Ferment
Vol.XI,#8 Jan. 20,1997
Roy Lisker ,Editor
#306 Liberty Commons
8 Liberty Street
Middletown, CT 06457
aberensh@lynx.neu.edu
"Malicious Malpractice"
The Flowering of Psychiatric Abuse in
the Last Quarter of the 20th Century
Introduction
"Bounded in a Nutshell"
"Psychotherapy is, above all, beyond whatever scientific
claims, a belief system..."
( Robyn Dawes , House Of Cards , pg. 33)
"Patients are trash..." ( Sigmund Freud, as quoted by
Sándor Ferenczi )
Since the term 'psychotherapy' has such
different meanings, both technical and popular, we make our own
definition: For the purposes of this series of articles,
'psychotherapy' is defined as the application, ( by persons possessing
some credential recognized by state and federal governments) , of
ideas drawn from the canon of modern psychology, ( that is to say the
ideas, findings and provided by, universities, medical schools and
accredited institutes ) , to the relief of symptoms of mental distress
and/or the cure of mental illness. This definition brings into
prominence its credibility vis-a-vis the laws, the schools and the
medical profession. Psychotherapy therefore includes psychoanalysis,
clinical psychology, social psychiatry, biopsychiatry, behavioral
psychiatry, Marriage-Family-Child Counselors, (MFCC), and several
other categories of counselors and therapists. It does not include
herbalists, witch doctors, religious figures, football coaches,
Christian Science practitioners, gurus, wise hermits, or others ,
competent or otherwise , lacking the professional credential.
The thesis of this set of articles is that psychotherapy, so
defined, is a plague on society, a science gone out of control, and a
major threat to the survival of any civilization based upon the
respect for science and scientific values.
Psychotherapy has always been with us. Most of today's
psychotherapies either derive directly, or have incorporated a
substantial part of the language, concepts and methods of Freud's
synthesis of existing knowledge at the turn of the century: His
delusions may have been egregious , but Freud had a very good idea of
current research , belief and practice . One cannot fault his
intelligence, nor charge him with not having done his homework.
People normally assume that psychotherapists are rigorously
trained in certain professional methods to relieve anxieties, cast
away irrational fears, root out delusions, raise morale and, in
general, provide the insight, courage and energy for copingwith the
problems of living.
There has been quite a bit of research over the past thirty
years which shows that psychotherapy has not been very successful in
doing this . It must be admitted that the experimental procedures of
its detractors are on occasion as slip-shod as those of its adherents
; yet there is no doubt in my mind that the balance of credibility
tips in their direction. Specifically, what this research has shown
is that:
(a) The extent of a therapists' credentials is totally
uncorrelated with the recovery rates of his 'clients' . 1
(b) A famous study 2 published in 1977 concluded that the
credentials, the kind of therapy, and the length of therapy are all
irrelevant to either cure rates or remission of symptoms . All
subsequent attempts to this finding have failed. 3
(c) There is a certain artificiality to the generic psychology
experiment that naturally invites skepticism from this writer, who has
been in turns mathematician ,( thereby involved in science), and
writer of fiction, ( thus pre-occupied with the behavior of human
beings in their natural settings ) . Still he attributes some validity
in the conclusions drawn from a most unusual experiment done in 1979 4
: A group of individuals diagnosed with easily identifiable conditions
such as depression, anxiety neurosis, obsessive compulsive behavior
and so forth were distributed, via some standard statistical scheme,
to a pool of persons they believed to be 'psychotherapists' , but
which actually consisted of a mixture of professional psychotherapists
and an assortment of college professors, whose only credential was an
occupation that gave them a magisterial manner . The cure rates
between the two groups were found to be statistically
indistinguishable.
"The professionals charged higher fees, but they were no more
effective as therapists than the professors. The only slight
difference was that after therapy the clients of the professionals
tended to be a bit more optimistic about life than those of the
untrained professors, but they didn't function any better on any of
the multiple measures the investigators evaluated. " ( Robyn Dawes,
House of Cards, pg. 56)
(d) It has also been demonstrated, ( given, once again, the
great difficulties involved in setting up experiments in the human
sciences ) that the differences between the abilities of professionals
and amateurs to diagnose mental illness, or even to distinguish
between genuine and crudely faked symptoms, is nil. By all credible
research , plain common sense and empirical tests based on statistical
correlations of symptoms with some basic data on background and life
history, have always proven to be superior to the intuitive appraisals
of experts. 5
It appears that in this field, unlike chess or piano playing,
an experts 'expertise' does not increase through talent, study, or
length of practice. These findings ought not be dismissed when
psychologists are called to testify in court proceedings , or hired to
run psychological evaluations on plaintiffs, defendants, job
applicants, disturbed children, and so on. It has also influenced
insurance companies in calculating rates of payment to professional
psychologists, or when covering their malpractice damages.
