(1) Introduction

"As a one-time Freudian who had decided to help others resist the fallacies to which I had succumbed in the 1960s, I had long before articulated the critique of psychoanalysis that undergirds “The Unknown Freud.” Nor was I ever in doubt about the perniciousness of the recovered memory movement — a frenzy that is now deluding countless patients (mostly women) into launching false charges of sexual abuse against their dumbfounded and mortified elders — or about the ultimate origin of that move­ment in Freudian assumptions. In my view, the relatively patent and vulgar pseudoscience of recovered memory rests in appreciable measure on the respectable and entrenched pseudoscience of psychoanalysis. Thus, even though “The Revenge of the Repressed” was not even a gleam in my eye when I was writing “The Unknown Freud,” the closing paragraphs of the latter essay sound like a preview of its successor. " [mijn nadruk] (4-5)

[Recovered Memory Therapy wordt hier verder afgekort als RMT, dus dat zal ik overnemen. Crews kreeg met zijn kritiek op de psychoanalyse vanuit die hoek uiteraard de bekende verwijten - niet in therapie geweest, niet als psychoanalyticus gewerkt, een neurotische persoonlijkheid, weerstand tegen de psychoanalyse - waarmee die psychoanalyse zich al sinds Freud immuun maakt voor kritiek. ]

"Back in the late Sixties and early Seventies, a collision with the writings of philosophers such as Michael Polanyi, Karl Popper, Sidney Hook, and Ernest Nagel brought me to the painful realization that Freudianism in its self-authenticating approach to knowledge constitutes not an exemplification of the rational-empirical ethos to which I felt loyal ..." [mijn nadruk] (8)

"Indeed, there is nothing especially original in my appre­hension of Freud and psychoanalysis. I have done little more than synopsize the work of herculean scholars like Henri Ellenberger, Frank Sulloway, and Malcolm Macmillan and of persistent philosophical inquirers like Adolf Grünbaum and Frank Cioffi. To be sure, some of those authors — Ellenberger, Sulloway, and Grünbaum — initially couched their findings more tentatively and tactfully than I have done. It has gone largely unremarked, however, that their later development has been toward greater adamancy. As for Cioffi and Macmillan, my judgment of Freuds work concurs with theirs in every detail. "(9-10)

"If my portion of a book as miscellaneous as The Memory Wars can be said to have a main focus, it is precisely the carry-over, from Freudianism to its stepchild RMT, of blindness to the role of therapy itself in producing behavior that gets mistaken for the residue of long-buried trauma from the patient’s early years." [mijn nadruk] (14)

" ... this development within psychoanalysis is occurring at a time when RMT itself, after a meteoric rise between 1988 and 1993, has been rapidly losing favor in the courts, the pro­fessional journals, and even the mass media of the United States and other infected countries ... "(18)

[Die opkomst van RMT schrijft Crews toe aan de groei van het aantal vrouwelijke psychoanalytici, aan de opkomst van het feminisme, en aan de discussies over Freuds verleidingstheorie zoals bij Masson.]

"Significantly, one contribution to the launching of RMT as we know it was Jeffrey Massons emotionally charged rehabilitation of the late Ferenczi in his best seller of 1984, The Assault on Truth"(23)

(31) The unknown Freud

[Veel van de hier weergegeven kritiek op Freud komt overeen met de kritiek die ik zelf had toen ik het werk van Freud las. Vooral ook het voortdurend uitgaan van dingen die nog bewezen moesten worden hoort daar bij. Circulaire argumentatie, dat is echt Freud. Hij noemt het wetenschap.]

"... as a means of gaining knowledge, psychoanalysis is fatally contaminated by the inclusion, among its working assumptions and in its dialogue with patients, of the very ideas that supposedly get corrobo­rated by clinical experience."(34)

"As many casual remarks in his correspondence reveal, he was indifferent to his patients’ suffering and quite dismissive of their real-world dilemmas, which struck him as a set of pretexts for not getting down to the repressed fantasies that really mattered. Nor did he care very much, except from a public relations angle, whether those patients improved as a result o f his treatment."(39)

[Nee, Freud was geen aardige man, een autoritair baasje gewoonweg. Crews geeft er allerlei voorbeelden van. ]

"Such stories can only lead us to wonder whether Freud’s powers of observation and analysis ever functioned with sufficient independence from his wishes. That, in brief, is the paramount issue confronting Freud studies today. "(39)

"Yet Pankeevs thralldom to Freud was no greater than that of the analytic community at large, which left the contra­dictions and implausibilities in Freud’s published account of the Wolf Man case entirely unchallenged from 1918 until the 1970s. Even with the aging Pankeev on hand as living evi­dence that his announced cure was bogus, no Freudian dared to ask whether Freud had tampered with the record to make himself appear a master detective and healer. Rice under­stands, however, [in zijn boek Freud's Russia - GdG] that that is exactly what Freud did. "(45)

