11

STICKS AND STONES

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me.

—familiar childhood refrain

A CNN reporter, posing as a patient and wired with a hidden video camera, walked into the office of an Ohio psychotherapist and described her symptoms. She had been depressed for about eight months, and her despondency was affecting her marriage and causing sexual problems. At the end of the first session, she was diagnosed as an incest survivor.

“It seems to me you have symptoms of someone who could have experienced sexual trauma,” the therapist said.

“Do you get many women like this?” the pseudo-patient asked, after informing the therapist that she had no memories of abuse.

“Many, many.”

“And they forget?”

“Yes, they forget. They have no idea. In fact, what you present to me is so classic I’m just sitting here blown away, actually.”

In her second session, the CNN reporter expressed bewilderment at her total lack of memory. How could she have suffered so much and forgotten every last detail?

“I mean, if something bad happened to you, I would think you would remember it,” she said.

“You’re right, you’re right,” the therapist answered. “If something bad happens, you really remember it. But if something too bad happens to you, so bad that you can’t cope with it, you forget it.”

The CNN special segment titled “Guilt by Memory” represented a growing skepticism in the media about repressed memories of sexual abuse. “Phil Donahue,” “Sally Jessy Raphael,” “Maury Povich,” “Oprah,” “Sonya Live,” “Frontline,” “Front Page,” “48 Hours,” and “60 Minutes” featured stories questioning the reliability and authenticity of repressed memories and suggesting that therapists all over the country might be implanting false memories of abuse in their clients’ minds.

“How could you live your whole life and not remember?” Oprah asked one of her guests who claimed to have repressed memories.

When a guest on his show described her brutal memories of satanic abuse, including the ritual murder of her newborn children, Maury Povich was obviously skeptical. “If these memories are so clear and so brutal, why all of a sudden a year ago did she remember them?” he asked the audience. “What happened to all those years?”

What began as a clear-cut moral skirmish between enlightened child-abuse advocates and entrenched patriarchal forces was turning into an untidy war with ever-changing distinctions between good and evil. Suddenly therapists were accused of being the bad guys, the hired guns, the greedy, power-hungry, ideologically inspired zealots who manipulated their clients into accepting a trendy but mistaken diagnosis, creating rather than curing their patients’ psychological problems and ripping families apart. Therapists were being compared to the Salem witch-hunters and the McCarthy-era red-baiters, overturning every stone and looking under every bush in their search for a pre-identified source of evil.

Newspaper and magazine stories reflected the skeptical trend (which therapists were calling “the backlash”). Journalist Debbie Nathan wrote an article for Playboy magazine, detailing her experiences while attending a four-day marathon retreat for survivors of sexual abuse, physical abuse, emotional abuse and neglect. On the first morning, three dozen women clutching teddy bears or other “cuddly toys” crowded together with six therapists “in a room furnished only with mattresses.” On the mattresses were thick telephone books; survivors were instructed to stand or squat on the mattresses and flail away at the telephone books, which represented their abusers, with rubber hoses.

Most of the women introduced themselves as incest survivors or satanic ritual abuse victims. When it was “Donna’s” turn, she calmly identified herself as a survivor of emotional abuse. But then “her face contorted with sobs.”

“See,” she said between tears, “I feel like I don’t deserve to be here. I’m ashamed, because I have no memories of incest.”

The head therapist, a social worker named Beth, wasn’t fazed. “How many of you have no memories of your abuse?” she asked. Eleven women raised their hands. “Look around you,” Beth told us brightly. “Look at all the people who have no memories. You all deserve to be here. No matter if you can or can’t remember. No matter what happened or didn’t.”

Soon it was time to plunge into the gory details. A veritable competition over satanic abuse began as one woman after another related her grisly stories, progressively upping the ante of horror. Andrea remembered candles used to penetrate body parts, children impaled on swords, and cannibalistic feasts. Cathy recalled murdering three babies—her own children—and then carving out their livers. Teresa claimed that her father was the king of a satanic cult practicing just a few miles down the road from the retreat; he had recently raped her, hoping to impregnate her and then sacrifice the newborn baby to Satan.1

Donna’s memories paled by comparison. “‘God,’ Donna said later. ‘People who were sexually abused in satanic cults. After that, who wants to listen to how Dad used to criticize my school work?’”

On the final day of the retreat, Donna made an announcement to the group.

“I had a dream last night,” she said. “An incest dream.” She looked calm, relieved. “Besides my father, other people were there. It felt good. But that makes me feel ashamed.”

Beth the therapist answered on cue. “Donna,” she said, “you’ve made your start. When your kids inside [i.e., inner children] are ready, more memories will come.” Everyone smiled.

Debbie Nathan’s article appeared in the October 1992 issue of Playboy. That same month the Los Angeles Times published an article featuring the skeptic’s view of repressed memories:

Increasingly, scientists are urging caution: Seemingly long-buried memories sometimes can be pure fantasy or distortions of anything bad that happened to a child.… The harshest critics say repressed memory has become a fad diagnosis, used wrongly and sometimes harmfuilly to explain all manner of psychological suffering.

And later that same month, Time magazine reported:

Experiences can be altered as they are hauled out of memory. Remembering is an act of reconstruction, not reproduction.… Critics charge that misleading questions as well as the publicity given childhood sexual abuse frequently plant the idea of molestation in the minds of susceptible children and adults, though no abuse has taken place.

“Unfounded accusations of childhood sexual abuse are tearing apart families all over North America,” a Toronto Star article announced. An accused parent was quoted as saying: “Some of these so-called therapists are doing brain surgery with a knife and fork.”

Science writer Daniel Goleman of The New York Times began his story “Childhood Trauma: Memory or Invention?” with a reference to the witch trials:

Is it Satan or is it Salem? A wave of cases in which men and women suddenly remember traumatic events from their childhood has set off a debate among psychologists who study memory and trauma.… Critics liken the wave of such cases to the hysteria and false accusations of the Salem witch trials.

“Recall experts say therapists create hysteria,” blared the San Diego Union-Tribune headline.

Psychiatrists, sociologists and memory experts from among America’s most prestigious universities who have studied the mind say many of the early memory claims touted by therapists are impossible. And they criticize the therapists, who generally have master’s or doctorate degrees in psychology, for subscribing to a theory that has no basis in scientific fact. The scientists further charge that these therapists, however well-intended, are injecting into the minds of their clients the idea that they were abused, that in many cases the abuse probably never occurred and that past abuse has become an unwarranted, umbrella explanation for mental unrest.

Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Darrell Sifford devoted a series of columns to criticizing therapists “who dig and dig and eventually … uncover what they’re digging for—even if it’s not there.” He spoke bluntly of the legal problems facing individual therapists and the potentially devastating impact on the psychotherapeutic profession. “I think that this issue of false accusations will be the Big Bang that will rock therapy in the 1990s,” he wrote.