A few factors have been positively correlated with cure rates:
(a) The degree of personal empathy between the client and the
practitioner
(b) The positive mental attitude which leads someone to seek
help in the first place , (no matter how foolish that help may be) .
Parenthetically this was true in my case. In the spring of 1975 I had
myself committed to the Philadelphia General Hospital because I
finally recognized that it was not wise for a person in my condition
to be out on the streets. The 'therapies' I received there ranged from
sensible to foolish to comical to brutally manipulative, ( One of the
doctors told my parents and I separately that our hatred of each other
was so extreme that we never wanted to see each other again. This
disrupted family life for two years. His technique resembles that of
the notorious John Rosen - even psychotherapists concede that he was a
monster - who may have been his teacher. Rosen was for many years
professor of psychiatry at Temple University . ) I now feel that it
was this emergence of this new mental attitude on my part that was the
first sign that a psychotic episode that had lasted almost exactly a
year was coming to an end. )
(c) Everyone must overcome a considerable amount of emotional
distress merely through participation in the human condition. 6 It is
not "abnormal" for persons suffering from acute depression because of
failure at school, frustrated ambitions, ruined car eers, involvement
in unhappy love affairs, or the lose of loved one to, all by
themselves, rediscover hope and adventure in living. It is only the
psychotherapists who have a vested interest in telling us that such
'illnesses' , ( as Americans tend to label all 'negative' emotions ) ,
cannot get better without professional care.
Statistical regression is another factor that comes into play
: people normally go to therapists when they are in crisis. As this is
an exceptional, not a normal event, they will tend to be less upset in
future visits, something that has nothing to do with the psychiatrist,
but which he is often inclined to take credit for .
These are serious criticisms, yet they do not, in and of
themselves, indict the entire enterprise. Thus: it is reasonable to
conjecture that it might be impossible to provide reliable statistics
in support of the hypothesis that a belief in the divinity of Christ
saves people from Hell. One can, however, show that the belief in the
truth of this claim , does give a great many people a purpose for
living. Many Christians will assure you that their well being and
their ability to do good for others depends heavily on their belief in
the above hypothesis. Likewise , it might not matter at all if the
ideas of Freud, Jung, Reich, Laing, Rogers, Sullivan, Ferenczi,
B. F. Skinner and other behaviorists, the biopsychiatrists, the ECT
advocates and so forth were nothing more than an insalubrious mass of
superstitions ( as I believe them to be ) if, like the ideas of
Judaism, Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism , ( which I do
believe to be a sound scientific psychology) , they give social
coherency and reasons for living a good life to most of the world's
population .
But that is not what we see. Psychotherapy has clouded the
Western mind with morbidity. It does not make people good: it makes
them selfish, self-centered and mean-spirited. It compares badly with
religion, even with the most mediocre forms of conventional faith,
even with the insidious cults, in its' stated objective of relieving
the world's toll of psychic torment. It appears to make little
difference that ..."Unlike medical practitioners, well-paid mental
health practitioners have hardly caused even a blip in alleviating
society's rate of distress...." ( House of Cards , pg 199) . Over the
last quarter century, despite innumerable shocking revelations,
investigations and calls for reform, despite the raging in-house
warfare between the 'pep-pill' biopsychiatrists, the behaviorists, and
the wide range of 'talking therapies', the status, power and wealth of
the profession as a whole is on the increase. The new unholy alliance
of the American Psychiatric Association, the National Institutes of
Mental Health, and the giant pharmaceutical houses such as Eli Lilly (
Prozac), Upjohn (Xanax) and Ciba-Geigy ( Ritalin) has given
biopsychiatry in particular unprecedented strength.
Psychotherapy has become a menace far more fearful than any
real or imagined source of terror in the minds of its consumers .
Psychotherapy ruins lives; destroys families; undermines civil
liberties; sends innocent people to prison. It has contributed its
share to the epidemic of homelessness. It has created millions of drug
addicts, hooked on tranquilizers and neuroleptic drugs whose worth is
doubtful yet whose dangerous side effects are well known . It tells
children to ' Say No' to the drug-pusher in the school yard, but feeds
millions of them Ritalin , a first cousin to speed , goof-balls, and
amphetamines, to make them more tractable in class. To it we owe the
modern epidemic of tardive dyskenia , 7 Peter Breggin, director of the
Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology in Bethesda,
Maryland, a man who has devoted his life to psychiatric reform,
characterizes it as "the worst plague of brain damage in medical
history." ( Toxic Psychiatry, Chapter 13 ) .
