Truth and reconciliation

Once patients believe in their repressed memories and have invested socially and emotionally in their absolute truth, they are often encouraged to "drain the abscess" of the experience by a process called abreaction, pioneered by Freud a hundred years ago. It's a process by which therapists induce patients to "relive" the painstakingly assembled "memories" as if they were actually happening.

Hypnosis can make the experience of "reliving" dredged-up scenes of childhood abuse particularly vivid and horrifying. As Elaine Westerlund wrote in a 1993 article in the journal Women and Therapy, "Movement in therapy will be much greater if the woman is able to sob like a child, to shake with terror and to scream with rage ... Physical responses such as vomiting, incontinence or fainting will sometimes occur." Some patients can even break out in welts, rashes and stigmata.

There's only one problem: There's no scientific evidence -- or even consistent descriptive evidence -- that memory recovery or abreaction actually works. Not only did it become increasingly clear to Freud that many of his patients' "memories" couldn't possibly have happened, but his patients also failed to get better following the big cathartic crises he engineered for them.

In fact, some of them got worse, as countless patients did while undergoing similar therapy a century later. It was common for late 20th century recovered-memory therapists to search "deeper" for more and more hidden memories when the "purging" of the first ones didn't cure their patients. As a result, the recovered memories often expanded into more and more horrible outrages -- with predictable effects on patients whose psychological lives were already fragile.

The practice often initiated or accelerated "flashbacks," so that patients experienced spontaneous, hallucinatory moments of the recovered abuse scenarios in their waking lives. Christian psychologist Paul Simpson, a one-time promoter of recovered-memory therapy and the author of "Second Thoughts: Understanding the False Memory Crisis and How It Could Affect You," notes that these supposedly "cathartic" experiences can have devastating effects. "As patients experience more traumatic flashbacks, they begin to decompensate -- their personality and ability to function deteriorate dramatically. As decompensation increases, they are told that their psychotic breakdown is proof that what they fantasized is real."

The emotionally excruciating effects of recovered-memory therapy are addressed reassuringly in "The Courage to Heal." Bass and Davis describe the "emergency phase" of the process that begins when the memories of abuse have been uncovered and accepted as real: "You may find yourself having flashbacks uncontrollably, crying all day long, or unable to go to work. You may dream about your abuser and be afraid to sleep."

"I just lost it completely," one woman told Bass and Davis. "I wasn't eating, I wasn't sleeping ... I was afraid to stay in the house alone. I would go out in the middle of the night and hide somewhere, behind a Dipsy dumpster or something ... Physically, I was a mess. I had crabs. I hadn't bathed in a month. I was afraid of the shower." Bass and Davis note that for some survivors, the "emergency phase" can last for years, "with only short breaks in intensity." But, they say, the good news is that "it won't last forever."

Yet sometimes it does "last forever," if the abuse survivor finds that she can't take the pain of her awful realizations anymore. "Maria Meyers," a woman who finally came to believe that the "memories" of abuse that she had developed in therapy were false, wrote a response to the death of a fellow patient in a 1994 edition of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation newsletter. Far from having helped her or her friend, recovered-memory therapy turned them both into basket cases.

"Some therapists justify the worsening condition of their patients by telling them, 'You have to get worse before you can get better,'" Meyers wrote. For her, the "getting worse" part of her therapy "didn't mean getting a little more confused or a little more depressed. It meant nearly going insane. It meant retrieving memories so horrid and terrifying I couldn't eat or drink and ended up on IVs ... People are losing families, friends, jobs, and their homes. They are filing for bankruptcy after spending months in hospitals ... [S]ome people give up ... Some people commit suicide."

As patients continued in recovered-memory therapy without gaining a cure for the problems that had brought them into therapy, the number of perpetrators in their memories also tended to expand. "The more I worked on the abuse," said one woman quoted in "The Courage to Heal," "the more I remembered. First I remembered my brother, and then my grandfather. About six months after that I remembered my father. And then about a year later, I remembered my mother. I remembered the 'easiest' first and the 'hardest' last. Even though it was traumatic for me to realize that everyone in my family abused me, there was something reassuring about it."

It's hard for someone outside this kind of therapeutic environment to know what was reassuring about the belief that one's entire family was a vile pack of incestuous sexual abusers. But patients often find themselves relieved to know that their emotional problems and social difficulties are not really their own fault, says Richard Ofshe, a social psychologist and the coauthor with Ethan Watters of the landmark 1994 book "Making Monsters: False Memories, Psychotherapy, and Sexual Hysteria." In therapy, Ofshe says, "The hard questions are not about what choices the patient made and what she might do to change her current circumstances, but rather what was done to her."

Next Page: The seductive power of victimhood

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