Some of the therapists who have licenses will lose them—as professional organizations try to clean their houses. I think eventually malpractice lawsuits will be filed against some of these therapists when their patients figure out what’s been done to them.

Sifford even suggested that therapists “who dig and dig” might have serious psychological problems of their own.

I can’t help wondering what kinds of relationships these therapists have with their own parents. Were they, themselves, abused as children? Is that why they see abuse everywhere? Or is something else involved? Is it opportunism? Is it ignorance?

Therapists were understandably angered and frightened, for their reputations, their profession, even their psyches were being shredded in public. To add insult to injury, they were forced to deal with an unaffectionate nickname coined by a group of “retractors,” former patients who believed that their “memories” had been implanted in their minds by their therapists. The retractors, in a parody of the contraction “perps” for perpetrators, started calling therapists “therps.”

And so the counterattack began. In addition to denouncing skeptics as antiwoman, antichild, antivictim, right-wing reactionaries in serious denial (or “bushwhackers of the backlash,” as one prominent child-protection advocate phrased it), the therapists tried more conciliatory approaches. One of their strategies was to cross the line into enemy territory, seeking understanding and support from their critics. They hoped to win a few skeptics over to their side.

I became a primary target of their attention for several reasons: I’m a scientist, I’m a woman, and I’m a relative moderate in a battle being waged by extremists. Since I am a scientist who specializes in memory, specifically the malleability of memory, my work represented valuable booty. The therapists and child-protection advocates hoped that if they could somehow win me over, they could maneuver around enemy lines and win a necessary strategic advantage.

If I refused to budge as a scientist, perhaps they could appeal to me as a woman who should know better than to line up with the macho left-brainers. This controversy over repression was fast shaping up as a male vs. female, patriarchal vs. matriarchal battle in the war to end child abuse. Therapists have told me, their voices tight with emotion, anger just barely below the surface, that skeptics (like me) will destroy the hard-won gains of the feminist movement. One therapist informed me that I should hold myself personally responsible for “the backlash against women and children” resulting from “massive denial” of repressed-memory claims. I have been told that I am not in touch with my feminine side, that I am a narrow-minded laboratory egghead who should stop sticking her nose where it doesn’t belong, and that I have allowed my research to be used by those who are plotting continued male domination and victimization of women and children. In short, as a woman I had chosen the wrong side. I should stop fighting the therapists and join them.

Finally, I was potentially vulnerable to the therapists’ arguments because I am a seeker of balance and compromise. Although I do not avoid confrontation or controversy, I prefer rational discussion and intelligent airing of differences, and I refuse to stand in judgment over anyone. Word spread fast when I decided not to collaborate on a paper with social psychologist Richard Ofshe, who categorically dismisses repressed memories and “memory work” as one of the “century’s most intriguing quackeries,” which “no human society since the dawn of time has ever recorded except a bunch of wacked-out psychologists in America.” I told Richard I simply couldn’t dismiss these therapists as “wacked out,” nor was I prepared to label repressed-memory therapy “quackery.” I admire Richard’s strength of mind and purpose—he is not afraid to risk criticism, even ostracism, to make a crucial point—but I wasn’t willing to attach my name to such harsh summary judgments.

Word also got around that I had collaborated with Lucy Berliner, director of research at the Harborview Sexual Assault Center in Seattle, on a paper for the Journal of Interpersonal Violence. Lucy is a friend, and when we got tired of arguing all the time, we set out to find some areas of agreement. In our paper we advocated an end to the simplistic division of the world into “those who care about victims and those who care about the truth.… This is a false dichotomy; ultimately we all care about the truth and about the suffering of victims.” We ended the article with a suggestion to keep the lines of communication open: “Most of all, everyone will benefit if we keep this critical dialogue flowing.”

And so, for these reasons and perhaps others I do not understand, the therapists, child-protection advocates, and a number of my fellow feminists came after me, writing letters, sending books, pamphlets, and scholarly articles, leaving messages on my answering machine, rendezvousing with me at professional meetings, even flying to Seattle “just to talk.” They asked me to listen to their side of the story. All they wanted, they said, was a chance to be heard and understood.

Ellen Bass was one of the first to call, leaving a long message on my answering system.2 Ellen didn’t need to identify herself as the co-author of The Courage to Heal, a book that acts like a lightning rod to collect all the pent-up anger and fear of the accused parents. They have nicknamed it The Courage to Hate.

In her soft, pleasant voice Ellen expressed her hope that researchers and clinicians might call a truce and begin a dialogue. “Perhaps we can find some common ground,” she offered, “rather than spending so much time and energy entrenched in our various foxholes, sniping at each other.”

I saved the message and listened to it several times. This was an interesting development. Maybe the “True Believer” therapists and the “Skeptical” researchers and memory experts could get together and intelligently discuss our differences. Maybe it was possible to stake the boundaries of some common ground. But I must admit that I feared an ambush. Richard Ofshe believed that therapists were pre paring for a final showdown. He predicted that the debate over re pressed memory would become “the therapy world’s gunfight at the OK Corral.”

“This is not a simple scientific dispute,” he warned me. “This is an ideological battle with truth and justice, right and wrong up for grabs. Therapists have put their reputations on the line, and they’re going to fight like hell to protect themselves. Don’t trust them, don’t let them too close, because they’ll shoot for the heart.”

*   *   *

Three weeks later I met Ellen at the Bellevue Hyatt Hotel, where she had just completed a workshop designed for professionals counseling incest survivors. We shook hands hello, exchanged a few pleasantries, and sat down to a late breakfast of mushroom omelettes and croissants.

“So,” I said, cutting right to the chase, “when did you first notice that you were being attacked?”

She laughed good-naturedly. Right from the start I found myself liking this congenial woman, with her naturally frizzy hair going gray and her charming smile. “After The Courage to Heal was published I traveled around Europe for several months,” she said. “I was completely out of touch with the backlash that was developing around the book specifically and repressed memories in general.”

Her expression became thoughtful. “When I returned to California a few months ago, Laura Davis, my co-author, handed me a massive stack of materials she had been collecting—newspaper clippings, editorials, scholarly articles, letters from accused parents, literature from the False Memory Syndrome Foundation.3 It was so intense and there was just so much of it, that my immediate reaction was, Oh my God, we’re going to be sued! Laura looked at me and said, ‘That’s funny. My first reaction was Oh my God, we’re going to be killed!’”

I thought about Mike Patterson and Doug Nagle and the other accused parents I knew, and I wondered if any of them were capable of murder. I didn’t think so. Anger was a secondary emotion, less important than the fear and heartbreak that drove them to hope against hope that their children might come back to them. And yet the whole issue reminded me so much of the abortion debate that I felt uneasy. Pro-life activists were out there shooting the doctors performing the abortions. In what way was that situation analogous to this one? Who would be “shooting” whom and for what ideological or personal reason?

