day care workers imprisoned on ludicrous charges. Crews again:
In the 1980s, as McNally relates, day care workers risked prosecution and imprisonment on the coerced testimony of bewildered and intimidated three-year-olds who were prodded to “remember” nonexistent molestations. Meanwhile, poorly trained social workers, reasoning that signs of sexual curiosity in children must be “behavioral memories” of rape, were charging parents with incest and consigning their stunned offspring to foster homes. And most remarkably, whole communities were frantically attempting to expose envisioned covens of Satan worshipers who were said, largely on the basis of hypnotically unlocked “memories,” to be raising babies for sexual torture, ritual murder, and cannibal feasts around the patio grill.
It would unfortunately be premature to say that those days are behind us, as the recent case of Anver Daud Sheikh highlights. For some US cases, where individuals remain in prison, Dorothy Rabinowitz’ “No Crueller Tyrannies” is worth reading.
As the history of the early years of psychoanalysis is studied more closely it’s become clear that Freud’s founding myth is untenable, and Masson’s revisionism simply compounds the mistake. Both these accounts only make sense if the patients’ stories of early sexual abuse were freely forthcoming, but this is precisely not the case. Freud’s theory of the genesis of neuroses required that the memory of sexual abuse be suppressed. In the strange hydraulic pressure model that Freud used, it was the repression of the abuse which manifested itself in the symptoms of the neurosis. It was of no use whatever to Freud to have patients who remembered being sexually abused. On the contrary, the memories had to be dragged out of them, and Freud is quite clear about this. They will resist, he said. They will strenuously deny that any such thing ever happened. What is required from the therapist is an absolute insistence on the central truth that abuse had occurred, and only when the patient accepted this, after long and wearying sessions, with the therapist using the full weight of his authority, could recovery begin.
In other words, the stories of infantile sexual abuse which Freud elicited, prior to his “breakthrough” understanding, were entirely constructions of the therapeutic situation, as were those elicited by recovered memory therapists more recently. McNally’s book provides further evidence of the sand on which these theories are based. When empirical findings are scrutinised, there is no evidence that the required repression of trauma actually exists. As Crews concludes:
Remembering Trauma is neither a polemic nor a sermon, and McNally offers little counsel to psychotherapists beyond warning them against turning moral disapproval of pedophilia into overconfidence that they can infer its existence from behavioral clues observed twenty or thirty years after the fact. But another lesson is implied throughout this important book. Attention to the chimerical task of divining a patient’s early traumas is attention subtracted from sensible help in the here and now. The reason why psychotherapists ought to familiarize themselves with actual knowledge about the workings of memory, and why their professional societies should stop waffling and promulgating misinformation about it, is not that good science guarantees good therapy; it is simply that pseudoscience inevitably leads to harm.
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