From: romulus.ehs.uiuc.edu!saul.cis.upenn.edu!pjf (Peter Freyd)

                    Copyright 1995 Chicago Tribune Company
                                Chicago Tribune

                April 3, 1995 Monday, NORTH SPORTS FINAL EDITION

SECTION: TEMPO; Pg. 3; ZONE: C; TV previews.

LENGTH: 973 words

HEADLINE: PAST IMPERFECT; 'DIVIDED MEMORIES' CASTS SKEPTICAL EYE ON
REPRESSED-MEMORY MOVEMENT

BYLINE: By Steve Johnson, Tribune Television Critic.

 BODY:
   The airing of Ofra Bikel's riveting new documentary probably will
be troubling to those who believe repressed memory is widespread and
its recovery is a profound therapeutic tool.

   Do not expect this trauma to be buried in the subcionscious,
however, like the sexual abuse that so many believe they experienced
behind the facades of apparently unexceptional families.

   "Divided Memories," the two-part, four-hour "Frontline" documentary
airing Tuesday and April 11 at 9 p.m. on WTTW-Ch. 11, is likely to
provoke protest because Bikel casts an unblinking eye on this new peak
on the nation's psychological landscape, familiar from television
movies, ubiquitous talk show discussions and a recanted accusation
against Chicago's Catholic archbishop Cardinal Joseph Bernardin.

   Simply by taking her cameras into the sessions, Bikel demonstrates
thatrecovered-memory therapy often looks a lot like bunkum. More
significantly, through interviews with experts on both sides, she
helps to place it as a political movement-mixing threads of feminism,
spiritualism and victimism, and relying on anecdote in its
defense-rather than a scientific one rooted in empirical evidence.

   Her film, Bikel says, "is skeptical of the theory. It's-more than
anything-worried about the therapy I've seen that's going on in the
name of repressed memories. . . . I started with the utmost respect
for therapists and I'm very sorry that I lost a lot of it."

   In what Bikel labels the "war" over repressed memory there is no
middle ground. If you express skepticism about the logic that lets
people pin their adult problems on fresh and unsubstantiated
recollections of being violated decades prior, you are in league with
pederasts. If you wonder: Isn't this doing somebody, somewhere, some
good, you are helping to tear decent families apart.

   "I tried very hard not to come down with pronouncements, not to use
experts who come down with pronouncements," says Bikel, a veteran
documentarian who is no stranger to the shifting sands of sexual
memory and accusation.

   Her acclaimed "Innocence Lost" (1991) and "Innocence Lost: The
Verdicts" (1993), both made for "Frontline," explored a court case
that hinged on children's accusations of profligate sexual abuse by
day care workers in Edenton, N.C. Her work raised significant doubts
about the guilty verdicts and suggested that the town itself fell
thrall to a witch-hunt mentality.

   Talking to patients and their families from cases famous and
unfamiliar, "Divided Memories" works on a bigger canvas than the
"Innocence Lost" films.  But by again exploring what people can come
to believe, it again points toward a species of hysteria.

   It does so with a steady hand, a seeming interest in presenting the
best case both sides have to offer. Early on in the four hours, Bikel
talks with a woman who did indeed repress-or forget-childhood sexual
abuse. She learned of it when her mother told her. This is the only
case Bikel found where a claim of recovered memory could be backed up
by anything more substantial than a woman and her therapist believing
it so.

   More typical is Kate Rose, who, her grieving family says, won't
examine school or medical records that prove impossible the Gothic
horrors she claims to recall. In a moment of shining truth, Bikel asks
Rose what hurts more, the constant ritual abuse or her mother's
admitted lifelong coldness.

   "Every bit of desperation in my life," Rose responds, "is the lack
of mother."

   "Divided Memories" places recovered memory as an outgrowth of the
addiction movement, in which love is "enmeshment" and friendship is
"people addiction," and of pop-psych theory popularized during the
1980s about healing the inner child.

   At the same time, society and psychology were recognizing that
sexual abuse was more widespread than had been thought and that it
could be talked about. A school of therapy developed believing that a
damaged inner child could be traced to a sexually abused child.

   The seductiveness of all this permeates the broadcast: therapists
get to achieve dramatic results; patients get to find an external
source of blame for their problems.

   Yet is sex abuse a one-stop answer? Bikel quotes a skeptical
expert, who paraphrases psychologist Abraham Maslow: "If the only tool
you have is a hammer, then everything around you begins to look like a
nail."

   The therapists, though, contend it's no surprise that people
damaged by sexual abuse find therapists who specialize in it. Feminist
defenders add that so many therapists find incest and abuse because
it's so rampant. In this climate, doubting a woman who proclaims sex
abuse is like doubting Anita Hill: You don't just damage her, you
damage a cause.

   What's chilling about this is that the gulf between the two camps
is so vast, yet they are united by apparent good faith. The people who
believe in their rediscovered memories are dealing with emotional pain
that appears real and intense, whatever the explanation.

   And the families that therapy dictates these women must "detach"
from seem extraordinarily stunned, like each new day is a fresh blow
to the solar plexus.  One accused father, a union carpenter, is shown
forlornly picketing the counseling center that helped his daughter
find her abuse memory.

   The ultimate question, though is, does any of this do good? Is it,
as the therapists say, empowering for women to find abuse and confront
it? Happiness is not transparent, but the women Bikel focuses on look,
after years of therapy, haggard and unsure of themselves.

   In place of long if troubled lives, they have a new life that began
with the definition of their victimhood. In place of parents,
siblings, spouses, even children, they have deep attachments to their
fellow victims and, especially, to their therapists.

GRAPHIC: PHOTOPHOTO: Kate Rose, shown with her therapist Doug Sawin,
recalled repressed memories of sexual abuse. A two-part "Frontline"
looks at the issue.