It frightened me that those of us involved in this debate were even thinking about the possibility of violence. The threats and warnings had escalated with the recent media focus on the “abuses” of therapy. Just that week I had found a message on my answering machine from a woman who claimed to know an arch-satanist with electromagnetic powers who was capable of communicating all over the globe and bending people’s minds. “It might help people to cope if they knew there was a satanic force working against them rather than a force within themselves,” the caller said. I listened to the tape several times, but I still couldn’t figure out whose side Satan was on.

Sometimes it seemed as if the whole world really had gone mad.

“How can we cut through this anger that divides us and work together to help the victims of sexual abuse?” I asked. “You spend your days talking to survivors—”

“and nights,” Ellen gently interrupted.

“Days and nights,” I continued, “and on the basis of their reports, you believe that it is possible for memories to be repressed and then come back in flashbacks years or even decades later. As a scientist, I have an obligation to search for evidence. Where is the proof that these repressed memories are authentic?”

She told me a story, then, about a close friend who had suddenly recovered a twenty-year-old memory while making love. The friend had been depressed for some unknown reason, and during lovemaking her mind kept wandering. Finally her partner asked if something was bothering her. And then the memory came back, out of the blue, without any warning. Her body just floated away and her mind began to spin out of control. She was overcome with grief and shame; the images just rose up from within her and with them came a sense of knowing the truth, finally, for the first time. Someone had hurt her a long, long time ago. Ellen’s friend shook and sobbed and the words spilled out of her, before she even knew what she was going to say: “I was molested.”

The next few months were hell for Ellen’s friend as the memories returned and she concluded that her grandfather had abused her. Plagued by constant, unpredictable flashbacks, she suffered from insomnia, depression, mood swings, and crying spells. But worst of all, she endured crippling doubt and disbelief: Maybe it never happened. Maybe I’m just making it up. Ellen reassured her friend that the memories had to be authentic because the pain was so intense and all-encompassing. No one would willingly choose to go through that kind of torture.

After finishing her story, Ellen appealed to me for understanding, clearly hoping to overcome my skepticism. “Survivors are in so much pain,” she said. “Why would anyone invent a story that involved so much anguish and suffering?”

“Was there any corroboration of your friend’s memory?” I asked.

“Yes, definitely,” Ellen answered. When her friend questioned her family members, every one of her siblings remembered strange and bizarre occurrences at their grandfather’s house. Even her mother, who denied that the abuse occurred, agreed that her father was “weird.”

“Strange things may have gone on in her family,” I acknowledged, “but is that proof that she was abused?” I remembered a line in The Courage to Heal, often quoted to me by accused parents: “You are not responsible for proving that you were abused … demands for proof are unreasonable.” These men and women, typically in their sixties and seventies, do not remember having abused their children. Totally bewildered by the accusations, they always ask me the same question: “How can we defend ourselves?”

Ellen fielded my questions adroitly, managing to be clear and concise without becoming defensive. “I understand that memory is not perfect and that there will always be mistakes and errors in people’s recollections of the past. But the core of my friend’s memory is intact, and the feelings associated with it are appropriate and relevant. My friend physically re-experienced the terror of her abuse through body memories—she felt the pain, she endured again the fear and horror—and when the memory returned, she recalled both gross and trivial details. I don’t believe that anyone could recover those kinds of details and feel that kind of pain if the event had never happened.”

I told Ellen about the retractors, those whose cases we described earlier in this book, and others who told similar stories about memories created by their therapists through suggestions, expectations, and various therapeutic techniques like trance writing, age-regression, dream work and art therapy. These women recovered memories of abuse that were detailed and filled with emotional pain. Every one of them experienced what they believed at the time was a “body memory.” The pain was so intense that they tried to commit suicide or were hospitalized for severe depression and heavily sedated with tranquilizers and antidepressants. And yet their memories were false. When they “escaped” from their therapists, as they put it, and found appropriate psychological help for their problems, the memories simply turned to smoke and drifted away on the stiff breeze of reality.

“Retractors,” Ellen repeated. “That’s the first I’ve heard of them. You see, my whole world is survivors. I work with them, talk to them, cry with them. My whole life is dedicated to easing their pain. Because this is my world, I have a strong sense of the massive prevalence of sexual abuse. I know that children are being abused right now, as we speak. I know how hard it is for victims to speak the truth, and I know how desperately they need to be believed. This is my reality.”

“I do not deny that child abuse is a serious problem for our society,” I said, “and I would not for one moment suggest that the pain and anguish of an abused child or an adult survivor be minimized or overlooked. But my reality is different from yours. I know how easy it is to distort and contaminate memory. I know that memories are reconstructions that incorporate suggestions, imaginations, dreams, and fears. I spend a great deal of my time talking to people who insist that they have been falsely accused and are desperate to understand what has happened to them and their families. I hear their stories, and I am moved by their pain. Just as you want to stop the perpetrators of the world from continuing to inflict pain on their victims, I want to stop the therapists who suggest abuse where no memories exist and who refuse to meet with family members. I want to shout at these therapists: ‘Can’t you see the harm you are doing?’ The stories told by the accused parents are as emotionally upsetting for me as the accusers’ stories are for you.”

We looked at each other, trying to gauge the depth of the chasm sculpted by our separate realities.

“Perhaps we could each make an effort to understand the other side,” Ellen suggested. “Perhaps you could spend more time trying to grasp the concerns of the survivors, and I could spend more time listening to the retractors and the accused parents.”

“We’re certainly not doing anyone much good attacking each other,” I agreed. It was a serious moment but I suddenly laughed out loud, remembering a recent “attack” against me.

“What’s so funny?” Ellen smiled.

I told her the story of an astonishing encounter. A few weeks earlier I was flying back to Seattle after giving a talk at a meeting in California. The woman seated next to me had just finished reading the business section of USA Today and was looking out the window when I asked my standard airplane opening question: “Are you headed home or away?”

“I’m returning home to Seattle from Australia and New Zealand, where I presented a series of lectures and workshops,” she said pleasantly.

“On what subject?” I asked.

“Surviving childhood trauma,” she said.

I must have said something like “Oh, that’s interesting,” but I was wondering how I had happened to get seated next to this woman when there must have been at least a hundred people on the jumbo jet who had neither repressed a memory nor counseled someone who had. Maybe there were even a handful who hadn’t yet heard the word “repression.” Why wasn’t I sitting next to one of them?

I was feeling a bit grumpy anyway, because during the talk I’d just given to a professional audience of psychologists and psychiatrists in San Francisco, I was hissed and booed. That was a first. Now all I wanted to do was get back home, put my feet up, and turn on the tube. (Although the last time I’d done that, I’d tuned in to Faye Dunaway, all dyed and dressed up as Joan Crawford, inflicting horrendous tortures on her adopted child in Mommie Dearest.)

