The long long betrayal of incest survivors

Freudian “fantasies” and “false memories”

“In 1895 and 1896, Freud, in listening to his women patients, learned that something dreadful and violent lay in their past. The psychiatrists before Freud who had heard seduction stories had accused their patients of being hysterical liars and had dismissed their memories as fantasy. Freud was the first psychiatrist who believed that his patients were telling the truth.”                                                                                                                    -Jeffrey M. Masson, from “Freud and the Seduction Theory” in The Atlantic, 1984

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I believe that for those of us who have dissociative amnesia for childhood trauma it is essential to uncover our memories, to at least know the basics of what happened. It is only in knowing what happened that we know ourselves; only in acknowledging our trauma that we can recover, change, and grow. But the endeavor to know is fraught with difficulties. Some of these are personal, involving the conflict between the parts of us who want to know and the parts of us who believe knowing is too painful or too disabling—or just devastating.

But much of the difficulty is external. Just as there are these inner parts who resist knowledge, so there are people in our lives who will do anything to prevent us from knowing. They will do whatever it takes to destroy every shred of confidence in a victim’s knowledge of their own abuse. They know we need a degree of confidence to be able to stand up to them and to eventually tell our stories.

This is mostly about sexual abuse, especially incest. It is sexual abuse that perpetrators and those who are associated with them most want to hide. This is seen in the case of the hierarchy of the Catholic Church which has so appallingly—almost unbelievably—suppressed knowledge of the sexual abuse of children by priests. In this prominent example we can clearly see that it isn’t only the perpetrators but anyone who is associated with them who will go to any lengths to suppress knowledge of these crimes.

With incest, this suppression starts in the family but widens into the larger world, into clinical psychology (therapy/psychiatry), into the media, into academia and books. The most influential example of this suppression in clinical psychology occurred over a century ago with Freud. (See Jeffrey Masson’s book Assault on Truth as well as his 1984 Atlantic article.)

Freud began his career with the paradigm-shifting insight that his patients’ psychological disturbances were due to incest—to having been sexually used by members of their families as children. He called this his “seduction theory,” realizing that small children don’t need to be forced into sexual intimacy, merely seduced—or what is now referred to as being “groomed.” (Though Freud was well aware that children are violently raped and threatened as well.)

Immediately he encountered resistance to his theory by his peers. Perhaps there was resistance elsewhere, surely in his own psyche. Within a few years he had come up with a new theory that turned the old one on its head—the Oedipal theory. This proposes that what his patients thought were memories of sex were actually fantasies.

Despite the absurdity of this idea—he was proposing that children, even very young children, all know what sex is and desire to engage in it with their parents—it was accepted and made Freud one of the most famous men in history. What a great way to obfuscate the reality of incest! Even adults who had clear memories were unlikely to bring it up—even with a therapist—for fear of being shamed: it’s the child who wants sex, not the adult. And fear of being gaslit: what you think is a memory is actually a fantasy. You are just so neurotic and confused!

This worked. It’s painful to consider the sexual abuse of children, and this way no one had to go there. But it is also painful for anyone to discuss any kind of abuse or neglect of children by their families, so nearly the whole of clinical psychology came up with approaches that skirted the issue. Cognitive therapy worked with conscious thoughts and attitudes, usually staying away from any consideration of childhood whatsoever and the non-conscious mind. Biological theories distanced themselves even further, not even considering thoughts and attitudes, searching to ameliorate suffering through chemical and mechanical means. These methods have surely helped many people, but they have hurt others, because they often hide and avoid the reality of the abuse and neglect of children.

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Still—as Judith Herman wrote—atrocities (which is what incest is) “refuse to be buried.”

The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma.

-Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery

Trauma will out in the individual and in the discipline of clinical psychology as well, in spite of all attempts to suppress it. It comes up and yet, inevitably, there is another movement to suppress it. As soon as it was revealed that Freud’s Oedipal theory was a coverup, along came the idea of “false memories.”

Anyone writing about dissociative amnesia must eventually address the topic of “false memories” and the False Memory Syndrome Foundation that proposed it. A false memory is imagination or fantasy that has been mistakenly labeled memory. There’s no doubt that people are often mistaken in the details of their memories, but it doesn’t follow from this that we should doubt all memories. The FMSF, of course, didn’t focus on all memories, only a particular set: memories of incest.

So it’s similar conceptually to Freud’s Oedipal theory and has the same purpose: to discredit/invalidate memories of abuse so victims won’t talk about their abuse, or if they do talk, ensure they won’t be believed.

