Mistakes Were Made - Carol Tavris [61]
The most ideologically committed clinicians reduce dissonance by killing the messenger. In the late 1990s, when psychiatrists and psychotherapists were being convicted of malpractice for their use of coercive methods, and courts were ruling against them in cases of alleged recovered memories, D. Corydon Hammond advised his clinical colleagues at a convention thus: “I think it’s time somebody called for an open season on academicians and researchers. In the United States and Canada in particular, things have become so extreme with academics supporting extreme false memory positions, so I think it’s time for clinicians to begin bringing ethics charges for scientific malpractice against researchers, and journal editors—most of whom, I would point out, don’t have malpractice coverage.” 38 Some psychiatrists and clinical psychologists took Hammond’s advice, sending harassing letters to researchers and journal editors, making spurious claims of ethics violations against scientists studying memory and children’s testimony, and filing nuisance lawsuits aimed at blocking publication of critical articles and books. None of these efforts have been successful at silencing the scientists.39
There is one final way of reducing dissonance: Dismiss all the scientific research as being part of a backlash against child victims and incest survivors. The concluding section of the third edition of The Courage to Heal is called “Honoring the Truth: A Response to the Backlash.” There is no section called “Honoring the Truth: We Made Some Big Mistakes.”40
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There are almost no psychotherapists who practiced recovered-memory therapy who have admitted that they were wrong. Of course, they may fear lawsuits. But from the few who have publicly admitted their errors, we can see what it took to shake them out of their protective cocoons of self-justification. For Linda Ross, it was taking herself out of the closed loop of private therapy sessions and forcing herself to confront, in person, parents whose lives had been destroyed by their daughters’ accusations. One of her clients brought her to a meeting of accused parents. Ross suddenly realized that a story that had seemed bizarre but possible when her client told it in therapy now seemed fantastical when multiplied by a roomful of similar tales. “I had been so supportive of women and their repressed memories,” she said, “but I had never once considered what that experience was like for the parents. Now I heard how absolutely ludicrous it sounded. One elderly couple introduced themselves, and the wife told me that their daughter had accused her husband of murdering three people…. The pain in these parents’ faces was so obvious.And the unique thread was that their daughters had gone to [recovered-memory] therapy. I didn’t feel very proud of myself or my profession that day.”
After that meeting, Ross said, she would frequently wake up in the middle of the night “in terror and anguish” as the cocoon began to crack open. She worried about being sued, but most of the time she “just thought about those mothers and fathers who wanted their children back.” She called her former clients, trying to undo the damage she had caused, and she changed the way she practices therapy. In an interview on National Public Radio’s This American Life with Alix Spiegel, Ross told of accompanying one of her clients to a meeting with the woman’s parents, whose home had been dismantled by police trying to find evidence of a dead body that their daughter had claimed to remember in therapy.41 There was no dead body, any more than there were underground torture chambers at the McMartin Preschool. “So I had a chance to tell them the part that I played,” said Ross. “And to tell them that I completely understood that they would find it difficult for the rest of their lives to be able to find a place to forgive me, but that I was certainly aware that I was in need of their forgiveness.”
At the end of the interview, Alix Spiegel said: “There are almost no people like Linda