In the Wood with a Hood -- the Repressed Memory Movement

A shock wave has been sweeping across North American psychotherapy, and in the process causing major repercussions within our families, courts, and hospitals. A single diagnosis for miscellaneous complaints—that of unconsciously repressed sexual abuse in childhood—has grown in this brief span from virtual nonexistence to epidemic frequency.... a conservative guess would be a million persons since 1988 alone. The number affected is of course vastly higher, since, as all parties acknowledge, virtually every case sows dissension and sorrow throughout a family.

Frederick C. Crews, New York Review of Books, Nov., 1994

The repressed memory movement, first cousin to the ritual abuse panic, was influenced by Michelle Remembers but chiefly by a book called The Courage to Heal. The phenomenon chiefly affected young women, mostly white, from well-educated, middle class families. These women often went into therapy because they were suffering from depression or eating disorders. The repressed memory theory held that long-buried memories of sexual abuse were the hidden cause of patients’ discontents. A lengthy, intensive course of therapy was called for. Unlock the memories, purge the hurt, the therapists urged, and you’ll find release. Therapists even believed that memories could be repressed by the mind but remembered by the body: “body memories” such as unexplained aches and pains might really mean the body was recalling the suffocating horrors of being molested.

As a result, thousands of women accused their fathers, uncles, grandfathers and brothers of incest. On therapists’ couches across the land, noted The New Republic, the “memories that count are almost always of sexual abuse, as though every secret sorrow grew from the same root, and every psychic poison seeped from the same vial.”

Almost one in five of these cases of recovered memory, according to the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, included allegations of ritual abuse. While it’s entirely possible that some women were confronting genuine instances of past abuse, the accusations of satanic ritual abuse were bizarre and unprovable -- and yet were accepted as true by many therapists, policemen and journalists. “I was locked in a crawl space full of bugs when I refused to make love to a corpse.... I remember a child who was about one year old being cut up with an axe, and we were forced to eat it,” two anonymous “survivors” told reporter Tom Fennell for Maclean’s, a Canadian newsmagazine in 1992. Fennell explained to his readers that “such memories are usually deeply suppressed because Satanists... brainwash their victims... as a result, children will act normally outside of the cult -- without consciously remembering their experiences.” One way this was done, therapists believed, was that the personality of the child splintered off to create multiple personalities. This disorder was popularized by the book, Sybil. (More recently the real Sybil’s diagnosis and the treatment she received has been called into question.)

Which brings us back to Michelle Remembers author Dr. Lawrence Pazder’s contribution to his profession: during the 1970’s and 1980’s, anti-psychotic and anti-depressant drugs were changing psychiatry. Doctors discovered that schizophrenia and manic-depression, so resistant to lengthy therapy, was more successfully treated with medicine. There was not as much need for “talk therapy,” which is an expensive form of treatment, requiring as it does lengthy sessions between the therapist and the patient once a week or more.

It was once commonly believed that schizophrenia was caused by bad parenting. This idea has been debunked and medication has revolutionized our treatment and our perceptions of mental illness. But during this same period, diagnoses of multiple personality disorder and post traumatic stress disorder, popularized by Dr. Pazder's book, caused by repressed memory of ritual abuse, soared. Those diagnosed with multiple personality disorder are back to blaming Mommy and Daddy and are therefore in need of extensive counselling.

The Narcissism of Therapy

Talk therapy has as its essence a delicious luxury: the patient is the center of attention. The patient (or the medical insurance plan) is paying a trained professional to listen as the patient talks about herself and her feelings. Likewise, the survivors take center stage in their accounts of satanic torture, as therapist George Ganaway has noted. “My earliest memory,” said one survivor, “is of being raped on the High Altar.” Others speak of being groomed for positions in the highest hierarchy of the secret priesthood. In Michelle Remembers, little Michelle is either the centerpiece of the ritual, or the chief audience member. A coven of Satanists poured an extraordinary amount of energy into devising spectacular ceremonies for her. They took her to a cemetery in downtown Victoria and lowered her in a grave. She was locked up for weeks in a hollow statue while they conducted their solemn rituals. The chanting, the dancing, the human sacrifices, it was all for her and about her, to prepare her for the "Feast of the Beast."

But why have only the stars of the rituals come forward to tell their stories? Where are all the minions? Where is the third torch-bearer from the right? The handmaiden, the second banana, the also-ran? No one's come forward to say, "Yeah, it was my job to bring the snacks," or "I set up the sound system."

Freelance writer Julia Gracen, writing for Salon, picks up on the selfishness and immaturity of the survivor: "She has suffered, and she is therefore the center of the family's emotional and moral universe. She must have all the power and control in her relationships with her family, and her family must, according to another checklist in "The Courage to Heal," accept the truth of the accusations without reservation, apologize, conform to the survivor's wishes, say only the right things, and let the survivor direct the relationship."