It is responsible for emotional damage, educational
disruption, social ostracism, brain damage , physical injuries and
suicides on a scale that ought to cause much more concern than it
does. Such persistent malpractice would not be tolerated in any other
traditional area of medicine. Although powerful organizations such as
the American Psychological Association and the American Psychiatric
Association want to police licensing, and never tire in stressing the
need for more rigorous standards of teaching and 'training', most
trainings do little more than promote dogma, superstition and
ignorance from one generation of practitioners to the next:
" The problem is that licensing simply requires training - not
training in something valid, or in something that works, but simply
training. As far as licensing is concerned, one can be 'equally
'well-trained' in the best established techniques of behavior
modification or in 'repressed memory recovery through
hypnosis'.... thus, in areas where there is little or no scientific
understanding, the training requirement does absolutely nothing
whatsoever to enhance quality service.... it creates a pretense of
knowledge where none exists, because the practitioner is required to
'acquire' it. This pretense misleads both the clients and the general
public, who support the whole enterprise through third-party
payments."
(House of Cards , pgs 140-141)
Grossly distorted and diluted spin-offs of psychologic dogmas,
( which from the beginning had little true science to recommend them )
, seep into the mainstream of social discourse, generating clichés
that poison human interactions in families, education , law and
medicine. Examples abound: 'schizophrenogenic mothers ' ; 'addictive
personalities' ; the 'link between homosexuality and paranoia' ;
'attention deficit disorder' (ADD) .
" For example, the belief that schizophrenia and autism are
due to a 'schizophrenogenic' ( or 'iceberg') mother, who was unwilling
to or incapable of providing the afflicted child with the affection
required for normal development, has caused untold misery among the
families of such disturbed children". ( House of Cards , pg. 20)
What Diane McGuiness writes apropos of ADD could be said about
many another manufactured 'condition':
" We have invented a disease, given it medical sanction and
now must disown it. The major question is how we go about destroying
the monster we have created. It is no easy to do this and still save
face, another reason why physicians and many researchers with years of
funding and an academic reputation to protect are reluctant to believe
the data."
Recently we have witnessed a phenomenon which, although truly
horrifying, has the gratifying feature of revealing to the world the
true locus of psychotherapy's intellectual antecedents. I am speaking
of the syncretism of recovered memory therapy, multiple personality
disorder, ( which despite a tradition from Morton Prince to the
present day, remains hypothetical), and demonology , witchcraft,
Satanism, exorcisms, alien abductions and so on . There is an
advantage of bringing together primitive superstition, castration
complexes, lithium medication and electroshock, in that one is no
longer speaking of apples and oranges. Their spiritual kinship is
indeed manifest. One must agree that there is more sense in this
classification scheme , than in the grouping of lobotomy with
statistics and Newtonian mechanics. Consider how successful the aura
of real science was in prolonging the life of this senseless and cruel
procedure!
All the same, what one has witnessed in the last decade is no
laughing matter. This perverse alloy of pseudo-science and black magic
has destroyed entire communities, ( McMartin family case of 1983; see
Pendergrast, Victims of Memory , pgs. 360-363) .
The catastrophe that fell upon Paul Ingram and his family, (
reported by Lawrence Wright in the New Yorker then published as
Remembering Satan , 1994 ) shook the political stability of the entire
state of Washington.
There is a natural tendency to sneer at, even to ridicule
people who willingly place themselves under the control of quack
psychologists, unquestioningly accept the most lurid nonsense, and
ruin their lives. The extreme fragility of psychic equilibrium
is a fact none of us want to deal with. I don't think that one can
find anyone who has not experienced the need to cling to trusted
authority in times of serious crisis. In its proper time, anyone might
become vulnerable to the malevolent malpractice of some doctor of the
psyche.
Periodically cases involving notoriously bad therapists will
receive lots of publicity: Ewen Cameron, Sheldon Ziegelbaum , Margaret
Bean-Bayog, John Rosen, Bennett Braun, Kenneth Olson,.... Their ordeal
of public disgrace may temporarily interfere with,
but will rarely put an end to their professional career The dust
settles; the insurance companies pay huge sums in out of court
settlements; the 'psychotherapist' now becomes simply a 'therapist',
the 'psychologist' a 'counselor'. Indeed, often enough a change of
venue, a move from California to Hawaii, Wisconsin to Montana, may
lead to a job with higher status and more pay.
