All That Incest

Feminist Mass Hysteria

In what we believe to be one of the most disturbing books written in New Zealand in the past fifty years, Lynley Hood in her A City Possessed, begins with an overview of the historical phenomenon of mass hysteria. The Salem Witch Trials are an example. The Christchurch Creche Case is another--and there are many, many more recorded historical instances.

Many of the child-abuse cases of the eighties and nineties were based upon "recovered memory". Most of the abuse cases depended either upon female or young-child testimony. Salon Magazine recently carried an interview with an evidently still disturbed woman who once claimed that she was abused by her father, but has now acknowledged that she lied. The piece is entitled, "My Lie: Why I falsely accused my father". It is an important read.

More than 20 years ago, Meredith Maran falsely accused her father of molestation. That she came to believe such a thing was possible reveals what can happen when personal turmoil meets a powerful social movement. In her book "My Lie: A True Story of False Memory" (the introduction of which is excerpted on Salon), Maran recounts the 1980s feminist-inspired campaign to expose molestation, which hit feverish levels in 1988 with the book 'The Courage to Heal." As an early reporter on the story, Maran observed family therapy sessions, interviewed molesters and steeped herself in cases where abuse clearly took place. Meanwhile, she divorced her husband and fell in love with a woman who was also an incest survivor. Maran began having nightmares about her own molestation and soon what had been a contentious relationship with her father turned into accusations of unspeakable crimes. Eventually, she came to realize the truth. She was the person who had done wrong.

Her case is a tragedy--one of many. It is a scintillating case study of how suggestion and a pervasive culture-of-belief can produce psychological "evidences" and "symptoms" in the lives of those controlled by emotions and passions, unchecked with sceptical, intellectual rigour.

For a reader new to your story, and perhaps even the recovered memory craze of the 1980s, can you explain briefly what happened to you?
During the 1980s and 1990s, tens of thousands of Americans -- most of them middle-class, 30-something women in big cities, like me -- became convinced that they'd repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse, and then, decades later, recovered those memories in therapy.

In the years leading up to that mass panic, I was working as a feminist journalist, writing exposés of child sexual abuse, trying to convince the world that incest was more than a one-in-a-million occurrence. In the process, I convinced myself that my father had molested me. After five years of incest nightmares and incest workshops and incest therapy, I accused my father, estranging myself and my sons from him for the next eight years.

In the early 1990s the culture flipped, and so did I. Across the country, falsely accused fathers were suing their daughters' incest therapists. Falsely accused molesters were being freed from jail -- and I realized that my accusation was false. I was one of the lucky ones. My father was still alive, and he forgave me. . . .

It's a little embarrassing for a person who's always been thought of as a critical thinker. There's a lot about writing this book and putting it out there that's embarrassing. It's not exactly the most flattering portrait. I think if it were a novel my editor would have rejected it, because the protagonist wasn't sympathetic enough. It really shocked me, I must say, to see how much influence the external had on the internal. That the most intimate emotions and relationships can be so affected by the dominant paradigm.

Precisely. Meredith Maran is still emotionally disturbed--at least by our count. Observe her description of her hearing her father's voice on the phone after many years:

There were no legal implications in your case, and you never directly confronted your father. Would it have sped the process toward realizing the truth had you talked to him directly?

I was pretty terrified by my father. People ask, "What did your father say when you confronted him?" Well, I never confronted him. I withdrew from him, and I spent years sort of patching together this story and lining up the evidence.

Including a regular set of dreams that pointed to being molested. I wonder if you ascribe any meaning to those dreams now?

I felt a little stupid when I started interviewing the neuroscientists about how I could be dreaming something if it never happened. One of the doctors basically said, duh, a dream is a dream. It's not reality. It's not like something had to happen in actuality for you to dream about it, as those of us who like to dream about flying during dry sexual periods have experienced. But when I dreamed over and over about my father's hands, and all around me people were losing their heads and blaming it on incest, I said, oh, see, I'm dreaming about my father's hands. Obviously he molested me. It was just a few links that were a little extreme.

On the other end of the story, was there a moment when you could say, I have decided it did not happen?

That too went on for years, just like the process of deciding that he had. But when I stopped believing, it was a little more dramatic, during the breakup with my incest survivor lover. Over time, I had been less and less able to believe her stories, which progressed from incest with a slightly older relative to satanic ritual abuse, to the extent where I thought she was becoming defined as an incest survivor. I knew I couldn't say I don't believe her without examining my own beliefs just because her story is crazier. To my family, my story is pretty crazy too. When she left me, that was the break I needed to realize it was not true.

There is this amazing scene in the book when your father calls after you've sent him a birthday card for the first time in years and you recall that you sort of floated to the ceiling and could look down at yourself. And you hear your therapist say floating to the ceiling is what little girls do when they're molested. Can you tell me a little bit more about what happened to you that day?

That was a really good example of mind control, of brainwashing, that I had been so steeped in the symptomatology of incest survivors. How do you know it's true and what happens to little girls when they've been molested? All that stuff had gone into my head. That is a symptom of mass hysteria. I was actually transposing what I had heard from these little girls into my own psyche. When I heard my father's voice, I just went there.

Because the writing is so direct in that passage, I have to ask, what really happened?

Well, you know that feeling when you hear a voice you didn't expect to hear, that means a lot to you, and you feel weak-kneed? It was more like that. It was such an intense experience coming over my body.

Sadly, also, she is still trying to justify the "movement". It did good she claims. Think of how sensitive society now is to the abuse of children. The interview finishes with a chilling recitation of how deeply she remains enthralled to utilitarian ethics: incarcerating innocent victims is justified because a greater social good resulted.

In the middle of the book, while you are still deeply in the mind-set of being molested, there's a notion you agree with that if one innocent man goes to prison, but it stops a hundred molesters, it's worth it. Do you still agree with that notion?

I'm fairly close to a man still in prison, and really believe he is innocent. I know how he's suffered. I know he's 80 years old and in ill health. He's spent 20 years in prison, for no reason. If every elementary school child is now taught how to protect themselves from sexual abuse -- and even more to the point, some father or preschool teacher who feels the urge to molest a child will be inhibited from doing so because they think there are guys still in jail for doing that -- but innocent people are in prison, do I have to make that choice? It is a Sophie's choice kind of thing. Would I allow an innocent man to sit in prison if it meant keeping children safe?

So would you make that choice?

I think so.>

Such a sad child of our wretched times!