We Believe the Children

by Richard Beck

  It was not until his abandonment of the Seduction Theory, which led directly to the invention of the Oedipus complex and mature psychoanalytic thought, that Freud decisively broke with Victorian notions about the psychology of trauma. Although it is true that part of this shift involved Freud’s realization that much of what he had previously taken for accurate memories were actually fantasies of events that never occurred, it would be more truthful, as a matter of emphasis, to say that Freud discovered that his patients’ fantasies were real. Dreams, unwanted sexual or violent desires, memories that turned out to be false—Freudian psychoanalysis recognized that all of these could affect people’s interior lives in ways that were just as tangible and consequential as those exercised by external events. Casting the distinction between fantasies and memories of real events as, in a sense, unimportant of course made psychoanalysis useless in forensic terms, but that was part of the point. In ascribing so much power to mental life in its own right, psychoanalysis rebuked those theorists and physicians who insisted that symptoms of hysterical illness must have their source in some obviously traumatic life event. These physicians, Freud argued, had insufficiently credited both the complexity and the force of the mind’s responses to what happened around it. This proposition was still provoking angry objections in the late 1980s.

  Recovered memory therapists paid constant homage to the seduction theory–era Freud, but in practice they more often appeared to see themselves as latter-day Charcots. The technical signature of Freudian psychoanalysis is the therapist’s impassivity, his prohibition against endorsing or condemning his patients’ thoughts and feelings. Even the arrangement of the analyst’s office, no longer much in use but still familiar to many people via decades of New Yorker cartoons, enforced this distance, with the patient prone on a couch and the analyst seated out of the patient’s view. Recovered memory therapists, however, cultivated intimacy. This was true in the early days of “Sybil’s” dependence on Cornelia Wilbur and Michelle Smith’s marriage to her therapist, Lawrence Pazder, and it was true as recovered memory reached its peak in the late eighties and early nineties. Therapists made themselves available for frequent phone calls. The establishment of dedicated recovered memory and MPD clinics in St. Paul, Dallas, Chicago, and elsewhere—little Salpêtrières scattered across the country—ensured that doctors were in constant contact with their patients and, crucially, that patients were in constant contact with one another. The contents of the recovered memories also furthered this sense of closeness. As patients discovered they had been betrayed by their fathers, then their brothers, then their uncles and also their mothers and grandparents, the therapist began to seem the only trustworthy person left.

  Patients saw their therapists and fellow MPD sufferers as making up a kind of surrogate family, and as in most families, that involved a clear hierarchy to go along with the nurturing care. The men who ran these clinics (and it was, in fact, usually men) were patriarchs surrounded by patients who, because they invested so much energy in cultivating and communicating with their inner children, were predisposed to thinking of themselves as infantile.

  This dynamic was not subtle. Colin Ross, one of the most prominent figures in the treatment of MPD, wrote in one of his books that the disorder could best be described as “a little girl imagining that the abuse is happening to someone else,” and he liked the line so much that he used it again in a completely different passage.27 In group therapy, patients were asked to vent their anger by striking at mattresses with rubber hoses and yelling at their absent childhood tormenters. These outbursts alternated with periods spent in tears, as patients held teddy bears and curled up in the therapist’s arms. The emotionally grueling quality of these sessions sometimes ran alongside or on top of a thinly veiled and repressed eroticism that also seemed drawn from the intimacy of family life.

  The recovered memory therapist Richard Kluft, one of the founders of the International Society for the Study of Multiple Personality and Dissociation, described the experience of treatment as “exquisitely uncomfortable” for the patient.”28 And if patients expressed too many doubts about their memories, if they stepped back to wonder at the enormous gulf separating their new abuse narratives from everything they had previously known of their lives, the therapist, whether male or female, could fully inhabit the role of dad at the head of the table. One journalist attended a group therapy retreat at which a woman named Andrea wrestled with having recovered memories of her mother in a satanic cult. “I don’t know if what I’m remembering is really true!” she said. “I don’t want the memories to be true.” Her therapist, Beth, replied, “Andrea, all the wants in the world can’t change what you know. You really know inside what happened, but you spend all your energy saying, ‘No, it didn’t.’ You need to face those memories, that rage. I want you to get onto a mattress. Now.”29

  Although the popular literature on MPD tended to repeat simple versions of Freud’s ideas about trauma and the unconscious, more academic recovered memory researchers proposed an entirely different psychological mechanism by which abuse memories were pushed out of view. Whereas repression, in the classic view, involved a mind divided in the manner of an office building’s floors, with traumatic memories pushed down into the basement, these researchers favored a concept of dissociation, in which different parts of the conscious mind were sequestered off from one another like jail cells along a single corridor. The split personalities exhibited by MPD patients, in this view, were not manifestations of unconscious conflict but simply different segments of the conscious mind that would need to be integrated in order for the patient to recover. “For me,” Colin Ross wrote, “MPD demonstrates that the so-called unconscious is not unconscious at all—it is wide-awake and cognitive in nature, but dissociated.”30 Different researchers took different views on how this worked exactly. For some, dissociation and repression were distinct phenomena, only one of which could be seen at work in MPD.31 Though repression might occur in response to certain internal or external events, they argued, dissociation was the psyche’s privileged response to certain kinds of trauma.32 Others used the terms interchangeably to a certain degree, perhaps favoring one over the other most of the time.33

