She must quench her thirst for revenge. Today, I gather, she is still concerned with denouncing a coven of Satanists within the Olympia police department. 6 (1994), pp. But that only makes it more imperative that the air be cleared. “A humiliation that was experienced thirty years ago acts exactly like a fresh one throughout the thirty years…” (SE, 5:578). Has anyone past the age of, say, six who has survived racial persecution, a famine, a bombing campaign, or a brutal enemy occupation ever forgotten that it occurred? ↩, To take an admittedly extreme example, Freud once treated a teen-age girl for what he called “an unmistakable hysteria, which did in fact clear up quickly and radically under my care.” But her abdominal pains had the ingratitude to recur, and two months later she was dead of cancer—a fact that caused Freud a rare access of chagrin but prompted no second thoughts about the correctness of his diagnosis (SE, 6:146n.). Once the bizarre and sinister features of the recovery movement are widely known, sophisticated readers will not hesitate to distance themselves from it. ↩, Lawrence E. Hedges, “Taking Recovered Memories Seriously,” Issues in Child Abuse Accusations, Vol. 2, pp. 61 (Autumn 1992), pp. But Lenore Terr first needed to tiptoe across a theoretical minefield of her own. 43–44. Disastrously missed at the trial, this cardinal fact slipped away once again on a subsequent Faith Daniels talk show where, for the first time, Eileen Lipsker and Elizabeth Loftus sat down together. ↩, As Loftus and Ketcham say, “With that diagnosis all the quirks and idiosyncrasies of Eileen Franklin’s personality could be explained away. Her studies of children who had lived through the notorious Chowchilla bus kidnapping and the Challenger explosion had shown unambiguously that such experiences do not get repressed. Check out Revenge of the Repressed. ↩, Whether Terr had actually detected anything is open to doubt. Apparently, a community steeped in Biblical literalism on the one hand and Geraldo on the other needs only a triggering mechanism to set off a long chain reaction of paranoia.18 Yet such a community epitomizes a good portion of North America. There is, in the first place, the eerily dreamlike quality of the “memories” themselves, whose floating perspective, blow-up details, and motivational anomalies point to the contribution of fantasy.13 There is the therapist’s reckless encouragement of the client to indulge her visions and worry “later”—usually never—whether or not they are true, along with his “supportive” absence of concern to check the emerging allegations against available knowledge. Although Ketcham did conduct some of the interviews that inform The Myth of Repressed Memory, I will usually call the “author” Loftus alone. For one thing, it transcribes his numerous interviews with therapists, “survivors,” “retractors,” and accused “perpetrators,” allowing the cruel unreason of the recovery movement to be voiced with a minimum of editorial mediation. The creeping revenge of the unreformed state security machine pulled it back down, which means that myriads of secrets remain concealed from the public domain. They become anxious, depressed, sometimes suicidal, and far more fearful of items suggestive of their traumas.”5 Bass and Davis agree. Emerald Fennell’s Dark, Jaded, Funny, Furious Fables of Female Revenge. Still later, it covered fantasies (and some events) whose existence could be known only by positing the action of repression itself. 145-154. ↩, Controlled research indicates that there is nothing easy about identifying incest victims from their symptoms. Etc. But this is not to say that psychoanalysis is doomed to stand by helplessly while young fanatics strut upon the stage that Freud built. In Renee Fredrickson’s words, “You may be convinced that your disbelief is a rational questioning of the reality versus unreality of your memories, but it is partially a misguided attempt to repress the memories again” (Fredrickson, p. 161). World War II3. There is, for instance, the concept of “screen memories” that are not to be taken at face value, and there are numerous posited defense mechanisms that supposedly warp dreams, symptoms, and errors into relatively obscure compromise formations. Now Dalit leaders are fighting back to defeat the Hindu nationalists. It was preceded by Harry N. MacLean’s scrupulous book-length retelling of the murder story, Once Upon a Time, and now it has been scrutinized by MacLean himself, by Elizabeth Loftus and Katherine Ketcham in The Myth of Repressed Memory, and by Richard Ofshe, professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and Ethan Watters in an even more trenchant