Origins of belief in satanism.
Like the existence or nonexistence of satanic abuse, whether or not false memory syndrome exists is peripheral to a cultural critique of its ideological import. However, if something widely believed to exist in fact almost certainly does not, then that unfounded belief is itself of interest. False memory syndrome fables use a disease metaphor, seeing "the other" as an aberration attacking traditional values from within: they make psychological claims about the state of people's minds. In contrast, the satanic abuse fable uses a war metaphor, seeing the satanic "other" as besieging traditional values: it makes factual claims about the physical world. In discussing satanic abuse, I was able to show that those factual claims are rationally, medically, biographically, logically, and historically untrue, and concluded that, almost certainly, no group of diabolical cannibals as described in satanic abuse narratives exists. However, I did not address the far more difficult question of how people come to psychologically believe they were abused by nonexistent satanists, a question tightly linked to the truth of the FMS Foundation's psychological claims.
When Michelle Remembers was published, the idea of "satanic abuse" had not yet been formulated. It was only after therapists started hearing completely unexpected stories about satanic sacrificial cannibalism, mostly from patients diagnosed with one of the newly recognized dissociative disorders (especially multiple personality), that the term "satanic abuse" began to be coined at psychiatric conferences (Mulhern 153-54). Once the idea of satanic abuse was formulated into a diagnosis, however, therapists who believed in it would be on alert for its supposed symptoms in their patients; would interpret a passing reference to robes, knives, and so on as a partial memory of a satanic ritual; and would then ask questions designed to elicit the expected motifs of satanic abuse (Mulhern 157). Thus we have two groups of patients: those who spontaneously apply cultural fables of satanism to themselves, and those who, when prompted by a therapist, apply the therapist's ideas of satanism to themselves.
Extratheraputic satanic victims.
The first group of patients has an old history. During the Middle Ages and Reformation, the popular view that the devil was perpetually attacking individual Christians (Cohn ch4) caused people who heard imaginary voices to think they were "possessed" by demons (Walker). Such beliefs are still current today among extremely religious mentally ill people. In 1977, Larmore, et.al. published the case of a multiple personality patient, a Christian fundamentalist (37) tellingly called "Faith." Her personae fit the usual virgin-whore dichotomy, except that the primary "bad girl" character had "taken on the delusion of being a satanic agent, sent by Satan to take over the body of Faith" (36). It would be only a small step from this sort of delusion, created by applying religious ideas of a personal devil to oneself, to a delusion based on the medieval witchcraft legend or its modern satanic version.
As early as 1979, Judith Spencer's "Jenny" was telling therapists that satanists were stalking her (Spencer 164), but evidently until 1983 all the therapists she saw treated her, reasonably, as a paranoid schizophrenic when she told them in the initial interviews that she had been in a cult that summoned demons and sacrificed people (178). Less obviously insane people who claim to be satanic victims, like Lauren Stratford (Passantino et.al.), have played a significant role in getting the satanic abuse fable to be taken seriously. When such people appear to be sane and rational in all respects other than their delusions, it is all the harder to realize that they are delusional, making them especially convincing: therapist Noreen McCarrick, the most rational satanic believer I have encountered, cited a patient who came to her claiming to have never forgotten her satanic upbringing as convincing evidence that satanic abuse existed. McCarrick ignored the irrationality of this patient's story, accepting it as true, with all its usual motifs of maternal abuse, ritual sex, and forced pregnancy followed by sacrificial cannibalism of the resulting infants, among otherwise typical Americans (interview). The reasons why people become deluded have a number of simple labels but are poorly understood. Suffice that such people exist, but are too rare to account for all satanic victims.
Spontaneous therapeutic satanic victims.
Delusions can also be created in the course of therapy. A century ago, Emma Eckstein, a "deeply religious Catholic" woman diagnosed with "hysteria" (Nathan 159) told Freud about being raped by Satan. At the time, Freud still used hypnosis and thought that the cause of hysteria was incest. His ideas of sexual abuse combined with Emma's notions of the devil (and perhaps one of them had read of Jarcke or Mone's ideas, first published in Germany sixty years before, that there really had been a witch cult [Cohn 103-04]). Freud writes to Fliess that the entranced Emma tells of having "the diabolus [i.e, the devil] sticks needles into her fingers and then places a candy on each drop of blood" (Freud, The Complete Letters 225); in the next letter, he writes that she speaks of having "a piece of [her] labium minor" cut off by someone who "sucks up the blood" and then gives her "a piece of the skin to eat" (227). Similarly, In the 1970s therapists gradually decided that dissociative disorders were caused by trauma, especially childhood trauma like abuse (Mulhern 153). When combined with a Christian patient's notions of satanism, expectations of abuse could create stories of "satanic abuse."
