FMS compared to satanic abuse.
It is more useful to see the FMS Foundation as a logical development of the satanic abuse fable than as a reaction or backlash to it. The obvious differences that make false memory syndrome and satanic abuse seem to be opposing ideas are primarily superficial. At core, both support "traditional family values" and attack "the other." In addition to their identical ideological agendas, both satanism and false memory provide simplistic, satisfying explanations for the mental illness thought to be caused by sexual abuse without questioning those power structures in the traditional family that encourage and exacerbate child abuse. Their largest significant difference is in underlying assumptions: both assume that the traditional family is deeply threatened, but in different ways. The satanic abuse fable sees the traditional family as besieged from without by the ultimate evil of "satanism." On closer examination, the "satanists" turn out to be effigies for "others" like feminists, poor single mothers, gays, and so on. The satanism fable invokes popular ideas of satanism to demonize "the other" as an embodiment of evil. False memory syndrome, also a fable, sees the family as subverted from within by false accusations of child abuse. On closer examination, the false accusers turn out to be effigies for the same "others." The false memory fable invokes the popular idea of the 1950's as an ideal, "other"-less utopian era to define "the other" as a group that must be excluded to reachieve that utopian ideal.
Another significant difference between the two fables is that satanic abuse has a diverse body of critics while false memory has few outside the incest survivor movement. For example, when the feminist news journal off our backs recently ran a feature criticizing the FMS Foundation, the unspoken premise of the article was that incest survivors are never mistaken about their recovered memories (Elliott). The only criticisms of false memory I have seen embrace a simplistic polarized dualism, where in response to the FMS Foundation's claim that recovered memories are always false, the critic contends that they are always true. Among satanic abuse critics, an alarming number fall into the same trap (Jeffrey Victor has joined the FMS Foundation's advisory board), but others do not (Debbie Nathan's feminist debunkings of the satanic abuse fable are based on a critique of the traditional family).
My research may have missed some critiques, or false memory may be too recent an idea to have acquired impartial skeptics. Another explanation is that the satanic abuse fable has no single advocate pressing its case, while false memory syndrome was invented by the FMS Foundation, a single, well funded, media wise organization. However, the same is true of hundreds of organizations. The enthusiastic embracing of false memory by scholars and journalists (two newsweeklies ran feature articles on the Foundation in late 1993) suggests a deeper cause for the lack of criticism.
Appeals of prejudice and simplicity.
False memory is a culturally appealing idea in a number of ways. Unlike satanic abuse believers, who are convinced that many parents are secret satanists, the Foundation has defined itself as an organization of falsely accused families, a sacred word and concept in America. The Foundation's annual membership dues are $100, effectively excluding working class and nonwhite families from its rolls. In the December 1993 FMS Foundation Newsletter (cited as Newsletter), John Hochman writes that almost all the women who recover memories of abuse are "white, as opposed to Latino, black, or Asian American" (10). While Hochman may have wanted to note that whites are over represented among these women, he has effectively implied that whites don't abuse their children. In a similar vein, Foundation advisory board member Martin Gardner writes that "sixty percent of [accusers'] parents are college graduates . . . more than 80 percent [of the parents] are married to their first spouse" ("The False Memory Syndrome" 370), as if incest only happened in uneducated, or "broken" (unsaid: poor, thus nonwhite) families. Covert class bias and racism of this kind lets the Foundation present itself as standing for "good" or "all-American" families, appealing to Americans' covert, unconscious bigotry.
In addition, the Foundation presents itself as scientific, especially in contrast to the irrational conspiracy theories of satanic abuse believers. The group's name, with the pseudo-medical term "syndrome," sounds especially impressive when bolstered by an "advisory board" of forty PhD's and MD's (FMSF goldenrod leaflet). The flashy label "FMS" provides a simple, satisfying explanation for supposedly false accusations of abuse. To say that people can be mistaken in their memory or interpretation of events is far less satisfying than to say that therapists and new age self-help feminists are brainwashing people into destroying their innocent families. By defining itself as a "backlash" movement (Reich 33), the Foundation capitalizes on people's love of simple, satisfying explanations and journalists' love of polarized, dichotomous views.