“And what do you do?” my seatmate asked politely.

“I teach at the University of Washington.” Purposely vague.

“What do you teach?”

“Psychology.”

“Are you a clinician?” she asked, turning in her seat to regard me with greater interest. “What kind of therapy do you do?”

“I don’t do therapy,” I said. “I study memory.”

“Memory,” she repeated softly. “What kind of memory?”

“I study memory storage and retrieval processes,” I said, trying to use neutral language to describe my work.

“What’s your name?” she asked suddenly.

I told her. How could I lie about my name? She looked at me, her eyes harrowed. “Oh no,” she said. “You’re that woman! You’re that woman!” And—I know this will be hard to believe—she started swatting me over the head with her newspaper.

When I got to that part of the story, Ellen burst out laughing. “You’re not serious!”

“It’s true, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God,” I said, holding up my hand for the mock oath.

“What happened next?” Ellen asked.

“She started looking around as if she couldn’t wait to get away from me, but the seat belt sign was on. The flight attendant came by a few minutes later, we both ordered drinks, and we spent the rest of the flight trying to win each other over. Just before her trip to Australia she had heard me speak on a local Seattle radio program, and she described me as strident and dismissive. She accused me of spending all my time defending the perpetrators. She believes that even if repressed memories are not literally true, they are symbolic of some terrible event or experience in the person’s past. ‘People in therapy are not that easily misled,’ she insisted, ‘and psychotherapy is not mind control.’”

“I think she’s right there,” Ellen said. “I just can’t believe that a therapist could convince a patient who was not abused that she was abused, not just once but many times, and by someone she knew and perhaps even loved. The whole idea of implanting memories of sexual abuse strains credibility. If a therapist is on the wrong track, most patients would simply say so, and either the therapist would get back on track or the patient would look elsewhere for help. Therapy can be suggestive—suggestion is, in fact, one of the most effective tools a therapist has. Perhaps details are added that don’t belong in the original memory. But it’s just not possible to implant in someone’s mind a complete memory with details and relevant emotions for a traumatic event that didn’t happen.”

“But that’s exactly what we did in the shopping mall experiment,” I countered.

“I’ve heard a lot about that experiment,” Ellen said. And not all of it good, her tone communicated. “You were able to inject a memory for a fictitious event into the minds of several volunteer subjects. But you can’t compare getting lost in a shopping mall with the experience of sexual-abuse victims.”

“That’s true,” I acknowledged. “Being lost and frightened in a shopping mall is not the same as being molested, and I would never try to equate those very different experiences. But creating a false memory of being lost and frightened through suggestive questioning might involve a psychological mechanism very similar to that involved in the creation of a false memory of abuse. All we’re trying to do in our experiment is to show how suggestion can create a traumatic or mildly traumatic memory of something that never happened.”

I had been attacked before by clinicians and child-protection advocates who argued that my laboratory experiments measure distortions in normal memory and should not be generalized to the experiences of adult survivors of sexual abuse. When the shopping mall study was first reported in the press, one of my friends, Py Bateman, founder of the Seattle sexual-assault-prevention agency Alternatives to Fear and a well-known victim’s-rights advocate, wrote a letter to the editor of the Seattle Times. “If Professor Loftus thinks that the experience of being lost in a shopping mall is analogous to incest, she needs to do her homework,” Py wrote. The implication was clear: I may be an expert on memory, but I’m a mere novice when it comes to understanding sexual abuse.

Judith Lewis Herman, one of my harshest critics, wrote a long and impassioned letter to the Harvard Mental Health Letter, which had published a paper I wrote critical of trauma theory and repressed-memory therapy. Herman argued that I had been enlisted by defense attorneys who were “looking for new ways to challenge the authenticity of adult claims of child abuse.” Despite my “lack of clinical experience and knowledge of psychological trauma,” I was speculating on the psychotherapeutic process and trying to generalize my findings to patients with delayed or repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse. I had no business, Herman continued, suggesting “that therapists can implant scenarios of horror in the minds of their patients”; and indeed, by making that suggestion, I was demonstrating “common prejudices”: widespread fears of manipulation by therapists; prevailing stereotypes of women as submissive, shallow, and spiteful; and “the universal wish to deny the reality of sex abuse.” My laboratory research was being exploited and used to support a backlash against victims, jeopardizing future investigations into traumatic memory and increasing the social pressure on victims to remain silent, Herman concluded.

I was no longer Elizabeth Loftus, Ph.D., a specialist in the malleability of memory, but a careless academic who had allowed and even encouraged her laboratory studies to be used in a campaign against children, women, and victims. In a phrase coined by one of my graduate students, I had become the Evil Pedophile Psychologist from Hell.

“Remember,” my students reminded me, “this debate is not about the prevalence of sexual abuse or the hard-won gains of the women’s movement. This is a debate about memory, not ideology.”

I had to keep repeating the phrase to myself. This is a debate about memory, it’s not about ideology; this is about memory, memory, memory.…

Ellen was looking at her watch. “I have to leave for the airport in an hour,” she said. “Why don’t we go up to my room and continue to talk while I pack?”

I followed her into the elevator and up to the fourth floor to a large suite with a commanding view of the snow-covered Olympic Mountains. As I settled in an overstuffed chair and listened to her talk with such passion and intelligence about survivors and the courage they demonstrated in speaking the truth about their past, I began to wonder if maybe I had missed something. Certainly Ellen Bass was an expert in issues that I knew nothing about. She had practical knowledge that I would never have, insights, knowledge and wisdom that I did not possess. How could I discount her experience? How could I jeopardize the gains of the women’s movement by calling into question the memories of adult survivors?

“This is about memory,” I said. I was talking to myself, but I spoke the words out loud. “That’s why I’m involved, that’s why I’m here with you, trying to find areas of agreement. I know that incest is widespread, I empathize with the anguish of the victims, and I applaud the courage of the survivors. I am not an enemy of the women’s movement, the victim’s-rights movement, or the recovery movement. I don’t question memories of abuse that have cogent corroboration from, for example, medical records indicating venereal disease or obvious scarring of delicate tissues. I don’t question memories of abuse that existed all along, because these are as believable as other kinds of memories, positive or negative, from the past. I don’t question the fact that memories can come back spontaneously, that details can be forgotten, or even that memories of abuse can be triggered by various cues many years later.”

I took a deep breath. “I am only interested in this isolated subset of memories that are labeled ‘repressed.’ All I want to discuss, all I have the right to examine, is this relatively unexplored part of the survivor/recovery movement concerned with repression.”

“But why do we even have to talk about repression?” Ellen asked. “Why can’t we just get rid of that word? What if a person simply forgets about an abusive event and then remembers it later, in therapy? She’s in a safe place; she feels, perhaps for the first time, that someone will believe her and validate her experience, and the memory suddenly returns. Isn’t that a valid experience?”