It often happens that the most esteemed and honored
professionals, presidents and directors of major institutes and
professional organizations, have eventually been found guilty of the
worst abuses. Throughout the decade (1953-63) , while D. Ewen Cameron
was president of the American and Canadian Psychiatric Associations,
president of the World Association of Psychiatrists, director of the
Allen Memorial Institutes and chairman of the department of psychiatry
at McGill University, and professor of psychiatry at Albany Medical
College, he was also receiving funds from the CIA to run torture
chambers at the Allen Institute for brain-washing and memory -
destroying experiments on his patients.( John Marks: The Search for
the Manchurian Candidate, W.W. Norton,1991 )
While Jules Masserman was president of the World Association
of Psychiatrists and the American Psychiatric Association he used
sodium amythal to put his female patients into comas and raped them
. (Barbara Noel, You Must Be Dreaming , Poseidon Press, 1992)
Beginning in the mid-50's, while John Rosen was a professor of
psychiatry at Temple University Medical School, director of the
Institute for Direct Analysis, director of the Institute for the Study
of Psychoanalysis , and chairman of the Philadelphia Mental Health and
Mental Retardation Foundation , he was terrorizing, abducting,
imprisoning, raping, beating and physically torturing his
patients. His license was not revoked until 1983, at the age of 81. (
Masson, Against Therapy , pgs. 124-152 )
All in the name of science.
The list is quite long; these and other names will be
re-appearing throughout this series of articles. Everything is in the
public record. Most of it can be traced through any serviceable
public library. The revisionist movement against psychiatry has been
around for 40 years. My only reason for writing on this topic is
that, despite an already enormous literature, the situation with
respect to flagrant malpractice appears just as horrible in the 90's
as it did in the 60's.
Although it is true that the neuroleptic drug 'revolution' has
emptied out the snake pits which passed for mental hospitals for 150
years, ( themselves the product of major reforms at the beginning of
the 19th century), the plight of the brain-damaged populations of
homeless psychotics that fill the streets is scarcely more enviable. 9
" There is no question but that Hitler belongs in the category of the
truly mystic medicine man. As somebody commented about him in the last
Nürnberg conference, since the time of Mohammed nothing like it has
been seen in the world. This markedly mystical characteristic of
Hitler's is what makes him do things which seem to us illogical,
inexplicable, curious and impardonable...So you see, Hitler is a
medicine man, a form of spiritual vessel, a demi-deity, or even
better, a myth" ....( C.G. Jung,1939, quoted in Against Therapy ,
pg. 106)
Were I to give way to a tendency towards literary
over-indulgence, this evocation of familiar horrors might win me the
enthusiastic endorsement of Stephen King addicts. My stronger
obligation is rather to demonstrate that the custom of viewing eac h
pathological manifestation as an isolated incident stemming from the
diseased mind of some would-be Mengele, is incorrect. We are in fact
dealing with a science that is completely out of control, a hideous
cross-insemination of medicine, religion, superstition, politics and
greed. It is this combination of public and scientific endorsement
that has rendered psychotherapy as serious a risk to civilization as
Stalinism, Maoism, Fascism, Nazism: the cruellest totalitarian
ideologies afflicting our century.
In one respect psychotherapy outdistances even
these. Its' place within the European medical tradition has been
maintained with such political skill that public opinion, the medical
profession, the schools and the law have endowed it with the full
autho rity of modern science . Even the psychiatrists who acknowledge
all the abuses cited here will argue that its scientific credibility
is not damaged because of them. The argument is old, worn, and
deserves only to be admitted to an old-age home, ( preferably one
administered by the nefarious Columbia corporation) : science is
essentially neutral. The argument goes, that even the most tough-
minded sciences, physics, mathematics and chemistry, are employed in
harmful ways, the obvious example being the connection between atomic
weapons and elementary particle theory.
Nothing, not even Switzerland, is essentially neutral. The
difference between psychiatry and particle physics however , and one
can quibble over the fine points of the matter , is that the
predominantly noxious legacy of psychotherapy since Freud is not based
on science at all, but on superstition. Jeffrey Masson goes further:
he maintains that there is a serious intellectual error in the very
assumption that one person can cure another's mental distress. (The
first sentence of Against Therapy is : "This is a book about why I
believe that psychotherapy, of any kind, is wrong. " )
Note that one rarely finds psychotherapists whose intentions
are deliberately or consciously malevolent. There are, it is true,
instances in which governments such as Russia, China, Brazil,
Argentina, and the United States , ( John Marks , op. cit.) , have
funded programs of research and development into technologies of
brain-washing and psychological torture. Such aberrations have less
direct influence on the mainstream of psychology than nuclear weapons
research does on basic physics.
Most psychiatric abuse derives from ignorance, indoctrination,
righteous intentions, arrogance deriving from fear of the mentally
ill, the mentality of power, appalling degrees of self-deception, and
the normal concomitant of greed that pervades the entire medical
profession.
