by Richard Beck
Like their patients, therapists found the high drama of recovered memory work intoxicating. “Like a play, novel, or movie,” Colin Ross wrote, “there is a rise and fall in the action of therapy, and interludes of different intensity are required.”47 The outlaw status of their project, held at a wary arm’s length by mainstream psychiatry until, all of a sudden, it wasn’t, also made it easy for therapists to think of themselves along the lines of nineteenth-century psychiatric pioneers whose genius would eventually induce an awed respect in society at large. “Like Janet,” Ross wrote, describing the power plays in which he engaged a patient’s alter personalities, “I am willing to exploit the vanity of the demons.”48 Ross had such confidence in his therapeutic powers that he even unleashed them on unsuspecting readers of his academic MPD monograph. After describing therapy as a “mysterious ritual” and outlining his methods for preparing a patient to undergo hypnosis, Ross set down the following paragraph:49
And now as you sit reading this book you begin to notice that your body is a little more relaxed and warm and comfortable than usual, as you listen to the sound of my voice. You aren’t disturbed by any other thoughts or sensations, you’re able just to focus on the words, understand their meaning, and feel yourself calm and comfortable and relaxed. And the more you read, the deeper and deeper you go into this pleasant, relaxed, natural state of calmness and tiredness, as you listen to the sound of my voice. This feeling of calmness and relaxation becomes stronger and stronger with every word you read, until, at the beginning of the next paragraph you will be in a deep hypnotic state, perfectly relaxed and calm. This will last for 30 seconds or until you read to the end of the paragraph, whichever comes first. Then you will be wide awake, fresh, and alert, feeling calm and confident and ready to continue reading.50
Two paragraphs later Ross acknowledged that readers might “have reservations about the ethics of including such a hypnotic induction in a book,” which he brushed aside with the assertion that reading is by definition a hypnotic practice. “For me,” he wrote, “writing induces an even deeper trance state than reading.”51
Recovered memory therapists judged the magnitude of their achievements by the extremity and complexity of the cases they uncovered. The line of thinking seemed to be that although a patient with three or four alters and a history of harsh physical punishment could be detected by any reasonably skilled practitioner, only a therapist with real vision and courage would be able to suss out the hundreds of alters produced by a childhood of satanic ritual abuse. Accordingly the number and variety of alters discovered in treatment increased, as did the extent of the abuse that supposedly brought them into being. Therapists discovered animal alters, alien alters, dead alters, plant alters (trees), and angel alters. The abuse narratives began to include cult rituals, forced abortions, murders, rape, and cannibalism. Whether therapists really believed, deep down, in the reality of these stories is a tricky issue. One group of psychiatrists that included the prominent recovered memory advocates Roberta Sachs and Bennett Braun published a paper in which they certainly appeared to take patients’ allegations of ritual abuse at face value, but they later claimed to have been simply documenting these stories, not endorsing them.52 The latter claim looks like a cover for the mistake of having made the former, but the former was also a cover that justified recovered memory’s extreme therapeutic techniques, which included administering huge doses of Sodium Pentothal and other barbiturates. It was certainly in these therapists’ interest to behave as though there really were groups of Satanists out in the world splitting children’s minds apart. It justified their exercising extraordinary amounts of control over their patients’ lives. One Texas institute for dissociative disorders censored patients’ mail for the ostensible purpose of screening out coded messages from the cult. That institute also told a patient she would have to prove the cult no longer presented a safety risk before they would grant her discharge request.53
Popular books on recovered memory often included lengthy symptom checklists that readers could use to determine whether they were likely to be harboring a repressed history of abuse. Taken as a whole, these checklists encompassed an impressively wide range of unpleasant and upsetting experiences. An interest in religions or a preference for baggy clothes suggested childhood abuse, as did promiscuity, celibacy, workaholism, breast lumps, trouble sleeping, fear of closets, fear of coffins, alertness, vagueness, gambling, and dozens of other troubles. Although the wide symptomatic net cast by recovered memory obviously helped therapists to grow their practices, it may be more important to consider what these checklists told patients about themselves and the society they inhabited.