FMS Foundation's history and tactics.
The False Memory Syndrome Foundation claims to have been founded in March of 1992 by a number of parents who said that their grown children's accusations of sexual abuse were false (FMSF yellow leaflet). Like so much of the Foundation's propaganda, this claim may or may not be the whole truth. Jennifer Freyd, the daughter of the organization's executive director, maintains that the Foundation was formed to be a weapon in her parents' feud with her (over her assertion that her father incested her), and has willy-nilly grown into a national phenomena (cited in Kristiansen 8). In addition to acting as an advocacy and support group for such parents, the Foundation publicizes itself and "false memory syndrome" in the media and seeks to have the syndrome accepted as a valid phenomena among psychologists and psychiatrists.
The Foundation's primary publicity tool has been the personal stories of parents supposedly falsely accused and of "retractors," people who have decided their accusations of incest were untrue. Indeed, these narratives seem vital to FMS discourse: the scholarly journal Issues in Child Abuse Accusations devoted its Fall 1992 issue to false memory syndrome, in which three of the ten articles were personal accounts. These narratives have been used in research and conferences sponsored by the Foundation or by members of its advisory board, and that research has in turn been used by the writers of later narratives. As a result, the stories have become rather standardized, with a sameness of form and theme especially visible in the more recent collection of FMS narratives, True Stories of False Memories (cited as True Stories). The earlier Confabulations (cited as Confab) gives narratives by parents, while True Stories contains those by siblings and "retractors." Virtually all the accusers and retractors in both books are white women. Eleanor Goldstein and Kevin Farmer edited both books and contribute essays in both to contextualize the narratives. The wide range of writing ability (from nearly inarticulate to professional) shown in the narratives suggests that they have not been editorially revised to any great degree.
Professed love, actual spite.
Except for three "retractors," all of the narratives in both books are anonymous, supposedly because the narrators want reconciliation with their accusers. This anonymity is only nominal, however--I myself was able to infer that "How could this happen" (Confab 27-60) is by the Foundation's director, Pamela Freyd. Freyd, like many other narrators, takes advantage of her anonymity to engage in meanspirited insults, claiming her daughter took drugs, had sex with "a variety of partners" (37-38), and has become "deranged." Freyd was surely aware that others would be able to discern her identity, thereby violating her daughter's privacy, and that the daughter she claims to love would naturally recognize herself in Freyd's narrative and be hurt by the airing of such private details (or slanders).
Even if the narratives were truly anonymous, which they are not, the class, cultural, and sexual conflicts in some of the narratives are so filled with hate that the professed reconciliation seems impossible. In "My Last Letter to My Sister" (True Stories), the author seems more disturbed by her (?) sister "Sara's" change in class status and cultural tastes than by her statements that their parents were abusive. Sara has gone from a well paying office job to being on medical disability (35-36), and is no longer able to afford the clothes, furniture, or level of housekeeping that the author is accustomed to. Instead of understanding Sara's financial hardship, the author sees her as "living like a pig" (41) because her apartment is "a mess of Salvation Army furniture" (35), and thinks that she is now dressing in "rags" (39) not from stylistic choice or lack of money, but because she is "sick" and has become an "animal" (41,42).
Similarly, in "A Father Speaks" (Confab), the narrator seems more distraught over "Margaret's" decision to leave his conservative Midwestern culture than he is over her accusing him of incest. He is shocked that Margaret thought about majoring in "Women's Studies" at one point, and italicizes the term as if it were a swear word. More italics follow when Margaret experiments with "New Age" spirituality and turns to worshiping "Goddesses" (89-90). He labels her a "cult personality" (i.e, brainwashed), implying that her allegations of incest cannot be taken seriously because she is not in her right mind. After all, he claims, she grew up in a "very normal, middle class family" and graduated "with honors from high school" with "no drugs, no problems. Great kid" (89). He assumes that "normal" families do not abuse their children, so (from his view) he could not be an incestuous father, and her accusations must be groundless ravings. To clinch his implied argument that his daughter is insane, he notes that "she told her mother she is now a lesbian" (91), as if this, along with her feminism, were a symptom of mental illness.