The reasons someone would combine their religious fears with a therapist's expectations are complex. According to theory, dissociative disorders are caused when traumatic events get "dissociated" in memory so that they are present but either not fully retrievable (e.g, emotions might be divorced from events) or else not consciously retrievable at all; recovering emotions and events into conscious awareness is supposed to cure the symptoms. Treatment usually centers on recovering memories in a hypnotic trance (whether called "hypnosis" or something else), in which unconscious memories supposedly become directly accessible (Mulhern 146-47). In addition, Ganaway notes that "the most consistent" common denominator "among individuals with severe dissociative disorders, including multiple personality," is "very high hypnotizability," scoring a five on Herbert Spiegel's scale (Ganaway 121). Hypnotherapist Spiegel ranked his patients from unhypnotizable zeros to very easily hypnotized fives (303). The vast majority of multiple personality patients are fives (Mulhern 149). Spiegel found that hypnotizability seemed constant for any individual, and that those with high scores tended to share certain personality traits (Spiegel 303), traits directly relevant to the creation of satanic abuse delusions. Authors tend to discuss these traits in pejorative terms: I have tried to simply describe them.
Spontaneous victims and hypnosis.
On a day to day basis, fives have "an almost magnetic attraction" to "new events," including new "perspectives," and tend to "affiliate" themselves with novelty (Spiegel 305). In other words, a five reading Michelle Remembers would very likely wonder if she herself had been so abused. Less easily entranced people would reason that they didn't remember any such thing, and would dismiss the thought. Fives, however, tend to be willing to replace "old premises and beliefs with new ones," usually suspending "critical judgment" in doing so (305). Once a five has fully adopted a particular belief system, however, her views become intransigent (308). Fives also tend to show an "intense" and insistent "trust" that effectively amounts to a "demand that all attention and concern be focused on them" (304). In the hypnotist's office, this demanding trust causes them to respond to the therapist's questions not necessarily with honest answers, but with one calculated to please and gain more attention from the therapists (Spiegel 315-16).
These traits, combined with a time sense "focused almost exclusively in the present" (306), create a remarkable ability to relive the past. When a moderately hypnotizable person is hypnotized and asked to remember, say, her fifth birthday, she relates fragmentary, incomplete memories and is aware that she is remembering the past, not in the past. When a five is so asked, there is no such awareness: she will relive her fifth birthday in the present tense, with total recall for even the most trivial of details (Spiegel, 306). Skeptic and anthropologist Sherrill Mulhern argues that what is actually happening is that the five, eager to comply with the hypnotist's request for detail, unconsciously fills in gaps in memory with "information from various sources," in order to please the therapist (Mulhern 148). Rather than remembering, the five is spontaneously inventing a story from fantasies, books, and various real memories of unrelated times and events.
When their fictionalized reliving of the past creates a logical contradiction, such as the fictional memory of satanic abuse in conflict with other memories of a devout Christian upbringing, fives use a "trance logic" that enables them to accept both contradictory memories as equally valid (Spiegel 306). Finally, even modestly hypnotizable people experience memories invented in hypnosis as just as real as memories of real events (Mulhern 149).
An excellent example of the process by which a grade five person invents memories of satanism occurs in Feldman's Lessons In Evil. Barbara was raised in a fundamentalist family (44), and seems to have been a grade five: Feldman tells us that she is a very good hypnotic subject (42) and when remembering under hypnosis, she relives events in the present tense (Feldman says that dialogue from therapy sessions is verbatim [ix]). Barbara can simultaneously believe that the extensive burn scars on her back and arms are from satanic torture with a hot poker (196) and that they are self-inflicted (271). Elsewhere, she tells of giving birth in a satanic ceremony. Her grandfather is holding a knife, smiling sadistically, evidently intending to perform a Ceasarian section (183). He cuts her, she feels pain and a "pulling" sensation, then she is "looking" somewhere else, "trying not to think about it." She describes the satanists' ceremonial garb, and realizes that her grandfather, who she just said was barefaced, would logically be wearing his ceremonial mask--so she changes her story in midstride and he is suddenly masked (184). "They," specifically "Granddaddy," then "pull it out," and the satanists leave with the infant (185-86). "What about you," Gail asks, he "cut you open." Barbara is stymied: she doesn't know, but if she was cut open, she would be dead, so it must not be a very large cut, but, she repeats, she doesn't know (186). "How does Grandfather know how to do that," Gail asks. Barbara realizes that Gail is skeptical of the grandfather's ability to perform such surgery. Trying to give Gail what she thinks Gail wants to hear, Barbara again suddenly changes her story, saying that he only started to cut; the family pediatrician finished the deed. Where did the doctor come from? She doesn't know; he just appeared (186). When Barbara later realizes that she has no scar consistent with a ceasarian delivery, this contradiction does not bother her any more than the contradictory explanations of her burn scars: she simply decides that the grandfather cut her, then the doctor delivered a vaginal birth (196).
