- All she wanted were a few counseling
sessions to help her cope with depression and get on with graduate school.
Instead, she spent four years and tens of thousands of dollars in the bizarre
world of a hypnotherapist who talked to ancient deities and convinced her
she was the victim of satanic abuse.
-
- She came to believe she'd been raped
as a child by her father, the leader of a satanic cult that also included
her mother, brother, grandfather and a neighbor.
-
- She thought she had served as a High
Priestess -- sacrificing babies in secret caves throughout Southern Illinois
and killing who knows how many innocent people.
-
- Her therapist, Geraldine A. Lamb of Kirkwood,
Mo., thought so, too. It was that horrific abuse that was the root of her
depression, she said Lamb told her.
-
- So the young woman cut off all ties with
her family for more than a year. Lamb told her that was the only way she
could hope to recover.
-
- On June 26, St. Louis County (Mo.) Circuit
Court Judge John Kintz sentenced Lamb to 30 months in state prison, the
dramatic end of a criminal case with national significance.
-
- Lamb and two co-defendants, psychologists
who practiced in the Creve Coeur, Mo., counseling center she founded, are
believed to be the first people in the nation to face criminal charges
that included allegations of implanting false memories during psychotherapy.
Those charges were contained in an indictment handed up by a St. Louis
County grand jury in April 1996.
-
- The two psychologists allowed Lamb to
use their names on fraudulent bills she submitted to insurance companies.
Both pleaded guilty to misdemeanors. They were placed on probation and
ordered to make restitution.
-
- In April, Lamb pleaded guilty to two
counts of insurance fraud and one misdemeanor count of practicing psychology
without a license. In her plea bargain, the felony charges that included
implanting false memories were dropped.
-
- At a 5-1/2-hour sentencing hearing Friday,
Kintz heard another young victim tell how Lamb convinced her that her parents
sexually abused her as part of a satanic cult that included members of
the parents' bridge club.
-
- The judge heard a tearful mother say
her daughter is "as dead to us as if she had been murdered."
Their daughter, an attractive young woman in her early 20s, refused to
be in the same room as her parents and grandparents during that part of
the hearing because she still believes she was abused as a child.
-
- The judge heard accounts of how Lamb
encouraged clients to seek advice from a patient who "channeled,"
or communicated with an ancient Egyptian goddess named Amon and the Blessed
Virgin Mary.
-
- But he didn't hear a single expression
of regret from the 58-year-old hypnotherapist.
-
- Lamb's attorney produced a string of
other former patients who talked about the good that came from their sessions,
how she helped them resolve problems and get on with their lives. Several
freely admitted to taking part in the channeling and also claimed to be
survivors of childhood ritual satanic abuse.
-
- Nothing about Lamb's case detracts from
the horrible reality of child sexual abuse. In fact, two of the five patients
whose treatment led to Lamb's indictment acknowledge that they were molested
as children.
-
- But painful as it was, the women said
they had always known about that abuse. It was only after receiving suggestive
treatment by Lamb that they "remembered" elaborate ritual sexual
abuse, which they now realize never occurred.
-
- Six months before Lamb entered her guilty
plea, a federal grand jury in Houston indicted a psychiatric hospital administrator
and four mental health professionals on 60 counts of conspiracy and mail
fraud.
-
- The five operated a clinic at Spring
Shadows Glen Hospital in Texas. They allegedly reaped millions of dollars
in fraudulent insurance payments by implanting false memories of ritual
satanic abuse using what the indictment calls "techniques commonly
associated with mind control and brainwashing." That case is still
pending.
-
- Together, those two criminal prosecutions
represent a new wave of legal actions involving the controversial theory
of recovered memories -- the latest twist in a decade-old tale that is
still playing out on talk shows, in courtrooms and psychotherapy offices
around the country.
-
- It burst into the public consciousness
with a flurry of suits in the late 1980s and early 1990s. They were filed
by people who said they had been sexually abused as children, but had blocked
out all memories of those attacks until decades later.
-
- Many named parents or stepparents as
defendants. Several named priests and church officials. And at least two
high-profile murder cases were filed after adult children recovered memories
implicating their fathers.
-
- One of those murder cases resulted in
a conviction that was overturned on appeal. Another was dropped after a
judge refused to allow testimony about the recovered memories.
-
- The key to those cases, indeed the key
to all cases involving what are also called repressed or delayed memories,
is the notion that people can block out repeated, extreme childhood abuse
until years afterward.
-
- This is substantially different from
people who have some vague knowledge of being abused but can recall only
hazy details. It goes against the grain of traditional psychological theory,
and flies in the face of much research involving disaster victims.
-
- For example, when a group of children
from a small California town were kidnapped and buried alive in their school
bus for many hours, none of them forgot the experience. Several of those
students sought psychiatric help years later because vivid memories of
the event kept intruding into their consciousness.
