Volume 41, Number 19 · November 17, 1994
The Revenge of the Repressed
By Frederick C. Crews
Unchained Memories: True Stories of Traumatic Memories, Lost and Found
by Lenore Terr
Basic Books, 282 pp., $22.00
The Myth of Repressed Memory: False Memories and Allegations of Sexual Abuse
by Elizabeth Loftus and Katherine Ketcham
St. Martin's, 290 pp., $22.95
Remembering Satan
by Lawrence Wright
Knopf, 205 pp., $22.00
The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse (3rd edition)
by Ellen Bass and Laura Davis
Harper Perennial, 604 pp., $22.50 (paper)
Making Monsters: False Memories, Psychotherapy, and Sexual Hysteria
by Richard Ofshe and Ethan Watters
Scribner's, 340 pp., $23.00
Victims of Memory: Incest Accusations and Shattered Lives
by Mark Pendergrast
Upper Access, 603 pp., $24.95 (paper)
Throughout the past decade or so, a shock wave has been sweeping across North American psychotherapy, and in the process causing major repercussions within our families, courts, and hospitals. A single diagnosis for miscellaneous complaints—that of unconsciously repressed sexual abuse in childhood—has grown in this brief span from virtual nonexistence to epidemic frequency. As Mark Pendergrast shows in Victims of Memory, if we put together the number of licensed American psychotherapists (roughly 255,000) with survey results about their beliefs and practices, it appears that well over 50,000 of them are now willing to help their clients realize that they must have endured early molesta-tion. Those professionals have been joined by countless untrained operators who use the yellow pages and flea market ads to solicit 'incest work.' It is hard to form even a rough idea of the number of persuaded clients, because most of them take no publicly recorded action against the accused, but a conservative guess would be a million persons since 1988 alone. The number affected is of course vastly higher, since, as all parties acknowledge, virtually every case sows dissension and sorrow throughout a family.
Review, 6983 words
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