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Memories . . . Continued from Page 35things in therapy.• As soon as the parents were confronted, often in a letter or phone call, and denied the accusations, they were cut off.• Although most of the mothers and fathers literally have begged to meet with their children’s therapists, few have been granted the opportunity. Some have been admonished for their “guilt”and denounced as “perpetrators” by therapists who have never met them or asked to hear their side.“Until this happens to you personally or to someone you know, you hear a story about (incest accusations) and you have the knee-jerk reaction: ‘Kill the bastard,” said Pamela Freyd, an accused parent and the director of the False Mememory Syndrome Foundation in Philadelphia. “What we want is for people to pull back from the knee-jerk reaction and hysteria.”Established in March 1992 asan information and research organization, FMS Foundation has collected detailed stories of some 3,000 families who say they have been falsely accused by an adult child — mostly women in their20s, 30s and 40s — who recovered “memories” in therapy.Freyd and her husband, a mathematics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, were “first plunged into thisnightmare,” in December 1990. A Ph.D. and teacher for 20 yearsherself, Freyd looked for information ii? the Penn library stacks but found almost nothing. So she began to write and phone therapists and scientists, and the FMS Foundation formed.Along with wanting their children back, FMS Foundation parents and their 30-member advisory board of psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, researchers and academicians want the public to consider:Without denying the existence, insidiousness and tragedy of incest and child abuse, logic dictates that not every accusation can be true. Further, they say, the mushrooming number of adult repressed memory cases suggests that certain types of therapy may be inspiring vivid and detailed “memories” of abuse that never occurred.Foundation critics say it’s much worse than an advocacy group.Ellen Bass of Santa Cruz, Calif., co-author of the self-help book for incest survivors, “The Courage to Heal” (nearly 650,000 copies sold), has called the FMS group a natural haven for child abusers, a “sleazily run” organization and an example of the ‘backlash” against a strengthening incest survivor movement.To parents who say their families have been destroyed by false memories, the conflicting studies only underscore their frustration. They have lost theirchildren and are accused of something horrible.Like Pamela Freyd, these parents have looked for and found some answers in news stories, professional journals and incest survivor literature. With work they have discovered that one therapist’s technique for “memory recovery” is another’s idea of “false memory implantation.”Hypnosis, for example, once thought of as the key to the subconscious mind, is now seen by many therapists and scientists as a suggestive and potentially dangerous tool for creating false images and events. This, they point out, is why courts will not admit as evidence testimony or confessions obtained from a hypnotized person.And hypnosis is just one of the basic areas of psychotherapy in which there is radical disagreement among professionals. Other contentious issues are how memory works, the definition of “incest,” how common multiple personality disorder is and how widespread ritual cult abuse might be.One theory most critics of repressed memory therapy agree upon is that, after centuries of neglect and ignorance about child abuse and incest, we may have become so sensitive, we see it where it doesn’t exist.Especially if we are in therapy with someone who believes it is everywhere.
Newspaper Details
DuBois Tri County Sunday
DuBois, Pennsylvania, US
Sun, May 30, 1993
Page 36
Full Page
Clipped by
Curtis B.
CA 05 Jun 2021
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