TV REVIEW: `DIVIDED MEMORIES': PROBING DOCUMENTARIES
04/04/95
N.Y. TIMES

   Are an adult's memories of childhood sexual abuse believable?
That is a central question of ``Divided Memories,'' a probing and
often affecting four-hour documentary that begins Tuesday night on
PBS.
   But like the memories themselves, Ofra Bikel's report has a far
wider reach. It touches on feminist ideology; fashions and hype in
psychotherapy; the responsibilities of therapists and their
attitudes toward truth; the impact of accusations of sexual abuse on
parents and families, and the ability of the courts to sort out fact
from fantasy.
   Ms. Bikel talks with therapists, with their clients, both
grateful and disenchanted, and with the clients' parents and
relatives. We hear from those who maintain that past sexual abuse is
at the heart of much of the distress that brings people, especially
women, into treatment, and from those who say that memories of abuse
are being induced and families are being destroyed.
   ``Divided Memories'' goes beyond ``Innocence Lost'' and
``Innocence Lost: The Verdict,'' Ms. Bikel's 1993 reports for
``Frontline,'' about the charges of sexual abuse at a day-care
center in Edenton, N.C., strong works that deserved all the awards
they received.
   The repressed-memory cure or fad has its roots in the women's
movement's success in compelling the nation to acknowledge that many
children have in fact been abused and that later symptoms should not
be written off as hysteria, as psychologists since Freud had tended
to do. Now troubled women could find attention rather than
condescension.
   The narrator notes that the zesty brew of sex, violence and
victims quickly became the stuff of afternoon talk shows. (``I
personally have never met anyone who lied about being an incest
victim,'' announced Sally Jessy Raphael, mentor to millions.)
   There were television movies, best sellers (with checklists of
symptoms for readers to determine whether they were sexually abused
as children), and celebrities like Roseanne telling the cameras
their own stories of recently remembered abuse. Sexual abuse quickly
became the diagnosis of choice for a growing number of largely
unregulated practitioners; memory recovery became a profitable
specialty.
   Wendy Kaminer, a skeptical feminist, gives this analysis tonight
of the recovery movement's appeal: ``If you're unhappy, as many
people are, and angry with your parents, as many people are, it is
not a great leap to go from seeing yourself as someone who has been
a victim of metaphoric abuse to seeing yourself as someone who has
been the victim of actual abuse in its ultimate form of sexual
molestation.''
   The dispute has lately taken up many pages of The New York Review
of Books, where Frederick Crews, leading what some call a backlash
against recovered-memory therapy, has framed the issue this way:
``whether otherwise incredible tales, produced in a climate of
suggestion, should be allowed to ruin people's lives.''
   The scenes of recovery therapists are revealing as they listen to
their clients, whom they call survivors, dredge up memories of
abuse. They seem to confirm the observation of one critic, Dr.
Michael Yapko, a clinical psychologist, that the therapists ``tend
to view problems in terms of a presumed history of abuse.''
   He adds, ``And so by looking for abuse, expecting to find abuse,
it's no surprise when they uncover abuse.'' The memories can go back
beyond infancy. One woman, urged on by her therapist, is seen
bringing forth a recollection of being stuck in the fallopian tube.
It is like watching a birth, with the therapist as midwife.
   Pressed by Ms. Bikel about how they can be sure the revelations
about events of 20 or 30 years ago, which have a way of growing more
detailed and elaborate under therapy, actually occurred,
practitioners say they are convinced by the emotions of their
clients.
   One explains, ``When they access a memory, they are doing it out
of what's coming up from within them, and the body doesn't lie nor
does the psyche lie.'' Another says he does not have to know whether
a memory is true or not, that healing is not related to truth.
   Still another, a professed sexual-abuse survivor himself who
supported a client in a $20 million suit against her parents for
sexual and ritual abuse that included the insertion of spiders,
wires and vegetables into her vagina, says: ``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.'' He says, ``We all live in a delusion.''
   In that case, the family settled out of court for $15,000. But a
California man, whose family broke up after his daughter accused him
of abusing her 25 years earlier, was awarded $500,000 in his
malpractice suit against two therapists who he charged had implanted
false memories in his daughter. The judgment sent a chill through
the recovered-memory industry.
   Next week, the cameras visit Genesis, a seven-year-old counseling
center in Philadelphia, where some 100 people are treated, at $75 a
session, by a social worker and an addiction counselor.
   The theory here is that the clients, most of whom are found to
have been sexually abused, suffer from some sort of addiction; they
may be ``relationship addicts'' or ``people addicts.'' One of the
proprietors says, ``We're coming up with more addictions every
day.''
   Highly emotional encounter sessions, some of which are shown, are
used to detach the clients from what are viewed as their
dysfunctional families. The words ``dysfunctional'' and
``detachment'' are mantras here. Most clients evidently believe the
treatment has helped them; a few tell of feeling manipulated, and
eight are suing Genesis for psychological damage.
   Like parents who band together to combat cults that have drawn in
their children, several thousand people are now supporting a
campaign by the False Memory Syndrome Foundation against what they
say are false accusations that have destroyed their families. The
memory recoverers retort that such ``perpetrators'' are in a state
of denial, that denying an accusation of sexual abuse is virtually a
confession of guilt.
   Ms. Bikel gives all sides a hearing and delivers no explicit
judgments about the scientific validity of repressed-memory therapy.
But her program makes its point in the sympathetic treatment of
distraught parents and in the self-exposure of therapists who claim
to be above the truth.
   FRONTLINE
   Divided Memories
   PBS, Tuesday night and next Tuesday
   Written, produced and directed by Ofra Bikel. Karen O'Connor,
associate producer. Susan Sanschel, editor. Frontline is produced by
a consortium of public television stations: WGBH/Boston,
WTVS/Detroit, WPBT/Miami, WNET/New York and KCTS/Seattle. David
Fanning, executive producer for Frontline. Will Lyman, narrator.