From this it seems clear that the first group of satanic victims mentioned above, those who spontaneously tell stories of satanic abuse regardless of the expectations of the therapist, primarily consists of highly religious, highly hypnotizable people. They easily adopt beliefs about satanism, but are extremely reluctant to give them up. When asked to remember under hypnosis, they combine real memories with fantasies based on their religious beliefs and their reading of religious propaganda about satanism, and then uncritically accept those delusional memories of satanic abuse as factually true no matter how illogical they may be.
Iatrogenic satanic victims.
The second group of satanic victims, those who recover ambiguous memories that the therapist interprets as satanic, has a much simpler etiology. Told by a supposed expert (a therapist or self help book) that they are satanic victims, the patient trusts the expert's opinion and agrees to do trance state "memory work." The ability to invent detail in a trance is not confined to the highly hypnotizable. Perry and Laurence show that all memories "recovered" in hypnotic trances are potentially unreliable, and can range from being mostly accurate to mostly inaccurate ("Enhancement of Memory by Hypnosis"). Again, people who fabricate memories in a trance usually accept those memories on the same level as they do accurate memories of real events. With somewhat hypnotizable people, conscious memories can act as a reality check on what is retrieved in hypnosis, but if there are no conscious memories of the event (as is usually the case with patients who suspect but do not remember that they are victims of incest), then the imagination has free reign unless great care is taken. Told by a trusted expert that satanic abuse is real, the patient starts interpreting all her memories from a new perspective, until she is fabricating freely.
My own mother, Mary, had been troubled by dreams of blood. A therapist told her that such memories indicated satanic abuse, which the therapist did not think herself competent to deal with, and referred Mary to Noreen McCarrick. In a trance state with McCarrick, Mary described being, at age two, in a galvanized metal tub full of blood. Mary was extremely fortunate in two ways. First, unlike many satanic believers, McCarrick realized that children's world views are quite unlike an adult world view, and so she did not try to make adult sense of Mary's recovered childhood memory. Second, McCarrick was logical enough to realize that the memory more likely had something to do with a very young Mary being terrified at scenes of hog slaughtering on her parents' farm than with satanism.
Laura Buchanan was not so fortunate. Seeking help for vague memories she had of incest with her father, she entered a support group where the most colorful person was a satanic victim. A few months later, her lack of progress caused her psychiatrist to recommend a sodium amytal interview (in which a small dose of barbiturates induces a relaxed trance state). After several hours of possibly leading questions, the drugged Buchanan made a vague reference, possibly inspired by stories in the support group, to robes and animal killings that the psychiatrist interpreted as satanic. Diagnosing Buchanan as a satanic victim, the psychiatrist encouraged her to speak with other victims. Under this urging Buchanan gradually decided that the psychiatrist (an expert) was right, to the point that she later became so paranoid she decided the psychiatrist was a satanist (Buchanan 108, 117-18 and phone interview).
Thanks to tabloid television, which has made satanic abuse fables common knowledge, people do not need to be in therapy to unconsciously fabricate memories of satanic abuse: In addition to the delusional patient who claimed never to have forgotten her satanic past, McCarrick told me of two other patients who had spontaneously recovered "memories" of being satanically abused after the trauma of being raped or in an automobile accident, respectively. The 19th century physician Charcot induced trances in his "hysterical" patients through the cruel method of sounding a loud gong next to their ears (Evans 43-44). In a similar way, the trauma McCarrick's two patients had undergone could have put them in a trance, in which they fabricated memories that McCarrick interpreted as satanic abuse.
Belief among therapists.
Vital to each group of patients is that therapists believe in the factual reality of satanic abuse: without that, delusional beliefs would be irrelevant and fabricated memories inchoate. In the 1970s, therapists treating dissociative patients, such as Larmore (cited above), were experimenters working outside standard diagnostic manuals. Their patients would normally have received a pejorative diagnoses: "malingering" (lying), "histrionic behavior" (acting out for attention), or "hysteria" (Aldridge-Morris ch3), and so they were skeptical, cautious, and careful to verify, when possible, their patients' assertions (Larmore 36). Once dissociation became an accepted diagnosis, however, many more therapists began working with it, and with no fear of ostracism, the newcomers have been far less careful. Some individual therapists obviously choose to believe their patient's tales of satanic cults because of their own religious fundamentalist beliefs. More secular therapists choose to believe for two reasons. First, they express an ethical reluctance to treat patients' memories of abuse as anything but truthful. Second, many seem ignorant of the limitations and powers of hypnosis.
