Victims
of Memory : Sex Abuse Accusations and Shattered Lives
by Mark Pendergrast, Melody
Gavigan
Reviews
Midwest Book Review
Thousands of families have been shattered
by therapies which encourage adults to remember childhood sexual abuse
patterns repressed over time: but has the therapeutic approach gone too
far and instead victimized adult women further? This title's sure to prove
controversial in many circles: it tackles issues of healing, therapy, and
memory reconstruction.
From Booklist, January 1, 1995
They're staples on talk shows - adult incest
survivors who have only recently recovered memories of being abused. Until
lately, it was politically correct to believe the abused, never the accused.
Then parents and others who felt themselves unjustly accused banded together
to form the False Memory Syndrome Foundation.
What is going on here? Pendergrast has written a well-researched and important
book, and his findings should rightfully scare all of us. Pendergrast,
it must be said, is not an objective reporter: his own daughters have accused
him of abuse. His shock at their allegations sparked a personal crisis,
leading to the writing of this book. Despite his conflict of interest,
Pendergrast tries for evenhandedness, going so far as to offer in-their-own-words
chapters by those with repressed memories and the therapists who treat
them. But there is also a chapter from the "retractors," women who have
realized that their memories of abuse were only products of their own imaginations.
Pendergrast's account of this controversial
subject is wide ranging. He covers everything from the nature of memory
and hypnosis to such related forms of sexual hysteria as the Salem witch
trials to this country's growing cult of victimization. He also chronicles
how abuse memories often lead to memories of ritual satanic abuse. His
strongest and most effective assaults are reserved for the book The
Courage to Heal, the bible of the repressed-memory movement, which
informs readers that if you feel you've been abused, even if you don't
remember the abuse, you probably have. Pendergrast takes readers into an
Alice-in-Wonderland world in which innocent incidents, such as the back
rubs he gave his daughters, become starting points for "remembered" abuse.
He details how therapists, using The Courage to Heal, lead their
patients into "memories" and encourage them to abandon their families without
giving parents any chance to refute the accusations. (Patients often find
new "families" in survivor support groups.) Pendergrast makes a strong
case that what began as a way to empower women has now victimized them,
isolating them from friends, families, and their true memories. This book
is sure to spark a long-overdue debate, and it deserves to be on library
shelves, right beside The Courage to Heal.
Ilene Cooper - Copyright©
1995, American Library Association. All rights reserved
The publisher, November 17, 1997
Review Excerpts of VICTIMS OF MEMORY
VICTIMS OF MEMORY: SEX ABUSE ACCUSATIONS
AND SHATTERED LIVES Hinesburg, VT: Upper Access Books, 1996, second
edition by Mark Pendergrast
-
An even-handed treatment that presents all the
different positions with empathy. - Psychological Reports
-
Anyone touched by the subject of repressed memories
would do well to read this book. - Burton Einspruch, M.D., Journal of the
American Medical Association
-
An impressive display of scholarship. Pendergrast
demonstrates a laudable ability to lay out all sides of the argument. -
Daniel L. Schacter, Scientific American
-
Victims of Memory constitutes the most ambitious
and comprehensive, as well as the most emotionally committed, of all the
studies before us. Pendergrast devotes the most effort to analyzing the
contemporary Zeitgeist in which the recovery movement thrives. - Frederick
Crews, The New York Review of Books
-
Pendergrast has written a well-researched and
important book.
Gripping, accessible, very informative,
upsetting
h.hintjens@swansea.ac.uk, July 7, 1998
For the interviews with parents and former
believers in recovered memory alone, this book is worth reading. It is
long (about 600 pages) but there is little padding. I could not stop reading
it, and found the authors' way of presenting their arguments very fair,
despite the sensitive nature of the subject. They do not at all seek to
minimize the importance of real abuse of children, but give ample evidence
that psychotherapists and others are - sometimes with good intentions -
abusing their positions to create a theory according to which even the
most appalling abuse in childhood can be completely forgotten until the
therapist recovers it, sometimes in horrendous ways. The authors don't
believe it. Those who've been abused remember something, and don't need
suggestions made to them. The best chapter is 'Why now?' which seeks to
explain what seems like a contemporary form of witch hunting. I have always
been very suspicious of arguments about memories being invented, but I
can see, having read this book, how it can happen.
A must-read book
ocrt_ge@cgo.wave.ca, June 16, 1998
Pendergrast turns the spotlight on a dirty
little secret of modern-day mental health therapy: that many therapists
are using unproven, experimental and suggestive techniques to recover images
of childhood abuse events that never happened. Untold numbers of patients
have become emotionally disabled and their families have been destroyed
because of this dangerous therapy.
|