Cultural Prejudice.
While few of the narratives reach the level of spite just described, most of them speak from a class and culture profoundly different from the accusers' newly acquired one. In "I Want My Sister Back" (True Stories), "Natalie" writes of visiting her sister "Lynn." In her apartment, Lynn has a bulletin board covered with "notes [to herself] about making sure she was taking care of herself," including self- affirmations like "Lynn, I love you. Love Lynn" (96). Such note writing is a common coping tactic and one that may be especially necessary for Lynn, whose problems have forced her to check into a hospital psychiatric unit at least once (93-94). But writing notes and love letters to yourself is not acceptable in Lynn's family, so when Natalie comes to visit, Lynn tapes a cloth over the notes she is ashamed to let her sister see. Her shame is justified, since Natalie makes the bulletin board an object of ridicule, seeing it as a sign of sickness itself rather than as a way of dealing with sickness.
In "The Recovery Movement," Goldstein and Farmer ridicule the "adults, often in childish clothing, who were holding, dangling, even hugging teddy bears" at a John Bradshaw workshop (Confab 274). Similar hostility toward teddy bears, hugs, and other "touchy-feely" aspects of therapy culture appears in various narratives and in the Foundation Newsletter. Aspects of therapy culture have been "feminizing" the larger public culture for some time (Bush didn't hug; Clinton does). Goldstein's hostility may in part be toward this "feminizing" trend to infuse the masculine "public" space with the same emotional openness formerly reserved for the feminine "private" sphere.
However, FMS supporters direct similar ridicule and hostility toward a number of other targets. The April 1994 Newsletter presents two pages of "what they're saying about us in professional publications" (3), decontextualized excerpts from various psychiatric articles critical of the Foundation. The longest excerpt is from a personal and informal feminist essay by Connie Kristiansen that appeared in the January 1994 SWAP Newsletter. (10) Kristiansen describes a speech and symposium on false memory syndrome put on by FMS Foundation supporters that she attended; the speech was disrupted by hecklers. In addition to critiquing the content of the symposium (as usual assuming that recovered memories must be true), Kristiansen describes incidents in which she thought the university where the symposium was held was engaging in "oppressive silencing, sexism, racism, and the misrepresentation of science" (Kristiansen 15). she concludes her piece with a lyrical passage about a tattoo she got "to ensure I never forgot the horrific, systemic violence against women and children" inflicted by patriarchal culture (Kristiansen 15).
The excerpter makes Kristiansen seem to have been a participant in the heckling, excises her essay's political content, but leaves in Kristiansen's brief description of herself and six friends sharing a single "hotel-apartment" ("Seven women, one bathroom. Beautiful laughing, moaning and groaning." [Kristiansen 11]). And, of course, the excerpter quotes the part about the tattoo. The excerpter makes Kristiansen, a PhD professor of Psychology at Carleton University, seem like a stereotyped sorority airhead with strange tattoos who disrupts meetings, and then primly complains that the Foundation had not gotten a response to its inquiry if "this" was proper professional behavior (3-4). In fact, the SWAP Newsletter editor informed me, no such inquiry was ever made (DeCourville interview).
Similar violent misrepresentation and decontextualized quoting occurs throughout the Foundation's Newsletter and in the essay sections of Goldstein and Farmer's books. The hostility in false memory literature is too widespread to simply be a strawman caricature of therapy culture, new age fads, and radical feminism. Any difference that doesn't fit a narrow version of white middle class suburban culture is ridiculed and scorned, from the feminist spirituality movement (Confab 308-310) to a performer who uses dance to help her audience "understand the effects of trauma from child abuse" (April 1994 Newsletter 4, quoting the March 94 "Lagazette: a feminist forum for the central coast").
