Repressed memories come to light on `Frontline'
04/03/95
THE DETROIT NEWS

   The phone call was sudden and devastating.
   Al Norris, a lawyer and a father of four, received a call
from his grown daughter, Ann. She knew, she said. She knew he had
sexually abused her as a child.
   Norris seemed stunned, his wife tells PBS' Frontline in a
report titled Divided Memories at 9 p.m. Tuesday (Channel 56 in
Detroit), and which continues the following Tuesday.
   "I went to grab the phone from him," Judy Norris says. "He
was in shock. It was just an unbearable sound, coming out of a
man."
   And then he went out and bought apples. "It's the only thing
I could think to do," he says.
   Things would escalate, shattering the family. Ann sued her
parents, based on "repressed memories" she found during hypnosis
therapy.
   Then comes the catch: There's no way of telling if the things
she found were real or scenes concocted by her subconscious.
   That point comes across in this devastating two-part report
from producer Ofra Bikel.
   Bikel acknowledges the importance of facing the past and
confronting evil. But she also asks whether people are now being
battered by false memories.
   Dr. Michael Yapko wondered that, while polling 850 therapists:
   "I asked, `How do you distinguish a true memory from a
confabulation?' " Yapko says.
   "And the unanimous answer, regardless of what side of the
issue they were on . . . was: Without external evidence, you can't."
   Even the therapists who support digging for "repressed
memories" told Bikel they can't guarantee something is true:
   "For the survivor, this is very real," says Laura Brown.
"For her, this is a reality."
   "As a therapist, your job is not to be a . . . fact-finder,"
says Dr. Judith Herman. "Your job is to help the patient make sense
of her life."
   "We all live in a delusion," says Dr. Douglas Sawin. "Do any
of us know the truth?"
   Maybe not. Maybe it's fine to learn a possible truth, if it
helps someone put a life in order. But what happens after that?
Talking to Frontline, Yapko posed that question:
   "If this patient is going to turn around and sue someone, and
say, `He abused me,' and is going to take him to court," Yapko
says, "it would be nice to know whether it really happened."
   That's what Ann Norris did, backed only by Sawin's testimony.
When lawyers ask him, he tells Frontline, he makes no claim that a
repressed memory is true: "I say, I don't care if it's true. What's
important to me is that I hear the child's truth, the patient's
truth. That's what's important. What actually happened is
irrelevant to me."
   It was relevant to the Norris family, as things dug deeper.
Ann (now also known as Kate) had found 27 personalities. She told
of torture, beatings, mutilations and satanic rituals by both
parents and by grandparents.
   The evidence refuted all of that, Al Norris says. "She has a
perfect attendance record at school. . . . She never had a scratch
on her, her entire lifetime."
   Her sister, Caroline, feels Ann's feelings were hurt by a
span when her mother was cold and distant. Her subconscious built
that into something huge and tangible. Then she confronted her
parents.
   "It just crushed both of them," Caroline says.
   "(It) just swept their marriage away, what was left of it. .
. . It was heartbreaking to see what they went through."

