PBS probes repressed `Memories'
Notes:    Divided Memories -- PBS -- #### (out of four)
04/04/95
USA TODAY

   The billion-dollar recovery movement may need its own recovery
movement after a national TV audience gets a load of Divided
Memories, an exhaustively balanced and emotionally exhausting
dissection of the debate over repressed memory of child abuse. This
is Frontline at its most provocative; Part 2 airs next Tuesday.
   At times, it will curdle the blood, boggle the brain and race the
pulse, with harrowing sequences of deeply pained adults (most always
women) eagerly led by therapists down a garish garden path of lurid
memory and - most disturbing - questionable validity.
   This is the land of Oprah, Geraldo and Sally, but presented with
a depth and complexity that takes the sensational and renders it
unnervingly ambiguous. While never slighting the horror of abuse and
incest, these four hours show another abuse perpetrated: of the bond
between therapist and patient.
   Producer Ofra Bikel leaves conclusions to the viewer, with a
meticulously analytical approach she used to great effect in
previous award-winning Frontlines: Innocence Lost and its sequel The
Verdict, about child-abuse charges at a North Carolina day-care
center.
   Divided Memories is their equal, and that is high praise.
   As in Innocence Lost, Bikel calmly observes hysteria, with
stunning impact. Her access to bizarre therapy sessions is
remarkable and begs many questions: How authentic are these
horrific, long-buried memories of childhood abuse that erupt during
treatment? Are therapists inducing false memory, more concerned with
making their patients feel good than ascertaining the truth?
   Critics say it's  pandemic of pop psychology gone amok, that this
has nothing to do with reality and leaves families shattered by the
charges. Advocates argue there's a backlash against women speaking
out on what was once taboo.
   What isn't in dispute is that, without external evidence, no one
can distinguish true memory from what's made up. For the therapists
interviewed, it doesn't even matter. "I don't care if it's true,"
says therapist Doug Sawin. "What actually happened is irrelevant to
me."
   Not irrelevant, of course, to the distraught families, who have
formed their own support group. But that's not the therapists'
concern. They're not detectives or fact-finders, they say, neither
judge nor jury.
   What they often appear is arrogant, dangerously enabling
vulnerable patients' delusions to take a life of their own.
   At times, you feel you've stumbled into an absurdist episode of
The X-Files, as in a hypnosis session where a woman recalls being
abused by her baby sitter. Then she flashes back to a former life
where she says she abused the baby sitter, who was then her servant.
   It would be funny if it weren't so scary. Divided Memories is one
long shudder of the national soul.