Natural and unnatural.
As with the satanic abuse fable, cultural difference is the true target of false memory syndrome--whether Sara's poverty, Margaret's spirituality and sexuality, Lynn's organizational habits, Kristiansen's politics, or those teddy bears. But the satanic fable declares difference a subversive, diabolical evil besieging "people like us," something to be warred against. The false memory fable makes difference a mental disorder in society, an inner sickness rotting the family tree. Instead of proper villains or evildoers, false memory narratives feature women who are "suggestible, trusting, and believing" daughters (Confab 70) or "naive, trusting, innocent" sisters (True Stories 26). To war against these "poor women" (March 94 Newsletter 1) would destroy the family in order to save it; instead the Foundation makes difference an object of scorn, ridicule, or pity. The daughters have "fallen into the hands" (March 94 Newsletter 1) of therapists who are misguided, greedy, or themselves in need of therapy, but who are hardly evil.
Difference, in false memory discourse, is an internal weakening, a structural and systemic evil rather than a personal and individual one. It is not therapists who are evil, but memory recovery therapy, which Foundation literature claims advocates "rage, hate and retaliation," and is judgmental and absolves people of "responsibility for their actions" (True Stories 92). The author of "Becoming Schizophrenic" sees the therapist as merely misguided, and reserves her (?) venom for the evil of what she facistically calls "extremely stupid 'human rights' laws" that allow "a patient [to be] visited by anyone she wants" (True Stories 55), laws that allowed her sister to be deluded by the therapist.
In every narrative, however, the greatest evil is that the accuser breaks off contact with her family. Goldstein and Farmer constantly attack the affronty of daughters who dare to abandon their "family of origin" and form a "family of choice" (True Stories 3). It seems that the worst thing about the therapy, new age, and feminist cultures is that they promote the idea that a woman can and sometimes should sever her natural family ties (which some narratives almost treat as a sacred bond) and create a new, supposedly unnatural family of friends. The symbol of this evil idea, a sort of inverted crucifix and pentagram for false memory narratives, is The Courage to Heal, a bestselling self-help book for "women survivors of child sexual abuse" (subtitle) that supposedly encourages women to confront and disown their abusers and create a new family for themselves. (In fact the book merely says that some women find such tactics helpful and healing, while others do not, and then gives advice for those who wish to do so.) That this supposedly evil recovery movement "bible" happens to be by two lesbian feminists is almost certainly no coincidence.
All-American perverts.
If families are a sacred bond, then the accuser's disowning her perfect, all-American family would be all the more unnatural. Of course perfect, all-American families commit incest; Debbie Nathan points out that regardless of exact statistics, incest cuts across race and class lines and is so common that it "seems practically endemic to the family as a social formation" (Women 118). The FMS fiction is built on a need for a more comfortable story in which incest is only "an act by a violent, crazy individual psychopath" (Goldstein & Farmer Confab 315), and not a consistent application of patriarchal ideology. The mother writing "An Open Letter to Our Daughter's Therapist" (Confab), is unable to think of herself as ignorant of or willfully blind to her husband's activities, and finds it more comfortable to assume that she can really know for certain that there was no incest just as "there was not a single case of infidelity" in her 33 year marriage. If there was incest, she must have been a "subservient doormat" to "a pedophile, rapist, sexual pervert," a position that, for her, rhetorically slips into being an "accomplice," a "pervert" herself. If they really were perverts, "it would surely show somewhere else as well," but of course it doesn't. After all, "we are appreciated at work and in the community," and anyone who knows them "can confirm" that they are "absolutely normal people" (151).
When incest is redefined as an aberration of the family rather than a logical outcome of its structure, accusations of incest against WASP middle class families become absurd. So all of the narrators, like the mother in "A Personal Account of 'the Accusation,'" assume that saying they were a "normal" all-American white family is the same as saying "we were not perverts," and go on to deny not just incest but any kind of abuse: this mother claims she "never, ever" even spanked her daughter (Confab 65). Such descriptions by parents of their families as perfect are, naturally, rather self-serving, but even the more equivocal siblings, who note that their families were "not perfect" ("A Sad Reunion" True Stories 63), still go to lengths to maintain that their parents were not abusive in any way that could have been traumatic, usually claiming, as proof, to be well adjusted themselves.