Whence cometh this madness? Why does our civilization endorse
a sick science for the cure of sick minds? It seems to have always
been true that we know least about what is closest to us. In the 18th
century, at a time when astronomy had reached a zenith with the
publication of Flamsteed's star catalogues ( 1725) , both the great
and the lowly could still die of a cut finger because nothing was
known about infection. Medicine has always been the most primitive of
sciences, even though the stars are many millions of miles away from
us, but we carry our bodies around with us at all times, ( whether we
want to or not). Medical science today has much to be proud of, ( and
hardly inclined to give us any opportunity to forget it), and it is
the science of mental disease that is as arbitrary, useless and
dangerous as 18th century medicine.
Yet what can possibly be closer to us than our own minds ?
We do not now possess anything resembling a valid
psychotherapy. What is promoted as such can and must be interrogated
at many levels: What is the extent of the social damage caused by
psychotherapy? The brain damage? Suicide? Crime? The undermining of
basic civil liberties? The larger political ramifications? What are
the historical roots of modern practices?
This series addresses these questions. In the first
few articles we will select a canonical ensemble from the more
flagrant psychiatric nightmares of our times . Next the political
implications of these will be considered. There will then be an
attempt to take an overview of Euro- American psychiatry since the
17th century, identifying those factors which have led to the
contemporary psychotherapeutic world view.
The epilogue ? Well...I'll see how far I've come. Ferment ,
like much other fermentation, is unable to predict its intoxicated
random walk more than a few steps at a time.
A. Canonical Ensemble
I. The Recovery of Repressed Memories.
II. Multiple Personality Disorder/Ritual Satanic Abuse
III. Biopsychiatry and Drug Addiction
IV. Electro-convulsive Shock Therapy
V. Psychosurgery
VI. Behavior Modification
B. The Politics of Psychotherapy
VI. The "Violence Initiative"
VII. The Therapy Jungle
VIII. The Tyranny of Social Services.
I. The Recovery of Repressed Memories.
The Salem witch trials re-entered our history in the 1980's
. It appears now that the worst is over, that the uncritical
acceptance of recovered memory testimony by lawyers, judges and juries
is rapidly becoming a thing of the past . There is still a danger that
we may revert to an earlier tradition of treating claims of childhood
abuse with patronizing disbelief.
A number of recent exposes have presented the public with
evidence of ignorant and unscrupulous psychiatrists inducing horrible
false memories in the minds of susceptible patients. Over Thanksgiving
60 Minutes carried a report of the case of the malpractice suit of
Nadean Cool vs. Kenneth Olson in a Wisconsin circuit court:
" Dr. Olson informed Cool that she had more than 120
personalities, including those of a duck and angels who talked to
God. Cool came to believe that she had knifed the babies in the heart
and passed them around for other cult members to eat. To become
Satan's bride, Olson told Cool, she had to be raped by 60 or 70 men
and have sex with animals... during this time, as a result, Cool made
several suicide attempts... On February 25th, 1989, in a mental health
unit at St. Elizabeth's Hospital, Olson covered the nurses viewing
windows with newspaper, 'tethered Cool spread eagle ' on a bed, and
ordered that no one enter the room no matter what they heard. Armed
with a fire extinguisher, because he had told Cool that 'she could
burst into flames as a result of the exorcism', Olson screamed to
Satan' while Cool begged 'let me go' for several hours." (False
Memory Foundation Newsletter. March 1,1997)
"In 1997, after 15 days of courtroom testimony, defendant
agreed to settle for $2.4 million. Testimony described how
psychiatrist induced horrific false memories of childhood sexual and
ritual abuse, including demonic possession and misdiagnosed
MPD. Therapy techniques included hypnosis, age regression, exorcism
and drugs which caused hallucinations. The patient had originally
entered therapy for bulimia and help after a traumatic event had
befallen family" ( "Trial Outcomes of Malpractice Suits," SheilaTaub,
Nov. 14, 1997)
On an encouraging note, modern research in cognitive science
and related areas has come to understand to what extent memory is a
reconstruction, not a reproduction, of the past. Elements of fact,
fantasy and interpolation are always present. The crude 'repression'
mechanism which is the cornerstone of Freud's psychoanalysis , and
which, applied to the treatment of shell shock victims during WWI
became incorporated into the rationale of "abreaction", has been
substantially rejected by psychologists. We simply do not know how the
psyche responds to extremely painful experiences in childhood. There
are certain kinds of ignorance which are liberating: this is an
example in point.
