5

GOD’S BEARD AND THE DEVIL’S HORNS

Ours is a divided empire in which certain ideas and emotions and actions are of God, and their opposites are of Lucifer. It is as impossible for most men to conceive of a morality without sin as of an earth without “sky.” Since 1692 a great but superficial change has wiped out God’s beard and the Devil’s horns, but the world is still gripped between two diametrically opposed absolutes. The concept of unity, in which positive and negative are attributes of the same force, in which good and evil are relative, ever-changing, and always joined to the same phenomenon—such a concept is still reserved to the physical sciences and to the few who have grasped the history of ideas.

—Arthur Miller, The Crucible

Mass movements can rise and spread without a belief in God, but never without belief in a devil.

—Eric Hoffer, The True Believer

Something has gone wrong with therapy, and because that something has to do with memory, I find myself at the center of an increasingly bitter and fractious controversy. On one side are the “True Believers,” who insist that the mind is capable of repressing memories and who accept without reservation or question the authenticity of recovered memories. On the other side are the “Skeptics,” who argue that the notion of repression is purely hypothetical and essentially untestable, based as it is on unsubstantiated speculation and anecdotes that are impossible to confirm or deny. Some skeptics are less circumspect, referring to repression as “psychomagic,” “smoke and mirrors,” or just plain “balderdash.”

The True Believers claim the moral high ground. They are, they insist, on the front line, fighting to protect children from sexual predators and assisting survivors as they struggle through the arduous healing process. The implication, unspoken but not unheard, is that anyone who refuses to join the True Believers in their quest to uncover the hidden past and to gain legitimacy for the concept of repression is either antiwoman, anti-child, antiprogress, or, at the worst extreme, “dirty,” i.e., a practicing pedophile or satanist.

The Skeptics attempt to evade these accusations with talk of proof, corroboration, and scientific truth-seeking, but they are not afraid to hurl some deadly grenades of their own. According to the most outspoken and vituperative Skeptics, therapists specializing in recovered memory therapy operate in a neverland of fairy dust and mythic monsters. Woefully out of touch with modern research, engaging in “crude psychiatric analysis,” guilty of oversimplification, overextension, and “incestuous opinion citing,” these misguided, undertrained, and overzealous clinicians are implanting false memories in the minds of suggestible clients, making “therapeutic lifers” out of their patients and ripping families apart.

This is obviously more than an academic discussion about the mind’s ability to bury a memory and then bring it back into consciousness years later. The issues evoked by the simple notion of repression are among the most controversial concerns of cognitive and clinical psychology: the role of hypnosis in therapy and courts of law; the power of suggestion; social influence theory; the currently popular diagnoses of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and multiple personality disorder (MPD, labeled in the fourth edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual as dissociative identity disorder, DID); the inner child and the dysfunctional family; pornography; satanic cults; rumor mills; moral crusades; alien abduction; media-inspired hysteria; and, of course, the question of political correctness.

I watch the bullets fly, and I duck for cover. My research into the malleability of memory aligns me with the Skeptics, but I am also sympathetic to the True Believers’ concerns. I do not want to see a return of those days, not so very long ago, when a victim’s cries for help went unheard and accusations of sexual abuse were automatically dismissed as fantasy or wish-fulfillment and shunted away into the backwaters of the public conscience. Nor can I automatically accept the idea that significant numbers of fanatical therapists are carelessly implanting memories in their clients’ vulnerable minds.

I don’t believe the world is so purely black and white. And so I insist on entering the gray areas of ambiguity and paradox, asking questions, listening carefully, struggling to sort out the conflicting and contentious points of view. I answer ten-page, single-spaced letters from the True Believers; I talk to them for hours on the phone; I meet them in airport coffee shops and hotel restaurants where they tell me their stories and plead with me to come over to their side.

“Can’t you see the damage you are doing?” they ask.

“All the gains the feminist movement has made in the last twenty years will be destroyed if you and others like you continue to question these memories,” they insist.

“If you could only see the pain that I see, if you could only witness the intensity of my clients’ anguish,” a therapist pleads, “you would know that these memories arise from real, not imagined, events.”

