Truth in Memory
TOLSTOY famously observed that all happy families are more or less alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own particular way. Today he might revise the second part of that judgment if he were to come across families torn by memories recovered in therapy, adults’ memories of child abuse and incest perpetrated by now-aging parents, memories denied as false, impossible, incoherent, by the elders. Many of these families seem to be unhappy in almost exactly the same way. The families look and perhaps become alike because they learn a new language and a new set of emotions. Hence their stories come out sounding remarkably similar.
The media of every kind are full of these confrontations. I shall spare us the roster of court cases and media notables, and the litany of accusations and counteraccusations. I shall touch on them only because they illustrate the present-day politics of memory, and then only insofar as that comes out in connection with multiple personality. This is the saddest part of my story. At first the topic might seem titillating, at least to the voyeur in us all, but it quickly palls.
Some families have been badly hurt by ill-trained and ideologically motivated therapists. Some evils have been exposed, in some cases, by the same therapists. We hear on all sides the question, Who is right? There is no general statement about who is right. That issue must be fought out from case to case. New standards of licensing, training, and review of therapists will be developed and enforced. For those who can afford it, individual charges have to be settled in or out of court. Personally I have a strong prejudice in favor of the jury system, but the more I read of both convictions and acquittals, the less confident I am, in this or that case, that the jury decided wisely. We are left with only one sound rule of thumb. Any expert who is confident in these matters is thoroughly suspect.
Extraordinary accusations began flying everywhere when ritual and satanic child sexual abuse hit flash point in 1982. Because early trauma, especially child abuse, is the acknowledged cause of multiple personality, every event in child abuse very quickly transfers to multiplicity. The 1986 meeting of the ISSMP&D had one discussion paper on cult abuse on the program; the 1987 meeting had eleven. Sherrill Mulhern, of the Laboratory for the Study of Rumors, Myths of the Future, and Sects, located in Paris, has summarized some of these unpublished presentations.1 There was much talk of alters deliberately created by cults. They were programmed to interfere with therapy. When a patient was treated with medicine, one had to be sure that the right alter got it. A cultinduced alter would likely steal it.
Some practitioners of multiple therapy, who were also flooded by victims claiming abuse by satanic cults, could not believe their ears. George Ganaway, director of the Center for Dissociative Disorders at the Ridgeview Institute in Georgia—from which the journal Dissociation is distributed—was the first to sound the alarm in print. He wrote, in 1989, that almost half the patients in his clinic and many more elsewhere in North America “are reporting vividly detailed memories of cannibalistic revels, and extensive experiences such as being used by cults during adolescence as serial baby breeders for ritual sacrifices.”2
Satan had become the star of American television talk shows. Geraldo Rivera gave major prominence to satanic rituals in 1988, and the TV tabloids reveled in them. Victims appeared on-screen, backed up by their therapists, to tell amazing tales. According to Ganaway, the Cult Crime Impact Network estimated that if the reports are correct, then a secret network of satanists spanning the United States is conducting fifty thousand ritual murders a year.
This ferment created a problem for the multiple movement. Multiple personality had thrived in a climate of consciousness-raising about child abuse and had been legitimated by the etiology that it suggested. In the early days, as claims to vicious abuse became increasingly credible, the multiple movement felt vindicated. When multiples recalled incest, their recollections were not only believed but encouraged. An eclectic therapy evolved, in which alters were elicited in order to remember and then work through childhood trauma. The traumas were taken to be historical fact, not reworked fantasy. Then, as the child abuse movement developed a ritual abuse wing, patients increasingly recalled terrifying tales of cults. The instinct of the therapist was to believe, for belief in shocking revelations had been the right strategy in the past. Yet the stories seemed to become increasingly impossible. The movement was threatened with polarization, even schism. One side, by and large the populist one, cried, “We told you to believe the children! Now you must believe the alters!” The other side retorted, “Stop—this stuff has to be fantasy!” Often religious difference lay near the surface of the argument. Believers tended to style themselves conservative Christians, that is, fundamentalist Protestants, while the skeptics tended to be secular in orientation.
