The Memory Wars

Some links I posted yesterday under del.icio.us are related to what we once called the “memory wars” in clinical psychology and psychiatry. I found it interesting that they appeared just a few days after I saw a new book at Borders by a psychiatrist who recounts his own memories of his years spent treating a person who, he says, “had” many different personalities. I had hoped that all of this had gone away…

During the heyday of what was formerly known as “multiple personality disorder” (MPD), now much less prominently known as “dissociative identity disorder” (DID), the same bad old days in which free-standing psychiatric hospitals made a fortune “treating” women (they were almost all women) who came to believe that they had been raised in satanic cults, in which their parents and the local police, and ministers, and priests, and judges (etc.) were all satanic cult members; during those days I was in training to become a psychologist. I worked part-time at two of the local free-standing hospitals (only one of them is still operating), and spent many, many 8-hour shifts right smack in the middle of the genuine insanity of that time in our culture. I watched women come into the hospital with a lot of anxiety and depression; and I saw that, by the time they left, weeks later, they were much worse off: they had “discovered” that they were “multiple” and that their whole lives had been spent under the control of satanic cults. They “had memories” of hideous, gory events involving their family members who subjected them to rape, bestiality, torture. Many of them subsequently went on disability, lost their careers and their families. But all along, they were supported by eagerly credulous therapists who “validated” them, every step of the way.

How did it happen? It was an unholy amalgam of all of the following, all at or near the same time:

• In popular culture, novels like Rabbit Howled and Michelle Remembers vividly portrayed some of the atrocities that the “multiples” later “remembered.” Also, there was the supposedly legitimate (and subsequently debunked) multiplicity of “Eve,” with her “Three Faces.”
• A feminist backlash arose against a version of Freudian thinking that held that women who claimed to have been subjected to incest were probably fantasizing the whole thing. This led to a swing of the pendulum in which it was impossible to ever question the plausibility of any woman’s claim that she had been sexually abused, no matter how outlandish the claim might be.
• Some fundamentalist Christians became excited about the phenomenon, which they interpreted as Satan, active and walking around in the world torturing innocent children; they felt that this validated their world view.
• Ego, or the desire to be special: patients who were diagnosed with MPD were thought of as special, exotic, and certainly very interesting. They were much more interesting, for example, than any regular old depressed person could possibly be. And the doctors and other therapists who treated MPD patients automatically became more interesting, too. There was always the possibility of memoirs, journal articles, and even talk show appearances.
• Within psychotherapy groups, both inpatient and outpatient, the MPD patients recruited new members into their fold by telling other patients that their symptoms (depression, difficult relationships, anxiety, etc.) were likely symptoms of repressed memories of incest and/or satanic abuse. And within pop psychology, self-help books proclaimed that anyone who suspected that she had been sexually abused during childhood, probably in fact had been. The idea of “repressed memories” became rampant and widely believed.
• Finally, of course, there is the money factor: the “treatment” of MPD patients was always very lengthy, and required frequent inpatient stays; this meant more money both for outpatient therapists and also for hospitals.

Anyway, this whole thing finally peaked, and then receded from the public eye. Most of the free-standing private psychiatric hospitals closed after the insurance companies got tired of paying out huge sums of money for lengthy inpatient treatment. This was probably a good thing for many women whose lives were in danger of being sucked into the MPD machine; but it also can be a problem for people who genuinely need inpatient treatment for genuine psychiatric problems.

So: a cautionary tale, indeed. For a lot more about all this, check out the web sites linked over under del.icio.us about “repressed memory” and the “McLean Hospital.”