychic repression of unwanted thoughts and desires with the total repression of events that actually occurred, Bass and Davis addressed long passages directly to women who didn’t yet know they were victims. “You may have forgotten large chunks of your childhood,” they wrote. “Yet there are things you do remember. When you are touched in a certain way, you feel nauseated. Certain words or facial expressions scare you. . . . You were taken to the doctor repeatedly for vaginal infections.”3 Odd revulsions, reluctance to spend time with a certain family member, fear of basements, and similar experiences made it likely that buried memories were waiting to be drawn to the surface. Although these memories might be hazy, dreamlike, or fragmentary, the authors wrote, that was no reason to discount their authenticity: “If you . . . have a feeling that something happened to you, it probably did.”4 And if a long course of therapy failed to stitch these memory bits into a coherent narrative whole, that still shouldn’t dissuade you from confronting those who may have abused you. “To say ‘I was abused,’” they wrote, “you don’t need the kind of recall that would stand up in a court of law.”5
On the surface, the popularity of such a book is baffling. It is hard to imagine a group of people who would welcome the revelation that such awful traumas had disfigured their childhoods and, as a consequence, their adult lives. But like no previous book, The Courage to Heal outfitted victimization with a redemption narrative, and in recasting victims as survivors, it made victimization into an identity with its own kind of bleak attractiveness. Though it warned that any kind or degree of abuse, from violent rape all the way down to being made to “listen to sexual talk,” would inevitably have severe, long-term psychological effects, it also provided constant reassurances that things would improve in time, and it mapped out recovery’s “stages” in detail. Other affirmations included the injunction to honor the things one did to survive the abuse by regarding coping mechanisms—including split personalities and memory repression—as signs of the survivor’s ingenuity and strength.
The book also advocated a regimen of self-care directed in particular at the survivor’s “inner child,” a part of the psyche paralyzed in a state of arrested development by the abuse. “Your job is to give that child pleasure and to listen to the stories she has to tell,” Bass and Davis wrote. One survivor described caring for her inner child by throwing herself a birthday party as though she were three years old. She planned to gather her friends together, make a fort out of sheets, and spend the night inside, reading stories by flashlight. “Oh, I love being little!” she wrote.6
Different kinds of pleasure took on an oddly prominent place in The Courage to Heal. In addition to giving survivors permission simply to spend time doing activities they liked, with inner-child care as the cover story, Bass and Davis described the healing process as intellectually fascinating, with memory retrieval as the highlight. If McMartin turned many parents into rogue investigators, monitoring their children’s behavior and the school’s grounds for evidence, The Courage to Heal made survivors into amateur detectives of the unconscious. On their own the memories and flashbacks, coming in dreamlike fragments, would not provide an intelligible picture of the abuse’s chronology or substance. The survivor had to help, and Bass and Davis described the process as “like putting together a jigsaw puzzle.” Solving the puzzle was important emotional work that was also interesting in its own right. “Part of me felt like I was on the trail of a murder mystery,” one survivor wrote. “I really enjoyed following all the clues. ‘Okay, I was looking at the clock. It was mid-afternoon. Why was it mid-afternoon? Where could my mother have been? Oh, I bet she was at . . .’ Tracing down the clues to find out exactly what had happened was actually fun.”7
It was also clear, however, that Bass and Davis expected the process of recovering abuse memories to be horribly upsetting, even debilitating. The second step in their recovery schema, right after making the “decision to heal,” was “the emergency stage,” which they described as follows:
The emergency stage feels like this: You walk out the door to go to work, and you fall on the steps and break your leg. Your spouse tries to drive you to the hospital, but the engine of your car blows up. You go back to the house to call an ambulance, only to find you’ve locked yourself out. Just as a police car pulls over to give you some help, the big earthquake hits, and your home, your spouse, your broken leg, and the police car all disappear into a yawning chasm.8
Many of the women interviewed for The Courage to Heal described personal, social, and professional breakdowns. “I just lost it completely,” one said. “I would go out in the middle of the night and hide somewhere, behind a Dipsy dumpster or something.”9 Bass and Davis wrote that the emergency stage could be especially crippling for people who repressed their abuse. Davis knew from experience. When she recovered her first memories it made her entire life seem a falsehood. “If this could have happened and I could have forgotten it,” she wrote, “then every assumption I had about life and my place in it was thrown up for question.” Survivors quit jobs, cut off communication with everyone other than their therapists, and spent long periods of time alone in the