The resultant level of rhetoric was pretty mind-numbing. Credulity about stories provided by alters was compared to a sort of reverse transference: the therapist was too emotionally committed to what an alter said, and had lost all critical faculties. On the other hand, those who believe in the stories about cults say that the disbelievers are afraid of hard truths. “MPD patients’ descriptions of extraordinary sadistic and prolonged experiences of satanic ritual abuse would seem to be peculiarly vulnerable to therapists’ self-protective incredulity.”3
There was panic in the air. In an editorial in Dissociation, Richard Kluft pleaded for moderation, but he acknowledged that powerful emotions were at work. He also raised the stakes by printing a comparison that I find rather odious. He noted that one party refers to Nazis and the holocaust, asking, “Should he or she be silent, emulating the ‘good Germans’ who did not speak out about the atrocities in their midst, and by his or her silence become a facilitator?” The other side, disgusted by such rhetoric, countered with “mass hysteria,” “present-day witch-hunt,” and the like.4 In an ISSMP&D newsletter, Catherine Fine, the president for 1991, wrote, “How we deal with the ritualistic abuse issue will be one of our tests. This issue has the ability to strengthen our organization as we negotiate the necessary steps to growth, but it also has the possibility of being a divisive—or even lethal element.”5 Lethal: I unkindly compare multiple personality to a parasite that needs a host; the host in recent times has been child abuse. A parasite can kill itself by feeding on a weak part of its host, killing the host, and thereby killing itself. Ganaway almost said as much. He thought that uncritical acceptance of memories of satanic abuse not only imperiled the credibility of multiple personality but put research on child abuse in general at risk:
In the wake of the current wave of extensive, incredible, often unverifiable abuse accounts, however, therapists who continue to feel compelled to suspend their critical judgment in active support of the veridicality of all their patients’ reconstructed traumatic memories may be placing the MPD field in particular and research on child abuse in general at risk…. Unless scientifically documented proof is forthcoming, patients and therapists who validate and publicly defend the unsubstantiated veracity of these reports may find themselves developing into a cult of their own, validating each others’ beliefs while ignoring (and being ignored by) the scientific and psychotherapeutic community at large.6
Rumors were flying. Early in 1992 Frank Putnam asked the newly founded False Memory Syndrome Foundation to help him track down one of these. Readers of the FMS Foundation Newsletter were to report whether they had come across the following statement, and if so, where: “Dr Putnam of the NIMH has found that 20% to 50% of multiple personality disorder patients have histories of Satanic ritual abuse.”7 I understand that Putnam did not find that a high proportion even had memories (let alone true histories) of satanic ritual abuse. Hence we have to wonder about clinicians who did elicit such memories. Consider Ganaway himself, opposed to the historical truth of such memories though he may be. He stated in mid-1993 that he had treated about 350 patients for dissociative disorders, between 100 and 150 of whom had memories of satanic cult abuse.8 Ganaway observed that other workers encounter a comparable proportion of stories of abduction by aliens, but no cult abuse survivors, whereas he meets no alien abductees. One possibility is that the cults are active in Georgia and the aliens in Massachusetts. Another is that the consulting clinician has a great deal to do with the form these memories take—even when that selfsame clinician is outspoken in denouncing those very memories.