“Of course it is,” I said, “but that’s simple forgetting and remembering, it’s not this magical homunculus in the unconscious mind that periodically ventures out into the light of day, grabs hold of a memory, scurries underground, and stores it away in a dark corner of the insensible self, waiting a few decades before digging it up and tossing it back out again.”

“But isn’t it possible to redefine repression so that it falls more in line with the normal, scientifically accepted mechanisms of memory?” Ellen asked.

“But then it isn’t repression,” I said, “because repression isn’t normal memory.” I tried to explain the difference between normal memory processes and this exceptional, extraordinary, and empirically unproven mechanism known as repression. Researchers can demonstrate in the laboratory that forgetting, loosely defined as the failure to remember an event or the inability to recall all the details of a past experience, does in fact occur. Experimenters can demonstrate and offer verifiable evidence as proof that memories lose shape and substance as time goes by.

More difficult to prove in the laboratory, but certainly part of every human being’s experience, is the phenomenon known as motivated forgetting, in which we push unacceptable or anxiety-provoking thoughts and impulses out of our conscious minds in order to avoid thinking about them. When I think about my mother’s death, for example, the images and emotions are so painful that I immediately push them away, out of mind. I purposely and intentionally try not to think about this disturbing event. That’s motivated forgetting, and it’s not anything like repression, because even though I purposely shove the memories of her death out of my mind, I still know that she drowned in a swimming pool, and I remember the context surrounding the experience.

“I understand that repression is an unusual occurrence,” Ellen said thoughtfully. “But isn’t it similar to amnesia, where a traumatic event is encoded in an abnormal form of memory? Isn’t it possible to be so severely traumatized that the memory traces are deeply and permanently imprinted in the unconscious mind? Then, years later, something triggers the memory and it returns to consciousness?”

This was trickier terrain. Human beings are affected by different kinds of amnesia, which typically follow some kind of head injury. Anterograde amnesia is a reduced ability to remember events or experiences that occur after an insult to the brain. The victim in the notorious Central Park jogger-rape case, for example, had no memory of being raped and beaten by her attackers because her brain had been injured, preventing the traumatic experience from making a biochemical impression in her mind.

Retrograde amnesia is the reduced ability to remember events or experiences that occurred before an injury or insult to the brain. An example of retrograde amnesia would be the case of a woman who leaves work to drive to a downtown restaurant for a luncheon engagement; on the way she runs a red light and is involved in a serious car accident. When she emerges from a coma two days later, she has no memory whatsoever of leaving her office, running the red light, or being broadsided by a pickup truck. The last thing she can remember is sitting at her desk on the morning of the accident, typing data into her computer.

Neither of these rare but documented types of amnesia is similar to repression, which has been proposed as a process of selective amnesia in which the brain snips out certain traumatic events and stores the edited pieces in a special, inaccessible memory “drawer.” There is another kind of amnesia, however, known as traumatic (or psychogenic) amnesia, and this is the type most commonly confused with repression. A terrifying or emotionally disturbing event—a rape or murder, for example—can somehow disrupt the normal biological processes underlying the storage of information in memory; consequently the memory of the event is improperly encoded or imprinted in disconnected, unassimilated fragments.

In a paper published in 1982, Dan Schacter and his colleagues at the University of Toronto described the case of a twenty-one-year-old man, identified as “PN,” who suffered from traumatic amnesia. PN approached a policeman in downtown Toronto and complained of excruciating back pains. He was taken to the emergency room, where he informed doctors that he could not remember his name, his address, or other vital personal information. When PN’s picture was published in the newspaper, a cousin came forward to identify him. The cousin reported that their grandfather, whom PN adored, had died the previous week. PN did not remember his grandfather and had no memory of attending the funeral, but the next evening, while he was watching an elaborate cremation and funeral sequence in the concluding episode of the TV series “Shogun,” his traumatic amnesia began to clear. As he watched the funeral scene, an image of his grandfather appeared in his mind, and his memories gradually returned.4

Traumatic amnesia typically involves a relatively large assemblage of memories and associated affects, not just single memories, feelings, or thoughts, and the unavailable memories usually relate to day-to-day information that is normally available to consciousness. The third edition (revised) of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, used by physicians and psychotherapists to diagnose psychiatric patients on the basis of their symptoms, defines psychogenic amnesia as “one or more episodes of inability to recall important personal information, usually of a traumatic or stressful nature, that is too extensive to be explained by ordinary forgetfulness.” A rape victim suffering from psychogenic (traumatic) amnesia, for example, might forget her name, address, and occupation in addition to the details of the assault. But the amnesia is typically reversible, and the memories soon return.

The traumatic amnesias of PN and the rape victim described above are amnesias that temporarily affect large portions of personal memory. The cases are sufficiently interesting that they are often written up in special cases in the literature. A somewhat different type of amnesia involves the victim who, for example, gets in a serious skiing accident and loses the portion of memory that contains the actual accident but retains the context of the memory. She remembers the events leading up to the point where her memory ceased to function, and she recalls her experiences following the memory loss. Most significant of all, she knows that she is suffering from a memory loss. She is conscious, in other words, of losing her memory for a meaningful portion of her past.

Men and women suffering from repressed memories, on the other hand, allegedly lose not only the memory of the trauma but also all awareness that they have lost it. The whole context vanishes without a trace. Many people who claim to have repressed memories of sexual or ritual abuse grew up believing that they had a happy childhood. It asked specifically about unusual or shocking events that occurred in their past, they would answer with a statement such as “Nothing really traumatic ever happened to me.” The memories simply do not exist until something happens to unlock the secret compartment and they fly out like bats released from a hidden belfry.

Twenty-five-year-old Gloria Grady’s story of repressed memories is typical. On January 2, 1985, Gloria checked into the Minirth-Meier Clinic in Richardson, Texas, hoping to learn how to manage her lifelong weight problem. After a five-week hospitalization, she decided to continue weekly individual and group therapy sessions. In a meeting with her parents, her therapist encouraged her to open up and assert herself by mentioning anything that had been bothering her. Gloria’s only complaint was that her father, a Baptist minister, was too quiet on Sunday mornings when the family was getting dressed for church. She also mentioned that she was considering moving out of the family home, and her parents readily agreed to help her find an apartment.

Several months later Gloria’s therapist asked her to write down everything bad that had ever happened to her. When she had trouble remembering specific incidents, she asked her brother and his wife for help in sparking her memory. Her list eventually included memories of being taunted by her classmates because of her weight problem and an unhappy incident that occurred in first grade when her parents told her she couldn’t square-dance with the rest of her class (she danced anyway).