"What necessarily falls beyond Rice’s purview is the relation of the Wolf Man case, with its fanatical misconstructions and its pathetic outcome, to Freud’s normal practice. For a concise sense of that relation, readers can consult an important 1991 article by Frank Sulloway [Reassessing Freud’s Case Histories - GdG] that reviews all of the major case histories and infers that they compose a uniform picture of forced interpretation, indifferent or negative therapeutic results, and an opportunistic approach to truth. We can go further and ask whether, strictly speaking, Freud can be said to have ever practiced psychoanalysis in the sense that he commended to others. Freud generally lacked the equanimity to act on his key methodological principle, that the patient’s free associations would lead of their own accord to the crucially repressed material. Some of his accounts and those of his expatients reveal that, when he was not filling the hour with opinionated chitchat, he sought to “nail” the client with hastily conceived interpretations which he then drove home unabatingly." [mijn nadruk] (48-49)

"Whether or not this is so, there can be no doubt that, even by the standards of 1901, Freud’s treatment of Bauer [de Dora-casus - GdG] constituted psychiatric malpractice."(50)

"Freuds personal quirks aside, Lakoff and Coyne argue, psychoanalysis as an institution — with its deliberate coldness, its cultivation of emotional regression, its depreciation of the patients self­ perceptions as inauthentic, its reckless dispensation of guilt, its historic view of womens moral inferiority and destined pas­sivity, and its elastic interpretative license, allowing the analyst to be “right every time” — seems ideally geared to assaulting the very selfhood of insecure female patients. " [mijn nadruk] (53)

"Lakoff and Coynes hesitation about taking too adversary a position toward Freud and psychoanalysis illustrates the continuing resilience of the Freud legend, which tends to snap back into shape at every point that is not under immediate pressure. To a lesser extent, even James Rice’s steadily lucid book on Freud and Russia exhibits the same phenomenon. And so, as we shall see, does another revisionist effort, John Kerr’s otherwise superb A Most Dangerous Method, All four authors could have profited from scanning still another recent book, Allen Esterson’s Seductive Mirage: An Exploration of the Work of Sigmund Freud. By concisely surveying the whole Freudian enterprise with a skeptical eye, Esterson dispels any impression that some parts of that enterprise have passed beyond controversy. " [mijn nadruk] (55)

"Estersons book, I should emphasize, is not a polemic written by a long-time foe of psychoanalysis. It is a piece of careful and sustained reasoning by a mathematician who happens to be offended by specious means of argumentation. And its eventual verdict — that every notion and practice peculiar to psychoanalysis is open to fundamental objection — rests on evidence that any reader can check by following up Estersons cited sources. Because people do have such a hard time perceiving the nakedness of Emperor Freud, Seductive Mirage will prove espe­cially illuminating for the attention it gives to Freuds seduc­tion theory and its sequel, the founding of psychoanalysis per se." [mijn nadruk] (56)

[Esterson laat zien dat Freud die verleidings- / incestverhalen in feite zelf construeerde vanuit zijn vooropgezette ideeën. Ik ben het eens met die kleine tussendoor constatering "Freud’s severe problem with reality testing" op p.59. Dat is de kern van de zaak.]

"Freud himself laid down the outlines of the seduction plots, which were then fleshed out from “clues” supplied by his bewildered and frightened patients, whose signs of distress he took to be proof that his constructions were correct."(59)

"Dissembling aside, it was no coincidence that the key amendment enabling psychoanalysis to begin its colorful history was one that placed Freud altogether beyond the reach of empirically based objections. Thenceforth, he and his suc­cessors could claim to be dealing with evidence that was undetectable by any means other than his own clinical technique — the same technique, as Esterson emphasizes, that had generated the false tales of seduction. Instead of spelling out that technique for the sake of the medically solicitous or the scientifically curious, Freud chose to keep it a mystery that he would unveil only to disciples whom he trusted to accept his word without cavil.

In a word, then, Freud had launched a pseudoscience — that is, a nominally scientific enterprise which is so faulty at the core that it cannot afford to submit its hypotheses for unsparing peer review by the wider community, but must instead resort to provisos that forestall any possibility of refu­tation. And, despite some well-intentioned efforts at reform, a pseudoscience is what psychoanalysis has remained." [mijn nadruk] (61)

Vervolgens de bespreking van John Kerr's A Most Dangerous Method: The Story of Jung, Freud, and Sabina Spielrein.