The division within the multiple movement largely conformed to existing status divisions. The skeptics tended to be psychiatrists, while an astonishingly large, or at any rate vocal, proportion of the rank and file were believers. Two therapists from southern California assert: “Our own experience indicates that there may be a very high rate of ritual abuse among multiples. Of the population we are most familiar with, which includes our clients and those of our colleagues, two-thirds may have been involved in ritual abuse as children.”9 As soon as satanic abuse was out in the open there was the inevitable multobiography, Suffer the Child.10 Here the multiple has more than four hundred personalities, and her illness was caused by horrendous cult abuse in which her mother played a major role. The Exorcist (1973) and Exorcist II (1977) were movies intended to scare you and doubtless had a significant role in the development of ritual abuse concerns, but they are just stagy compared to what happens to this supposedly real-life victim. Her husband was a strict fundamentalist Christian; she went to doctors secretly because he did not believe in them. But a meeting with Sizemore (“Eve”) was what turned her around. It must not be thought that the radical Protestant denominations are necessarily uncritical. One autobiography of satanic abuse was withdrawn by its publisher after an exposé that won an award from the Evangelical Christian Press Association, although it was then reissued in Louisiana by another publisher.11
Some psychiatrists did go along with the extreme stories and then changed their minds. Thus George Fraser published a paper about the full gamut of baby-breeders and baby or fetal sacrifice. “The child is subjected to every sort of sexual perversion known to mankind” in the satanic churches of sedate Ottawa.12 Fraser soon changed his mind and very much regretted having published the paper. Another group of four psychiatrists, including Roberta Sachs and Bennett Braun, described thirty-seven patients who reported ritual abuse in childhood.13 Their paper certainly sounds as if they believed their patients, but upon challenge they said they were just reporting what their patients said.14 Among movement psychiatrists, Putnam made the most forthright statement on the topic, calm, measured, and forceful. Speaking in 1992, he referred to “allegations by some MPD patients that they are the victims of abuse involving sexual torture, human sacrifice and cannibalism by international religious cults worshipping Satan.” The allegations, whether by multiples or others, are, he said, typically based on memories recovered in therapy. “Despite almost a decade of sensational allegations, no independent evidence has emerged to corroborate these claims.”15
The ISSMP&D set up a task force, headed by Kluft, to negotiate peace between cult-believers and cult-skeptics. Kluft may have decided that peacemaking was impossible. At any rate he resigned without calling the working group together for a meeting. One astute move was made during this period. Satanic ritual abuse had acquired an instant acronym, SRA. Now satanism, in itself, is not illegal. In the United States, it is probably protected by the guarantees of freedom of religion in the Bill of Rights. Hence satanic ritual abuse was hardly a charge that could be prosecuted in court. SRA turned into sadistic ritual abuse.16 The move to “sadistic abuse” may hint at a return to something more old-fashioned. What is sadism here but plain old extreme cruelty, cruelty inflicted with the deliberate intention of satisfying nonstandard desires? Are we seeing a return to older roots, namely, cruelty to children?
Probably not. The English language has not yet been exhausted; we now have “abuse within a malevolent context.”17 I do not foresee any shortage of future material with such titles as Other Altars: Roots and Realities of Cultic and Satanic Ritual Abuse and Multiple Personality Disorder.18 As for legal technicalities, works like this grant that “the ritual aspect was not introduced in court, but was clearly indicated by the account of the victims.”19 For the converted, this assertion means that these things were “really” evidenced, even proved, in court. For the skeptics, it means the opposite. The only systematic public inquiry on these matters took place in Great Britain. The committee gathered information over three years, and their findings were published in June 1994. The “defining characteristic” of satanic or satanistic rites that include torture, forced abortion, human sacrifice, cannibalism, and bestiality is that “the sexual and physical abuse of children is part of rites directed to magical or religious objectives.” The committee investigated eighty-four cases in which such satanic abuse had been publicly claimed and found no evidence whatsoever. Yet they had no doubt that in many cases children had been abused in more mundane ways.20
Psychiatrists such as Putnam, and scholars such as Mulhern, are right to insist that no case of satanic ritual abuse has been proven. It is essential for therapists to listen to their patients, and to let them express their fears and thoughts. But it would be a grave mistake for any therapist to believe memories of such events without conclusive independent corroboration. It is wicked for a therapist to encourage a patient to believe such fears as fact until the facts can be independently established at the level of the judicial standard: beyond any reasonable doubt.