-
- Researchers who have interviewed the
survivors of combat, plane crashes and natural disasters have reported
the same kind of results: People are troubled because they can't forget
the events, not because they can't remember.
-
- "All of these things are supposed
to be repressed," said Henry L. Roediger, chairman of the psychology
department at Washington University in St. Louis and a nationally recognized
expert on memory. "But all the research evidence seems to show that
they actually make good memories."
-
- Still, many therapists believe in recovered
memories -- although they often prefer to use other terms for the phenomenon.
One of them is Helen Friedman, a licensed psychologist in private practice
in St. Louis County, Mo.
-
- Friedman and other believers cite research
of their own that they say validates the theory. Much of it is performed
or published by members of a group called the International Society for
the Study of Dissociative Disorders.
-
- Friedman said she has worked with more
than 450 cases of childhood sexual abuse, most of them in adult survivors.
"Not all of them have (memories) that come back, but some of them
do," she said. Sometimes they can involve satanic ritual abuse, she
said.
-
- "There's a backlash in our country
against believing that children are abused," Friedman said. "Who
would want to believe that?"
-
- Research and her own clinical experience
tells her that such abuse is very real, she said. And it can often be forgotten
for years or decades.
-
- "Combat amnesia is very well established,
it has been since World War II," she said. "Why, in the area
of sexual abuse, are people wondering if this is real?"
-
- However, veterans who experience combat
amnesia have almost never forgotten that they saw combat. They forget gruesome
details of their battles, which sometimes come back years later with horrifying
clarity, but not the fact that they were in a war.
-
- In the same way, psychiatrists say, the
vast majority of men and women sexually abused after age 4 have at least
some awareness of that fact. They may not remember exact details, but most
realize something has happened to them.
-
- The idea of recovered memories was popularized
in self-help books during the 1980s and early 1990s. It was accepted unquestioningly
by talk-show hosts and some juries.
-
- But beginning in the early 1990s, another
wave of suits began to challenge its validity. These were filed by parents
who had been accused -- on the basis of nothing more than recovered memories
-- of abusing their children. Usually, they named therapists as defendants.
-
- In 1994, a California father won $500,000
in damages against a therapist he accused of implanting false memories
in his daughter, who had alleged that she suffered abuse at his hands.
The victory came despite the fact that his daughter testified against him.
-
- Soon, other suits were being filed by
former patients and their families.
-
- One of the most famous involved a Springfield,
Mo., minister, Thomas Rutherford, who lost his job and ended up working
as a janitor after his daughter's therapist told church officials he had
abused his child.
-
- On the basis of recovered memories, the
therapist told church officials Rutherford had twice impregnated his daughter
and forced her to have crude abortions using wire coat hangers. In fact,
Rutherford had a vasectomy when his daughter was 4. A medical examination
revealed his daughter was a virgin.
-
- The Rutherfords received a $1 million
settlement from the church in 1996. But that case was soon eclipsed by
others.
-
- Last year, a woman in Chicago received
$10.6 million in a suit against her therapist and the hospital where he
practiced. She alleged her psychologist implanted false memories that she
was a satanic priestess who practiced cannibalism and abused her own two
children.
-
- And a jury in Houston awarded $5.8 million
to a woman there who also claimed that her family was torn apart when her
psychotherapy produced false memories of ritual satanic abuse.
-
- With so many allegations of ritual satanic
abuse, you might expect that at least some cult members would have been
arrested over the years.
-
- But a 1994 national study that investigated
more than 12,000 reports of ritual abuse found only a handful of cases
where someone molested children while wearing the trappings of Satanism.
It was unable to establish even a single case of widespread sexual abuse
by organized cults of the kind so often alleged.
-
- True believers in recovered memories
often charge their critics with condoning child abuse.
-
- They frequently single out a Philadelphia-based
group called the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, which was founded by
families torn apart by incest allegations based on recovered memories.
Its members have a vested interest in undercutting allegations of abuse,
true believers say.
-
- But in recent years, criticism has been
coming from more than just families. The American Medical Association and
American Psychological Association have both issued statements warning
about accepting abuse allegations based solely on recovered memories.
-
- In February, Britain's Royal College
of Psychiatrists went even farther, advising against using suggestive techniques
to unearth sexual abuse of which patients have no memory.
-
- "I was at the American Psychiatric
Association meeting recently, and this didn't even come up," said
Carol S. North, a Washington University Medical School professor. "There
was no one making presentations on it. I'd say well over 90 percent of
American psychiatrists don't believe it."
-
- Her colleague, Richard D. Wetzel, a psychologist,
said, "We think a lot of people are being hurt by this sort of thing."
-
- "And hurt really bad," North
added. "This is really serious, life-changing stuff."
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