LEISURE & ARTS -- Television:  All-New Sins of the Fathers
04/03/95    WALL STREET JOURNAL

   In her new "Frontline" documentary, "Divided Memory," Ofra Bikel
takes on the issue of repressed memory and what's come to be known
as the "recovery movement" generally. For the therapy schools in
question, this is most certainly not good news. The reason will soon
be clear to anyone watching this grimly captivating, occasionally
hilarious, plainly masterful two-part work, beginning Tuesday (9-11
p.m. EDT on PBS; PBS air dates and times vary so check local
listings). Ms. Bikel's tone is scrupulously calm and searching. The
show has been publicized as a look at a "controversy" and the title
itself is intended to suggest a scholarly evenhandedness, but make
no mistake -- this is a killer assault. An assault, moreover, of
extraordinary texture, for which Ms. Bikel deserves all the awards
around.
   The therapists now making careers inducing memories of parental
abuse that supposedly occurred in childhood (if not in utero) are
given every opportunity here to air their analytic views and show
their therapeutic techniques in practice. This exposure, it hardly
needs saying, is more devastating than any direct comment the
filmmaker might offer. Ms. Bikel indeed asks few questions, though
when she does she is deadly.
   There is, for instance, her report on the case of Gary Ramona of
California -- whose adult daughter decided, after seeing a therapist
about an eating disorder, that her father had raped her when she was
a child. Mr. Ramona, a vineyard executive, lost his job, his
children and his wife, who came to believe passionately in every
word of the charges produced in therapy. With deep fervor, the woman
proclaims that mothers have gut feelings about their children and
everything happening to them, and that these gut feelings about her
daughter's experience were all the proof she needed.
   Pouncing, Ms. Bikel points out, "You said you were happily
married for 25 years -- so where were your gut feelings?" It is
quite something to see the woman realize, as she mumbles a reply and
stops, that everything she is about to say gives away the true
answer -- that those "gut feelings," like the rape memories, only
began with the visits to the therapist. Mr. Ramona became the first
accused parent to sue therapists for implanting false abuse memories
-- a malpractice suit he won, along with half a million dollars. The
fact still remains, Mr. Ramona points out in a bitter summation,
that thanks to these accusations he lost his family, and has not
seen his children in several years. "So tell me, what did I win?" he
asks.
   The other accused parents interviewed here had better luck at
least regarding family support. Part one of "Divided Memory," for
example, tells of a promising music student whose entry into therapy
led to immediate charges that her father had assaulted her when she
was a child. In due time the accusations against her father are
extended so that they include her mother and grandparents, too --
and the charges are no longer only rape but Satanic abuse with
wires, vegetables, electrodes, tools. Another accused father, who
had spent his entire working life as a union organizer, is so
infuriated at his daughter's (and her therapist's) contention that
he raped her as an infant that he does the only thing he knows how
to do to express outrage: He pickets the therapist's office.
   The therapists themselves are another story -- and what a show
they make. Here are psychologists confidently explaining that
whether the patients' "recovered" memories of abuse are factual or
not is irrelevant -- for there is no such thing as truth -- and,
after all, the most important goal of therapy is to make the patient
feel powerful. Everybody has memories of abuse, it appears. One
psychologist here tells how, in the midst of helping her patient
recover memories of early childhood molestation, she had to stop --
she too had suddenly begun to recover abuse memories of her own. A
nice dilemma.
   One school of therapy shown here has to do with something called
cellular suppressed emotion. In this section, which turns into a
family epic, we meet Heather, who has entered therapy because, as
she says, she isn't as happy as she should be. Next we meet the
therapist who explains, while working on Heather, that it is in the
shoulders that all memories are stored. Following this invaluable
insight we learn that Heather, evidently looking to shoulder many
more revelations, is also seeing three other therapists to help her
recover memories of abuse.
   Next comes Heather's mother, Pam, a teacher, who wants to know if
she too might have repressed memories of sexual abuse. It hardly
needs saying that the woman does not go away disappointed. We also
meet patients abused not only in childhood but in their earlier
lives. One woman, whose recovered memories are at least as credible
as any of the others dredged up in these sessions, recalls her
stomach being slashed "in the first century A.D."
   One of the more vivid displays of healing efforts shows clients
acting out their alleged recollections amid much shrieking and
pillow pounding. One decidedly hefty woman among them tells the
interviewer that she works hard pushing men away and that in fact
what she would like is "to overpower men." On hand to help her with
her flashbacks is a therapist who directs her to "bring the fullness
of your womanhood" to the struggle.
   In the roster of interviewees, there are of course critics of the
recovered-memory syndrome and its allied pathologies -- one of them
a therapist who turned his back on what he soon determined to be
nonsense -- nonsense of a highly damaging kind.
   Speaking of which, there is also a segment on John Bradshaw and
his inner-child rant, which has consumed so many hours of
public-television time. One of Ms. Bikel's most invaluable services
here has been to put her finger squarely on one of the prime sources
of the babble about the dysfunctional family, addictions and
co-dependency that has now infected the entire culture. Around the
emissions of Mr. Bradshaw and his like there has grown up a
million-dollar industry in recovery-movement books, workshops,
cruises, Inner Child toys and other gifts. In the end, though, the
film's most telling scene is the one in which a band of therapy
patients who have supposedly recovered their memories of abuse sit
around grimly discussing their new-found happiness, and how they now
enjoy the full range of emotions. Each seems to have discovered his
inner child. With luck they will lose them.