Debbie Nathan argues that the conviction that victims' stories must be true "stems partly from collective guilt over the time when they were hardly ever believed" (120), and judging from psychiatric literature on satanic abuse, she seems correct. The refereed journal Dissociation publishes essays by both satanic abuse believers and skeptics. In "A Reply to [the skeptic] Ganaway," believer Martin Smith focuses the second half of his essay on what he calls the "tone" of Ganaway's three-year old article. Ironically in light of the highly anti-feminist content of most satanic abuse accounts, Smith is bothered that Ganaway would even think of doubting patients' reports of abuse when "since the time of Freud until recently, therapists have functioned as apologists for the social status quo" in thinking that incest and beatings were rare events (118). "In light of our society's desire to stay in denial about abuse of any kind" (119), he asks therapists to use "caution" and "humility," and be more open to the possibility of satanic abuse (118). Since attacking the "tone" of an article is not proper scholarly debate, it seems that Smith's peer reviewers, like Smith, felt a sort of pseudo-feminist guilt that from the later Freud to the 1970s, their profession had dismissed women's reports of incest as fantasies. A similar attitude appears in Sakheim and Devine's satanic abuse anthology, Out of Darkness: one contributor calls for disbelieving therapists to adopt a supportive attitude, on the assumption that "to treat this material as anything but real would be to undermine the patient" (Greaves 47).
But this guilt does not seem to be operating in Feldman's case. From the first, she writes, she "knew" that "everything Barbara told me was the truth" (48). Feldman is vague about the reasons she knew because doing so adds dramatic impact to the brand of new age spiritualism she is peddling. Most likely, her belief, like that of many of her colleagues', is based on an inadequate understanding of hypnosis. Skeptics note that many therapists, like Feldman, assume that memories cannot be forgotten, merely misplaced, and that hypnosis allows full, cinematic access to all memory. This fallacy is recent--when working with Emma Eckstein, Freud realized that her memories were not factual, although he clearly did not know quite what to make of them. He toyed with and discarded both a "dream" of a "primeval devil religion," and labeling Emma a "paranoiac" as explanations (The Complete Letters 227-228). In the end, he decided that Emma's stories were valid but not literally true, that they "conceal" her victimizer in a "disguise" as a "defense" (225, 228). Evidently he thought it was less painful for Emma to imagine having been raped by the devil or by "witches" than for her to remember having been "seduced," as he puts it, by a relative. For whatever reason, therapists have since become significantly less sophisticated in their understanding of hypnosis. Knowledge of the inaccuracy of hypnotic memories seems be confined to pure research and forensics (Mulhern 151), while clinical hypnotists tend to be woefully ignorant of the findings of scientific research in their field (Mulhern 149, Baker 326).
In a related error, therapists regard the novelistic detail of patient's accounts of satanic torture as an indication of their veracity. When Spiegel described his "Grade 5 Syndrome" in 1974, he fell into the fallacy of seeing memory under hypnosis as a form of total recall. So, when he discovered that fives could produce "layer upon layer of memory" on request, he saw this as evidence for good memory rather than invention (306). Skeptics have noted that hypnotically inspired tales of reincarnation or of UFO abduction are acquired using the same techniques that elicit tales of satanic abuse.
Feldman asks us to accept Barbara's stories of satanic grandparents on the same basis as Barbara's hypnotically induced regression to a past life. In Hidden Memories, Robert Baker discusses various kinds of fantasies people "remember," including satanic abuse, past life regression, and tales of having been abducted by aliens. Discounting hoaxes, Baker notes that in numerous UFO abduction stories, "themes, content, ideas, and even dialogue," not to mention the appearance of the aliens, "had been borrowed directly from old science fiction movies, Star Trek episodes," and various science fiction novels and stories (322). Baker writes that when researchers hypnotized volunteers who knew little of UFO folklore (presumably not all of them were grade fives), and asked them to "imagine" being kidnapped by aliens, contrary to expectations, the volunteers came up with elaborate, detailed narratives, virtually indistinguishable from the kind supposed UFO abductees gave (323). Memories of past lives, Jeffrey Victor notes, have been shown to be similarly fabricated, unconsciously, from historical books and novels (87-89). My analysis of recurring motifs in satanic abuse narratives (chapter 6) strongly suggests that they are likewise drawn from a common tradition, either of prior satanic narratives, or of antisatanic propaganda and occult writings or fictions.
Believers and reality consensus.
Once they first began seeing patients with tales of abusive satanists, therapists who chose to believe such tales based their belief either on their religion, or on an acknowledged guilt over the way their profession dismissed reports of incest in the past. In addition, they overestimated the ability of hypnosis to recover accurate memories, and, since few of them were novelists, they underestimated the power of human imagination to construct complex, detailed stories out of a variety of sources on the spur of the moment. The first believing therapists began communicating with one another and presenting their beliefs at the international and regional conferences on multiple personality and dissociation that began meeting in 1984.
