Date:   Sat Feb 12 1994  22:48:14
From:   Sheppard Gordon
To:     All
Subj:   Mind Lies 
UFO                            -------------------------------

LIES OF THE MIND.  (REPRESSED-MEMORY THERAPY)
11/29/93   Time Magazine

   Suffering from a prolonged bout of depression and desperate for
help, Melody Gavigan, 39, a computer specialist from Long Beach,
California, checked herself into a local psychiatric hospital. As
Gavigan recalls the experience, her problems were just beginning.
During five weeks of treatment there, a family and marriage
counselor repeatedly suggested that her depression stemmed from
incest during her childhood.  While at first Gavigan had no
recollection of any abuse, the therapist kept prodding. "I was so
distressed and needed help so desperately, I latched on to what he
was offering me," she says. "I accepted his answers."
   When asked for details, she wrote page after page of what she
believed were emerging repressed memories.  She told about running
into the yard after being raped in the bathroom.  She incorporated
into another lurid rape scene an actual girlhood incident, in which
she had dislocated a shoulder. She went on to recall being molested
by her father when she was only a year old -- as her diapers were
being changed -- and sodomized by him at five.  Following what she
says was the therapist's advice, Gavigan confronted her father with
her accusations, severed her relationship with him, moved away and
formed an incest survivors' group.
   But she remained uneasy.  Signing up for a college psychology
course, she examined her newfound memories more carefully and
concluded that they were false.  Now Gavigan has begged her father's
forgiveness and filed a lawsuit against the psychiatric hospital for
the pain that she and her family suffered.
   Gavigan is just one victim of a troubling psychological
phenomenon that is harming patients, devastating families,
influencing new legislation, taking up courtroom time, stirring
fierce controversy among experts and intensifying a backlash against
all mental-health practitioners: the "recovery" -- usually while in
therapy -- of repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse, satanic
rituals and other bizarre incidents (see box).
   "If penis envy made us look dumb, this will make us look totally
gullible," says psychiatrist Paul McHugh, chairman of the psychiatry
department at Johns Hopkins University. "This is the biggest story
in psychiatry in a decade.  It is a disaster for orthodox
psychotherapists who are doing good work."
   No one questions that childhood sexual abuse is widespread and
underreported.  The subject, rarely mentioned and then only in
hushed tones until the 1980s, has become the stuff of talk shows,
movies and feature articles.  Indeed, many, perhaps millions of
Americans have jarring and humiliating memories of abuse,
recollections that, painful as they are, have stayed with them
through the years.
   But can memories of repeated incest and other bizarre incidents
be so repressed that the victim is totally unaware of them until
they emerge during therapy or as the result of a triggering sight,
smell or sound?
   Across the U.S. in the past several years, literally thousands of
people -- mostly women in their 20s, 30s and 40s -- have been coming
forward with accusations that they were sexually abused as children,
usually by members of their own family, at home or, in many cases,
at hidden sites where weird rituals were practiced.  Says McHugh,
"It's reached epidemic proportions."
   Unlike the countless adults who have lived for years with painful
memories of actual childhood sexual abuse, most individuals with
"recovered memory" initially have no specific recollection of incest
or molestation.  At worst, they have only a vague feeling that
something may have happened. Others, simply seeking help to
alleviate depression, eating disorders, marital difficulties or
other common problems, are informed by unsophisticated therapists or
pop-psychology books that their symptoms suggest childhood sexual
abuse, all memories of which have been repressed.
   In the course of the therapy, many of these troubled souls
conjure up exquisitely detailed recollections of sexual abuse by
family members.  Encouraged by their therapists to reach deeper into
the recesses of their memories -- often using techniques such as
visualization and hypnosis -- some go on to describe events that
sorely strain credulity, particularly tales of their forced
childhood participation in satanic rituals involving animal and
infant sacrifices, as well as sexual acts.
   In many cases the therapists conclude, and eventually convince
the patients through suggestion, that the repressed memories of
childhood abuse have caused them to "dissociate." As a result, they
appear to develop multiple-personality disorder, the strange and,
until recently, rare condition brought to wide public attention by
the 1973 book, Sybil, which describes the condition of a woman who
develops several strikingly different but interchangeable personas.
