The subtitle of this review, How therapists and 'victims' seized on the idea of repressed memory, leveling false charges and ruining lives, is not a postulate that some would accept. In fact, a friend of mine would vehemently disagree (and likely hurl not just one insult at the very temerity of the reviewer to assert it).
The reviewer, Theodore Dalrymple, is described as a contributing editor of the Manhattan Institute's City Journal and the author of "Romancing Opiates: Pharmacological Lies and the Addiction Bureaucracy".
Searching for the Manhattan Institute on Google yields this entry under its URL: The Mission of the Manhattan Institute is to develop and disseminate new ideas that foster greater economic choice and individual responsibility.
Immediately I think: right wing. Let me investigate. It is difficult to get a handle on it. But then I linked to a New York Post editorial listed on its website, Ideas Matter New York Post, editorial, January 30, 2003 and I think I may have an answer:
New Yorkers, in particular, have good reason to be grateful to the Manhattan Institute: Its ideas and proposals formed the basis of Rudy Giuliani's governing philosophy and his determination to challenge the long-accepted notion that New York City was simply ungovernable.
Giuliani - who was first exposed to those ideas at a Manhattan Institute conference on "Rethinking New York" - proved the skeptics wrong. Boy, did he ever.
President Bush, meanwhile, is one of the institute's biggest fans.
Well, if an organization boasts of a NY Post editorial, I have an idea of what its politics are, or might (well) be.Back to the point: how does this man simply assert this:
One of the most extraordinary outbreaks of popular delusion in recent years was that which attached to the possibility of "recovered memory" of sexual and satanic childhood abuse, and to an illness it supposedly caused, Multiple Personality Disorder. No medieval peasant praying to a household god for the recovery of his pig could have been more credulous than scores of psychiatrists, hosts of therapists and thousands of willing victims. The whole episode would have been funny had it not been so tragic.
His bio in the Manhattan Institute website has the following profile:
Theodore Dalrymple is the Dietrich Weismann fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor to City Journal. He is a retired doctor who most recently practiced in a British inner-city hospital and prison. Dr. Dalrymple has written a column for the London Spectator for thirteen years and writes regularly for National Review. Denis Dutton, editor of Arts & Letters Daily, called Dr. Dalrymple the "Orwell of our time."
Well, he has credentials, indeed. Yet I read sentences in this review which make me wonder how he can be so self-assured and certain.
In 300 years' time, our descendants – who will, of course, pride themselves on their superior rationality – will read of the recovered-memory-driven prosecutions of parents (usually fathers) as we now read of the Salem witch trials. And some future Arthur Miller will set his "Crucible" in a late-20th-century psychiatric hospital in which the disorder was supposedly treated but was actually manufactured.
In 1692 could someone have said that in 2008 the trials would be seen as he asserts people in 2308 will see recovered memory as sham as witch trials?
This next assertion leaves me wondering:
Perhaps the most alarming (or depressing) thing about this story – clearly, economically and sometimes amusingly told by Dr. McHugh – is that the worst excesses did not take place among the poorly educated class of society, whom one might expect to be easiest prey to ludicrous notions, but among the well educated.
Why would one expect the educated to be less gullible than the poorly educated?
Mr. Dalrymple is not content with discrediting (to his assurance) the idea of recovered memory; he takes on Freud himself.
Dr. McHugh is surely right in seeing the buried-treasure school of psychology, introduced as a system by Freud, as one of the roots of the recovered-memory disaster. The supposition that underlying every undesirable behavior there is a hidden psychological secret awaiting therapeutic exposure has taken a deep hold on society at all levels. I remember a burglar asking me, in the prison in which I worked as a doctor, why he continued to burgle, expecting me to say that it was because of his terrible childhood. When I told him it was because he was lazy and stupid, and because prison sentences were not nearly long enough, he burst into laughter.
Now there is a valuable underpinning of a theory: a burglar he didn't coddle broke out in laughter. That proves Freud was wrong, doubtlessly.
In "Try to Remember," Dr. McHugh hints at the cultural context in which preposterous and vicious accusations against parents and others could be so easily believed by seemingly intelligent people, including courtroom judges. He rightly notes that the hysteria was presaged in the 1970s by the popularity of the best-selling novel "Sybil," which incorporated theories about childhood sexual abuse and Multiple Personality Disorder advanced by "a strange off-beat psychiatrist, Cornelia Wilbur."
Off-beat? What in heck does that mean?
But I wish that he had probed more deeply into that cultural context. Freudianism alone could not have produced the necessary atmosphere; there must have been other forces at work as well. The sanctification of victims and victimhood comes to mind.
Hey, you're not sick; stop whining and just get better. Sound psychiatry.
Oy vay.
Try to Remember
By Paul R. McHugh, M.D.
(Dana Press, 276 pages, $25)
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