The author of "Manipulated by New Age Therapy" (True Stories) writes that her (?) father's 1950's discipline methods "were not like the 'hands off'" ones used today, but says she is proud that his strict demands that "our behavior and manner be flawless" kept any of his kids from growing up to be criminals, drug addicts, or drunk drivers (87). Having euphemistically sidestepped whatever degree of spankings or beatings the father used on the children, the author justifies those blows as necessary and good, and thus as not abuse. With such a perfect family and father, whatever emotional problems drove the author's sister Catherine into therapy cannot have been childhood trauma, and so her accusations of incest cannot be true.
Virgin, whore, or unnaturally crazy.
Once they have dismissed the possibility of an unhappy childhood as the cause of an accuser's emotional problems, the narrators have to explain those problems. Many simply claim that there were no problems. Blithely ignoring the high cost of therapy and the fact that for many of the accusers, it carries a social stigma with it (as in the case of Lynn), many accounts portray the accuser's going into therapy as a frivolous, if not inexplicable decision, despite evidence to the contrary. As mentioned above, in the account "A Father Speaks" the father claims that Margaret had no problems before going off to college; yet in a letter he quotes without refuting, she writes that she was suicidally depressed throughout high school, and that she told him about it, asking for professional help (92).
Another repeated explanation is to place the accuser on one or the other side of the virgin-whore dichotomy. She may be a bad girl who has the problems she deserves for being "fairly promiscuous" (True Stories 13), "experimenting with homosexuality" (True Stories 65), "running with a fast crowd" (Confab 122), belonging to "a Marxist political group" that is "like a cult group" (Confab 120), or simply being "up to her [unspecified] old tricks" (Confab 15). On the other hand, her problems may stem from being unable to be the good girl she is trying to be. It may have been "the emotional stress of divorcing" and her inability to keep her family together (Confab 139), or the "guilt from having given birth to three children that she didn't parent" (True Stories 66), or the depression from being "unsuccessful in conceiving a second child" (True Stories 87). It seems these daughters can only be happy as a selfless wife and nurturer. They become unhappy if their quest for self-effacement is thwarted by outside events, and become equally unhappy if they reject that role. Even in the case of bad girls, however, FMS fiction has no personal villains; the daughter in "Becoming Schizophrenic" becomes violent and paranoid, and "started to abuse drugs and alcohol" because of impersonal forces beyond her control, but her bad girl behavior "was not really her true nature" (True Stories 54).
But there is a there there.
The parents' and siblings' narratives nearly all contend that the false accusations in their family are completely groundless--a contention that is completely refuted by the half dozen lengthy accounts by "retractors" (women who have decided their earlier accusations were false), published in True Stories of False Memories. In the first account, "Memories Not Mine," the author begins by portraying herself as a "good girl" with problems, who "finally" overcame the stigma of seeking therapy because of "the life-threatening illness of my baby" (223). On the very next page, however, we discover that she was "raped by a friend's brother" as a child (224), surely an event that contributed to her lifelong emotional distance and collection of "many fears and phobias" (223). We also discover that her sister is also in therapy dealing with the "terrible childhood she thought we had" (224). It seems that there really are good reasons for looking at your childhood in therapy, but the writer does her best to brush them under the rug.
She may not have experienced incest, but she has told us that she was sexually abused. Yet her language slips between the two terms, one moment deriding "incest survivor therapy" (229) and the next wondering at her willingness to believe that "childhood sexual abuse" might have happened to her, an idea she calls an "insanity" (228-229). After years of getting only worse in therapy, she is finally able to "listen to my heart and distinguish between lies and truth" (230), and says "I [now] love and respect my parents more than I ever have" (233). At the beginning she says that her family was not all "like the Waltons" (223) but by the end it seems she has chosen to treat them as if it were, conveniently forgetting that just a page before she told us that both her parents were alcoholics (232).