   Legislatures in nearly half the states have responded to the
widespread public acceptance of recovered memories by applying a
strange twist to venerable statute-of-limitations laws.  In general,
the new legislation allows alleged victims of child abuse to sue the
accused perpetrators within three to six years after the repressed
memories emerge.  This means that with little more than the
recollection of the accuser, a parent or other relative can be
hauled into court decades after the supposed crime.
   Taking advantage of the newly enacted legislation, some of the
supposed victims have successfully brought civil and even criminal
actions against members of their own families.  Juries have awarded
them damages, and in a few cases the accused parent has been
sentenced to jail -- based entirely on the recovered memory of his
adult offspring.
   To many critics of the recovered-memory movement, the accusations
and convictions are reminiscent of the 17th century Salem witchcraft
trials, in which elderly women and an occasional man were condemned
to death, often on the basis of a single unsubstantiated charge that
they had demonstrated witchlike behavior.
   "Recovered-memory therapy will come to be recognized as the
quackery of the 20th century," predicts Richard Ofshe, a social
psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley.  And in the
process, Emory University psychiatry professor George Ganaway fears,
it may "trigger a backlash against {legitimate charges of} child
abuse.  As these stories are discredited, society may end up
throwing the baby out with the bath water -- and the hard-earned
credibility of the child-abuse-survivor movement will go down the
drain."
   The backlash has already begun.  In Texas this summer, a woman
patient won a settlement from two therapists and a psychiatric
hospital after suing them for therapeutic negligence and fraud. She
claimed that four years of recovered false memories had made her a
"walking zombie." It was the first of what some reputable therapists
fear will be many such rulings that will ultimately give their
profession a black eye.
   An increasing number of recovered-memory accusers have recanted,
and some have reunited with their families and joined them in suing
the therapists and clinics they claim led them astray.  Many of them
are among the more than 7,000 individuals and families who have
sought assistance from the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, a
Philadelphia-based organization that has taken the lead in
publicizing the wrongdoings and in helping the victims of
recovered-memory therapy.  Pamela Freyd, who co-founded FMSF in 1992,
has yet to be reconciled with her accuser daughter.
   Growing controversy and concern in the mental-health community
has led the American Psychological Association to appoint a
false-memory working group to investigate the phenomenon.  At a
meeting of the American Psychiatric Association last May, the issue
of false memories was addressed in three sessions and heatedly
debated by experts on both sides.  The American Medical
Association's house of delegates also indicated its discomfort with
such memory-enhancement techniques as guided imagery, hypnosis and
body massage, all of which heighten suggestibility and are widely
employed by recovered-memory therapists.  Use of these practices in
eliciting accounts of childhood sexual abuse, the AMA delegates
concluded, was "fraught with problems of potential misapplication."
   "I wish I could say the debate just involves a few kooks," says
Stephen Ceci, a Cornell University developmental psychologist who is
a member of the American Psychological Association's work group.
"It's much broader than that, happening among the cream of the crop
of psychiatrists and clinical psychologists." The battle could not
have come at a worse time, says Ceci; some professionals are
currently pushing for increased coverage of mental health in the
President's proposed national health plan. "It's not a good time for
us to be airing our dirty laundry."
   Christine Courtois, also in the APA work group and a clinical
director at the Psychiatric Institute in Washington, charges that
criticism of the recovered-memory phenomenon is part of a backlash
against society's tardy recognition of widespread sexual abuse.  The
"wholesale degradation of psychotherapy by some critics," she says,
represents "displaced rage" at therapists for bringing the issue to
public attention.
   That kind of reasoning does not sit well with Margaret Singer, a
retired professor from the University of California, Berkeley, and
an expert on cults and influence techniques.  She has interviewed 50
people who once believed they had recovered repressed memories of
incest or ritual abuse but now think they were mistaken.  All 50,
Singer emphasizes, were in therapy when they "recovered" terrifying
memories of abuse. "These people are reporting to me that their
therapists were far more sure than they were that their parents had
molested them."
