OHIO ASSOCIATION OF RESPONSIBLE MENTAL HEALTH PRACTICES

June 2001

I dedicate this June issue to Mark Pendergrast. In April Mark spoke in Medina and Wooster, thanks to the arrangements of Kathy Begert. You may have seen her articles in the FMSF newsletter and in ours from time to time. Mark gave such a great presentation and answered questions so skillfully even to attending therapist who tried to trick him up, that I was sorry more of you were not there. In May I e-mailed him and said "Mark tell us more about you and why you wrote the Victims of Memory." He sent the following article. If you haven't read VICTIMS OF MEMORY yet, I urge you to do it. I have a couple left at $10 each if you want me to send one. Everyone should check their local library and book stores to make sure they are in stock. His other two books on Coke and Coffee are fascinating and great gifts for history buffs. . I recommend them also. ~Carole

Early in 1995, the first edition of my book, VICTIMS OF MEMORY, appeared in the United States. "I did not want to write this book," I wrote at the outset. "It's much too painful. The truth is, I HAD to write it. I finally realized that what has been termed 'false memory syndrome' (FMS) was destroying not only my children's very identities and my relationship with them, but millions of other families as well."

It would have been impossible for me to drop this book, given the way I was raised. I am one of the seven children of Britt and Nan Pendergrast, from Atlanta, Georgia. My parents were active in the civil rights and anti-war movements in the Deep South at a time when that was not exactly mainstream thinking. They taught me that, if I could, I should try to right wrongs and speak truth, even when it might not be expedient.

I was extremely nervous when the book came out. My parents had urged me not to use my real name. Why should I tell the entire world that I was accused of committing incest? Couldn't it hurt or possibly ruin my writing career? Wasn't it possible that it would drive my children even further away? My literary agent was equally concerned. No major American publisher would touch the project. In 1993, I had published FOR GOD, COUNTRY AND COCA-COLA, a social and business history of the soft drink, which had received rave reviews and sold in translation all over the world. Was I crazy? Why didn't I follow up with another business book?

But I really couldn't make myself think about anything else. I didn't initially intend to write VICTIMS OF MEMORY. I simply decided to apply my interviewing and research skills to understand how and why my two daughters would think I had done something so awful, when I hadn't. So I began to read books such as THE COURAGE TO HEAL, by Ellen Bass and Laura Davis, the book that had so influenced my children. And I began to interview therapists who specialized in memory retrieval. Then I attended an incest survivors group and began to interview people I met there.

What emerged from the interviews and reading was astonishing. It became crystal clear that my children had stumbled into a vast social phenomenon in which a sizable number of therapists had adopted an unproven theory and applied it to most of their clients. "Do you feel powerless, like a victim?" asked THE COURAGE TO HEAL. "Do you feel different from other people?... Do you have trouble feeling motivated?...Are you afraid to succeed?...Do you feel you have to be perfect?" These were supposedly symptoms of a history of sexual abuse.

Not only that, it was entirely possible, according to the authors, for people to REPRESS all memory of sexual abuse. "Often the knowledge that you were abused starts with a tiny feeling, an intuition," THE COURAGE TO HEAL advised. "If you think you were abused and your life shows the symptoms, then you were."

The interviews with therapists and "survivors" were just as disturbing. Of course, I couldn't tell them my personal involvement, or they wouldn't have talked to me, so I told them the truth as far as it went, that I was a journalist trying to understand the recovered memory phenomenon. The therapists told me how they hypnotized clients or used guided imagery (really a form of hypnosis), dream analysis, journaling, or the like. "Following the memory," one therapist told me, "there's almost always denial. ‘ I don't believe this; this didn't happen.' When they deny it, I tell them, 'It's understandable; who would want to believe it? It's hard to believe. If it's true, it will become more clear as more evidence comes up.’ "

I realized what a terrible toll this form of "therapy" took on those who came to believe they had suffered, all unknowing, a childhood of rape and torture. THE COURAGE TO HEAL quoted some of them: "I felt my whole foundation had been stolen from me. If this could have happened and I could have forgotten it, then every assumption I had about life and my place in it was thrown up for question." My interviews revealed the same terrible effects. "I've had to let go of the myth of what I thought my childhood was like," one woman told me.