I listen and try to balance their passion with the pain I have witnessed in the stories of “the accused.” A balding man in his seventies hands me a letter he recently received form his daughter’s lawyer. He and his wife hold hands and wait patiently as I read through the official-looking document with “Attorneys at Law” embossed in scrolled script at the top. “Dear Mr. Smith,” the letter begins:

I have been retained by your daughter, who is prepared to file a lawsuit against you for severe emotional damage inflicted during her childhood. She has recently recovered memories of perverse physical and sexual abuse perpetrated upon her by you, her father, when she was a minor. We are prepared to settle this case for $250,000. If we do not hear from you within four weeks from the date of this letter, we will file a lawsuit requesting a substantially larger sum of money.

An accused mother shows me the fading color photograph of her “baby,” the youngest of five children, whom she hasn’t seen in more than three years. “She went to a therapist for help after she was severely beaten by her alcoholic husband,” the gray-haired woman explains, cradling the thirty-year-old photograph in her arms. “While she was in therapy, she left her two young children with us. But after a few months she began to have flashbacks of her father sexually abusing her, beginning when she was just five months old. She wrote us a letter and said she never wanted to see us again. She has forbidden us to see or talk to our grandchildren.”

“I’m not a baby-raper,” an accused father tells me, tears running down his cheeks. “How could my daughter say these things about me? Where did these memories come from?”

I pick up the phone and call the accusing children, hoping for—what? Reconciliation?

“I can’t take back the truth,” the voices tell me.

“He did what he did, and he needs to admit it and ask for my forgiveness.”

“I’m not responsible for my parents’ pain.”

“People need to believe the children.”

“The world is an unsafe place.”

“I only want to protect other children.”

“The truth has set me free.”

“Parents lie,” a child-abuse advocate tells me, her face red with anger. She quotes me the oft-repeated but always shocking statistic: One in three women have been sexually abused by the time they reach the age of eighteen.

“But those statistics,” I interrupt gently, “are based on a very broad definition of sexual abuse that would include grabbing at breasts or buttocks covered with clothes, stroking a leg, or snatching a sloppy, unasked-for kiss at a drunken wedding reception.”

“If you doubt the statistics”—the woman’s voice rises—“why don’t you visit the county rape center or the battered women’s shelter? These women and children are not statistics; they are real people in real pain.”

I have stopped arguing statistics.

“I can’t describe the pain,” an accused mother tells me. “If a child dies, you learn how to deal with the grief, but every morning I wake up to this nightmare, and every night I go to bed with it, and in between nothing changes.”

“I think, My God, could this have happened? Did I repress the memories of abusing my children?” her husband says, waiting patiently for his turn to put words to his anguish. “And then I think: How could you forget something like that, how could I have touched my child and repressed all knowledge of it? No, no, no. I didn’t forget this because it never happened. It simply never happened.”

They look pleadingly at me. Do you understand? Do you believe me?

One of the most heartbreaking stories I’ve heard was told by a thirty-year-old woman who happens to be trained as a therapist. Her story is, perhaps, more complicated than most because she was a victim of childhood sexual abuse.

I know a lot about victimization, because I have been a victim. When I was in grade school, I was sexually molested. For the record, it was not my parents. And also for the record, I have never forgotten it, not for one day. But out of a deep sense of shame, just as many other victims experience, I remained silent for more than twenty years.

Then, one day, I shared my story of my abuse experience with my sister. Eventually she began to suspect that she, too, had been abused. She had no memories, no clues, no reason, no faces, no names, not one shred of evidence. She and my other sister began discussing their ideas and suspicions. As they bounced their thoughts and feelings off each other, they began having dreams about being molested.

They accused my grandfather, my uncle, and then my father. Their allegations became more bizarre and included my mother and older brother, aunts, uncles, cousins, friends, and neighbors. My parents stood by and watched as their family went down like dominoes, and they could do nothing.

My six-year-old nephew, who had been in therapy for more than a year and was now seeing his second counselor because his first counselor couldn’t find any evidence of sexual abuse, began to make some disclosures. He said that my mother, my father, and my older brother, whom he had not seen in four years, had sexually molested him. Two weeks after my parents were named, I began my career as a therapist. I worked for three days, and on the fourth day, my supervisor called me into the office to inform me that my nephew had named more people who allegedly molested him. I was among the people he named. I was fired on the spot and was investigated by the Children’s Services Board and the police. The investigation took almost four months before my name was cleared.