The bulk of anthropologist Sherrill Mulhern's study of satanic abuse fables has focused on examining how a consensus view of reality was created among believers at these conferences. Informal discussions evolved into scientific papers--nine at the third (1986) international conference, twenty percent of the papers and a full day workshop devoted to satanism at the sixth--with all the papers accepting patients' stories as literal truth (Mulhern 154). In what Mulhern calls a "paranoid" interpretation of data (158), Jenny's delusions about demons, Michelle Smith's miracle play of being rescued from the Devil by the Virgin Mary, Laura Buchanan's drug-induced ramblings about robes and slaughtered animals, and my mother Mary's dreams of being covered with blood have all been interpreted by therapists as evidence of satanic abuse. Satanic victims, Mulhern shows, "are not so much saying the same things as they are being heard the same way" (158, her emphasis). All published writings by satanic believers I have read see the motifs of satanic abuse fables as evil assaults on innately innocent children; they hear their patients tell of horrible tortures and sexual abuse, confirming their expectations. Noreen McCarrick more rationally sees the same motifs as what satanic victims are brought up to regard as normal, and thus not necessarily traumatic; so she hears her patients describe the same satanic abuse motifs as the normal (to them) religion in which they were raised (interview).
Paranoid Consensus.
Therapists like D. Corydon Hammond hear their patients talk about satanism as a global conspiracy in which victims are tortured for purposes of "brainwashing, mind control, and programming," turning them into "satanic Manchurian Candidates" (Mulhern 154)--a reference to Richard Condon's fanciful cold war novel in which Communists "brainwash" a captured American soldier into committing assassinations on command (The Manchurian Candidate). In an interview, Noreen McCarrick (who does not believe in a conspiracy but still thinks satanists routinely brainwash their children in order ensure that they keep the cult's secrets), referred me to this novel as if it were a nonfiction reference.
Reactionary dislike of the new, untraditional religions that have appeared in the last thirty years created the myth that "cults" practiced "brainwashing" on their converts (Richardson, Introduction). The concept of "brainwashing," invented to explain why a handful of American POWs in the Korean War chose to stay in Korea rather than return home, is based on the work of researchers who were "caught up in the anti-communist rhetoric of the time" and who assumed that communist ideology was "fundamentally alien to human nature" (Richardson, Introduction 5-8). Since satanic abuse narratives assume that satanism is fundamentally unnatural, satanic cults are thought to use "brainwashing" on their inherently good child victims in order to transform them into satanists: as early as Michelle Remembers, the satanists are supposedly using "ego destruction" and "mind control" (Smith & Pazder 35, 194). The seriously flawed cold war studies of brainwashing rest on the dangerous assumption that human thought can be conditioned, Pavlov style, in the same way that animal behavior can (Sargant). Even if people were like animals, for such conditioning to be successful, it must include predictable, rule based reinforcement, both positive and negative (Sargant; Andersen & Zimbardo). Yet Hammond, McCarrick, and the satanic abuse narratives I have read all agree that satanic "brainwashing" is done through torture, not reward and punishment; even McCarrick, otherwise reasoned and wise in her satanic believing, sees that torture as explicitly random (McCarrick interview). Since children brought up as satanists would follow the tenets of satanism just as naturally as Hare Krishna children follow the tenets of Krishna, brainwashing would be superfluous in any event.
Brainwashing and conspiracy were motifs of Michelle Remembers despite their paranoid illogic and complete lack of any factual basis, because they were part of the reality consensus among religious reactionaries of what "cults" were like. Today, they are still a satanic motif because despite their irrationality, they "explain" so much that would otherwise make belief in the reality of satanic abuse impossible. To Hammond and others, the complete lack of evidence for satanic abuse is simply evidence for the power of the satanic conspiracy: the police must be infiltrated by satanists, who hid or destroyed evidence. At the 1992 Akron, Ohio regional dissociation conference, Hammond even explained his lack of therapeutic progress on the satanic conspiracy: as many as a third of all satanic abuse patients, he said, were being picked up by satanists after their therapy sessions and rebrainwashed (Hammond, tape 1b). Finally, this view of reality allows satanic believers to dismiss all skeptics and critics as satanic pawns, if not actual satanists. Laura Buchanan quotes an article on false memory syndrome that appeared on the editorial page of her local paper. She names the author of the piece and claims that the person's daughter was a satanic victim (186): the author of the piece is thus, presumably, a satanist.
FMS Foundation and all-American incest.