new book, Making Monsters.6 In view of their findings, the Franklin matter may come to serve as a very different object lesson from the one that Terr intended. Even those men had to think long and hard about whether they might have unknowingly lived double lives; and Ingram’s wife, Sandy, did conclude that she must have been a secret Satanist. Repression is the psychological attempt to direct one's own desires and impulses toward pleasurable instincts by excluding them from one's consciousness and holding or subduing them in the unconscious. Crews followed this devastating critique with another provocative essay, "The Revenge of the Repressed," in 1994. Once understood in its true lineaments, the Franklin/Lipsker matter turns out to be highly typical of other recovered memory cases. It is certainly true that he showed precious little pity for child sexual victims after he became properly “Freudian” and cast children as the would-be seducers.14 Like Bass and Davis, however, the early Freud was less interested in comforting certified veterans of molestation than in rounding up converts to his all-purpose diagnosis. Let us hope that they read not just that letter but the whole of Victims of Memory, which, though it is hardly addressed to them alone, rests partly on the desperate premise that a 603-page dose of history, logic, and exhortation may be able to turn well-coached zealots back into the amiable young women Pendergrast once knew. 281–292. © 1963-2021 NYREV, Inc. All rights reserved. If, as Terr believes, every symptom tells a story, in this instance the story is a fairy tale. References: 1. Nor, lacking his imprimatur, could they have bandied about notions of repression, abreaction, and unconscious symbolism without feeling a need to argue for their cogency. And two of his sons also developed a knack of instantly becoming “dissociated” in order to provide inquisitors with the required lurid reminiscences. Demanding and untrusting in relationships. ↩, See, respectively, The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Flies, 1887–1904, edited by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (Harvard University Press, 1985), pp. That is just what Loftus, a highly regarded researcher and a professor of psychology at the University of Washington, has done in her own experimental work—and that is also why she has been pilloried by the recovery movement as an enemy to incest survivors. These authorities then disconcert the toddlers with rectal and vaginal prodding, with invitations to act out naughtiness on “anatomically correct” dolls with bloated genitals, and, of course, with leading questions that persist until the child reverses an initial denial that anything happened and begins weaving the kind of tale that appears to be demanded. It is as though it comes from a phonograph. The previous day’s program, which they may or may not have seen, was called Satanic Breeders: Babies for Sacrifice. Webster's online dictionary defines revenge as to avenge (as oneself) usually by retaliating in kind or degree or to inflict injury in return for something, such as to revenge an insult. I refer not just to repression but to the mind’s ability to take snapshots of extremely early scenes and reproduce them in detail several decades later. 85–102; the quotation is from p. 96. 14, p. 16. In some cases, she continued, the expert can even reliably infer the nature of an unknown trauma. There remains, however, the one striking detail that captivated both the jurors and, I am sure, the early readers of Terr’s book: the bleeding bald spot that was said to have marred Eileen Franklin’s pate for five straight years after the murder. This in turn makes it credible that more extensive and systematic insights of the same type can be developed by analysts who probe far more deeply and uncover far more material for interpretation” (Nagel, p. 36). She even came to believe that George had physically assisted her godfather in raping her. They wanted to see if Ahsoka "worked" in the Mandalorian, and based on the youtube reactions people are really excited to see her live. They’re going to wonder what’s on your mind. She must rage out for being the obedient one, for being the repressed singer, for being that perfect Chinese girlhood too timorous to break the mold.” ― Marilyn Chin, Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen Feminists were certainly warranted, in the 1970s and 1980s, in declaring that the sexual abuse of children was being scandalously underreported. Carrying hatreds. Obviously, the impetus for such legislative backwardness is not coming from reputable psychological research—which, as we have seen, offers no support to the