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By Root 1273 0

Incest in 1981, the patients she described remembered what had happened to them all too clearly. At the time, feminist clinicians like Herman were doing important work in raising public awareness of rape, child abuse, incest, and domestic violence. They were not claiming that their clients had repressed their memories; rather, these women said they had chosen to remain silent because they felt frightened and ashamed, and that no one would believe them. There is no entry for “repression” in the index of Father-Daughter Incest. Yet within ten years Herman had become a recovered-memory advocate: The very first sentence of her 1992 book Trauma and Recovery is “The ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness.” How did Herman and other highly experienced clinicians move from believing that traumatic experiences are rarely or never forgotten to believing that this response was “ordinary”? One step at a time.

Imagine that you are a therapist who cares deeply about the rights and safety of women and children. You see yourself as a skillful, compassionate practitioner. You know how hard it has been to get politicians and the public to pay serious attention to the problems of women and children. You know how difficult it has been for battered women to speak up. Now you start hearing about a new phenomenon: In therapy, women are suddenly recovering memories that had been repressed all their lives, memories of horrific events. These cases are turning up on talk shows, at the conferences you go to, and in a flurry of books, notably the hugely popular The Courage to Heal. It’s true that the book’s authors, Ellen Bass and Laura Davis, have had no training in any kind of psychotherapy, let alone science, which they freely admitted. “None of what is presented here is based on psychological theories,” Bass explained in the preface, but this ignorance of psychology did not prevent them from defining themselves as healers and experts on sexual abuse, based on the workshops they had led.32 They provided a list of symptoms, any of which, they said, suggest that a woman may be a victim of incest, including these: She feels powerless and unmotivated; she has an eating disorder or sexual problems; she feels there is something wrong with her deep down inside; she feels she has to be perfect; she feels bad, dirty, or ashamed. You are a therapist working with women who have some of these problems. Should you assume that years of incest, repressed from memory, are the primary cause?

There you are, at the top of the pyramid, with a decision to make: Leap onto the recovered-memory bandwagon or stay on the sidewalk. The majority of mental-health professionals were skeptical and did not go along. But a large number of therapists—between one-fourth and one-third, according to several surveys33—took that first step in the direction of belief, and, given the closed loop of clinical practice, we can see how easy it was for them to do so. Most had not been trained in the show-me-the-data spirit of skepticism. They did not know about the confirmation bias, so it did not occur to them that Bass and Davis were seeing evidence of incest in any symptom a woman has, and even in the fact that she has no symptoms. They lacked a deep appreciation of the importance of control groups, so they were unlikely to wonder how many women who were not molested nonetheless have eating disorders or feel powerless and unmotivated.34 They did not pause to consider what reasons other than incest might cause their female clients to have sexual problems.

Even some skeptical practitioners were reluctant to slow the bandwagon by saying anything critical of their colleagues or of the women telling their stories. It’s uncomfortable—dissonant—to realize that some of your colleagues are tainting your profession with silly or dangerous ideas. It’s embarrassing—dissonant—to realize that not everything women and children say is true, especially after all your efforts to persuade victimized women to speak up and to get the world to recognize the problem of child abuse.