   Singer insists that trauma does not cause people to repress
memories, although bits and pieces of experience can be lost through
amnesia.  In fact, she says, trauma has just the opposite effect:
people can't forget it.  As an example, she cites the cases of
Vietnam veterans who suffer flashbacks and posttraumatic stress
disorder.
   Psychologist Ofshe is particularly disdainful of the concept of
what he calls "robust" repression: the instantaneous submergence of
any memory of sexual abuse.  Recovered-memory therapists, he says,
"have invented a mechanism that supposedly causes a child's
awareness of sexual assault to be driven entirely from
consciousness." According to these therapists, Ofshe explains,
"there is no limit to the number of traumatic events that can be
repressed, and no limit to the length of time over which the series
of events can occur." Belief in robust repression, he concludes,
"can be found only on the lunatic fringes of science and the
mental-health professions."
   "Repression definitions are so loose and varied, so abundant, so
shifting that it is like trying to shoot a moving target," says
Elizabeth Loftus, professor of psychology and law at the University
of Washington and an authority on cognitive processes, long-term
memory and eyewitness testimony. "If repression is the avoidance in
your conscious awareness of unpleasant experiences that come back to
you, yes, I believe in repression.  But if it is a blocking out of
an endless stream of traumas that occur over and over that leave a
person with absolutely no awareness that these things happen, that
make them behave in destructive ways and re-emerge decades later in
some reliable form, I don't see any evidence for it.  It flies in
the face of everything we know about memory."
   If such recovered memories are indeed false, where do they
originate?  From two sources, critics say: the popular culture and
misguided or inept therapy.  Sensational tales about recovered
memories of incest have been grist for celebrity-magazine cover
stories.  And repressed-memory incest and satanic-ritual-abuse
victims have been featured prominently on Geraldo, Oprah, Sally
Jessy Raphael and other daytime TV talk shows.
   In bookstores, pop-psychology sections are filled with dozens of
self-help survivor titles.  By far the most controversial and best
selling (more than 700,000 copies) of these books is The Courage to
Heal by Ellen Bass and Laura Davis.  In their 1988 publication,
considered the bible of the recovered-memory movement, they include
such dogma as "If you think you were abused and your life shows the
symptoms, then you were," and "If you don't remember your abuse, you
are not alone.  Many women don't have memories . . . this doesn't
mean they weren't abused." Like many of the authors of these
self-help books, neither Davis nor Bass has any academic training in
psychology, although Davis claims to be an incest survivor.  Yet
many therapists urge their patients to read Courage and other
similar volumes.
   Many of these books contain laundry lists of symptoms of
repressed-memory victims.  They inform their readers that even
though they have no memory of the acts, they may have been victims
of childhood sexual or ritual abuse if they experience some of the
following conditions: depression, anxiety, loss of appetite or
eating disorders, sexual problems and difficulty with intimacy.  The
all-inclusive nature of that list, critics say, suggests that among
the entire U.S. population, only the rare individual has managed to
escape childhood sexual abuse.  That doesn't seem to surprise
therapist E. Sue Blume.  In her book Secret Survivors, she writes,
"It is not unlikely that more than half of all women are survivors
of childhood sexual trauma."
   Almost any night, in any major American city, adult incest and
ritual-abuse survivor meetings are held in church basements and
community rooms.  Churches and other institutions also offer
counseling for dissociative disorders and satanic-ritual-abuse
victims.
   Private psychiatric hospitals, which advertise in medical
journals and airline magazines, are profiting as well. "We can help
you remember and heal," promises one ad for ASCA Treatment Centers
in Compton, California. "Remembering incest and childhood abuse is
the first step to healing."
   The thriving recovered-memory industry dismays psychiatrist
Ganaway. "In some cases," he says, the hospitals and clinics "are
memory mills with an almost assembly-line mentality," he says. "A
patient comes in with no memories but leaves with memories of
childhood incest or ritual abuse." Yet even some well-trained family
and marriage counselors, psychologists and psychiatrists seem too
quick to tie their patients' problems to repressed memories of
incest and ritual abuse. "That makes psychotherapy very easy at
first," explains Johns Hopkins' McHugh. "Therapists and patients can
say, `We found the secret.' The fact that the patients and families
steadily become more confused, incoherent and chaotic is then
believed to be an expression of the original incest." What is really
happening, he says, is that "conflicts are being generated by false
memories.  We have found something to make therapy easy."