  These variations in the use and meaning of the terms “dissociation” and “repression” made things tricky for those trying to determine the scientific validity of the MPD therapists’ claims, but so did the history of one of the terms. Many of the last century’s most prominent psychoanalytic thinkers have claimed that repression specifically refers to forgetting that happens involuntarily, using the term “suppression” to describe situations in which a person makes a conscious effort to avoid thinking about an idea or event. But this was not Freud’s contention. He argued in one paper that “the essence of repression lies simply in turning something away, and keeping it at a distance, from the conscious,” and elsewhere he wrote that in order for hysterical symptoms to emerge, “an idea must be intentionally repressed from consciousness.”34 Of course, subsequent decades during which disciples and critics layered hundreds of new theories and objections on top of Freud’s originals significantly muddied the waters, and so it could occasionally be difficult to determine exactly what MPD researchers were claiming when the word “repression” appeared in their work. But taken as a whole, the MPD literature does make one clear and fundamental claim, which is that people sometimes respond to the experience of trauma by instantly and completely excluding those experiences from the parts of consciousness to which they normally have access. This forgetting is a reflexive, automatic event that happens involuntarily.

  So this became an important question for researchers working on cognition and memory: Did people actually forget trauma in the ways the MPD champions claimed? Some parts of this question were easier to answer than others. In cases in which people were abused, whether physically or sexually, at a very young age, forgetting does occur, although not because of psychological trauma. Scientists still disagr
ee about the mechanism behind it, but childhood amnesia, or the inability to remember almost anything at all before the ages of three or four, is one of the most well-documented phenomena in all of developmental psychology. Young children are actually very good at remembering events that occurred up to about a year in the past, but these memories almost invariably fade as children age, and many adults have no memories at all until the age of seven.35 In the hypothetical case of an adult who knows (because of adult witnesses or the preservation of documentary evidence) that he or she was abused as a two-year-old but cannot remember it, there would be no reason to cite repression as the cause.

  Cognitive psychologists have had no more success turning up evidence of traumatic repression in adults. If anything, as the research psychologist Richard McNally wrote in his book Remembering Trauma, “people remember horrific experiences all too well.” Although the kinds of stress associated with trauma can make it more difficult to remember peripheral aspects of an event (e.g., the kind of shoes worn by a mugger brandishing a gun), that is only because the victim’s attention is more intensely focused on the event’s central components (the mugger, the gun).36 Of course, such studies have built-in limitations when conducted in the laboratory, as researchers cannot ethically subject test subjects to levels of stress that would cause actual trauma.

  But field studies confirm the laboratory results. Some months after a fatal shooting, two researchers interviewed more than a dozen people who had witnessed the crime in person. Their accounts, when compared to the official version set down in police reports, turned out to be remarkably accurate, and those witnesses who were most upset by their experiences provided the most accurate accounts of all.37 Even some of the earlier feminist research on sexual abuse supported the idea that trauma did not have a negative impact on victims’ ability to remember. In 1981 the feminist psychiatrist Judith Herman published her classic work Father-Daughter Incest. The book featured interviews with forty adult victims of childhood incest, and its publication date meant that it preceded the popularization of ritual abuse and recovered memory. None of Herman’s interview subjects mentioned torture at the hands of satanic cults, and none mentioned ever forgetting what they had endured as children.38

  The child psychiatrist Lenore Terr tried to find a way around this problem. She argued that children exhibited two distinct responses to different kinds of trauma. Type I syndrome, as she called it, involved children exposed to isolated episodes of terror or violence such as shootings, robberies, and car crashes. Terr argued that children remember Type I traumas very well, and in fact they do. But Terr argued that children dealt very differently with Type II traumas like repeated abuse at the hands of a family member or teacher. These traumas occurred regularly as part of a child’s daily life, and Terr believed it was this very regularity that caused the child to begin to respond to his or her experiences with self-hypnosis, denial, and other techniques that pushed memories out of consciousness.

  Of the two types, it was the second that constituted Terr’s original contribution to the field, but the scientific literature does not offer much supporting evidence for its existence. She interviewed twenty children who had been abused before the age of five and concluded that those exposed to Type II trauma had a harder time remembering what happened to them. However, the three children who were completely unable to articulate abuse memories were all victims of abuse that ended before they were two and a half years old, falling well within the window of normal childhood amnesia.39 Studies have also failed to turn up Type II syndrome in the field. Child soldiers, Holocaust victims, and children raised in conditions of extreme neglect or violence all remember their experiences very well.