In 1992 Debbie Nathan attended and reported on a four-day retreat organized by the group Incest Survivors Anonymous (ISA). She sat through group sessions, listening to the three dozen women in attendance, and she noticed interesting currents of guilt and doubt running underneath the tales of ritual abuse. “Ritual-abuse survivor Cathy,” Nathan wrote, “fingered a crucifix as she recited, in rote tone, details of eating the livers of newborn babies.” But Nathan heard real emotion flood Cathy’s voice when she described an affair undertaken with a married man more than two decades earlier, when she was a student. “I was a virgin then,” Cathy said, “at least I thought I was until I remembered the cult stuff recently.” Cathy fell in love, had sex, and became pregnant. The man refused to divorce his wife. “So I had an abortion. I killed my own baby! My own baby. The worst thing I’ve ever done.” The ritual abuse story that came much later amplified Cathy’s sense of guilt about what happened (by replacing a single aborted fetus with multiple cannibalized newborns) and mitigated the extent to which she was to blame—she had not chosen to give up her virginity; the cult had taken it from her.
Some women clearly did need some version of the help ISA provided. Nathan listened as one survivor described how her father began to climb into bed and fondle her while her mother was in the hospital. When she finally told the family what happened, her father said she had wanted it, and then her brothers beat her up. Another woman talked about her army colonel father who beat her and her sisters for saying it was wrong for President Nixon to bomb Cambodia. The beatings stopped when the sisters said they supported the president. These stories, Nathan wrote, “were so prosaic in their detail that they could be nothing but real.” But then there was Donna, a thirty-something woman with a good job and a happy social life. The issues she described sounded like the kind of thing that would send any reasonable adult to a psychotherapist. “She suffered from ‘relationship’ problems,” Nathan wrote. “She was supercompetitive and a control freak.” Donna’s therapist assured her, despite her complete lack of memories, that these problems stemmed from incest, and now, at the retreat, Donna was tentatively trying to live up to her therapist’s expectations. One time she had walked in on her father having sex with his secretary; she told Nathan her father had probably done the same to her.54
What was the source of this pressure that asked women to shoehorn all of their different experiences into a rigidly generic father-daughter incest narrative? Some part of the answer can be found in the legislation that extended the statute of limitations for adult survivors of childhood abuse only if the abuse had been sexual. Those laws did nothing to help adults who may have wanted to bring suit against their parents for physical abuse or neglect, and this created an incentive for women to talk about their childhood traumas in terms of sexual abuse regardless of their actual experience. Delayed discovery laws then created an additional incentive for plaintiffs to claim they had completely repressed memories of the abuse until recently. Plaintiffs who said they had always remembered what happened to them, that what they recently discovered was not the abuse itself but the psychological harm it caused them, had a harder time winning a favorable verdict. Finally, because there is no point in bringing a civil suit against someone who simply does not have much money, the suits that did wind up in front of a judge and in fron
t of the media usually involved upper-middle-class families, who were also usually white. That this archetypal narrative of incest, trauma, repression, and recovery, all taking place in the context of middle-class family life, did not match the vast majority of abuse experiences that people actually had did very little to weaken its appeal. The narrative was a kind of key, and women who would or could not make use of this key found that the doors to social and legal recognition and aid remained closed.