It was the therapy and not her own problems, she claims, that caused her to suffer the "great loss" of having her "relationship with my husband and daughters" deteriorate. When she quits therapy, she is rewarded for returning to her natural place as wife and mother by the recovery of her baby daughter's health (230).
The author of the second account, "Who Made Her God?", admits from the outset that "I was raised in a mentally unhealthy environment" (235), but is unable to label the treatment she received as "abuse." She is one of five sisters who were raised in a "beautiful home" by their mother, a "full time homemaker" who spent hours each day maintaining the landscaping and keeping the house spotless (236). When the writer and two of her sisters allowed their room to get too messy for their mother's taste, she made them live in an unfurnished basement room until they met her standards of neatness (237-238). This sort of controlling behavior evidently was not confined to cleanliness: obsessed with privacy, her parents refused to let outsiders set foot in their home, restricting visitors to the family room, which had an outside entrance. "I always felt as if there were a barbed wire fence protecting our property" (236-237), the author writes.
Her parents' obsessive need to have power and control over their children continued into her adulthood. When they disapproved of her fiancee, they cut off all contact with her. When she told them she was thinking of getting divorced, they rewarded her with a new car, new wardrobe, hotel money, and a blank check (presumably to pay the lawyer). When she changed her mind and told them she was staying married, they took away the car and the check and disowned her (239). Considering the manipulative power games they had been using on her, being disowned was probably for the best, but when she had a son they refused to meet, she became very depressed and sought therapy.
In therapy she dwelled on the pain of her childhood: she complains that only one of her therapists tried to stop her from doing so. She gets worse because of therapy, she thinks (242), and eventually listened to a "small chilling voice inside" her and quit. At the end, the four pages the author spent describing a childhood of horrifying emotional cruelty are dismissed, and she concludes her story by deploring the trend in therapy of "blaming parents for all the problems one may have in adulthood" (249). After all, that emotional cruelty wasn't all that bad, and it's better to have "made peace with my parents" and be planning to visit them soon so they can see their grandson (249).
No matter how horrible it was, the family is better and more important than an individual woman's happiness. When she realizes this, she is rewarded: now that she has returned to her senses, she has a "gainfully employed and very supportive" husband, a son who is "the joy of my life," and she is no longer overweight. Having realized that true happiness exists in being a wife and mother and nothing else, she hopes "to have more children in the future" (249).
The fifth narrative, "The Truth Set Me Free" by Gerilena Spillios (a penname), describes Spillios's sexual molestation on two occasions by strangers, the first at age nine, and her rape, again by a stranger, at age 13. Spillios says there were other incidents of sexual abuse but doesn't describe them. She had a plethora of problems and at one point checked every item on Sue Blume's "Incest Survivors' Aftereffect Checklist" except multiple personality (333). This means that in addition to various things that are only problems if you label them as such, she considered herself suicidal and self destructive and thought she had blocked off childhood memories of a particular period, person, or place (Blume, Secret Survivors xxvii-xxx). Not too unreasonably, her therapists assumed that dissociative memory loss great enough for Spillios to be aware of it must point to something more extensive than having been molested by strangers, and looked for incest. Eventually, she claims, the voice of God told her that the idea she was abused by her father was a lie (341), and she leaves therapy. Despite the manifest failure of her parents to protect her from all these molesters, she concludes by saying that "I always felt protected" by her father (344).
Only two of the narratives are by women who do not describe some kind of neglect or physical abuse by their parents, or sexual abuse by someone other than a parent. It is hardly a coincidence that they are two of the three that are not anonymous. Yet all of the authors insist that it is terribly wrong to blame these abusive or neglectful parents for their behavior. Far better to pretend that abuse or neglect never took place, reforge that sacred bond, and repudiate any misguided dabbling in "New Age" spirituality, the worship of "goddesses, or worst of all, "women's studies."