The False Memory Syndrome Foundation has likewise built up a consensus view of reality, but since the Foundation was formed by a small group that invented and defined false memory syndrome, and then promoted its definition with a well-organized publicity campaign, the reality consensus of the Foundation is much more rational and concise than the satanic abuse fable, which grew haphazardly and was heavily influenced by irrational and paranoid people like Hammond and Buchanan. The Foundation's reality view is based first, on an assumption that incest is a pathological aberration, and second, on a flat rejection of the theory that mental illnesses can have a traumatic etiology.
As discussed in the previous chapter, the Foundation points to the white race and middle class demographics of those who contact it claiming to have been falsely accused, making an implicit assumption that "good" and "normal" all- American WASP families don't abuse their children. Consider Goldstein and Farmer, who strenuously object to the feminist observation that incest is a normal outcome of the cultural ideologies of the patriarchal family and not a pathology. They label this understanding "extreme lesbianism" (Confab 307) and, rather than address such theories or the research behind them, they selectively quote and ridicule a few fringe feminist writers in their first book (Confab 307-316), and simply label Susan Brownmiller's "conclusions [as] based on emotion and intuition" in their second (True Stories 170-71). They conflate feminist scholars with self-help "experts" (True Stories 168-206), and throughout hold the idea that incest could be anything but a "despicable crime . . . contained to the lower class" with contempt (True Stories 171). Nor is class and race bias confined to the Foundation's popular propaganda; Kristiansen writes that Harold Lief, a member of the FMS Foundation's "professional advisory board," (11) speaking at a presumably scholarly symposium on "false memory syndrome" at Montreal General Hospital, argued that "standards of morality for the middle class have been raised" while standards for the lower class have been lowered, so that "innocent behaviors" of the bourgeois become criminal, while the "deviant actions" of the poor become innocent (14). In other words, real incest, which exists only among the poor, is overlooked while the "innocent" peccadilloes of the upper classes have been mistaken for heinous crimes.
The Foundation assumes that all 12,000 (as of March 1994) bourgeois "families" that have contacted it claiming innocence are in fact innocent. Statistically, in such a large sample, there are probably at least some couples where the husband was in fact incestuous and the wife, ignorant of his guilt, contacted the Foundation; and at least some guilty people are probably using the Foundation to bolster their claims of innocence either in court or in community opinion. I wrote the Foundation's director, Pamela Freyd, asking how she ensured that such people were excluded from its rolls; in the best style of public relations, I received a reply to a question I had not asked. Freyd wrote that "people who have contacted the Foundation" were asking for "thorough psychiatric evaluations," and that such tests, properly conducted, could accurately identify "people who are likely perpetrators" (Freyd). In short, the Foundation does not verify its contactees' claims, instead using the fallacious idea that there is an incestuous "type" (poor, uneducated, nonwhite, and so on), claiming that since its contactees are not that type, they are innocent.
Even if there is an incestuous "type," Freyd's claim that psychiatrists can "identify people who are likely perpetrators" is simply false. In Hidden Memories, Baker cites a famous 1973 study by Rosenhan which showed that even professional diagnostic psychiatrists are seldom able to make valid diagnoses. The study, which has been replicated a number of times with similar results, had sane individuals check themselves into various psychiatric wards, all complaining of the same minor auditory hallucinations. Once admitted, they reported that their symptoms had vanished and that they felt fine. Could they please leave now? Despite the fact that they behaved in a perfectly normal manner the entire time (keeping a journal of their experiences), the staff persisted in seeing them as insane. It took the experimenters an average of two and a half weeks to convince the staff that they were sane enough to discharge. One hospital, quite angry at being "tricked" when the results were published, was told that a follow up experiment would be conducted. In the next three months, that hospital identified twenty percent of their new arrivals as possible experimenters: in fact, no new experimenters had tried to check in at all (Baker 35-36).
Assuming that there was indeed an actual "type" that could be identified, if the Foundation was concerned about the innocence of the people it represents, it could test a statistically valid sample of its contacts, looking for the "type," but it has not done so--such surveys as it has done, according to the March 94 FMS Newsletter, were self-administered and self-selected by the respondents (4), a technique that does not give representative results.
FMS Foundation and "repression."
Based on its claim that the people it represents are innocent--a claim based on false, unvalidated premises that are almost certainly not true in at least some cases--the Foundation also claims that memories of traumas are not forgotten and therefore cannot be recovered. As in the case of its argument that the feminist analysis of incest is incorrect, the Foundation bases its claims on deliberate distortions, in this case of the theory of dissociation.