Eventually Gloria began seeing her therapist twice a week in addition to two or more weekly group therapy sessions. She was combining weight-loss pills, sleeping pills, diuretics, and antidepressants, and had to be hospitalized several times for accidental overdoses. On July 24, 1987, after spending nearly two months in the hospital psychiatric ward, Gloria wrote her parents a shocking letter. During her stay in the hospital she had recovered “many horrible memories” of her childhood. Her pain had become so “unbearable” that she “literally wanted to die at the remembrance of the abuse suffered” at her parents’ hands. Because family members continued to deny the truth revealed in her memories, she had decided to remove herself “from the family system.”

Two years later Gloria Grady filed a request for a protective order to prevent her parents from trying to contact her. In court the Gradys learned for the first time the details of their daughter’s accusations. Her father, she testified, had raped her repeatedly from age ten until she was in college, sodomizing her at various times with a knife, a pistol, and a rifle barrel. Her mother sexually abused her by inserting different items into her vagina. Her parents, her brother, her grandfather, and other family members were identified as members of a satanic cult that sacrificed her three-year-old daughter by cutting up the baby’s body and throwing the pieces into a fire. The cult, she testified, ritually aborted five or six of her pregnancies and then forced her to eat portions of the fetuses.

Experts testified that Gloria displayed no scars, tearing of delicate tissues, or signs of sexual torture. Medical records, photographs, and witnesses contradicted Gloria’s accusations. Police investigation uncovered no evidence of murdered babies, although testimony was presented indicating that Gloria had been pregnant. The judge denied Gloria Grady’s request for a protective order.

“It all hinges on evidence,” I explained to Ellen Bass. “In amnesia cases we have documentation—cogent, reliable proof that the injury occurred and that memory loss was connected to the trauma. But where is the proof in these cases of repressed memories? Can you prove to me that someone like Gloria Grady can endure numerous sexual and ritual tortures and repress all memory of every single incident, maintaining the belief that her family life was happy and unremarkable? Can you prove that it is possible, as author Betsy Petersen claims, to be raped by your father from early childhood into your twenties and repress all memory of those events and feelings? Can you prove that it is possible, as Roseanne Arnold and many others have claimed, to repress episodes of abuse that took place during infancy and then suddenly remember them in vivid and intense detail? All I ask for is proof that repression is a common phenomenon and that the brain routinely responds to trauma in this way.”

I was tired of talking. “That’s all I’m asking for—proof.”

“But aren’t these cases proof in and of themselves?” Ellen asked. “Isn’t the fact that thousands of people all over this country are recovering repressed memories proof that repression exists? What kind of corroboration can you demand in cases where the event was witnessed by only two people and one of those people will never tell the truth?”

“I would like to see some kind of evidence that the brain responds to trauma in this way,” I responded. “I would like to see proof for the claim that traumatic memories are engraved or encoded in abnormal ways and then stored in a separate section of the mind. I would like to see cogent corroboration for individual accusations based on supposedly de-repressed memories.”

We were at an impasse. As a victim’s-rights advocate, Ellen believed that believing is the gift that a therapist offers to her clients. For too many years, women had not been believed, and victims of sexual abuse were forced to live alone with their painful, shameful secret. By saying those three words—“I believe you”—a therapist gives her patients permission to voice their pain and to speak of their violation and outrage. Having given that permission, how can the therapist then turn around and ask for proof?

“Do you believe that repression is at least possible?” Ellen said as we prepared to leave. “Do you believe there is a possibility that it might exist as a defense mechanism?”

“I suppose it’s like believing in God,” I said as we walked down the hallway to the elevator. “It all depends on your definition. If God is defined as a literal, physical presence with a flowing white beard sitting on a throne in heaven surrounded by adoring angels, then I would have to say ‘No, I do not believe in God.’ But if God is viewed as a theory, a possibility, then I could say ‘Yes, I believe in the theory that something might exist out there, but I would want proof before I’d call myself a believer.’

“The same line of reasoning could be applied to repression. If you define repression as a process in which the mind selectively picks and chooses certain memories to hide away in a separate, hidden compartment of the mind and decades later return in pristine form, then I would have to say ‘No, nothing I have seen or witnessed would allow me to believe in that interpretation.’ But if you define repression as a theoretical possibility, a rare and unusual quirk of the mind that occurs in response to terrible trauma, I could not dismiss the theory out of hand. I would say ‘Yes, that’s possible, but I would have to see some proof before I’d call myself a believer.’”

“But how can you prove that the mind buries these memories?” Ellen asked me. “How could you ever show with any scientific accuracy how the process works?”

“Then how can you justify million-dollar lawsuits and deathbed confrontations based only on a theory of how the mind works?”

“The theory and the memories.”

“Memories that did not exist until someone suggested them.”

We looked at each other across that great ideological chasm that divided and separated us. On what faith could either of us justify jumping across and losing everything we had worked so hard to achieve?

“Therapists are not priests, and repression is not theology,” Ellen said gently.

I nodded my head, but I wasn’t so sure.

*   *   *

Less than a month after I met with Ellen Bass, an essay appeared in The New York Times Book Review that stoked the flames of the already heated controversy over repressed-memory therapy. Titled “Beware the Incest-Survivor Machine,” the front-page article was written by psychologist Carol Tavris, author of the critically acclaimed The Mismeasure of Woman. Tavris started off with sample symptoms from The Courage to Heal checklist (“You feel that you’re bad, dirty or ashamed”; “You feel unable to protect yourself in dangerous situations”; “You have trouble feeling motivated”). While the checklist is supposed to identify the effects of incest, Tavris pointedly remarks that the list is so generalized that “nobody doesn’t fit it.”

Tavris went on (it might be more accurate to say that she accelerated) to lambaste the simple-minded, greed-induced, power-hungry advocates-turned-authors of the incest-survivor recovery movement:

The problem is not with the advice they offer to victims, but with their effort to create victims—to expand the market that can then be treated with therapy and self-help books. To do this, survival books all hew to a formula based on an uncritical acceptance of certain premises about the nature of memory and trauma. They offer simple answers at a time when research psychologists are posing hard questions.

Tavris’s straight talk was studded with cynical witticisms. She decried the “incestuous” relationship among the incest-survivor books, claiming that one book “begat” another, which begat another and so on and so on, until the whole world was swarming with these creatures, all distantly related to one another and all programmed with the same inherently flawed genetic material. From one “generation” to another these books pass on their missing and broken chromosomes of information.

In what can only be called an incestuous arrangement, the authors of these books all rely on one another’s work as supporting evidence for their own; they all endorse and recommend one another’s books to their readers. If one of them comes up with a concocted statistic—such as “more than half of all women are survivors of childhood sexual trauma”—the numbers are traded like baseball cards, reprinted in every book and eventually enshrined as fact. Thus the cycle of misinformation, faulty statistics and unvalidated assertions maintains itself.

Tavris didn’t let up. She blasted the “simplistic” themes and formulaic premises appearing and reappearing in these blood-related tomes.