The infantilization of adult women has long been one of patriarchy’s most effective tools. The ostensible meaning of the classic Victorian expression “Women and children first” is that society values those groups in a special way, but it also lumps them together as helpless victims in need of saving by men, who hoist them into lifeboats as the ship goes down. Recovered memory therapy emerged in the midst of an intense, reactionary antifeminism that sought to undo many of the changes of the 1960s and early 1970s. Feminism’s legislative momentum was halted entirely, as the long push to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment stalled in the early eighties, and the cultural climate reflected the revived prestige of domesticity and traditional family life. As the journalist Susan Faludi pointed out in her book Backlash, recovered memory guides shared space on bookstore shelves with a deluge of self-help titles designed to persuade women to reconcile themselves to the old sex roles: Women Who Marry Down and End Up Having It All; No More Lonely Nights: Overcoming the Hidden Fears That Keep You from Getting Married; and If I’m So Wonderful, Why Am I Still Single?55 What made these titles such powerful instruments of the decade’s reactionary politics was their recognition, first, that political change is partly a matter of psychology and, second, that it is frightening to be suddenly granted new freedoms. They played on the anxious underside of the realization that women no longer had to marry to achieve social respectability: a fear of dying childless and alone after a lifetime of empty individualistic hedonism. Multiple Personality also dramatized a kind of nightmare version of women’s liberation. If feminism had won for at least some women—white and middle class, the same demographic in which MPD appeared—the power to choose from among different kinds of social roles, MPD recast that victory as a grave error. What is an MPD patient but a woman who cannot choose between the different roles available to her and whose struggle to do so ruins her life? Along with the self-help titles and magazine cover stories asking whether women could “have it all” (they couldn’t), recovered memory reimagined the previous two decades of political change as brutal traumas from which women needed to heal. The goal was to make women too insecure and too anxious to make use of any of the freedoms they had won for themselves. (The first entry on a list of repressed memory symptoms from 1992: “Do you have trouble knowing what you want?”)56
Of course, some recovered memory advocates saw their work as a feminist project, and there is a long line of conservative objection to such victimization-based appeals for political change, running from Janet down to the pundit George Will, that condescends to self-identified victims as vain attention seekers. But the women who entered into recovered memory were not frustrated hack actresses looking to use the psychiatrist’s office as a stage; they were adults in distress who needed help with very normal adult problems: depression, divorce, isolation, job loss. Recovered memory therapy struck an unfair bargain with these women. It said, Tell us that you are a victim and behave like a child, and you will be listened to—or if not listened to, then at least pitied. Refuse to play this role, refuse to identify yourself as mentally ill, or insist that your distress is a normal adult’s response to the people around you or the conditions in which you live, and you will receive no assistance at all.
So despite the feminist rhetoric of books like The Courage to Heal, recovered memory therapy rested on a chauvinistic vision of female weakness that was perfectly in keeping with the reactionary times. From the anticrime campaigns that began to fill the country’s prisons to the day care cases that helped expand prosecutorial powers in state governments, victimization was turned to many conservative political ends in the 1980s. Recovered memory was part of this political shift. An earlier feminist analysis of incest and abuse had placed blame squarely on the nuclear family as an institution, as a way of distributing power among small groups that allowed fathers and husbands to exercise dangerous amounts of control over their children and wives. But recovered memory discarded this argument and replaced it with horror-movie plots and a parade of traumatized child-women. The isolation these women experienced in treatment, their dependence on the therapist as a surrogate parent figure, and the unprovability of their allegations rendered them completely nonthreatening from a political point of view.
For most of the really powerful figures in recovered memory, the majority of whom were men, this was not a problem. In his book of case studies on multiple personality, Colin Ross described treating a nineteen-year-old client named Loni. According to Ross, the young woman was “attractive, wholesome, relaxed, and casually dressed. Her blond hair and hazel eyes highlighted striking cheekbones.”57 Loni claimed to have a twelve-year-old inner child personality named Julie, and when “Julie” spoke, Loni pouted her lips and put her feet in a pigeon-toed position. The description of Julie’s affect makes her sound more like a cartoon child than an actual twelve-year-old person. “Julie’s eyes and facial expression were much more animated, childlike, spontaneous, and charming than Loni’s,” Ross wrote. “The host personality, Loni, was somewhat restricted in her emotion, and was more composed and adult. Julie was charming and engaging. One’s natural response was to soothe and protect her, whereas Loni evoked a more neutral reaction.”58
Ross embarked on a course of treatment that uncovered some fifty alter personalities (many of them also children) as well as a buried history of abuse that involved ongoing paternal rape, live spiders, a “contract rape” paid for by her father and carried out by a biker in a parking lot, and ritual abuse orchestrated by her mother. For nine months, Loni’s “host” personality, which is to say her actual personality, disappeared entirely. “She became psychotic,” Ross wrote, and she would sometimes “hold her head, hallucinate, rock, and be unable to carry on a conversation.”59 In order to protect her from further abuse as she tried to recover, Ross and Loni arranged for her to move to Montreal, where she could live in a woman’s shelter for up to one year. Ross would stay behind. Loni planned to work with a former therapist while living in her temporary home.