"It was like bursting a beautiful bubble, and it's very difficult to do." She went on to tell me that she still loved and missed her father. "He may not remember the abuse himself. He may have been in a trance state."

This seems an outrageous notion, that terrible abuse must have occurred, but that EVERYONE, including the perpetrator, forgot it somehow. Yet when you are accused of something so terrible by those you love, you question yourself. Paul Ingram, a Washington State policeman accused by his two daughters, managed to convince himself that he was guilty. A fundamentalist Christian, he "prayed" to God to reveal what he had done, essentially performing autohypnosis on himself, and then confessed in glowing color. I could have done the same thing. At first, I thought I might have done something that I forgot. So I went to a hypnotist to find out. Fortunately, I did not create an abuse scenario while in a trance state, but I could have. Afterwards, my research revealed that hypnosis frequently results in confabulations -- mixtures of fact and fantasy -- and that hypnotic subjects are likely to "remember" or visualize what is expected of them. In a trance, people become highly suggestible. Consequently, hypnosis should never be used to recover memories, though it can be useful for pain relief, smoking cessation, or anything else that someone WANTS to be suggested into.

The more deeply I looked, the more shocking and fascinating the entire subject became. I realized that it was not simply my children who were imperiled. My parents, who were active in the civil rights movement in the American South, had taught me that it was my obligation to try to do good in this world, to prevent injustice where I could. I could not simply walk away from this horror. I decided to write VICTIMS OF MEMORY. After rejections from major publishers, I found Upper Access, a tiny Vermont publisher, which did a wonderful job of editing and production. Even though the book came from a virtually unknown press, it received an incredible pre-publication review in the NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS, where Frederick Crews singled it out as "the most ambitious and comprehensive, as well as the most emotionally committed, of all the studies before us."

Still, I wasn't sure of its reception when it was published, or what effect it would have on my life or the recovered memory movement. As it turned out, VICTIMS OF MEMORY has had a major impact on this type of misguided therapy. In the U. K., HarperCollins picked it up. I hasten to point out that other books have also questioned recovered memories, including those by Richard Ofshe, Elizabeth Loftus, Reinder van Til, Margaret Hagen, August Piper, Richard Webster, Tana Dineen, and others. Here in the United States, lawsuits brought by retractors -- those who once believed in such "memories" and no longer do -- against their former therapists have made headlines with multi-million dollar settlements. And, of course, the false memory societies in the U. S. and U. K. have raised public awareness and provided a scientific perspective in the debate.

Those who believe in massive repression are now in retreat, but there is still much to be done. In most of the U.S. and the U.K., virtually anyone can set up a shingle saying "therapist," regardless of training. Even those who receive advanced degrees do not necessarily learn about the hazards of hypnosis, human suggestibility, or memory distortion. The worlds of the clinician and the scientist are still miles apart.

In addition, the recovered memory epidemic was just the most virulent and destructive in a long line of pseudoscientific psychological fads. Unless we change the way we approach messing with one another's minds, we will repeat the past, including its witch-hunts, in other forms in the future. Right now, I am deeply concerned over the repeated questioning of young children who are bullied into "disclosing" fictional abuse, even though they denied that it took place initially. As a result of such interviews, many innocent people are languishing in prison.

Since writing VICTIMS OF MEMORY, I have written a comprehensive history of coffee called UNCOMMON GROUNDS, and I am working a new book about mirrors (history, science, folklore, psychology, religion). Looking back, I can say that VICTIMS OF MEMORY is probably the most important book I will ever write. I have heard from people all over the world telling me how much it meant to them, how it virtually told their own story. Once, when I introduced myself in a public forum, someone in the audience gasped. Later, he came up and said, "Your book saved my life." He had been suicidal, believing in his recovered memories, before picking it up. Now if only my own children would read it. They are still estranged. I love them. I miss them every day.

--Mark Pendergrast is the author of VICTIMS OF MEMORY; FOR GOD, COUNTRY & COCA-COLA, and UNCOMMON GROUNDS.

markp@nasw.org    http://nasw.org/users/markp/