To fence-sit on such hot issues would be cowardice, but since my own opinion on the existence of satanic ritual abuse is not founded on hard work, I shall state it only in a personal note.21 As for the fables of worldwide satanic conspiracy, they are, to speak strictly, incredible. That is, it is impossible to give them any credence on the basis of available evidence. The stories that were spreading like wildfire from place to place all sound the same. We are observing the powerful contagion of panicky rumors. The sociology of such rumors is a fascinating study with dreadful practical overtones. Nevertheless, I do not find the countercry of witch-hunt very helpful. Conspiracy and witch-hunt are mirror images, so far as explanations go. When it comes to rhetorical parrying, comparisons to witch-hunts are all too quickly neutralized, because people convinced that vicious cults and rituals are all around us produce abbreviated populist sketches of similar goings-on in the past.22 Mulhern has drawn important parallels between the recent satanic scare and fifteenthcentury mass panics about witches or demons.23 Her analogies are useful because they are backed by a serious historical understanding. Casual invocation of witch-hunts by people who know nothing of the witch craze of the past is worthless.
One recent item of the satanism agenda is grotesque and should be discredited: programming. It has close ties to some models of multiple personality. The cult programs the child or adult to respond to triggers—a telephone call, a flashing light, a playing card, black clothing. These triggers make an alter come out. The alter is a cult member, cult slave, cult spy, or cult killer. A subdued bank teller suddenly becomes a cult member and works at plots that interest the cult. Or she reports back to the cult, telling when the psychiatrist is probing into the cult. The cult-alter lies or misleads, bullying the bank-teller host so that no secrets will be exposed. Malicious or persecuting alters are deliberate creations of the cult and are ready to be switched on for offensive or defensive action; they were probably preprogrammed when the victim was a child.
Programming is a weird brew of old and new. It draws on the old hypnotism threat of a century and more ago. There was a deep-seated fear that innocent people could be hypnotized into committing heinous crimes in response to a signal arranged by the hypnotist. This notion permeates the psychiatric journals as well as the popular press during the years 1870–1910. Then there is the Pavlovian theory of conditioned responses. Next is a 1962 cold war movie, The Manchurian Candidate, in which evil Chinese and worse Russians (from the Pavlov Institute in Moscow) use drugs and hypnotism to program an American sergeant captured in Korea to commit murder. Pauline Kael, who was for many years the New Yorker’s film critic, called the film daring, funny, far-out: “It may be the most sophisticated political satire ever made in Hollywood.”24 Outside the Big Apple they don’t see things that way. The film is regularly mentioned in far-flung workshops for therapists. Even the standard reference to a playing card as a trigger for programming alters is taken straight from the Richard Condon novel on which the movie was based.25 Then came the Moonies, unhappy and typically idealistic young people, lacking direction, lacking love, and often lacking powers of critical thinking, who fell under the influence of the Reverend Moon. Not so long ago it was the current wisdom that their families should employ professional “deprogrammers” to reclaim their children. This bundle of confused notions is then merged with the idea of computer programming to produce a smooth fantasy that has no resemblance to anything ever encountered in real life. It is comfortably accepted by all too many therapists. I’m not just saying that we have no evidence for cult programming—I’m saying that nothing resembling a systematic and reliable technology of programming has ever been witnessed in the history of the human race.