But Ross perhaps did not anticipate the effect that Loni’s time away from him would have on her mind-set. Six months after moving to Montreal, she began to talk about missing her parents, and within another month or two she decided that she did not have MPD at all. Ross advised her against coming back to Winnipeg and said that if she did, he would be unable to continue working with her. She moved back anyway, and over the following three years, up until the point when Ross wrote out his case study, he did not communicate with Loni at all. Ross describes the decision to terminate Loni’s treatment as his own, and it is worth noting that he made this decision at the precise moment when Loni said she would no longer continue to present herself in therapy as a traumatized child. But there is no indication that Loni expressed any particular eagerness to continue seeing him, and in the final pages of Ross’s case study, a wounded tone begins to creep in. “The decision I made not to see Loni again was difficult,” Ross writes, “and I was tempted to try to contact her many times.” He blames part of their relationship’s breakdown on “projective identification,” which he describes as occurring “when the patient projects her feelings onto the therapist, then unconsciously engineers the situation so that the therapist actually feels the patient’s projected feelings.” Although this may have occurred, a simpler explanation is that once Loni realized she did not have MPD, she stopped wanting to see the therapist who was sure she did. Ross’s case study ends on a melancholy note that also conveys a tinge of bitterness: “I feel sad when I think of Loni in her apartment,
knowing that one of her inner children is still having intercourse with her father, probably on a weekly basis.”60
Ellen Willis, who spent the 1980s railing against mainstream feminism’s increasingly conservative focus on sexual violence and trauma, wrote, “The contradictions of contemporary American politics and culture are the product of a profound and largely unconscious psychic struggle: an ongoing clash of powerful desires for freedom and pleasure with guilt-ridden fear that such desires lead straight to license, chaos, and destruction.”61 To speak seriously of a social or cultural unconscious was as unfashionable then as it is now, and yet little else could account for the speed and eagerness with which evangelicals and disappointed feminists alike adopted MPD as a diagnosis and as a worldview, with all its attendant assumptions about the dangers of sex and the pervasiveness of trauma.
By the early 1990s MPD had fully entered the mainstream. Gloria Steinem’s up-market self-help book Revolution from Within made caring for one’s inner child a basic step toward achieving inner peace and also referred without skepticism to those women who had recovered memories of “ritual or cult abuse.”62 One year later Ms. magazine, the country’s largest feminist publication, put out an issue with the cover headline: “BELIEVE IT! Cult Ritual Abuse Exists. One Woman’s Story.” Writing under a pseudonym so as to avoid further cult persecution, the author described the satanic activities of her mother’s “otherwise ordinary middle-class family.”63 She claimed to have witnessed multiple murders, including the decapitation and cannibalization of her baby sister. Sidebars on MPD and various treatment recommendations accompanied the article, including a paragraph that warned about the effects ritual abuse might have on a victim’s ideas about sexuality. “Some survivors may not know what ‘normal’ (nonviolent) sexual behavior is,” the article said, and for this reason survivors should “never” engage in sadomasochistic sex—it would only repeat the abuse.64 At the time of publication, the author was married with two children who had “never been exposed to cult activities.” She said she was working on a novel about her experiences.