The FMSF focused on those who didn’t have continuous memories of abuse, and began to remember abuse while they were in therapy. It ignored the fact that most recovered memories first emerge outside of therapy, and also the fact that recovered memories are as likely to be validated/corroborated (that is, true) as continuous memories. (See Trauma and Memory, ed. Williams/Banyard)

In actuality, the “false memory” concept was applied to any purported memory of incest whether continuous or recovered, and whether recovered in therapy or not. Because the purpose of the movement was not to better understand traumatic memory, but to discredit all memories of incest as an attack on, and ruination of, families. And to discredit, attack, and sometimes ruin the careers of therapists who supported victims of incest.

Anna Holtzman summarizes this history well:

In the 1980s and 90s, a movement of incest survivor activism emerged as an outgrowth of the Women’s Liberation movement of the 60s and 70s. And when incest survivors began taking their perpetrators to court, a furious and powerful backlash erupted and took the media by storm.

At the center of the backlash movement was an organization called the False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF). Founded in 1992, the FMSF was on its surface an “advocacy group” created by and for parents who’d been accused by their children of sexual abuse. The group’s supposed agenda was to provide support and fellowship to families that had been “destroyed” by accusations of incest. They launched a well-funded media campaign purporting the existence of an epidemic of “False Memory Syndrome” — not a scientifically researched condition, but rather a slogan concocted by accused parents to discredit the testimonies of their children. The campaign was highly effective, and the media eagerly gobbled it up.

Today, despite the changing times and the gains of the #MeToo movement, this “false memory” rhetoric continues to be validated in both media and academia:

In media, many popular psychology magazines still publish articles that validate the false memory myth, while providing very little information about the reality of incest. These publications include Psychology Today, BetterHelp, GoodTherapy, Healthline, Verywellmind, and others.

In academia, false memory rhetoric still shows up in mainstream textbooks and courses on both psychology and law.

Therefore, the false memory myth is still very much embedded in the public consciousness.

So the complexity and frequent uncertainty of memory have been weaponized by sexual offenders—especially incestuous families—to hide their crimes. Since virtually all criminals try to hide their crimes, and most families and institutions strive to protect their reputations, this should be no surprise. What is so terribly problematic is that the media, the public, and many psychologists bought into it so readily. The FMSF’s ideas live on, just as Freud’s do.

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That these movements—both the FMSF and Freud’s—have been so influential and long-lasting has been disastrous for me and many others who have suffered childhood sexual abuse. We need the help of therapists to process the memories and the damage done to our bodies and psyches. Instead of developing a thorough and practical understanding of traumatic memory and dissociative amnesia, psychologists are still mired in controversy and the doubt and paralysis that follows.

Of course, there are many difficulties besides these. But can we at least try to see the power of those who sexually abuse children (or enable them) to distort the discussion? Can we at least acknowledge how they have always manipulated—still manipulate—the minds of victims and the theories and practices of clinical psychologists?

I think of my own family, and how I visited my paternal parent who sexually and physically abused me—visited him in my late thirties after nine years of therapy. What must he have been thinking when I told him I was coming? Was he afraid that I had learned about my abuse and amnesia in all that therapy and intended to confront him? Was he relieved when he realized I was just as dissociated as ever, glad that my therapists had been, apparently, either too ignorant or too afraid to support me?

I don’t know, of course. I do know the searing humiliation I felt when I realized at 53 how helpless and blind I had been all those decades, visiting him alone—as vulnerable as I’d been at six—still having amnesia for everything.

And then to recognize that my paternal parent, having read Freud, may have easily convinced himself all his long life that having sex with his children was harmless because Freud said children long to have sex, at least with their opposite-sex parent.

And then to realize that my therapists may have been crippled by the “false memory” people, intimidated and confused into not supporting me. And to discover that therapists are still crippled by these ideas and the intimidation.

I felt a anger and despair that I am still trying to work through.

Can we at least see the power of those who sexually abuse children (or enable them) to distort the discussion?

Can all clinical psychologists educate themselves about the family dynamics of incest—the gaslighting, the violence, the threats—and develop a thorough knowledge of the universal, evolved mechanisms of traumatic memory, dissociative disorders, and dissociative amnesia?

Until they do, people like myself will continue to live far too much of their lives trapped by their own amnesia and doubts, betrayed by their families and society, by therapists, and by clinical psychology itself, the one discipline whose function is (or should be) to help us.

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For more about these issues see this blog post from Healing Honestly.

See a more recent interview with Masson from 2019.

Though Masson’s works are the most detailed, many of the books listed in my Resources page discuss these issues: Jennifer Freyd’s Betrayal Trauma, Charles Whitfield’s Memory and Abuse, Judith Herman’s Trauma and Recovery, Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score

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See my Resources page for links to more information about dissociative amnesia.