A brief account of programming lore may be useful. A two-day fee-charging workshop held in March 1994 was titled “Overcoming the Shadows of Ritual Abuse”; the facilitator was a regionally well-known therapist and expert in ritual abuse, herself a survivor; the participants consisted of thirty therapists, all women, and one observer.26 The programming segment of the workshop began with the statement that children dissociate a lot. When they are abused, they dissociate more. Alters produced for coping can be adopted and manipulated by cult members. The Manchurian Candidate was invoked as an instructive video on the power of programming—but cults, it was stressed, are more insidious than communists. Triggers are built into early abuse, starting when babies are exposed to sounds, shapes, or colors during abuse. That is why such distinctly colored and shaped objects as playing cards can be so effective later. After infancy programming methods include sleep deprivation, induced confusion about time, drugs, hypnosis, degradation, electroshock. Programs include self-injury or self-mutilation, which is induced to stop confession during therapy. Self-harm may also take the form of anorexia or bulimia: eating disorders are programmed. A victim may be programmed to commit suicide if she begins to expose the cult to her therapist. An alter may be created with the specific role of reporting back to the cult about what other alters are doing or noticing. Another alter may be programmed to force the victim to check in and get reprogrammed. You may be programmed to have nightmares, to avoid people, to be silent, or even to tell the therapist that all this ritual abuse stuff is a bunch of silly rumors to prevent her probing deeper.
Notice the air of what, to abuse psychiatric terminology, might be called batty narcissistic paranoia. The therapists in the workshop were learning that the cults are out to get them, either indirectly, by interfering with therapy, or directly, by getting patients to harm therapists. Many more cautious members of the multiple movement have stated that bizarre memories elicited in therapy are not strictly true but are ways in which a patient can shield herself from the grim reality that it was her immediate family that abused her. The abuse was real, but cloaked in fantasy.27 There is a halfway stage to that opinion among the cult-therapists, that many of the victims received cult abuse from members of their own families.
Ganaway was right. With so many bizarre events coming out of recovered memory therapies—and so many silly theories going into them—recovered memories in general were cast in doubt. Many therapists encouraged confrontation after a client came to recall abuse by family in childhood. By 1990 it became a fixed doctrine, in some quarters, that the client must break with the family. Many accused parents could not believe what was happening. The alleged memories were simply false, they said, developed in the course of therapy, just as dubious as alien abduction. And so after several months of intense activity the False Memory Syndrome Foundation was established in Philadelphia in March 1992.
The foundation is a banding together of parents whose adult children, during therapy, recall hideous scenes of familial child abuse. Its mission is to tell the world that patients in psychotherapy can be brought to seem to remember horrible events of childhood that never happened. Distressed thirty-somethings (and up) believe that they were abused by parents or relatives long ago. But, urges the foundation, many of the resulting accusations and subsequent family chaos result not from past evils but from false memories engendered by ideologically committed therapists.
The foundation first became known by word of mouth, along with a little reporting. It has now furnished feature stories for all the significant media in North America. By coincidence I encountered it early in its career; it may be useful to report how the rhetoric has gone from the start (it is still exactly the same today). The first major daily newspaper in North America to publicize the foundation at length was the Toronto Star, in mid-May 1992. The Star is a middlebrow daily with a substantial market between the relatively highbrow Globe and the tabloid Sun. The headline for the opening story was WHAT IF SEXUAL ABUSE MEMORIES ARE WRONG? The third day’s heading was THERAPIST TURNED PATIENT’S WORLD UPSIDE DOWN. The series ran to about ninety column inches of text, plus ample headlining, some photographs, and a short item accompanying the second installment, printed in a pink box, PSYCHOTHERAPY UNREGULATED IN CANADA. A Philadelphia phone number was given, and about four hundred readers of the Star called at once.28
The effect of publicity like this is remarkable. The foundation’s newsletter tabulates the number of calls it has received, and breaks down member “families” by region. In April 1992, it recorded 2 Ontario families. In June, after the story broke, the province of Ontario had more paid-up families (71) than any American state except the home base, Pennsylvania (97). The most populous state in the union, California, was way down (40). The next month Ontario rose to 84 subscribing families and stayed there for the rest of the year. After the San Francisco Chronicle broke the news in northern California, membership in that state jumped to 315. The January 1994 newsletter announced that 10,000 families had contacted the foundation, and 6,007 were members. California (928) had three times as many as the runner-up, Pennsylvania (302). The big membership surges can be identified with daily newspapers rather than television shows on the topic.