There is a direct connection between the etiology of Freud's
theories and the present controversy on the veracity of recovered
memories. As Masson has shown (The Assault on Truth ; Farrar, Straus
and Giroux ,1984 ), psychoanalysis properly began when Freud
decided that most of the accounts his patients were giving him of
sexual abuse by their parents were fantasies. Since he already
believed that all hysteria had a sexual origin, ( a transmutation of
the 'uterus' hypothesis dating from the mists of time), the
elaboration of a theory by which all neuroses are caused by the
repression of ungratified, forbidden or shameful fantasies of sexual
activities with one's close relatives, was inevitable.
One cannot resist the fascinating lure of the epistemological
challenge : weighing the correct proportions of fantasy and reality
present in a patient's accounts of childhood sexual abuse seems to be
psychotherapy's Quantum Uncertainty Principle. Faced with a gullible
subject a strong-willed doctor, unaware of or uninterested in his own
delusions, can reshape, even invent, memories, until she becomes
convinced that real abuse is imagined, or that all fantasies are real.
Freud's ( extremely chauvinist) axiom that almost all accounts
of childhood sexual abuse are fantasies, came full circle in the
80's. Now many psychiatrists, inspired by the puerile vindictiveness
of The Courage to Heal of Ellen Bass and Laura Davis were claiming
that all memories of childhood sexual abuse, including fantasies ,
daydreams, those prompted under hypnosis or sodium amythal , or even
fictional , ( 'directed visualizing ') were real.
What has unleashed this shock wave of hysteria, leaving a
social devastation in its wake as widespread and irreversible as any
natural disaster ? Has prosperity bred a generation of shallow-minded
children unaware of the inevitable consequences of accusing their
parents of outrageous crimes? Has the end of the Cold War turned our
paranoia inwards? Is this pathology related to the new gender
feminism, the misandric racism that has poisoned the academic
discourse, ( never healthy in the best of circumstances), turning
romance into a dirty word? Or is it our Puritan heritage that, like a
recessive gene permanently embedded in our spiritual chromosomes, is
always with us, finding its opportunity for expression from time to
time?
For me the latter argument has never carried much weight: it
implies a metaphysical essence called "national character" persisting
unchanged over 3 and a half centuries, that is to say, 1 fermat. 10
National Character may well be the deadliest superstition ever
to take up residence in the human mind. From the 15th century onward,
for good or ill, there has never been a time when the population of
North America has not been abundantly ethnically diverse. It defies
simple logic to imagine that a peculiar cult that got its jollies from
hanging Quakers and branding women with scarlet letters could have set
the spiritual tone for a heterogeneous empire of 300,000,000+ souls.
My own understanding begins with the acknowledgment that there
is nothing unhealthy in the mind of a girl growing up in our culture,
because she happens to be terrified of men. Men are encouraged, even
trained, to terrorize women and fight with one another. There are
women who tend to imagine a rapist lurking behind every chance
encounter with a man. Rape however is merely one of the forms of
violence, including assault and the many species of humiliation, while
violence is as intrinsic to our way of life as is nitrogen in the air
we breathe.
There are, of course, considerable differences between:
(a) being terrified of a certain group of people who do
everything they can to terrify you ;
(b) the experience of being molested, assaulted or raped by
them; and
(c) coming to believe or being persuaded to believe, that your
most lurid fantasies recall things that actually happened to you at
one time or another.
It is in this third area that psychiatric malpractice
intervenes. Psychiatry has never placed the struggle for women's
rights among its goal. In the 19th century, it was customary to bring
in a psychiatrist to persuade a recalcitrant wife to sleep with their
husband. Drugs, scoldings, rebukes, lectures were not the only
weapons in his arsenal: terror and even torture were applied when
necessary 11
The penumbra of this historical tradition extends as far as
Freud's celebrated "case of Dora", the account that is credited with
bringing the light of psychoanalysis to the attention of suffering
mankind. " Asked to pinpoint the beginning of what we know as modern
psychotherapy, many people would cite Freud's treatment of the patient
he called Dora ( Ida Bauer). " ( Against Therapy, pg. 45)
Freud was out to convince Dora that she was really in love
with Herr K-, the husband of the mistress of Dora's father, himself a
close
personal friend of Freud's. Freud wanted her to agree to have sex
with Herr K- , and confesses himself astonished that Dora should have
found a spontaneous, unsolicited kiss from K- "disgusting". All 14
year old girls, he argues, should be aroused by the kisses of older
men. He then reasons as follows:
" If I may suppose that the scene of the kiss took place in
this way, I can arrive at the following derivation for the feelings of
disgust . Such feelings seem originally to be a reaction to the smell
( and afterwards also to the sight) of excrement. But the genitals can
act as a reminder of the excretory functions; and this applies
especially to the male member, for that organ performs the function of
micturation as well as the sexual function. Indeed, the function of
micturation is the earliest known of the two, and the only one known
during the pre-sexual period. Thus it happens that disgust becomes
one of the means of affective expression in the sphere of sexual
life. The Early Christian Father's ' inter urinas et faeces nascimur '
clings to sexual life and cannot be detached from it in spite of every
effort at idealization. " ( Freud Reader, editor Peter Gay, pg. 186)
Those psychiatrists who have imagined that they were
liberating their clients by goading them to recall instances of
childhood sexual
abuse, have been themselves guilty of psychic violation and rape as
terrible as the supposed crimes they uncovered . All that they have
done
is to continue the tradition of physical and spiritual domination of
women. Everyone has suffered from this catastrophe, but its worst
victims
have been the patients themselves: victims first of dysfunctional
homes that provided the soil for the cultivation of mental illness;
victims next
of a culture of violence that treats all relations between men and
women as regimes of hunter and prey ( in both directions); victims
finally of a
pseudo-science triumphant, that has never had any capacity for
self-criticism or self-regulation, that vaunts its cherished delusions
at a greater
value than its ( important) handful of hard-won insights.