   Some patients now leave their therapist's office convinced that
they suffer from multiple-personality disorder, which is said to
stem from repressed memories of early childhood trauma, including
physical and sexual abuse.  Until the publication of Sybil, MPD was
apparently rare; around the world, only a few hundred cases had been
documented over the previous three centuries.  Since then, however,
many thousands of supposed cases of MPD have been identified in the
U.S. alone -- most of them incorrectly, say critics, by therapists
who are looking for an easy solution in their search for evidence of
childhood sexual abuse or who too easily accept the likelihood of
the disorder.  One problem, says Ganaway, is that once these
patients have been diagnosed with MPD, they are convinced that they
have it, tend to exhibit what they think are the symptoms and often
reinterpret their entire life histories accordingly.
   Those charges infuriate Dr. Richard Kluft, a Philadelphia
psychiatrist, who works extensively with MPD patients. "It's an
absolute lie that MPD is a rare psychiatric disorder," he says.  He
attributes the sharp rise in reported MPD cases to the rise of
feminism and the resulting willingness of people "to speak out more
openly on issues of exploitation and abuse."
   Another doctor who believes that MPD is fairly common is Bennett
Braun, medical director of the dissociative-disorders program at
Rush-Presbyterian-St.  Luke's Medical Center in Chicago.  Braun says
the number of cases of MPD has risen not for faddish reasons but
because therapists have become better at recognizing the symptoms.
   In his 12-bed unit at Rush North Shore Medical Center in Skokie,
a branch of Rush-Presbyterian-St.  Luke's Medical Center, Braun
treats MPD cases, some of whom think that they are victims of
satanic-ritual abuse.  When he first began to hear the satanic
stories in 1985, Braun says, he was incredulous.  Now, having heard
similar tales from many people from different states and countries
and having treated more than 200 of them, he declares, "Yes, there
is satanic-ritual abuse."
   If some of the recovered memories of familial childhood abuse
sound fanciful, the recollections of satanic-ritual abuse are
downright bizarre.  These tales have proliferated since the
publication in 1980 of Michelle Remembers, a book about a belatedly
aware satanic-ritual victim.  They describe a massive secret
conspiracy to abuse children sexually in order to brainwash them
into worshipping Satan.  Victims recall being raped by their parents
and then by members of a cult who drink blood and sacrifice fetuses.
More often than not the abusers are pillars of their communities --
the mayor, police chief or school superintendent -- who come out at
night and join their parents in terrifying ceremonies.
   But could such satanic rituals be that commonplace, let alone
exist at all?  In 1990, a group of researchers at the State
University of New York at Buffalo conducted a nationwide sample of
clinical psychologists, asking them if they had encountered claims
of ritual abuse.  Some 800 of the psychologists, about a third of
the sample, had treated at least one case.
   Yet, law-enforcement authorities report that not one shred of
reliable evidence has turned up to support these claims -- no
documented marks of torture, no bones of sacrificed adults, infants
or fetuses and no reputable eyewitnesses.  Lorraine Stanek, a
Connecticut rehabilitation counselor for trauma survivors, also
stresses the lack of evidence. "If you look at the alleged number of
deaths that would be accounted for," she says, "there should be
bodies in all our backyards." Still, incest-survivor groups are
inundated with these claims.  Monarch Resources, a California
referral service for survivors, is said to receive more than 5,000
calls annually from people who believe they have been victims of
satanic abuse.  Alleged ritual abuse is also involved in about 16%
of the calls to Philadelphia's False Memory Syndrome Foundation.
   Braun demonstrated his belief in satanic rituals during a 1991
trial, when he testified in behalf of two daughters seeking damages
from their 76-year-old mother.  Recovering childhood memories, they
had accused her of abusing them in bloody and murderous ceremonies.
Both claimed that they had developed MPD as a result.  After Braun
told of treating similar cases, the jury found in favor of the two
daughters.
