Innocent self and deviant other.
Implicit in the fable of satanic abuse is the idea that child abuse and incest are serious problems threatening to destroy "the family" and everything American, Christian, and good--but that the problem emanates from evil, deviant outsiders, "satanists" (poor, nonwhite, and especially feminist) and not from "us" (Christian middle class, white, and especially patriarchal). That these deviant outsiders are imaginary simply lets them be more amorphous, so they can symbolically stand for whatever outsiders the believer wishes. The FMS Foundation's implicit message is only slightly different, claiming that abuse, especially incest, is rare, and that those "who are likely perpetrators" of it (Freyd) are "contained to the lower class[es]" (True Stories 171), and are certainly not to be found among the men of white, middle class American families "like us."
These false conceptions of sexual abuse are not unique to FMS and satanic abuse, but are part of the wider culture. Debbie Nathan shows that child sexual abuse from outside the family--done by daycare workers, for example--is zealously prosecuted and demonized as (satanic) "ritual abuse" by child protection advocates. Faced with an incest case, the same child protection advocates "defend the family rather than question it," and recommend probation and treatment for the incestor rather than a felony conviction. Nathan quotes a social worker saying that "most of these people [incestors] really do love their kids," and observes that most often the incesting men and victimized children are "immediately returned to the home" (Women 118-19). Similarly, in the spring of 1994, National Public Radio ran a special series on stopping child abuse. The last segment, devoted to questions of education and treatment of abusers, discussed educating people about physical abuse and the treatment versus incarceration controversy over "child molesters," but the word incest was never spoken.
Peccadilloes of the middle class.
Both fables claim that the white Christian middle class is perfect, when in fact it is not. Even the most Aryan, virtuous, rich, patriotic, seemingly well adjusted families can contain incestuous men and victimized girls. In the presence of such realities, the fables act directly contrary to the way Harold Lief thinks (Kristiansen 14). The problems structural to families of "the other" become capital crimes and global conspiracies of huge and alarming scope, while the equally severe structural problems of the traditional patriarchal middle class family become mere peccadilloes, blown out of proportion by alarmists. Of course, a peccadillo is only a fault to some; others might see it as nothing wrong, or even a virtue.
When Stratford implies that women should be honored to become everything "the woman of the house was supposed" to be for their fathers (51), she is unfortunately not speaking as part of some lunatic fringe. In late July of 1994, National Public Radio aired a story on an anti-spanking campaign. A local group was contending that spanking was abuse and inappropriate. The speaker for another group that was protesting the campaign said that it was their personal philosophy to physically discipline their children; they did not tell other people how to raise their children, and it was improper for anyone to tell them how to raise their kids. Unconscious ideologies are so universal and so insidious, that I found myself agreeing with this person's claim that how children are punished, and for what, is completely up to the parents. The speaker on the radio was well practiced in turning an unacceptable statement (that this group of Christian reactionaries will beat their children when they want) into something palatably phrased in the language of rights and freedoms (for "the family," not the individual children). Last year, an Idaho member of Pat Robertson's "Christian Coalition" espoused the same philosophy but was not as practiced in using acceptable terms: he told journalist Donna Minkowitz "I don't know if legal structures should even try to preclude [incest] . . . It would amount to invading family structures" (38). Both of these people see middle class child abuse and incest as harmless, certainly nothing so serious to require interference in the private business of "the family."
Insignificant daughters and all-important children.
These pro-beating and pro-incest speakers see the family as an indissoluble unit, in which women and children, especially daughters, are less than full humans, have no individuality or rights, and are merely property of the father. Satanic abuse narratives subordinate the satanic victim to her husband, while in false memory syndrome discourse, the accusers are turned from adult women into daughters: as "A Dad" puts it, they "are our children" who need to be protected from "falling" (sexually?) "into the hands of therapists" (March 94 FMS Newsletter 1, my emphasis). Unlike men or sons, women and daughters are supposed to sacrifice their happiness, self interest, and personal freedom for the sake of their family ties, that is, their husbands and fathers.
Again, these ideas are reflected in the wider culture. Yesterday, on 10 August 1994, National Public Radio ran a story about a child custody case. The mother had her daughter as a teenager, left school, then put her in daycare in order to attend nursing school. A judge awarded the father, an estranged boyfriend, custody, claiming that he would be able to take care of his daughter full time (something possible only if he were unemployed), which would be better than daycare. In short, the judge punished the unimportant mother for the affronty of trying to be more than just a mother, and rewarded the more important father with the daughter, whose wishes and welfare were as unimportant as her mother's.
But the unspeakable fact that children are often treated as chattel must be concealed--women and children are supposedly first. Immediately after the child custody story, NPR discussed the trend to require that communities be informed when a "sex offender" moved into the area. I was considering the rights of women to be informed versus the rights of convicted rapists to have privacy, when I realized that "sex offender" had somehow come to mean "child molester." "Daughters" are chattel in relation to their fathers but, to disguise that status, "children" become superhuman in relation to other people's rights and safety.