Uniformly these books persuade their readers to focus exclusively on past abuse as the reason for their present unhappiness. Forget fighting with Harold and the kids, having a bad job or no job, worrying about money. Healing is defined as your realization that you were a victim of sexual abuse and that it explains everything wrong in your life.

Turning the tables on those who denounce the skeptics as antichild, antiwoman, and antivictim, she accused the other side of pathologizing female experience by focusing on vulnerability and victimhood rather than competence and power.

Uniformly these books encourage women to incorporate the language of victimhood and survival into the sole organizing narrative of their identity. It becomes their major story, and its moral rarely goes farther than “Join a group and talk about your feelings.” Such stories soothe women temporarily while allowing everyone else to go free. That is why these stories are so popular. If the victim can fix herself, nothing has to change.

Tavris drew blood. The responses published several weeks later were razor-sharp, slashing indiscriminately in an attempt to inflict injury on the perpetrator.

“I must protest her mean-spirited and completely gratuitous attack on incest survivors,” Judith Lewis Herman fumed. “If Ms. Tavris is really so tired of hearing about incest, she should stop trashing other women and join with us to try to end the epidemic of sexual violence.”

“By questioning the validity of memories that are wrenched with such reluctance and with so much pain from their hiding place in the mind, Ms. Tavris has done a tremendous disservice to survivors, whose strong need to disbelieve their own stories is a common phenomenon,” complained the Reverend Dorothy Greene.

Betsy Petersen voiced surprise that the attack came from within the ranks of feminism: “I never expected such charges to come from a writer I admire, one who apparently considers herself a feminist.”

One letter writer compared Tavris to Sigmund Freud, who “claimed that reports of incest were merely the fantasies of hysterical women.”

And therapist-turned-author E. Sue Blume actually put Tavris in the same cage with the rapists and pedophiles of the world: “Carol Tavris’s essay … places her directly on the side of those who provide support for ‘molesters, rapists, pedophiles and other misogynists,’ a side one certainly should apologize for choosing.”

But Tavris stuck to her guns. “I fear that the current sad and destructive impulse to see abuse in every home, and to manufacture memories where none existed, is creating a dangerous new set of problems,” she replied in a letter of her own.

To raise this concern does not make me antifeminist, any more than criticizing some policies of my Government makes me anti-American.… Women are not helped, nor is feminism advanced, by the mindless acceptance of any doctrine that oversimplifies a complex issue. If we wish to improve the health and status of women, we need to understand not only how women are helped by the recovery movement, but also how some are harmed. Shouldn’t we worry if the movement is, however unintentionally, contributing to a national mood of sexual hysteria, parents’ fears of hugging and kissing their children (let alone of walking around naked in the house) and cruel condemnations of nonabusive parents who merely made normal mistakes?

Watching from the sidelines as the two opposing sides duked it out, I had one comforting thought: Now, at least, there were two Evil Pedophile Psychologists from Hell.

*   *   *

The attacks against me were getting personal. In a long Seattle Weekly article about my work and its relevance to repressed-memory therapy, the reporter interviewed two psychologists—one clinical and one cognitive—who were openly critical of my position. Interestingly enough, the clinical expert attacked my research methods, while the cognitive expert tried to psychoanalyze me.

“She doesn’t study traumatic memory, she studies normal memory,” Judith Lewis Herman said. “Her research is interesting and valid as far as it goes, but what is troubling is her insistence on applying it where it doesn’t belong.” Kathy Pezdek, a professor of cognitive psychology at Claremont Graduate School in California, wondered out loud if some difficult or traumatic experience in my past might be responsible for my unreasonable skepticism. “I just wonder if Elizabeth has been honest with herself about what went on in her past,” Pezdek said. “Anyone who takes a strong stance on an issue needs to be honest about why.”

But by far the most interesting comments appeared two weeks later in a letter to the editor. The letter writer, a psychiatric nurse-practitioner, expressed deep concern that my work had been given front-page coverage and worried about the “potentially devastating effects this may have on my own clients as well as the huge numbers of survivors of childhood abuse.” She accused me of being hard-hearted, angry, and self-centered. I had, in her words, shut off my “feminine, instinctual side.” My photo reflected “a wounded, frightened, angry woman who desperately needs to get out of her compulsive workaholism and intellectual avoiding of her own emotional pain.”

(I remember looking at the photograph, which I thought was rather flattering, and wondering: Do I really look “wounded”?)

The letter ended with a reference to the fact that my work would have a “dangerous” impact on the legal system, discouraging clients from engaging in courtroom battles while leading lawyers to believe that they had the power to decide what was “therapeutic.” Said the writer, “We must not give Dr. Loftus any more power or credibility. Let’s continue to hear women, therapists, and men who are in touch with their feminine side speak out against this patriarchal madness!”

*   *   *

I have one more story to tell. I cannot reveal the real name of the therapist involved (I will call her Barbara), but I can say that she is an intelligent, articulate, and compassionate human being. I have no doubt that she cares deeply and genuinely about her clients and that her crusade to convince me of the reality of repression and the need to line up on her side against the pedophiles and rapists of the world was motivated by the best and purest of motives. Yet what happened between us taught me a great deal about the inherent and potentially abusive power of the therapeutic process.

Barbara originally called me in the late 1980s for help with an article she was preparing for a scholarly clinical journal on the retrieval process involved in repressed memories of sexual abuse. She was concerned about the difficulty of identifying adult survivors of sexual abuse and wondered if repressed memories go by the same rules as normal memories. “Are repressed memories more or less sensitive than conscious memories to the distorting effect of post-event information?” she asked.

“The answer to that completely depends on what you mean by repression,” I said. “I assume you mean a memory for a real event that you haven’t thought about for a very long time as compared to a memory that you have thought about periodically throughout your whole life. If this is what you mean by ‘repressed,’ then I would predict that such a memory would be especially susceptible to change or distortion.”

For the next two or three years we communicated sporadically, a clinical psychologist and a cognitive psychologist sharing information and insights about memory-retrieval processes. Then, on August 31, 1992, Barbara called to complain about an article she had seen in that morning’s edition of USA Today. She read me the headline and lead sentence:

SOME DOUBT REPRESSED MEMORIES

Unfounded “repressed” memories of childhood sexual abuse are splitting families and sending innocent people to jail, charges Seattle psychologist Elizabeth Loftus.

“I am extremely concerned about the effect articles like this will have on incest victims,” she said. “Survivors have so much difficulty revealing their painful memories and speaking the truth about their traumatic past. They constantly question their memories and doubt their own minds. Information like this, published in a newspaper that reaches millions, will send them reeling and destroy years of productive clinical work.”

“I share your concerns,” I said. “I don’t want to be responsible for further polarizing this already divisive issue, and I am terribly distressed by the idea that genuine survivors of sexual abuse might feel like I’m revictimizing them.”

