Frontline tackles repressed memories head on
04/04/95
Calgary Herald

DIVIDED MEMORIES, airs tonight at 9 p.m. on Ch. 14
You say nothing is more important to you than your family. You say
that nothing in the world could possibly break the ties that bind
you to your parents, your brothers and sisters, your children.
Yet there is a force in North America that for the last 10 years or
so has been ripping apart and destroying literally thousands of
families -- families that, allowing for the usual range of
problems and conflicts of any close-knit group, had seemed happy
and healthy.
The force is the concept of repressed memory, and it is laid bare,
examined and powerfully dissected in Divided Memories, a two-part
Frontline documentary that premieres tonight at 9 on PBS (Ch. 14)
and concludes next week. The repressed memories at the heart of
this film, methodically and tenaciously produced by Ofra Bikel,
involve alleged incidents of child abuse so horrible and so
painful that the young victims could not deal with them.
Instead, the theory goes, their psyches protected them by burying
and ``forgetting'' the memories. Years later, the memories are
``recovered'' during psychological counselling sought for
unrelated problems.
Questions about the reliability of the memories and therapies
through which they surface began to percolate in the early 1990s.
The subject is now hotly debated in professional circles and in a
new round of books and articles. Divided Memories, however, is
TV's first in-depth look (four hours' worth) at the phenomenon.
Bikel, whose previous prize-winning work includes two documentary
mini-series about a controversial, North Carolina child-abuse
case, takes a measured and deliberate but relentless approach to
the subject.
She devotes a great deal of time to adults who have no doubts about
their recovered memories of abuse as children, to therapists and
authors whose faith in the concept is unshakable and to group
therapy sessions during which memories are retrieved and dealt
with. But Bikel also speaks to other family members who speak
convincingly of the complete absence of any signs of abuse:
unexplained injuries and medical problems, changes in a child's
mood, behavior, affection toward family members, performance in
school and so on.
There are interviews, too, with former patients who denounce
treatment that bears an unnerving resemblance to classic
brainwashing. And Bikel offers up experts who point out that these
notions of repressed memories run contrary to all scientific
knowledge about human memory.
At the same time, the program acknowledges the terrible reality of
child sexual abuse and the early psychiatric theories that
shamefully dismissed such claims, attributing them to hidden
desires for forbidden sexual contact.
Bikel never explicitly takes a position on the controversy but her
position is clear.
She contrasts descriptions of terrible acts of abuse with home
movies of happy families enjoying time together, marrying the two
elements with a piano score of profound sadness. And she uses
repressed-memory therapists' own comments to discredit them. They
admit, for example, that they regard the truth of patient claims
of abuse as irrelevant to treatment, despite the awful
consequences.
If Bikel's program intensifies the scrutiny of what has become a
psychological phenomenon with profound impact on thousands of
North Americans, it could turn out to be the most important TV
program of the year.