outdoors. “I dropped everything else in my life,” one wrote. “It was like there were large six-foot-high letters in my living room every day when I woke up: INCEST!”10
Things supposedly calmed down to a certain extent after the emergency stage, but it seemed that no part of the healing process was without its attendant crises. And although The Courage to Heal always kept its readers oriented toward recovery, at least on the surface, the testimony of some survivors suggested that much of what made the process appealing were the crises themselves. This fact slipped out in asides and stray bits of observation, as when the authors introduced a survivor who had been recovering abuse memories for the past ten years. Although this constituted more than a quarter of the woman’s life, she said the passage of time had made memory retrieval more difficult, not less. “I believe [the memories] now,” she said. “It hurts more. I have the emotions to feel the impact.”11 The memory retrieval process also echoed the day care abuse investigations in that the initial discovery of abuse often led not to resolution and healing but to the repeated discovery of more and increasingly bizarre abuse. “The more I worked on the abuse, the more I remembered,” one woman said. “First I remembered my brother, and then my grandfather. About six months after that I remembered my father. And then about a year later, I remembered my mother.” Retrieving these memories was traumatic, but she ultimately found the revelation that everyone in her family had abused her for years to be reassuring. “My life suddenly made sense.”12
The memories did not make sense of everybody’s life, though. A section titled “Believing It Happened” quoted a number of survivors who clearly remained skeptical of their memories long after recovering them. “Up until three months ago,” one said, “I didn’t really believe it happened: ‘It was hypnosis.’ ‘I only imagined it.’ I was acting as if it really happened. I’d go to an incest survivor’s group. I’d freely tell people. But when I was alone, I’d say, ‘Of course it didn’t really happen.’”13 Like Freud’s early patients, who reluctantly assented to his belief in their histories of childhood abuse even as they lacked any “feeling of remembering the scenes,” this survivor identified as a victim despite the intuition that her abuse memories were somehow fundamentally not like her other memories of normal life.14 “It’s natural that you have periodic doubts,” Bass and Davis wrote, breezily dismissing all the things their readers actually knew of their own experience. “But that’s because accepting memories is painful, not because you weren’t abused.”15 One of the book’s final sections, “For Counselors,” drove home similar points to the psychologists, family therapists, and social workers who made up another key chunk of the intended audience. “No one fantasizes abuse,” it read. “Believe the survivor. You must believe that your client was sexually abused, even if she sometimes doubts it herself.” And, “Be willing to believe the unbelievable. Working with survivors puts you face to face with the sickest, most twisted things human beings do to each other.”16
Recovered memory therapists believed their breakthroughs were possible because they were able to acknowledge and confront what Freud and his Victorian contemporaries could not. In rehabilitating the seduction theory almost a century after its initial proposal, they saw themselves as heirs and successors to Freud’s only truly revolutionary work, work that had been carried out in the white heat of passionate commitment and then abandoned out of careerism, in response to social denial. “Freud’s new theory,” Bass and Davis wrote, referring to the system of Oedipal complexes that replaced the seduction theory, “was obviously more palatable to society and to the patriarchal profession in which he worked.”17
What these vulgar Freudians miss, however, is the fact that the seduction theory was not revolutionary for its time, nor did it provoke a storm of criticism within the psychiatric community. It only added a new wrinkle—the idea that the repressed traumatic events must have taken place before puberty—to a line of thought that had been developing, step by step, for more than a century. In 1864 the physician Moritz Benedikt began to publish a series of papers arguing that a secret, usually having to do with sex, lay at the root of many cases of hysteria.18 Further back in the history of dynamic psychotherapy was the German physician Franz Anton Mesmer, who theorized in 1779 that the key to treating disease lay in provoking “crises” within the patient. Only by inducing successive attacks of asthma in an asthmatic person, for example, would the symptoms eventually disappear. This was a key predecessor to Freud’s emphasis on the need to “reproduce” traumatic scenes and, in turn, to Bass and Davis’s emergency stage.19 Preceding Mesmer was Father Johann Joseph Gassner, known during his life as one of Germany’s most brilliant healers. Gassner also ascribed great therapeutic significance to the crisis, but he was an exorcist, not a physician, and he believed the crisis was evidence of possession. When the Enlightenment drove the exorcist and demonic possession out of good standing, the physician and multiple personality replaced them, accounting for at least some of the ease with which MPD and recovered memory therapy in the 1980s often produced stories of satanic abuse.20