The recovered memory witch hunt has not been without salutary
consequences. Within the past 5 years it has compelled critical
reforms,
even revolutions, in law, jurisprudence, biology, cognitive science,
forensic medicine and psychotherapy itself. 40 legal precedents
stemming
from malpractice suits around the country have changed the rules of
evidence and done away with the uncritical acceptance of so-called
expert scientific testimony . Alleged memories solicited under
hypnosis or truth serums like sodium amythal are no longer accepted by
most courts. In
a growing number of states it is no longer possible to prosecute
individuals on the basis of someone's presumption of infallibility in
recognizing
the authenticity of a recovered memory. Cognitive science has cast
out the traditional models for the functioning of memory. Repression,
the cornerstone of Freud's theory of neurosis, has been delivered a
knock-out blow. 12
These are the vicarious benefits of a decade of the unchecked
activities of a therapeutic pathology based on the theory that all
manifestations of mental illness in adulthood are caused by the
repression of sexual abuse in childhood. Most psychotherapists would
probably demonize the false memory hucksters as uneducated,
incompetent, crazy and so on. Yet it must be emphasized that the rise
and fall of this fashion belongs to the history of psychotherapy ,
that it was legitimized by an illegitimate science:
(a) The hundreds of psychiatrists who have pressured,
intimidated and drugged their patients, mostly women , into believing
that they were raped by their parents have never been charged with
doing anything illegal. They have not served a day in jail for their
malpractice, yet their word alone has been responsible for the
incarceration of dozens of innocent people.
(b) Few of them, ( if any), have been expelled from
the American Psychiatric Association or the American Psychological
Association, (organizations which rarely clean house ) .
(c) It is only in recent years, after over a decade of
untrammeled irresponsibility, that the testimony of such
psychotherapists has
received anything less than unqualified acceptance in the courts.
(d) These so-called 'deviant' psychotherapists have employed
standard procedures based on traditional beliefs.
Including:
(i)The repression mechanism : Painful experiences in
childhood are not forgotten. Still in the mind , they are 'repressed'
into the
unconscious. Unless they are remembered, they will continue to cause
neurotic and psychotic symptoms, in the same way that a lodged
splinter continues to generate infections .
(ii) Abreaction : The notion that the way to restore
such memories is to provoke, by some means, ( drugs, hypnosis,
massage, primal screams ), an emotional crisis. A folk belief
associated with abreaction is that the things that are said during
such crises must be true.
Abreaction goes back to Franz Anton Mesmer. His magnetic therapy
sought to bring about the "salutary crisis" that discharged the
"magnetic
fluid". His model being more simplistic than Freud's, he probably
caused less harm by its' application. Like Freud, Mesmer was a
perverse mixture of scientist and charlatan. I tend to think he was no
worse as a scientist, but a much better doctor.( See Ferment ,
vol. VIII, 1991-92 )
(iii) The denial syllogism . Freud's great contribution to
Aristotelian logic. One might call it Inquisitorial Logic. It goes as
follows:
To Be Proven : X is Y
Premise A: X is not Y
Premise B: Premise A is asserted by
the patient
Conclusion: X is Y
Q.E.D.
The denial syllogism proves that whatever the patient believes
about herself must be false. This is called being 'in denial'
. Further proof is obtained through taking note of the hostility
aroused by the application of the denial syllogism. This is called
'resistance'.
"'Denial' was the buzzword that reverberated throughout the
room, the quick diagnosis that explained everything. If one of the
women expressed doubts about being abused, she was in 'denial' . If
you are in denial , the therapist explained, that is further proof
that you were, in fact, abused. If a parent or sibling resists your
story, accuses you of getting your facts wrong, or asks for external
proof or corroboration, then they are 'in denial' . Most likely they
have repressed memories of their own." ( Loftus and Ketchem, The Myth
of Repressed Memory , page 16)
(iv) The erroneous belief that under hypnosis, people will
always tell the truth rather than what they think the hypnotist wants
to hear.