Foundation advisory board member Martin Gardner claims false memories of abuse are being generated by incompetent therapists, and that "better-trained, older psychiatrists do not believe that childhood memories of traumas can be repressed for any length of time, except in rare cases of actual brain damage" ("The False Memory Syndrome" 374, my emphasis). Kristiansen writes that board member Harold Lief made a similar "implication that, because there is no scientific evidence for repression, there can be no such thing as a recovered memory" (Kristiansen 13, my emphasis). Similar statements that "repression" does not happen, and that therefore traumatic memories cannot be forgotten, recur in various numbers of the Foundation's newsletter and in Goldstein and Farmer's books. In short, the Foundation is claiming that since memories of trauma supposedly cannot and are not "repressed," memories recovered in therapy are always fallacious (I held above that memories recovered in hypnosis can be incorrect, especially if care is not taken).
Kristiansen notes that the key word here is memory "repression" (13), a concept invented by Freud that has since become the vernacular way of speaking about forgotten memory. As I said above, the current, more comprehensive theory is one of "dissociation" of memory. "Repression," as theorized by Freud, has indeed been discarded for some time, but only because there is a new, better concept to explain the observed phenomena of amnesia and forgotten trauma. Gardner's and Lief's arguments are logically equivalent to saying that since the theory that the sun moves about the earth has been discredited, it is absurd to think that the sun "rises" in the morning.
There is ample anecdotal evidence of the whole or partial forgetting of traumatic memories (without Gardner's "actual brain damage"). Incest survivor Barbara Schave writes in Forgotten Memories that while other childhood events are clear to her, she "remembered nothing that happened in the interior of [her parents'] house" (46-47, her emphasis). My own mother has been aware that she could not remember a two year period ever since she discovered in a college mathematics class that she had never learned how to manipulate percentages. In her essay collection Skin, Dorothy Allison writes that at age eleven she mustered up the courage to tell one of her cousins that her stepfather was incesting her. Her mother moved her and her sisters away from him, but he "swore he would stop," and "we went back after a few weeks." Allison "stopped talking for a while" and has "only vague memories of the next two years" (18-19). Later, she explains that her sisters "do not remember all of our childhood," so that she had to go through parts of her autobiographical novel with them, explaining, "that page is true. It didn't happen to me, though, it happened to you" (55-56). In addition, although the overall rate of forgetting among incest victims is just as unknown as the rate of incest itself, Kristiansen cites a number of small (under 200 participants) studies which verified that forgetting of memories did occur (10-11).
Such evidence does not deter the Foundation. During a question and answer period at Harold Lief's presentation, Kristiansen writes that she cited her list of studies and their findings and asked Lief to explain how he could fly in the face of such evidence (10-11). According to her, in response, Lief tried to characterize the studies she had cited as ones of "allegedly recovered memories" and as "anecdotal"; she corrected him. Then, like Freyd in response to my letter, he answered a question she had not asked, reciting the Foundation party line that therapists were recovering memories without corroboration and that this was malpractice, and then, having called a study of 150 people "anecdotal," presented his own anecdotal evidence--of one person (11).
In another instance, two consecutive issues of the Foundation's newsletter (Jan. & Feb. 94) contained attempts to minimize a study by Linda Williams. The Foundation articles disingenuously claim that Williams' results are unpublished, with the implication that there must be something wrong with a study that is taking so long to appear (Feb. FMS Newsletter 3); in fact, a preliminary report was published in 1992 (Kristiansen 16; I have been unable to obtain the preliminary report), and publication delays of two years are typical for scholarly journals. According to FMS Newsletter articles, Williams gathered over 100 hospital records of girls treated for sexual abuse, then interviewed the now-adult women. Thirty-eight percent of the women were unable to remember the incident of sexual abuse that had caused them to be hospitalized (Jan. FMS Newsletter 2-3). Advisory board member Terence Campbell argues that the 38% figure is incorrect because many of the women remembered some kind of sexual abuse, but not the particular event. He arbitrarily declares that all of these women did in fact remember the particular event, but had it confused with other abuses, and triumphantly cuts 38% to 12%, the number of women who were unable to remember any abuse at all. Naturally, he does not consider that even one in ten women is more than the zero that the Foundation implicitly claims.
FMS reality consensus.
With therapists who believe satanic abuse accounts, it seems clear that beneath the complexity lies a simple combination of ignorance and willful blindness. Feldman simply does not and will not realize that her patient is saying mutually contradictory things, even though she has written those contradictions into her book. In the case of False Memory Syndrome, however, it is hard not to see a deliberate deception at work. Both of the Foundation's claims--that its contactees are innocent and that traumatic events cannot enter memory in a manner that makes them consciously unretrievable--are false to fact; both are based on fallacious and deceptive reasoning and argument. The Foundation expects therapists to corroborate their patient's memories with forensic evidence (Freyd letter, Lief quoted in Kristiansen 11), but does not apply that standard to its own claims. In the August 1993 newsletter, the editor replies to a letter from a skeptic by saying that "we welcome a dialogue," since "it is by challenging ideas that we refine our theories and develop new theories" (8). These seem to be empty words.