Ten days after running its series, the Star gave equal prominence and fifty-two inches of text to a reply by Sylvia Fraser, whom the paper styled “noted author” and “incest survivor”: “DESPERATELY WANTING not TO BELIEVE.”29 Fraser is a widely read novelist who has also written an auto-multobiography.30 In the reply she summarized the effect of disbelief on incest victims. “The truth can plunge them into a lonely chaos and terror.” The second page featured a photo of a sad old man captioned “SIGMUND FREUD: Father of psychoanalysis likely was molested as a child.” More than half of the text is given over to the story made famous by Jeffrey Masson, that in mid-1897 cowardly Freud abandoned his 1893 theory that hysteria was caused by what we now call childhood sexual abuse. In the newspaper Fraser drew not on Masson but on an earlier, and insightful, psychological study of Freud by Marianne Krüll, who argued that Freud gave up the seduction theory at his father’s funeral, 25 October 1896, where he closed his father’s eyes.31 As Fraser has it (she refrains from mentioning that she is referring to a dream of Freud’s, reported by Freud himself), “the last service Freud rendered his father was to close his [Sigmund’s] eyes to Jacob [Freud]’s sexual abuse of him [Sigmund].”
The False Memory Syndrome Foundation makes two important rhetorical moves. First, it distances itself from custody disputes between divorcing parents and says it is concerned only to heal families that have been torn apart by false memories. “Family” is a key word; indeed members of the foundation were first put in two classes, “families” and “professionals.” Now there is an additional category: “retractors,” people who in therapy denounced their families but now abjure the charges. Second, the experts on repressed memories of abuse, often called when a case goes to law, are trumped with the word “syndrome.” False memory itself is medicalized, thereby demanding a new type of expert. Sylvia Fraser, at least in a medium like the Star, cannot reply with the self-evident but subtle retort, “Who says this is a syndrome? Your use of the word ‘syndrome’ is a piece of rhetoric, not psychiatry.”32 The less aggressive British version of the foundation has called itself the False Memory Society.
The American foundation was set up by Pamela Freyd. The Freyd family has had more than its share of problems; according to Freyd herself, writing in her own newsletter, the December 1993 issue of Philadelphia magazine ran a cover story about them titled “The Most Dys-functional Family in America.”33 I avoid issues of personality, but I have to mention two pieces of writing. Pamela Freyd was driven to establish her foundation because her daughter Jenifer had broken with the parents after intensive therapy. Pamela Freyd circulated a highly personal description, initially published under the pseudonym Jane Doe, and in a later version printed anonymously in an anthology titled Confabulations: Creating False Memories, Destroying Families.34 Jenifer Freyd is a professor of psychology at the University of Oregon. Her mother’s anonymous account had circulated widely and (according to Jenifer) was sent to Jenifer’s colleagues, employers, and in-laws, and to reporters for the Oregon newspapers. Jenifer Freyd then told her version of events in an appendix to a paper that she delivered at a conference in the summer of 1993.35 When artists present us with the same events told from different vantage points—Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, Akira Kurosawa’s 1951 film Rashomon—we come away enriched, improved, full of the complexity of life. The Freyd stories, read separately, are quite moving, but read consecutively in either order they leave the uncommitted bystander impoverished, unable to believe either party.
The FMS Foundation did not at once address multiple personality, but within months of the organization’s establishment the multiple personality movement was running scared. The foundation was felt as a direct threat to multiple personality. A systematic challenge to repressed and hence forgotten “memories” of early child sexual abuse could undermine the etiology of multiple personality. There was talk of a Rich, Big, (and guilty) Man who was orchestrating the whole thing. When He was exposed, the foundation would collapse. During the next few months the main attempts at damage control were driven by fear of lawsuits. The fear was well justified. A former patient is bringing suit against Bennett G. Braun for finding three hundred of her personalities and encouraging her to recall satanic ritual abuse. This occurred at Rush-Presbyterian in Chicago—site of the first MPD clinic, and home to the annual ISSMP&D conference; Braun is the former ISSMP&D president. “There’s always a good effect from attacks on professions or products,” the lawyer defending Braun against malpractice is quoted as saying; “before product liability cases, manufacturers were not as stringent as they are today.”36 Well, perhaps she is right: we are discussing a product, not the healing arts.
