Remembering Satan (21 page)

There were, of course, many people who clearly recalled childhood sexual experiences who did not suffer from hysteria; as Freud pointed out, however, it was not the
memories
but
the
repression
of them that caused hysterical behavior. The memories haven’t disappeared; they’ve been shoved into the unconscious, where they work their poisonous influence until dragged into the light of awareness.

Freud spoke movingly of the reality of child abuse, which was rarely discussed in his time:

All the singular conditions under which the ill-matched pair conduct their love-relations—on the one hand the adult, who cannot escape his share in the mutual dependence necessarily entailed by a sexual relationship, and yet is armed with complete authority and the right to punish, and can exchange the one role for the other to the uninhibited satisfaction of his moods, and on the other hand the child, who in his helplessness is at the mercy of this arbitrary will, who is prematurely aroused to every kind of sensibility and exposed to every sort of disappointment, and whose performance of the sexual activities assigned to him is often interrupted by his imperfect control of his natural needs—all these grotesque and yet tragic incongruities reveal themselves as stamped upon the later development of the individual and of his neurosis, in countless permanent effects which deserve to be traced in the greatest detail.

These passionate words were coldly received by Freud’s colleagues, who believed that the stories of hysterics were lies or fantasies. To the formidable Richard von Krafft-Ebing, who was presiding over this conference, young Freud’s remarks were “a scientific fairy tale.” Moreover, there was the unstated implication that the abusers Freud was indicting in his daring seduction theory were respectable family men—such as the psychiatrists and neurologists gathered in Vienna that day. Indeed, Freud’s theory was categorical. He had come to the conclusion privately that “in all cases, the
father,
not excluding my own, had to be accused of being perverse.”

Freud suffered humiliating rejection and damage to his professional reputation. He would later be accused of rejecting his seduction theory out of a craven need to please his colleagues, who were almost exclusively male. There were other sources for his misgivings, however. In October of 1896, only a few months after Freud’s disastrous presentation in Vienna, his own father died. During the grieving period that followed, Freud recognized that it was absurd to classify this lighthearted sage as a child molester, even though his own siblings showed traces of hysteria. His beloved theory was at war with his sense of reality. In order to account for the common diagnosis of hysteria, child abuse would have to be practically universal, since only a portion of the cases would give rise to neurotic illness. “Such widespread perversion against children is scarcely probable,” he realized.

Adding to his qualms was the fact that some of his patients reported events that he took to be fantasies rather than memories. One of his patients reported that the devil himself had stuck pins in her fingers and placed a piece of candy on each drop of blood. “What would you say,” Freud wrote to his friend Wilhelm Fliess, “if I told you that my brand-new theory of the early etiology of hysteria was already well known and had been published a hundred times over, though several centuries ago?” He was referring to the European witch trials. Freud was no believer in witches, and yet he wondered, “Why did the devil who took possession of the poor things invariably abuse them sexually and in a loathsome manner? Why are their confessions under torture so like the communications made by my patients in psychological treatment?” He had come to the same juncture that the profession he created would confront again a century later.

The abandonment of the seduction theory left Freud in a period of helplessness. In 1925, when he wrote his brief autobiography,
a penitent but defensive tone is still apparent. “I must mention an error into which I fell for a while and which might well have had fatal consequences for the whole of my work,” he wrote.

Under the pressure of the technical procedure
^*
which I used at the time, the majority of my patients reproduced from their childhood scenes in which they were sexually seduced by some grown-up person. With female patients the part of seducer was almost always assigned to their father. I believed these stories, and consequently supposed that I had discovered the roots of the subsequent neurosis in these experiences of sexual seduction in childhood. My confidence was strengthened by a few cases in which relations of this kind with a father, uncle, or elder brother had continued up to an age at which memory was to be trusted. If the reader feels inclined to shake his head at my credulity, I cannot altogether blame him.… When, however, I was at last obliged to recognize that these scenes of seduction had never taken place, and that they were only fantasies which my patients had made up or which I myself had perhaps forced upon them, I was for some time completely at a loss.… When I had pulled myself together, I was able to draw the right conclusions from my discovery: namely, that the neurotic symptoms were not related directly to actual events but to fantasies embodying wishes, and that as far as the neurosis was concerned psychical reality was of more importance than material reality. I do not believe even now that I forced the seduction-fantasies upon my patients, that I “suggested” them. I had in fact stumbled for the first time upon the
Oedipus complex,
which was later to assume such an overwhelming importance, but which I did not recognize as yet in its disguise of fantasy. Moreover, seduction during childhood retained a certain share, though a humbler one, in the etiology of neuroses. But the seducers turned out as a rule to have been older children.…

When the mistake had been cleared up, the path to the study of the sexual life of children lay open.

This momentous shift in Freud’s perceptions was the turning point in his thinking and in the history of the psychoanalytic movement. It is important to note in his statement above that he never repudiated the reality of child abuse and its—admittedly, more modest—role in psychopathology. In his new understanding, Freud realized that his patients’ fantasies were masking their own childhood sexual longings, and that what they were repressing were not actual seductions but their wishes for the same.