Therapists' reaction to survivor narratives

Could these stories possibly be true? Some therapists ducked this question altogether. It’s real for the patient, they said. It would be counterproductive to the therapy to disbelieve the patient, they said. (Although if a delusional schizophrenic thought he was Napoleon, it's unlikely that the psychiatrist would help the patient plan his Italian campaign.)

But when patients described murder -- murder of infants, murder of children, murder of people trying to escape the cult -- therapists sometimes notified the police, or the "survivors" themselves did. In Utah, for example, Mike King, an investigator for the Attorney General’s office reported in 1995 that “he talked to hundreds of victims who alleged they were raped, tortured, forced to perform horrible acts and brainwashed. Some said they saw babies murdered or were forced to participate in ritual murders,” but couldn’t find any forensic evidence to substantiate the charges. Similar hunts were carried on nation-wide but also came up empty.

As A.S. Ross noted in Redbook, “Investigators have not found any physical evidence to support the existence of such cults or their practices, despite zealously following up leads from self-proclaimed survivors. No bodies of sacrificial victims. No photographs or videos of sex acts or satanic ceremonies. No scars on victims' bodies from the physical torture.”

Some therapists grew skeptical: As one noted in The Dilemma of Ritual Abuse: “I had decided to keep records of all alleged cult-related murders, kidnappings, and sacrifices reported by my patients and those I saw in consultation. After a few years, it became apparent that if my patients’ accounts were accurate, they would have depopulated the counties in which they lived. Clearly, either wholesale slaughter was occurring without perceptible impact or most if not all of the killing simply had not taken place.”

Meanwhile, many of the patients in therapy, who were supposed to be “empowered,” because they were “silent no longer,” and “breaking the cycle,” were actually becoming worse -- angry, grief-stricken, incapable of functioning. Over the years, it became obvious that fishing for memories, real or false, did not lead to improved well-being for the patients. On the contrary, they felt worse and acted worse. Mark Pendergrast wrote, in Victims of Memory: “I have come to regard the process as a warped kind of tango in which therapist and client dance through a fractured hall of mental mirrors. During most of the dance, the therapist leads, but at other times, the client takes over.... My dance analogy breaks down, however, at its height. It is not the therapist who cuts herself, tries to commit suicide, develops multiple personalities, writes hate letters to her parents, becomes a drugged-out zombie, gets divorced, or finds herself bound in psychiatric ward restraints.”

Patients also dragged each other down into the whirlpool of unreality. Wrote one psychologist, who finally awoke to the realization that harm was being done: “I am particularly wary about leaderless or peer-facilitated support groups for [multiple personality] patients and others who alleged that they are survivors of ritualistic abuse. I have tracked the course of more than a dozen of these groups over the years, and all but one were unmitigated disasters.... [the groups] overwhelm... their members with one another’s traumatic material, excessive dependency, and unbridled requests for support and nurture.”

One therapist, quoted in Spectral Evidence, a book about a landmark repressed memory case, said, “We’ve been encouraging people to do what, in the short or the long run, makes them feel self-actualized... We’ve urged people to leave home, to break off with their parents, their husbands and wives, and even their children, and to settle for nothing less than perfect relationships that are never going to interfere with their self-pitying narcissism.”

Dr. Paul Simpson, a former practitioner of Repressed Memory Therapy, or RMT, reported on the results of a review of RMT treatment in Washington state:

"Once Patients Began RMT:

Suicide attempts increased by more than 500 percent.
Hospitalizations rose almost 300 percent
100 percent were estranged from extended family
Self-mutilization increased by more than 800 percent
Not a single patient was well after three years of intensive therapy.

"The implications," writes Simpson, "are disturbing: RMT is an expensive therapy... where patients get dramatically worse, with no end or recovery in sight."

Dr. Susan Clancy, a memory expert at Harvard University, explains that according to her research, "[E]vents that are terrifying or violent are always remembered -- often all too well. Events characterized by discomfort, shame and embarrassment may be forgotten, but this forgetting is due not to dissociation but to voluntary, active and conscious efforts to suppress painful memories.

"There are no scientific data that trauma victims dissociate and forget their abuse.

"Proponents of [recovered memory] theory need to spend less time talking with relatively affluent patients seeking explanation for their psychological distress and more time talking to real victims of childhood sexual abuse -- people who often lack the resources to seek therapy."

Indeed, persons claiming to have repressed memories of ritual abuse have been overwhelmingly female, white, middle or upper class -- among the more privileged citizens of the globe, they come to believe that they are uniquely oppressed and uniquely damaged by childhood trauma that they didn't even remember.