The False Memory Syndrome Foundation established the “FMSF Scientific and Professional Advisory Board.” This quickly attracted several avowed skeptics of multiple personality—distinguished psychiatrists such as Fred Frankel, Paul MacHugh, Harold Merskey, Martin Orne. Other board members are Elizabeth Loftus, the great critic of the idea of repressed memory of central life events; Richard Ofshe, the sociologist who has studied some of the more sensational court cases based on recovered memory; and Ernest Hilgard, his generation’s most eminent investigator of hypnotism. There are also well-known debunkers like Martin Gardner, the longtime Scientific American columnist and parapsychology-basher, and James Randi, one of the great magicians of our time, who exposes the miraculous and the spooky as plain old prestidigitation. The board draws also on a wide spectrum of concerned people of international repute.
The antimultiple psychiatrists on the board, together with families that joined the foundation, drew the attention of the staff office to the relation between memories of abuse and multiple personalty. The first annual meeting of the foundation took place at Valley Forge, a symbolic choice, in April 1993. The invited speakers did make extremely critical allusions to multiple personality. This prompted a gracious letter to the FMS Foundation Newsletter from Philip Coons, a past president of the ISSMP&D, regretting these comments in an otherwise serious conference. He insisted that MPD was a legitimate DSM diagnosis, and suggested the FMSF speak at ISSMP&D conferences, and vice versa. But aside from printing this letter and Putnam’s request for information about rumors, the newsletter made no mention of multiple personality for a year or more. There was a rebuttal of an offhand remark attributed to Kluft, but it did not mention multiple personality. Thereafter, however, it did launch out—with sharp thrusts to the jugular.
For example, Herbert Spiegel, an eminent elder psychiatrist from Columbia University, knew Sybil and was familiar with her treatment by Cornelia Wilbur in New York. The foundation newsletter drew upon an Esquire article in which Spiegel is quoted as saying that Sybil’s personalities were artifacts of treatment.37 That is powerful, given how central Wilbur is to the self-history of the multiple personality movement. For another example, the April 1994 newsletter includes a few paragraphs of a transcript of investigative reporting from a Canadian television program. It aired an hour on recovered memory, with a strong emphasis on Canadian multiple personality practitioners such as Colin Ross, Margo Rivera, and their trainees. The program includes several scenes involving Ross. In one we are shown a typescript with what looks like a title page headed “CIA MIND CONTROL”; the byline is “Colin Ross, M.D.” On the show Ross said that as far back as the 1940s the CIA took people to “special training centers where these different techniques like sensory isolation, deprivation, flotation tanks, hypnosis, various memorization tanks, virtual reality goggles, hallucinogenic drugs and so on are used on them to try and deliberately create more alternate personalities that can hold information.” Ross is recovering memories of CIA brain-meddling from his patients in therapy. The CIA knows this. That is how Ross explains the intense present criticism of the multiple movement—it is being orchestrated by the CIA.38 At Canadian meetings of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, members are told that they will be very lucky if Ross is called as an expert witness for the other side. He will be instantly discredited in front of any jury (the foundation speakers suggest) once his CIA conspiracy theories are made known.