Having been a victim of sexual abuse, I would rather be found standing with a bloody knife next to a corpse than be accused of sexually molesting a child. Not a day goes by when I don’t feel the emptiness of all the things and all the people that I have lost. But in the deepest part of my soul, I know the truth—the fact of my innocence, known only for certain to me and to God. No one can take that from me.

“These people are in denial,” therapists counter.

“You are being used by them,” a friend tells me. “They need your expertise to give their denials some kind of legitimacy. You’re just a pawn in their hands.”

“Get out of this whole field before your reputation is destroyed,” another friend warns.

*   *   *

The skeptics tell me to stop being so wishy-washy. “This is not a fence-sitting issue,” they say.

“Naive patients are being led like lambs to slaughter by incompetent therapists.”

“These therapists are worse than misinformed, poorly trained fools,” a sociology professor fumes. “They are dangerous zealots, and they must be stopped.”

*   *   *

Both sides tell me to watch my step. “Take very good care of yourself,” a therapist writes.

“Watch yourself,” a colleague warns.

“Be careful,” a journalist cautions.

An anonymous letter postmarked from a mid-sized city in the Midwest accuses me of collaborating with satanists. “Please consider your work to be on the same level as those who deny the existence of the extermination camps during World War II,” the letterwriter concludes.

“Is this the memory doctor who hates children?” a soft female voice inquires when I pick up the phone.

“I have an opinion about Dr. Loftus,” a caller to a local radio program announces. “I think she’s connected with the right-wing Christian groups who are trying to advance the cause of male patriarchy…”

I open the newspaper to read that a man I testified for in a child molestation case was brutally murdered. Two years earlier Kaare Sortland and his wife Judy had been charged with sexually molesting three young children at their day-care center. They were acquitted of one charge, and the judge dismissed the other two charges, noting that the children had originally denied that they were abused and only changed their minds after numerous therapy sessions and intensive interviews with interrogators.

On the night Kaare was murdered he heard noises outside his home and went outside to investigate. His wife heard him shout, “I didn’t do it!” Seconds later he lay dying in the gravel driveway, shot three times in the chest with a large caliber handgun.

*   *   *

I remember—was it just a few years ago?—sitting in a hotel coffee shop in Washington, D.C., with Herb Spiegel, a giant in the field of psychiatry and hypnosis, and Ed Frischholz, a young cognitive psychologist with a clinical practice in Chicago. Over coffee and Danish, we were having a lively discussion about memory, the media, and the amazing rebirth of the phenomenon known as repression. I related some of the odd stories and bewildering legal cases I’d become involved in, and we talked about the media frenzy that began with People magazine’s cover stories featuring the repressed memories of Roseanne Barr Arnold and of 1958’s Miss America, Marilyn Van Derbur.

During a lull in the conversation, Ed leaned back in his chair and said. “What do you suppose is going on out there?” By “out there” he meant, of course, the real world.

We were genuinely confused and caught a bit off guard. I couldn’t know then where that question would take me, how far I would wander from the ivory tower of safe, scholarly pursuits. I remember laughing a bit nervously, hugging my friends good-bye, and, as I rushed out to catch my plane, promising to mail reprints of my recent papers. It was a familiar routine. But my world and my life were already in the process of a radical and irrevocable shift.

*   *   *

I want to understand “what is going on out there.” I live, breathe, eat, and sleep repression. I have surrendered to this obsession because I believe that what is going on in the real world is vitally important to an understanding of how memory works and how it fails. I have been willing to step out of my role as a laboratory scientist and into this messy field experiment because I believe that this is where science begins: with puzzled questions about the causes of a phenomenon and the meticulous untangling of coincidence and design.

What is repression? Where do repressed memories come from? Are they authentic relics dredged from a forgotten past, or are they “smoke and mirrors” images that develop when a suggestion is implanted in a vulnerable person’s mind? Whatever the answers turn out to be, these are critically important questions. I believe that the phenomenon of repression holds up a mirror in which we can catch glimpses of our own psyche. If we are willing to look without prejudice and preconception, we may be able to discover profound truths about our need to belong, to be loved, to be accepted, to be understood, to recover.

To recover—from what? That, of course, is the question.