  It does sometimes happen that a person molested at a young age will not think about the event for many years, only to find his or her memory rushing back in response to some stimulus—say, a scene in a TV crime drama. In 1993 the child abuse and trauma researchers John Briere and Jon Conte published the results of a study in which they asked 450 people, all of whom said they had been sexually abused as children, whether they had experienced periods of time during which they were unable to remember the abuse. More than half of Briere and Conte’s subjects said yes, and their study became a touchstone for advocates of recovered memory therapy.40 As Richard McNally pointed out, however, the question at the paper’s heart—“Was there ever a time when you could not remember the forced sexual experience?”—makes no sense. “An affirmative answer,” McNally wrote, “implies that the subject has spent a period of time unsuccessfully trying to remember having been abused. But if a person has repressed all memories of abuse, on what basis would he or she attempt to remember it in the first place?”41

  It is more likely that those who answered the researchers’ question affirmatively meant that there had been periods of time during which they simply did not think about their abuse, and as a number of subsequent studies have clarified, that is perfectly normal. A team of researchers that included Elizabeth Loftus—an important figure in the study of child suggestibility in forensic interviewing—found that periods during which adults did not remember or think about their childhood abuse can largely be explained by the children not finding their molestation to be traumatic at the time.42 Lacking an understanding of sexuality and its implications, these young victims of nonviolent sexual abuse, mostly involving fondling and other kinds of touching, tended to see their experiences as having either a slightly negative emotional impact or none at all. Only in adulthood, when those victims recalled their experiences and came to understand them as abusive, did the memories become a regular matter of conscious thought. This coming to awareness of the abusive nature of one’s own childhood can be a traumatic experience in its own right. Family dynamics that once seemed benign or a relative’s habit of avoiding certain visits might take on ominous new undertones, and such delayed trauma, were it to set in, would obviously merit treatment. But the long effort to find evidence that the emergence of such an awareness implies the years-long repression of earlier wounds came up empty. The most sensible conclusion remains that it was not the psychological effects of trauma occurring at the time but the very absence of those effects that made it possible to forget that the abuse had taken place.

  Proponents of recovered memory ceded no ground in response to this body of work, citing dozens of studies allegedly providing strong evidence for their account of traumatic amnesia. A close look at many of these studies, however, makes it clear that they do not say what recovered memory advocates think they do. Some of these misreadings were made possible by a single clause in the DSM-III. In the fourth subsection of the diagnostic criteria for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, the authors list “memory impairment or trouble concentrating” as a symptom. As its pairing with “trouble concentrating” suggests, “memory impairment” refers not only to the possibility of traumatic amnesia but also to the more prosaic kinds of memory disturbance that can follow a traumatic experience: missing appointments or forgetting friends’ birthdays. These problems are caused precisely by victims’ preoccupation with what has happened to them, not their inability to remember it. But when Cory Hammond and other recovered memory researchers came across a study in which a group of disaster witnesses reported memory impairment, they cited it as evidence of amnesia.43 In reality the study subjects, who had seen a series of skywalk collapses at a hotel in Kansas City, had no trouble remembering what they saw; some had made “efforts at repression,” but those efforts had failed.44

  Freud developed the seduction theory out of an earlier theory’s failure. The work he conducted on hysteria with Josef Breuer convinced Freud that hysterical symptoms were caused by repressed memories of sexual trauma that took place after the onset of puberty, and that hypnotic abreaction of these memories would alleviate the patient’s symptoms. Again and again, however, Freud’s patients failed to improve after recovering their memories, or Freud would determine that the memories lacked sufficient traumatic force
to produce the kinds of hysterical symptoms he encountered. Freud could have abandoned traumatic repression in the face of these results, but he was at a crucial early stage in his intellectual career, when it is sometimes common to believe that a setback is best overcome with even more ambitious flights of intellectual daring. So he said the repressed trauma must really lay further back in the patient’s past, not during adolescence but rather before it.

  A similar impulse appears in the recovered memory researchers’ tortured attempts to prove that the available scientific evidence provided them with more support than it actually did. Of the many flawed and inaccurate interpretations put forward, one stands out as a gross misrepresentation of the source material. In 1985 a researcher named Stephen Dollinger studied thirty-eight children who were playing a soccer game when lightning struck and killed one of their teammates. He found that although many of the children exhibited mild to moderate emotional effects in the wake of the disaster, including sleep disturbances and separation anxiety, particularly during storms, two of the thirty-eight had no memory of the event whatsoever. The research group that included Cory Hammond cited this fact as evidence that traumatic amnesia was more common than mainstream psychiatry was willing to admit.45 What they did not mention was that the two children in question had also been struck by the bolt, which knocked them both completely unconscious.46 None of the other children reported any memory issues, though some became reluctant to play soccer.