Ferment
Vol.XI,#8 Jan. 20,1997
Roy Lisker ,Editor
#306 Liberty Commons
8 Liberty Street
Middletown, CT 06457
aberenshblynx.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 S ndor 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 coping with 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 careers, 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 clich‚s 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 8 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."
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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
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" 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
N*rnberg 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 each 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 authority 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.
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Sheila Taub, Institute for Pain Research. From a conference on "Recovered
Memories of Child Abuse: Legal, Scientific and Clinical Issues", New Haven,
Nov. 14, 1997
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, Sheila Taub, 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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1The cute euphemism of Carl Rogers .
2"Meta-Analysis of Psychotherapy Outcome Studies" Smith and Glass, American
Psychologist 32( 1977 ) :752-60
3This work is summarized in Berman & Norton, Psychological Bulletin
98 (1985): 401-407
4Strupp 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
6Some astronomers are searching for a planet where this might not be
the case.
7a 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.
8The Limits of Biological Treatment for Psychological Distress, 1989,
eds. Fisher and Greenberg
9Let 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).
10The unit of time required to prove a Fermat's Last Theorem.
11See the account of van Helmont's "water therapy" in the author's
book, 'Shrinking Expectations', available nowhere but from him for $6.00
.
12Not 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 .