(5) The belief in the efficacy of truth serums .
(6) The ancient superstition that all mental illness
has a sexual basis.
(7) The tendency to treat people who have been
diagnosed as mentally ill, like gadgets that have to be fixed, leading
to the search for
the missing or defective element.
These ideas reflect all the features of a hundred years of
psychiatric theory . There is no way that one can hope to isolate a
class of 'professionally incompetent' psychiatrists, specializing in
recovered memory therapy, without condemning the profession as a whole
.
An excellent prescription for society's mental health, by the
way .
Allowing that the recent changes in science, medicine and law
produced by the decade of false memory accusations have been positive,
is a bit like saying that the Holocaust was not altogether bad because
it produced the Nuremberg Conventions and the state of Israel. The
damage in terms of lives, families and communities is beyond
belief. For further information and accounts of dozens of specific
cases, one may consult the bibliography, or contact the False Memory
Syndrome Foundation, director Pamela Freyd. 3401 Market Street Suite
130, Philadelphia , PA. 19104-3315 215-387-1865 FAX: 215-387-1917.
(First of a series)
____________________________________________________
Bibliography
>>>Peter R. Breggin : Toxic Psychiatry ; St. Martin's Press , 1994
>>>Peter R. Breggin & Ginger Ross Breggin: The War Against Children;
St. Martin's Press 1994
>>>Lawrence Wright: Remembering Satan; Alfred A. Knopf, 1994
>>>Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson: Against Therapy: Emotional Tyranny and
the Myth of Psychological Healing ;Atheneum, 1988
>>>Robyn M. Dawes: House of Cards: Psychology and Psychotherapy Built
on Myth; The Free Press, 1994
>>>Elizabeth Loftus & Katherine Ketcham: The Myth of Repressed Memory;
St. Martin's Press, 1994
>>>M.D. Yapko: Suggestions of Abuse ; Simon & Schuster, 1994
>>>Editor, Peter Gay : The Freud Reader; W.W. Norton, 1989
>>>Mark Pendergast: Victims of Memory ; Upper Access. Inc. , 1995
>>>Claudette Wassil-Grimm: Diagnosis for Disaster; The Overlook Press,
1995
>>>Ellen Bass & Laura Davis: The Courage to Heal ; Harper&Row, 1988
>>>Moira Johnston: Spectral Evidence: The Ramona Case ; Houghton
Mifflin, 1997
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1. The cute euphemism of Carl Rogers .
2. "Meta-Analysis of Psychotherapy Outcome Studies" Smith and Glass,
American Psychologist 32( 1977 ) :752-60
3. This work is summarized in Berman & Norton, Psychological Bulletin
98 (1985): 401-407
4. Strupp and Hadley: Specific vs. Non-specific Factors in
Psychotherapy" Archives of General Psychiatry 36 (1979) 1125-1136
5. (i.) Paul Meehl " Clinical vs. Statistical Prediction: A
Theoretical Analysis and Review of the Literature" U. Minn Press 1954
(ii.) J. Sawyer: "Measurement & Prediction" Psychological Bulletin
66(1966) 178-200 (iii.) Dawes, Faust and Meehl, Science 243 (1989)
1668-1674 (iv) Bloom & Brundage (v.) Faust, Hart, Guilmette: Pediatric
Malingering... Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 56(1988)
578-582 ; 58(1990) 244-247 (vi.) Faust and Ziskin "The Expert Witness
in Psychology and Psychiatry" Science 241 (1988) 31-35
6. Some astronomers are searching for a planet where this might not be
the case.
7. Tourette-like condition of muscular tics and spasms. I suffered
from it for several months after I got out of the hospitals. The
medication that gave it to me was Prolixin.
8. The Limits of Biological Treatment for Psychological Distress,
1989, eds. Fisher and Greenberg
9. Let us however agree with Ho Chi Minh that, "Nothing is more
precious than liberty and freedom". Karl Scheibe, professor of
psychology here at Wesleyan, is of the opinion that most classical
schizophrenia was hospital induced,(iatrogenic).
10. The unit of time required to prove a Fermat's Last Theorem.
11. See the account of van Helmont's "water therapy" in the author's
book, 'Shrinking Expectations', available nowhere but from him for
$6.00 .
12. Not that it matters: history shows that the survival of an idea
has the weakest of correlations with its' credibility. "Repression"
may hang around like the Shroud of Turin for another 600 years .
Steamshovel!