In part, the fallacious and deceptive reasoning used by the Foundation seems to be a "party line," a uniform set of propaganda claims that it disseminates in a coordinated publicity campaign through both the academic and popular press. This party line is not a centralized ideology, as the term may suggest, but represents the consensus view of reality among Foundation supporters. When the Foundation was formed, the small group of founding members were the only experts in existence on false memory syndrome, since they had just invented the idea. They began sponsoring conferences on false memory (various FMS Newsletters) at which, as the only experts, they educated the other participants, creating a view of reality that has infused false memory discourse ever since. This results in claims about "repression," for example, being nearly identical from board member to board member (many of whom are psychologists who should know better).
Once their view of reality was established, Foundation supporters, like satanic abuse therapists, began to preach to the unconverted. The December 1993 newsletter reports on a meeting between the Foundation's directors and eleven members of its advisory board, noting that the "Advisory Board members also set some research and publication goals for themselves" (3). In other words, the board's members (most of them PhD's) are very consciously devoting their academic work to doing research designed to legitimize false memory syndrome and then publicizing that research. Since Issues in Child Abuse Accusations, a non-peer reviewed journal, is edited by a member of the advisory board, no research favorable to the Foundation's views need go unpublished.
Necessary beliefs.
Thus far, I have given empirical reasons why therapists might come to believe in satanic abuse and why supporters of the FMS Foundation might use arguments that are false, poorly reasoned, and deceptive. In addition, however, the ideological content of satanic abuse and false memory syndrome fables seems to be so appealing that it causes otherwise educated people to give up proper judgment. There is something deeply simple and satisfying in blaming a complicated and ill-understood psychosis like multiple personality on satanic brainwashing, especially since the discourse of satanic abuse contains so much antifeminist, antigay, anti "other" symbolism. That the ideas of satanic abuse and brainwashing are so clearly paranoid and false simply demonstrates the depth of therapists' need for an explanation that is simple and ideologically satisfying. Likewise, the Foundation provides an equally simple and satisfying explanation for the complex and messy disintegration of "the family" under changing economic and cultural conditions: blame it on a movement away from old-fashioned, 1950s values and on an inner rot caused by those same pesky "others": feminists, gays, nonwhites, and so on. Again, some people find the ideology of the idea so appealing that they become willfully blind to the unscientific and dishonest arguments they are making.
Probably the most famous example of ideology seducing a psychologist into a ridiculous assertion was Freud's decision that the stories of incest he was hearing from his patients were fantasies rather than memories. Since his change of mind encapsulates the entire satanic abuse-false memory debate, it is worth examining. Freud had good reason to eventually decide that his patients were inventing their stories of incest (Emma Eckstein, for example), and good evidence for his earlier conclusion that incest stories were true (he knew that one patient's brother had sex with her because the brother told him so ["The Etiology of Hysteria" 206]). But his need to think in simple, satisfying ways was so great, and his ideological reluctance to argue that fathers often had sex with their daughters was so strong, that he was unable to formulate the complex kind of explanation that would cover all the evidence. The title of his paper on incest, "The Etiology of Hysteria" shows that he needed one single cause for "hysteria" (which he assumed was a real disease, not a pejorative label), whether "premature sexual experience," as he argued at first, (203), or fantasy, as he decided later. Medicine had just recently adopted the germ theory of disease, and in a metaphor Freud analogized "the tubercule bacillus," and tuberculosis to sexual abuse and "hysteria" (209). He was looking for the one and only mental "germ" for his mental "disease." Once he decided that sexual trauma was an inadequate "germ," he discarded it completely rather than look for a more complex, less satisfying explanation.
On television, and distressingly often in newspapers, Freud's way of thinking rules. Argument between dichotomous and diametrically opposed positions takes the place of an editorial. Many skeptics of satanic abuse have joined the False Memory Syndrome Foundation's advisory board, since if one view is incorrect it must be totally discarded, valid and invalid aspects together, in favor of its complete opposite, no matter how incorrect the opposite may be. There is no global or even local conspiracy or network of sacrificial cannibals, whether satanist, Catholic, or Buddhist, except in the minds of patients and therapists who misunderstand the powers and limits of hypnotic techniques. What does exist, however, are large numbers of women who were abused by the "ordinary" middle class WASP men in thier families, including their own fathers, some of whom are unable to retrieve the memories of their abuse. What also exists are some careful therapists cognizant of the pitfalls of hypnosis who help those women to recover more or less accurate memories of their abuse.