These battles will continue to be fought out in the public arena for some time to come. The latest entrants to weigh in are two distinguished scholars, each of whom has enlisted the help of a professional writer to produce a rigorous but fiercely polemical book. Richard Ofshe is a social psychologist who has followed court cases in which an accused person has remembered bizarre and gruesome things that plainly never happened. He has studied other individuals who have not gone to court but have suffered grievously at the hands of therapists. He and his collaborator chose the title Making Monsters: False Memories, Psychotherapy and Sexual Hysteria.39
Elizabeth Loftus, a psychologist and expert on memory, has long upheld as a demonstrable fact of empirical psychology that the brain virtually never represses the memory of a profoundly important event and then reproduces it later, accurately. She and her collaborator chose the title The Myth of Repressed Memories: False Memories and Allegations of Sexual Abuse.40 Her doctrine was already being undermined (for advocates of recovered memory) by Bessell van der Kolk, director of the Trauma Center at Harvard University. Loftus, he generously told the members of the ISSMP&D, was surely right about the sorts of things that she studies, memories of isolated facts, schoolbook learning, and propositional memory in general. But she knows nothing of another kind of memory, which expresses itself not in sentences but in scenes that come whole to a trauma victim, flashbacks constituted by feelings and images.41
If only we were able to leave the experts to fight it out. If only we could forget about the very ordinary and very unhappy individuals who are caught up in this memory maelstrom. If only we could ignore the searing pain and destruction caused on the one hand by early abuse, and on the other hand by false accusations. If we could leave all that aside, then this entire morass would verge on the ridiculous. We could treat the television confessionals, pro and con, like the game shows. Unfortunately, though, out there in the audience many people are being enlisted into shoddy causes by both sides.
How did we get here, to a land where forgetting becomes so central an issue for competing ideologies? The basic confrontations seem to have nothing to do with memory. They occur on other fronts. One is outright religious: fundamentalist, evangelical, or charismatic Protestant faiths provide a fertile ground for memories of ritual abuse; wise secularism is an equally fertile ground for outraged antagonism. But even more important are competing ideologies of the family. The anthropologist Jean Comaroff has stated that the resurgence of the incest taboo is to be expected when the family itself is being challenged.42 There could hardly be a more potent alliance than incest and Satan. But why should the terrain of the confrontations be memory? The answer comes at two levels. At the lower and less inflamed level of discussion, memory is deployed because we want reasonable discourse about the family, no matter whether we want to preserve old structures or to destroy them. But since such discourse would involve us in values, and hence in what is supposed to be undebatable, “value judgments,” we turn instead to science. The only sciences tailor-made to swim on top of the sea of morality and personal values are the sciences of memory. Hence each side presents knowledge about the very nature of memory, pure scientific knowledge. But there is a second level. That comes after everything has heated up and closed in on passionate concerns, but the escape route is the same. At that level we are scared of talking about what frightens us, incest and the devil. So we turn to science, and the only science available is about memory. This is a thesis about the role of the sciences of memory. I have to show, in later chapters, that the ground for these confrontations, in terms of memory, was set up long ago, when the sciences of memory were used as a way to master the soul.
Already I have illustrated on several occasions how fact and fiction play into each other to support multiple personality. Recovered memory, however, may seem to be on its own, free of the novelist, and driven by real-life revelations. It seems as if psychology and psychiatry, from the time of Freud to the present moment, have delivered to us the very idea of recovered memory. Not so. The most disturbing flashback scene of all must be the one that comes at the end of Crime and Punishment (1866). There we read pages of wracking nightmare, indistinguishable from remembering. The feeling and tone of the successive scenes, rather than their literal content, overpower the dreamer. Is this the flashback of a victim, in this case a five-year-old girl? No. It is the molester’s flashback. It is the last event in the life of Svidrigaylov before he wakes at dawn, and walks toward the little Neva, and pulls the trigger.43
Dostoyevsky had planned the story twenty years earlier, for a novel he never completed. At that time there was to be less ambiguity than in the final version. It was to be an incident “in which a middle-aged man is lying in bed in an agreeable state between sleep and waking, when he is suddenly tormented by an indefinable feeling of mental discomfort; it proves to be the memory of a crime he had committed twenty years before, when he had violated a little girl; this he had ‘forgotten’ until now, when it chose to emerge painfully from his unconscious mind.”44 Such scenes, which in less gifted hands served gothic romances, fueled the science of pathological psychology that would be the direct line to the soul.