“Isn’t there something you can do about it, then?” she asked. Her tone was becoming strident. “Given your reputation, these exaggerated and distorted claims seem to indicate that repressed memories do not exist, that false memories are the norm, and that repressed-memory therapy is practiced by a bunch of incompetent, fanatical quacks. You are distorting the reality of good, solid clinical work. You don’t balance the stories of clinicians who say, as you put it in one of your research papers, ‘Tell me what that bastard did to you!’ with quotations from skilled, competent therapists. What right do you have as an experimental psychologist to criticize clinical work?”

I was sensitive to that particular argument. A psychotherapist friend had once told me that I was profoundly uninformed about clinical issues. He said he would never presume to be an expert on experimental investigations of memory, nor would he feel qualified to criticize memory research. Why, then, did I seem to have no qualms making blanket derogatory statements about psychotherapy, even to the point of telling clinicians how to do their work?

“Certainly inexperienced therapists can do a lot of harm,” he continued, “just as inexperienced scientists, lawyers, surgeons, and engineers can do a lot of damage. But the implication that many, if not most therapists operate on hunches and use blatant, suggestive techniques is both disturbing and insulting. You offer a burlesque of therapy, a sarcastic parody, and as a result you distort and minimize the reality of sexual abuse, thus increasing the probability that people who have been damaged by abuse will be further damaged by a skeptical society’s disbelief.”

“I am concerned about the effect your work will have on the genuine cases of abuse,” Barbara was saying.

“I’m also concerned about those possibilities,” I said. “What can we do about it?”

“Keep talking,” she said.

*   *   *

Two months later Barbara flew to Seattle just to “talk.” We spent the entire day discussing what laboratory research can tell us about real-life experiences, exploring areas of agreement, and seeking ways to communicate our shared concern for helping genuine victims of abuse. That evening we had dinner together and shared personal stories. I told Barbara about my mother’s death and my father’s long, agonizing battle with melanoma.

Barbara was warm and understanding. She told me stories of her own about career setbacks, relationship problems, disappointments, and dreams. And, of course, we talked about the controversy over repressed memories. I explained how every bit of criticism wounds me, even the off-the-wall vitriol that occasionally gets thrown my way. I told her about a therapist who was in the process of writing nasty letters about me to virtually every organized group of psychologists on the West Coast. A colleague who serves on the board of one of these organizations sent me a copy of my critic’s letter with a handwritten note attached: “This fellow seems to think you have the ethics of a caterpillar swimming in beer.” I laughed, but that comment hurt.

I told Barbara about a recent phone call from a former high school friend who lives in Los Angeles. Her eight-year-old son had been having problems in school; she took him to a therapist for testing and evaluation. The therapist asked to see him alone, and after a while my friend became suspicious and listened at the door.

“Were you abused?” the therapist was asking her son. “Do you remember any behaviors that made you feel uncomfortable or strange? Did anybody touch you in your private places? Can you draw me a picture of who you think might have abused you?” At this point my friend burst into the room, told the therapist she didn’t think that was a productive line of questioning (“a massive understatement,” she told me later), grabbed her son, and tore out of the office.

“Life is a series of daily dramas,” I told Barbara. “Every day I walk into my office and think, Okay, what’s going to happen now? I look to my right, and then I look to my left, and I wonder who’s going to be accused next? Who will be the next person to find a repressed memory? My brother called a few weeks ago to tell me that he had a breakthrough in his therapy. His therapist hypnotized and age regressed him to eight years old, and he remembered my mother scolding him for something. He began to sob, completely overwhelmed by his emotions. He told me he didn’t know the details of what had happened, but he felt like he was getting close.

“I’m sitting in my office listening to him and thinking, Don’t let that therapist talk you into sexual abuse! Then I find myself thinking, Well, at least Mom and Dad are dead, and if he accuses them, they’ll never know about it. And then I think, who else could he accuse? Who is still alive? I was in a terrible dilemma. I didn’t know what to do, because my brother believed he was making incredible progress. He was getting in touch with his emotions, starting to feel things he had forgotten he had ever felt. And I’m wondering, Can I just sit back and let this therapist put these memories in his mind?”

I waved my hand at the roomful of diners. “I would bet that half the people in this room either have repressed memories or suspect they might,” I said. “I just wonder sometimes—is there anything else in the world besides repressed memories?”

Barbara regarded me solemnly. “How can you treat this so lightly, Beth? You were abused as a child. Do you really feel that you can just forgive and forget? Do you really believe that you suffer no long-term consequences from being abused?”

I told her the truth. I was, in fact, deeply affected by the memory of Howard, a baby-sitter who molested me when I was six years old, and I had not been able to just forgive and forget. I remember waking up on my thirteenth birthday and thinking: Uh, oh. I’m thirteen, and I still don’t have my period. All my friends had theirs. My second thought was filled with terror: Oh, no! I must be pregnant! (This although Howard had only fondled me.)

“I know that seems naive,” I confessed. “But that’s what I thought.”

“Oh, Beth. I’m so sorry,” Barbara said with sincere feeling. “No one should have to enter adolescence with such shame and distress, such painful thoughts.”

“I often wondered if Howard realized what he had done to me,” I said, touched by her compassion. “He was fourteen or fifteen years old, certainly a narcissistic age. In his mind, I suspect, he was just taking a minor risk, experimenting with someone ‘safe,’ a little girl who wouldn’t reject him or tattle on him. I doubt that he ever thought about the long-term effect his behavior would have on me. He wasn’t cruel; he just didn’t think.”

“Did you ever tell your parents what happened?”

“No, I kept the secret to myself.”

“That’s what most abused children do,” Barbara said.

“Yes, I know. But I never forgot this memory, nor did I repress it,” I said. “And even though it affected me deeply, I choose to leave it in my past. I think that’s where it belongs.”

Barbara said she understood. When we parted later that night, we hugged.

*   *   *

A week later, a letter from Barbara arrived in the mail. My personal history was very painful for her, she wrote. The story about Howard made her sad; in fact, it made her angry—very, very angry. She had been trying to think of something she could do to ease my pain, my loneliness, and my sense of betrayal. On the plane trip home an idea suddenly came to her. She remembered that voodoo practitioners make a symbolic representation of the evil person and stab it with pins. That’s what she decided to do for me.

On a separate sheet of paper, Barbara had drawn an outline of a male body. HOWARD was typed in extra-large bold letters and placed dead center on the figure’s chest. In each of Howard’s hands and through his genitals, she had inserted a straight pin; the tips of the pins were colored bright red.

I looked at that drawing for a long time, not quite knowing what to think. Barbara was trying to help me, I knew that much; but my pain seemed to have become her pain, and my anger had been swallowed up by her anger. Was this what sometimes happened in therapy? When a patient expressed her deepest fears and anxieties, did the therapist take those conflicted emotions and enlarge or symbolically recreate them?

I wasn’t quite sure what it all meant, but I knew what Barbara had done—she had stolen my memory, stuck pins in it, and made it bleed.