   Now, however, the tables have turned.  Braun and the Chicago
medical center are being sued for negligence by a female patient who
in two years of in-patient treatment for supposed MPD "recovered"
memories of involvement in satanic rituals with her father, mother
and relatives.  The rituals supposedly included torture, murder and
cannibalism of large groups of people -- as many as 50 on an average
weekend.  In addition, before growing doubts led the woman to
terminate Braun's treatment in 1992, she had been made to believe
she had 300 "alters" or personas, possibly setting a new MPD record.
According to her lawyer, she is not currently undergoing any
treatment and is doing well.
   The ultimate victim of repressed memory may be the
psychotherapeutic profession itself. "Therapists are terrified,"
says MPD specialist Kluft. "Many are feeling very hamstrung because
they fear any time they ask a question, it can result in a lawsuit."
Instead of seeing a patient "as a person in pain and in need of
help," Kluft complains, "the therapist is looking at a potential
litigant.  Some people have discontinued treating trauma patients."
   S. Scott Mayers, a psychotherapist in Venice, California, is
hardly terrified.  But he is cautious. "What I do to ensure that I
don't inflict my agenda or opinion," he says, "is go with the
patients' presentation and stay with it, using their own words,
their own scenarios.  I'm so cautious because we are all very
suggestive."
   Recovered-memory therapists might do well to heed those
guidelines before they cause irreparable damage to their profession.
For, as the public begins to recognize that people have been falsely
accused by recovered-memory patients, says psychiatrist McHugh, it
"opens us up to skepticism and dismay about our capacity to do
things.  This is a bubble that is going to burst.  We will end up
having to re-create the trust this country puts in psychotherapy."
   Nancy, a West Coast attorney, remembered details of the incident
only four months ago, after she began hypnotherapy sessions.  Now,
she recalls how one spring night in 1989 she awoke in a stupor to
see a strange craft outside her window.  She was taken into the
vehicle and examined by a team of strange beings.  A silver tube was
inserted into her to extract an ovum.  She breaks down as she
describes the abduction. "People say `How do you know?' You don't
know.  You're never sure what happened."
   As thousands of therapy patients are "discovering" repressed
memories of childhood sexual abuse, a smaller number are adding a
new twist: they are recalling abductions by aliens.  Under hypnosis,
Los Angeles film producer Michael Bershad recalled his car being
pulled to the side of the road by a bright object. "I got out of the
car and saw five guys under 4 ft. tall.  They led me inside the
craft." A leader examined him, opening up his back to poke around
his vertebra.  The extraterrestrials also extracted sperm. "I had a
lot of shame," says Bershad. "It was humiliating and degrading."
   A painful sincerity unites those who have dredged up memories of
UFO abductions.  Many suffer from insomnia and shy away from telling
anyone what they believe may have happened for fear of being
perceived as crazy. "Virtually all abductees are opposed to the idea
that these things really happen," explains Budd Hopkins, author of
two books about contact with aliens. "They don't want these things
to be real.  There is no pleasure in this experience."
   Harvard psychiatrist John Mack, who won a Pulitzer in 1977 for
his psychological study of Lawrence of Arabia, takes the stories
literally. "I encountered something here very early on, which I saw
did not fit anything I had ever come across in 40 years of
psychiatry." He has treated more than 70 abductees, whom he calls
"experiencers."
   A few researchers argue that alien abductions may be disguised
memories of sexual abuse. Others assert that abduction memories may
also be unwittingly planted by over-zealous therapists. "I believe
these victims believe it," says Ray Hyman, professor of psychology
at the University of Oregon. "People are trying to please the
hypnotist.  The therapist and patient collaborate with each other to
produce the story." Hypnosis can be extremely effective in eliciting
fantasies that therapists can use in treating patients.  The
technique, however, can also create false memories. Says Ray William
London, president of the American Boards of Clinical Hypnosis: "It
isn't a way of validating an abduction or anything else."
   William Cone, a psychologist in Newport Beach, California, who
specializes in treating alleged abductees, finds similarities
between some of his patients and people who recover memories of
satanic-ritual abuse.  Both have "organizing personalities" -- a
loose sense of self given to paranormal experiences like seeing
ghosts.  Many are also highly suggestible. "They are highly
functioning, intelligent people and truly believe that this
happened," says Cone. "I try not to believe or disbelieve.  I just
sit and listen and try to help."