Freud compared the function of repression to that of a watchman who stands guard between the large entrance hall of the unconscious mind and the small drawing room in which consciousness resides. The watchman is a censor, examining mental impulses to determine whether they will be allowed to enter further. “If they have already pushed their way forward to the threshold and have been turned back by the watchman, then they are inadmissible to consciousness; we speak of them as
repressed
,” Freud wrote. Such an impulse, for instance, might be the desire of a young girl for her father. The watchman would certainly frown on that; and although the image would be pushed back into the entrance hall, that doesn’t mean that it is banished forever. Years, even decades, later, the forbidden desire might return, but this time in a clever and frightening disguise. In its exile from consciousness, the forbidden desire has become an unconscious fixation, enlarging itself on fantasies. “It ramifies like a fungus, so to speak, in the dark and takes on extreme forms of expression,” Freud wrote in 1915, “which when translated and revealed to the neurotic are bound
not merely to seem alien to him but to terrify him by the way in which they reflect an extraordinary and dangerous strength of instinct.” In this way, Freud accounted for the bizarre nature of the fantasies his hysterical patients produced. The shameful sexual desire of a young girl for her father is reexperienced as her father’s desire for her; her fantasy of sexual union is recast as a remembered assault.

An unfortunate consequence of Freud’s rejection of his seduction theory was that society took a more skeptical stance toward all reports of child abuse, not merely those that had been achieved through recovered memories. That state of affairs began to change in the 1970s, as feminist writers began to speak up about the issues of rape and incest. The question of recovered memories did not arise; indeed, it was the persistence of memory, and not its repression, that was seen as the hallmark of childhood trauma.

Several forces produced the vector that we may call the recovered-memory phenomenon. Among them was the publication in 1980 of
Michelle Remembers,
which not only awakened popular interest in satanic-cult activity but also established the notion of massive repression, such that an entire secret life could be hidden away in the unconscious, waiting to be coaxed into consciousness by a caring, believing therapist. No longer ruled by psychiatry, the counseling profession itself was undergoing an informal deregulation. Psychologists and social workers were at least trained to practice, but increasingly counselors of varying ability and experience were simply being certified, or—as in Washington State—registered for a small fee, with no credentials required. Undersheriff Neil McClanahan, who has a bachelor’s degree in human behavior from Evergreen State College, is a registered counselor; Pastor John Bratun is not registered, nor does he need to be unless he charges for his services. Bratun never even took a course in psychology in college; he was trained to be an art instructor, which is what
he did before taking up counseling. The lack of credentials is not at all unusual. In New York, for instance, anyone can call himself a psychotherapist. This trend has left the profession prey to fads and malpractice.

At the same time, the field of psychotherapy was under attack within its own ranks. In 1984 two books appeared that challenged Freud’s abandonment of the seduction theory: Alice Miller’s
Thou Shalt Not Be Aware: Society’s Betrayal of the Child
(which had been published in German three years earlier) and Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson’s
The Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory.
These books struck a deep chord, coming at a time when child abuse suddenly seemed to be far more prevalent than society had ever been willing to recognize. A number of counselors began to wonder whether Freud had been right the first time; perhaps trauma—specifically, childhood sexual assault—really was at the root of most neurotic behavior, as Freud originally had claimed. (This revisionist theory quickly became so entrenched with some practitioners that they began calling themselves “traumatists” rather than therapists.) Using the same techniques that Freud himself renounced, particularly hypnosis, therapists and other counselors began uncovering memories of abuse which had apparently been repressed for most of the patient’s life. In some cases, the patients reported abuse that had continued well into their teen or adult years, without being consciously acknowledged. Many of these patients were diagnosed as suffering from multiple-personality disorder.

Soon the discoveries in the counseling offices spilled out into the families and the communities, as patients were encouraged to confront their abusers, notify the police, or bring suit. “You cannot wait until you are doubt-free to disclose to your family,” admonished Renee Fredrickson in her 1992 book,
Repressed Memories: A Journey of Recovery from Sexual Abuse.
“Avoid being tentative about your repressed memories. Do
not just tell them; express them as truth. If months or years down the road, you find you are mistaken about details, you can always apologize and set the record straight.”

Whether truthful or mistaken, recovered memories have had the effect of breaking apart thousands of families. A 1991 civil suit in Orange County, California, is characteristic of hundreds of cases that have flooded the legal system. Two adult daughters and a granddaughter accused their elderly mother/grandmother of gross, ritualistic crimes over a period of twenty-five years. The daughters contended that they had been tortured, sexually abused, and forced to kill babies in caves and church basements in Southern California. The women said that they had repressed the abuse until just a few years before, when the older daughter entered therapy after the breakup of her third marriage. In therapy she learned that she was a multiple personality, and she began remembering satanic-ritual abuse. Soon she brought her sister and her daughter (who was eleven when the trial began) into treatment with the same therapist, and they began having similar memories. Eventually all three were diagnosed as multiple personalities. They sought half a million dollars in damages. The defendant, who was a wealthy woman, contended that none of this abuse had ever happened. She believed that her older daughter was after her money, while her younger daughter and granddaughter were simply trying to please her older daughter. The jury decided that the defendant had neglected her daughters but had not intentionally harmed them. No damages were awarded. These claims have become sufficiently routine that some attorneys have standardized forms for their clients, in which the accusations of rape, torture, sodomy, and ritual abuse are already specified.

In 1992, in reaction to the rise of charges and lawsuits, a number of accused parents formed the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, in Philadelphia. By June of 1993, more than four thousand families had come forward (including the parents
of Roseanne Arnold). The foundation discovered that these people had much in common. Most of their marriages—about 80 percent—were still intact, and usually only the husband had been accused, although wives had also been accused in nearly a third of the cases. The couples were also financially successful, with a median annual income of more than sixty thousand dollars. The majority had college educations. Most of them reported having frequently eaten meals together as a family and having gone on family vacations. More than half reported being active or very active in religion. About 17 percent of the accusations involved satanic-ritual abuse.