Hurtful therapy, harmful relatives.
People enter the therapy culture because they are unable to cope; to quote the first step of many self-help programs, their "lives had become unmanageable." That many more women than men enter therapy is a result of sexism: in her discussion of the history of "hysteria," Martha Evans notes that some 19th century doctors thought "woman is made for feeling, and feeling is almost hysteria" (17)--women were insane by nature, because they, like children, were part of "the inferior races, the rubbish of humanity" (32). Insanity is a cultural construct (Foucault, Mental Illness and Psychology), and in American culture today men, who count as full humans, are deemed eccentric and their thoughts and emotions, no matter how troubled, are classed as unproblematic. Women, who with children and "inferior races" count as not quite human, are deemed insane and their thoughts and emotions, no matter how untroubled, are classed as problems.
When Feldman does not recognize the ideological origin of some of Barbara's problems, treating feelings of being an inadequate housewife and mother as equally problematic as a history of abuse and deprivation, she is doing her patient a serious disservice. When false memory syndrome supporters claim that there was no reason for their daughters to enter therapy, implying that the daughters are simply vapid females going crazy for no other reason, they reinscribe the ideology and do their daughters an equal disservice.
Aside from ideology, troubled thoughts and emotions have both numerous and multiple causes. My mother suffered from a neurochemical imbalance and trauma in the past (as a child and an adult) and stress in the present; while brain chemistry dominated, each overlay and interacted with the others, and each had to be treated for her to heal. FMS Foundation "retractors" are doing themselves a disservice when they dismiss childhoods of abuse and neglect and claim that their problems were caused only by the stresses of the present. Therapists who search for childhood trauma and ignore more immediate and dominant overlays of ideology, current stress, or chemistry do a similar disservice.
However, satanic believing therapists do the worst disservice, ignoring any number of real problems for a wholly imaginary one. If the victim is indeed suffering from dissociation, her symptoms may go away--since the treatment of shell shock in World War II, psychiatrists have known that it is not the actual memories but the recovery of emotions related to them that cures dissociation (Sargant 72). But even if the victim is fortunate enough to be dissociative, being relieved of her initial symptoms is hardly a good trade for gaining paranoid delusions like Laura Buchanan, who is always on the lookout for brainwashing "triggers" and fearing satanic retaliation. Nor is it a good service to convince a survivor of incest or beatings, who might find a feminist understanding beneficial and healing, that she should identify with a deeply reactionary ideology like satanic abuse. Even less so is it a service to call such a reactionary idea feminist: the essay on satanic abuse in Ms, "Surviving The Unbelievable" by Elizabeth Rose (a pseudonym) gives, as the first entry in a list of resource groups, the antifeminist right wing "American Family Foundation" (44).
Finally, it is a disservice to do "memory work" for a satanic victim, who is faced with a huge list of satanic motifs she is expected to recover, and an essentially limitless number of repressed memories, since they need not be real. Stratford's Jenny spent six years in almost daily therapy and was not done yet, while Feldman's Barbara was in three times a week for a mere two years only because she had to move. My mother Mary, in contrast, was in therapy with Noreen McCarrick for less than a year. Recovering real memories is a more efficient and better treatment than recovering fabrications, satanic or otherwise.
Serving the Victims
Mary did herself a service when she researched the two year span she could not remember, borrowing copies of her family's home movies to see if they recalled anything, discussing what she did and did not remember in detail with McCarrick. Neither Feldman's Barbara nor Buchanan did so. McCarrick did Mary a service by carefully focusing memory recovery on Mary's "issues," inexplicable associations and fears that seemed to point to stored but unretrievable memories. Feldman simply instructed Barbara to go to an "important event" of abuse, an open invitation to fabricate if nothing came to mind. McCarrick did another service by expecting neither two years worth of events, nor a litany of tortures, nor a narrative story, asking only that Mary describe the unconnected image, good or bad, that came to mind in response to an issue. Finding a two year blank in memory, Jenny's therapists expected and got a narrative story of two years of tortures. Pazder and Feldman, and the therapists of Buchanan and Jenny, all assured their patients that recovered memories were factually true. McCarrick's greatest service was carefully explaining to Mary that the recovered memories were psychologically, rather than historically accurate: they represented real emotions and traumas, but their material content was not necessarily completely factual.
Most of the books skeptical of satanic abuse conclude with a set of recommendations, a more dry version of the previous paragraph. That McCarrick is a satanic believer, and that Ganaway, a therapist who treats dissociative patients, is a FMS Foundation advisory board member, shows that training and expertise in proper therapy and proper scholarly thinking cannot eliminate these fables. The unconscious reactionary appeal of blaming problems on "others" is too great. The need for neat and simple solutions to complicated problems that are unconsciously ideologically unsettling is too great. I nodded my head when the pro-beating group explained themselves in terms of rights and freedoms, but I belatedly recognized the political content of their assertions and stopped. When an unconscious, extradiscursive ideology is analyzed and articulated, it may not die, but it will no longer carry the same power to convince.