GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE OCTOBER 10, 1997

BOOKS

The courage to question repressed memory therapy

Victims of Memory

by Mark Pendergrast Upper Access Press, $24.95

Reviewed by Nancy C. Marcus

I was very confused about sexuality when I hit puberty. Many classmates informed me that I was gay, harassed me on a daily basis, called me a fag or a fairy. It hurt a lot ... [After puberty], I had strong homosexual tendencies, which upset me a lot...

I started to deal with sex abuse about eight years ago, when some of my parishioners came to me with their problems.

I believe all gay people were emotionally incested and show severe symptoms. I agree

with [the book] The Courage to Heal that if you think you were abused, then you were. I do worry sometimes about whether these memories are all true . . . I have to wrestle with my conscience. Am I helping them make this up?

The above is from an interview with a therapist conducted by investigative journalist and scholar Mark Pendergrast. It is one of 35 interviews in his 1995 book Victims of Memory, which explores the explosive issue of "repressed memory" therapy (which purports to recover repressed memories of longforgotten abuse).

The work is also a stinging critique of a book often prominently displayed in women's

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bookstores, The Courage to Heal, which Pendergrast believes has caused women— many of them self-identified lesbians-more harm than good.

At first glance, Pendergrast might not clearly personify an ally to lesbian feminists. To some who endorse the repressed memory theory, Pendergrast may appear to be the enemy-a straight man, accused by his own daughters of unspecified sexual abuse based on their recovered memory therapy.

There is no question, however, that Pendergrast has written a thoroughly researched, disturbing book that everyone interested in the debate over recovered memories should read before forming conclusions.

Included among the interviews are stories from therapists who practice memory retrieval, women and families directly impacted by the therapy, and women who believed they were repressing memories of years of abuse, but later retracted such beliefs.

Pendergrast reports that the search for repressed memories began in earnest in 1988, when Ellen Bass and Laura Davis (with no training in psychology, he notes) published The Courage to Heal, which has come to be viewed as the bible of the recovered memory movement.

"It is impossible to exaggerate the influence The Courage to Heal has exerted," writes Pendergrast, who records that the book sold 750,000 copies in several editions by 1996.

Based on a 1993 survey of Ph.D.-level psychologists, 43% report recommending The Courage to Heal to their clients, and 76% report using memory-recovery techniques.

Pendergrast notes that in a 1994 book guide, 500 prominent therapists were polled for their recommendations of 350 books. Their number one choice? The Courage to Heal.

While he credits The Courage to Heal with helping many survivors of sexual abuse who have always had a conscious memory of it, Pendergrast says, “The real trouble with the book is that women who think they might have been abused, but who don't remember it, are the primary intended audience."

He quotes from Bass and Davis: "If you think you were abused and your life shows the symptoms, then you were." This is a direct contradiction of a 1995 statement by the American Psychological Association that said, "Most people who were sexually abused as children remember all or part of what happened to them."

Pendergrast quotes from the book's list of symptoms that supposedly indicate the presence of repressed memories. "Do you feel powerless, like a victim? Do you feel different from other people? Do you feel alienated or lonely?"

The list goes on and on, and Pendergrast's rebuttal is a stinging one: "Other than the most well-adjusted and boring person on earth, who wouldn't answer some of these questions affirmatively? Sure, I sometimes feel powerless. I seem to be different from other people, and I often feel awkward and confused. It is an easy leap from there—if you are vulnerable, which is a good bet if you've picked up The Courage to Heal-to think, 'Oh, my gosh! I must be an incest victim!'

Even if no memories of incest exist after reading The Courage to Heal, Pendergrast despairs, the authors encourage women to act "as if" the abuse really happened, and form support groups with other "survivors."

One woman, who after reading The Courage to Heal believed she must be repressing memories of incest but later recanted, read the book on the advice of her therapist.

"I gobbled up The Courage to Heal—just read it, read it, read it... The phrase kept coming back, 'If your life shows the symptoms and you don't remember it, you were still abused.' I just lived with that phrase. I kept worrying that I wasn't a true survivor." Fully aware of the skepticism with which his work may be treated by lesbians in particular, Pendergrast expresses concern "that my book may be construed as support for

anti-lesbian or right-wing views." He quotes a 1993 Off Our Backs editorial which labeled anyone questioning repressed memories as "obviously right wing, heteropatriarchal, misogynist and anti-feminist." On the contrary, Pendergrast emphasizes his support of gay rights.

"Lesbians should be... treated just as any other human beings-with respect. Women have been, and continue to be, subjected to ill treatment at the hands of too many men, ranging from rape to subtle sexism. This does not mean that any 'recovered memories' of abuse are necessarily true. All humans deserve a fair hearing."

In response to people who may brand him a manipulative perpetrator, Pendergrast agrees heartily with Wendy Kaminer, who observed plaintively, “I wish we were less threatened by the debate."

Pendergrast adds that, "One of the most ironic tragedies of the recovered-memory movement is its supposed affiliation with 'feminism.'

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"Most of those recovering memories of abuse are women; those who question the memories are labeled sexist," he writes. "Yet what is really happening here? These therapists specialize in making women feel helpless, dependent, wounded, incomplete, and fundamentally flawed. Women's lives are being harmed by a movement that feminists should abhor."

One recovered-memory retractor is quoted by Pendergrast as commenting about her recovered memory experience.

"It robs women of all power and control over themselves. IfI really hated women and wanted to keep them in a completely powerless and childlike state, the best way to do that would be to remove their faith and trust in their own minds and make them dependent."

Pendergrast also raises concerns about the link between the recovered memory phenomenon and lesbian identification, pointing out that Bass and Davis encourage heterosexual women to avoid sex with men as a necessary step towards recovery.

Comparing that message to lesbian poet Adrienne Rich's essay on "compulsory heterosexuality," Pendergrast notes that today's "survivor" groups have created the inverse mandate compulsory homosexuality.

"There is an implication that a history of sexual abuse produces this sexual orientation, thereby stigmatizing it as somehow not a free choice or genetic disposition, but one more coping mechanism, a reaction to trauma. It is precisely that sort of thinking that gay men and women have fought for years."

At the time of Victims of Memory's publication, over 200 women have filed lawsuits against their former therapists for improper suggestive therapy which encouraged them to believe in repressed memories at the cost of damaging their relationships, careers, and sanity.

The London Daily Telegraph reported October 1 that a ban on using any method to recover memories of child abuse has been imposed on members of the Royal College of Psychiatrists. Members who continue to use the technique to unearth memories of past sexual abuse would face a series of sanctions, including being reported to the General Medical Council for professional misconduct.

Although Pendergrast's book may raise many troubling questions, including the question of the author's own credibility, for those able to give the book an open-minded reading, the research, studies, interviews and analyses in Victims of Memory may provide many long-needed answers.

While ultimately, readers of Victims of Memory must draw their own conclusions about the repressed memory debate, it would be a mistake to draw conclusions without reading the book at all.

Nancy C. Marcus is a survivor of rape and non-incestuous childhood sexual abuse. She is an attorney-in-training in New Philadelphia, Ohio.