(12)    Sun 2 Nov 97 10:15
By: Sheppard Gordon
To: All
Re: "Repression" overrated
St:
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@EID:0967 236251e0
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 Lofty Ideas That May Be Losing Altitude
 11/01/97
 The New York Times

  The New York Times asked six scholars what they thought was the Most
Overrated Idea. Here are their responses

 [ . . . ]

Repression

   According to this notion, one represses a memory because it is profoundly
traumatic and unacceptable to the conscious mind and this causes continuing
psychological damage. Thus, if we want to make people whole again, we need to
get at the early experiences that they have not been able either to remember
or to forget. And so we get psychoanalytic therapy.

   This kind of therapy is going to be more prolonged and more expensive than
any other kind. But there is no evidence whatsoever that the pursuit of
repressed memories is any more therapeutic than placebo treatments.

   Over the past dozen years, we've had a much stronger concept of repression,

one that even Freud would have hesitated to endorse. We now have innumerable
cases of adults who, until they entered psychotherapy, had the impression
that
they had been raised in loving families and had been treated in normal ways.
But thanks to the ministrations of therapists who believe that a whole range
of adult symptoms can probably be best explained by the repression of
childhood sexual abuse, these people emerge from therapy drastically
alienated
not only from their families but also from their own selves. In all but the
tiniest minority of cases, these accusations are false.

   Frederick Crews, professor emeritus of English, University of California,
Berkeley,

 [ . . . ]



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