Well before Freud ever got involved, the nineteenth century also saw prolonged debates about split personalities, forgotten trauma, and the efficacy of hypnosis as a treatment for hysteria. In the 1880s the French psychologist and psychotherapist Pierre Janet (who coined the term “subconscious”) conducted experiments on a nineteen-year-old woman named Lucie, who suffered from sudden attacks of crippling terror that she could not explain. He hypnotized Lucie and discovered a second personality hidden inside her. This second personality, Adrienne, constantly relived an experience from early in Lucie’s life in which two men jumped out at her from behind a curtain as a practical joke—that was the cause of Lucie’s attacks of fear. Janet went on to theorize more generally that hysterical symptoms were caused by split parts of the patient’s personality. These personalities could be brought into the open and treated via hypnosis, at which point the therapist could guide the patient through age regression to recover the original trauma. Janet believed it was necessary to heighten psychological tension within the patient in order to make the symptoms disappear for good.21
Janet and Freud both studied at the famous Salpêtrière hospital in Paris, working at the clinic established there in 1882 by the neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot. With forty-five buildings, streets, gardens, and even its own church, the Salpêtrière was less a hospital than a small independent city, and Charcot was its philosopher-king. He was one of the most famous scientists in Europe, a status he achieved in part thanks to his flair for the dramatic. Charcot was believed to have discovered hysteria, hypnotism, and split personalities, achievements for which he was bestowed the nickname “Napoleon of Neuroses.” He published selections from his collection of rare works on witchcraft and possession under the title The Diabolical Library. He charged enormously high fees in his private practice, and he put on public demonstrations of the effects his hypnotic treatments had on the young hysterics (mostly women) who lived at the Salpêtrière.
These demonstrations attracted intensely interested crowds of fellow scientists (all, naturally, men), and Charcot’s own photographs of his patients in the midst of hysterical fits make it easy to understand why.22 The women’s poses are extraordinarily varied and interesting: sometimes playful and childlike, sometimes prone and vulnerable. They lie in beds and wear loose garments that fall away at the shoulders. Sometimes, in these beds and in these clothes, their bodies and faces contort and strain in what is unmistakably a pose of sexual arousal. Audience members could enjoy these displays while simultaneously condescending to the women who put them on. Charcot’s assistant, assenting to the widely held belief that hysterics were vain, dramatic, and often dishonest, thought these traits were just exaggerated manifestations of normal female character. “One might even say that hysterics are more womanly than other women,” he said.23 A strange atmosphere of mutual suggestion seemed to circulate among the Salpêtrière’s physicians and patie
nts.
Charcot made a big impression on the young Freud. In an obituary he wrote for the great neurologist in 1893, Freud said of Charcot’s lectures that “each . . . was a little work of art in construction and composition; it was perfect in form and made such an impression that for the rest of the day one could not get the sound of what he had said out of one’s ears.”24 In addition to the time he spent watching Charcot stage his demonstrations with the appealingly feminine hysterics, Freud also explored the contemporary scientific literature on incest, which was the subject of lively professional debate and study. Freud owned copies of works on child abuse by Paul Brouardel, chair of legal medicine at the University of Paris, and Paul Bernard, who taught at the University of Lyon. Bernard’s Sexual Assaults on Young Girls documented more than thirty-five thousand reported attacks in France between 1827 and 1870, and Bernard wrote that he was particularly “struck by the large number of cases of incest.”25 Brouardel was more reluctant to specifically assign blame to fathers, but he did remark that “sexual assaults are crimes of the home.”26 The seduction theory as eventually articulated by Freud, then, simply took up work being carried out by many European physicians and applied it to the problem of hysteria in a new way. With its belief that repressed traumas caused hysterical symptoms, its rhetorical habit of regarding women and children as interchangeably helpless, and its faith in hypnosis as a means of accessing and treating the buried memories, the seduction theory may well be the most conventionally Victorian of Freud’s ideas.