
TV Preview; Vicious Psyche; 'Frontline's' Frightening Look at
Regression Therapy
Byline:   Tom Shales
04/04/95
THE WASHINGTON POST

     Those who cannot remember the past are inclined to invent it.
That clearly seems one of the lessons to be gleaned from a
fascinating and frightening "Frontline" report that begins tonight
at 9 on Channel 26.
      "Divided Memories" is about the controversy that surrounds a
raging vogue in psychotherapy: unearthing repressed memories of
abuse from a patient's childhood as a way of liberating the patient
from the grip of the past. The patients, mostly women, are
encouraged to dredge up long-suppressed horrors from youth as a way
of dealing with such current problems as depression, bulimia,
multiple personality disorder and panic attacks.
   But what if the memory of abuse is not true? "I don't care if
it's true," one California therapist replies to that question. "What
actually happened is irrelevant to me. . . . We all live in a
delusion." Unfortunately, one of that very therapist's patients
became so convinced that her nightmare tales of ritual abuse were
true that she sued her parents and grandparents for $20 million.
  She   claimed that after years of repressing the nasty, nasty
images in her mind, she suddenly remembered that her parents and
grandparents had subjected her to sexual and physical torture from
infancy as part of their devilish duty in a satanic cult. It doesn't
matter to the woman or her therapist that not an iota of
corroboration exists and that none of her siblings remembers such
horrors.
      Producer Ofra Bikel includes clips from the talk shows of
Sally Jessy Raphael, Phil Donahue and Oprah Winfrey, but her
approach to the subject is much more scholarly than tabloid. And the
narration is for the most part calm and nonjudgmental; the
therapists and some of the patients are allowed to speak for, and in
some cases implicitly condemn, themselves.
      A few of the cases have become famous, or infamous, like that
of a California woman who under therapy suddenly remembered that her
father had raped and killed a childhood friend of hers in front of
her 20 years earlier; her father went to jail on the strength of
this "evidence" alone. Another young woman destroyed her father's
life and career by insisting she had been the victim of his
incestuous lust as a child. This time, the father sued the
therapist, who he claimed had implanted the alleged memories. He won
a half-million-dollar judgment against her.
      One aspect of the phenomenon only superficially covered in the
report tonight is the sexual politics of all this. For the most
part, but not exclusively, those speaking in defense of regression
therapy are women, and those speaking against it are men. Some of
the female therapists appear to believe that they are winning souls
for feminism each time a female patient remembers a previously
forgotten incident of abuse by a renegade daddy.
      A male therapist who practiced regression therapy and then
abandoned it did so, he says, because he saw patients getting worse,
not better, as they rehashed traumas, real or fanciful, from their
early lives. "In many ways, psychology has become the religion of
this century," he says insightfully, and many of the patients who
claim that regression therapy has been their salvation sound a great
deal like the trusting souls who think the magical touch of a faith
healer somehow cured a lifelong ailment: "Evil spirits, out!"
      The repressed memory theory also fits in with the
victimization epidemic in American culture. One's ills and failures
and problems of adjustment can be conveniently attributed to a
single demon hidden within buried memories. One patient, watched in
the midst of shrieking self-realization, comes to the conclusion
that many of her current difficulties are linked to her having been
momentarily stuck in a fallopian tube as a fetus. Another woman
blames her cancer on "emotional repression" over the years.
      Truly, the human mind is a wondrously mysterious thing. So is
the human imagination. So is the human ego. Some of those who
eagerly divulge once-hidden secrets appear almost boastful: Look how
complicated I am, look what awful things happened to me. In group
sessions, there appears to be a kind of one-upmanship of the hurt
and wounded, with patients determined to prove the abuse they
suffered was more colorful and injurious than that of others.
      Bikel's report is certainly not heartless or reactionary; she
does not say all such cases are bogus, or hold the patients up to
ridicule, or minimize the evils of actual child abuse. But the
impression one gets is of a kind of hysteria sweeping the land, part
of the eternal quest not only for explanations but for scapegoats.
In their zeal to portray themselves as victims, some of the patients
make victims out of others who may be utterly and helplessly
innocent.
    In next week's conclusion to the report, Bikel will examine the
effects that these emotional outings have had on some of the
families involved. If recovering memories has become something of a
cottage industry, so has dealing with the damage the recoveries have
caused; Bikel interviews founders of the False Memory Syndrome
Foundation, a 15,000-member group composed of people who say they
have been falsely accused of sexual abuse.
     If Part 2 is as good as Part 1, it will be too gripping, and
too important, to miss.