concept of repression even in its mildest form. Second, it contradicted universal human experience of protracted duress. Yet the more one learns about the scare over “Satanic ritual abuse,” the more porous its boundary with the larger recovered memory movement appears to be. Wright tells of Paul Ingram, an Olympia, Washington, sheriff’s deputy, a born-again Christian, and the chair of his county Republican committee, who was eventually thought to have raped both of his daughters as well as one of his sons innumerable times, to have passed the daughters around sexually as poker nights at home turned into gang rapes, to have hideously tortured the girls and forced them and his wife to have sex with goats and dogs, and to have murdered and cannibalized many babies at huge gatherings of his Satanic cult—where, be it noted, long gowns, pitchforks, and “Viking hats” were de rigueur. (Lenore Terr, incidentally, put in her customary court appearance, offering an expert opinion that Holly Ramona’s current aversion to pickles and bananas confirms her childhood trauma of forced oral sex.) As Mark Pendergrast relates in Victims of Memory, the mounting (and very legitimate) concern about the underreported incidence of real child molestation formed only one corner of the picture. The Interwar Background 2. “Don’t hurt or try to kill yourself…,” they feel compelled to advise. When the things we have repressed bubble up, sneak out, and climb the stairs into consciousness, we are terrified not because they are alien, but because they are us. And Terr, bent upon condemning George Franklin as a rapist, has lately supplied the useful “fact,” which is false, that semen was found in the dead Susan Nason’s vagina. Not surprisingly, it is a shared belief in the theory of repression. Before Freud decided that patients suffered from repressed … “Bartleby’s Revenge” tells a tale of the enduring bonds of childhood friendship in an unfamiliar tune. See Richard Ofshe & Ethan Watters, Making Mon-sters-Psychotherapy's New Error: Repressed Memory, Multiple Personality and Sa-tanic Abuse, SOCIETY, Mar. The easiest answer is to presume that the abuse must have been more serious than originally thought, and that more repressed memories are hidden in the patient’s unconscious. The Bharatiya Janata Party’s rule came with an attack on Dalits and the minorities. ↩, See Wollheim, The Mind and Its Depths (Harvard University Press, 1993), and Nagel, “Freud’s Permanent Revolution,” The New York Review, May 12, 1994, pp. I may have anal sex with Paul, not real clear…. The study of trauma in sexual and domestic life becomes legitimate only in a context that challenges the subordination of women and children. India’s Most Oppressed Get Their Revenge. Moreover, Ingram, who is now serving a twenty-year term in prison after having confessed to six counts of child molestation, came close to being joined there by others who were caught in a widening net of lunacy—and at least two of them, who were in fact jailed briefly and then kept under house arrest for five months each, will never recover their reputations. Last year Kenneth Bruce Perkins, a Texas grandfather, was convicted and sentenced to four concurrent thirty-year terms in prison after his daughter spotted her children engaging in sexual exploration and inferred that he must have been molesting one or more of them. The very idea of repression and its unraveling is an embryonic romance about a hidden mystery, an arduous journey, and a gratifyingly neat denouement that can ascribe our otherwise drab shortcomings and pains to deep necessity. As its main proponents insist, “recovered memory” is by now not just a diagnosis but a formidable sociopolitical movement. No single book, of course, can make a social movement. Then, with the seduction theory, he adapted the idea of repression to cover the failure of patients to remember molestations that he soon conceded to have been imaginary. The Franklin/Lipsker case, so attractive to Lenore Terr as Exhibit A of validated repression, actually shows how a “memory” originating in conscious hunches and resentments can be crystallized by protracted therapeutic suggestion, or the subliminal contagion of ideas between a dominant and a subordinate party. The coming days and weeks, they thought, Ofshe could cast some light into the murky corner. Those risks with the rapist-murderer comes rather from a combination of broad belief. Reversal, repression, anecdotes can be powerfully effective the photographic return of loss... Obviously, it turns out to revenge of the repressed reproduced in nearly every controversy over therapeutically recall... 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