"For Kerr, the deeply antiscientific character of Freudianism — with its unformalized procedures, its gratuitous causal assertions, and its appeal to evidence consisting of unobservable buried wishes — left a rational void that could only be filled by exercises of personal power."(63)

"Running through this book, subtly but insistently, is a parallel between psychoanalysis and a modern totalitarian regime in which propaganda campaigns and heresy trials come to preempt free debate."(65)

Die onwetenschappelijke psychoanalyse heeft nog steeds invloed n veroorzaakt allerlei sociale schade.

"Most recently, moreover, even our criminal justice system has suffered episodes of delusion that would have been impossible without the prior diffusion of Freuds ideas. As I write, a number of parents and child-care providers are serving long prison terms, and others are awaiting trial, on the basis of therapeutically induced “memories” of child sexual abuse that never in fact occurred." [mijn nadruk] (71)

(75) Exchange

Een reeks brieven en Crews' antwoord met soms een verdergaande kritiek op allerlei begrippen in de psychoanalyse zoals overdracht en verdringing.

"In full-blown psychoanalytic theory, repression serves as a pseudo-explanation of a pseudo-phenomenon, the personality-forming renunciation by children of their primary desire to do away with one parent and copulate with the other. Well-designed experimental studies have not produced a shred of evidence for the existence of such a mechanism.

The concept of repression has nonetheless survived and prospered, thanks to a conjunction of several factors: the analytic fraternity’s century-long cover-up of Freud’s bungling in the birth hour of psychoanalysis; Freud’s public relations success in enlisting repression to “explain” dreams, jokes, and errors; the enticingness of the concept as a means of facilely negating manifest appearances; and a failure, by both analysts and the lay public, to appreciate the difference between isolated traumatic amnesia (a real but unusual occurrence) and Freudian repression, which entails all the epistemic liabilities of the Oedipus complex, the castration complex, and a demonstrably erroneous idea of the way human memories are typically made unavailable to consciousness.

This last point deserves emphasis because of its bearing on the urgent question of the moment, false memory syndrome. As Richard Ofshe and Ethan Watters have shown, unscrupulous or incompetent therapists who induce patients to “recall” fictitious molestations with hallucinatory vividness are employing a souped-up but still recognizably Freudian idea of repression." [mijn nadruk] (122-123)

Het gaat natuurlijk ook over de verleidingstheorie. Esperson schrijft in een brief als ondersteuning

"The parallels with the seduction theory discrepancy discussed above are too obvious to labor the point, but they indicate that, far from that discrepancy being innocuous, as Schimek would have us believe, it is an early example of the fact (repeatedly demonstrated in my book) that Freud s reporting of his clinical experiences is not to be trusted. " [mijn nadruk] (150)

Crews vult aan:

"The issue dodged in Holt’s letter is whether, as I claimed, free association is “inherently incapable of yielding knowledge about the determinants of dreams and symptoms” (italics added). Is there, even in principle, any trustworthy path of inference from a patient’s verbal associations to the causes of a given dream or symptom? My contention, cited but then ignored by Holt, is that you can’t get there from here. Let us review three well-established reasons why this is so. " [mijn nadruk] (151)

(157) The revenge of the repressed

"Throughout the past decade or so, a shock wave has been sweeping across North American psychotherapy, and in the process causing major repercussions within our families, courts, and hospitals. A single diagnosis for miscellaneous complaints — that of unconsciously repressed sexual abuse in childhood — has grown in this brief span from virtual nonexistence to epidemic frequency. As Mark Pendergrast shows in his recently published Victims of Memory if we put together the number of licensed American psychotherapists (roughly 255,000) with survey results about their beliefs and practices, it appears that well over 50,000 of them are now willing to help their clients realize that they must have endured early molestation."(159)

"As its main proponents insist, “recovered memory” is by now not just a diagnosis but a formidable sociopolitical movement.(...) The larger movement in question is, of course, womens liberation"(160)

[Dezelfde benadering binnen de #MeToo-beweging met dezelfde problemen.]

"Feminists were certainly warranted, in the 1970s and 1980s, in declaring that the sexual abuse of chil­dren was being scandalously underreported. If they now go on to claim that untold millions of victims, mostly female, have forgotten what was done to them, their claim cannot be discredited by the mere fact that it sprang from an activist commitment. Obviously, it needs to be assessed on independent grounds.

Yet such grounds are hard to come by. How can one count authentic cases of repressed memory when the very concept of repression stands in doubt? And what, for that matter, do the champions of recovered memory mean by repression? It is fruitless to press them very hard on this point, since most of them show an impatience with or outright ignorance of conceptual subtleties." [mijn nadruk] (161)

[Er wordt kritiekloos gegrepen naar het idee 'repressie' als een verdringing van echte gebeurtenissen. Zelfs Freud was nog minder kritiekloos.]

"By today, recovered memory has enlisted the enthusiasm of many psychotherapists who lack the explicit feminist agenda of Herman, Bass and Davis, and other advocates whose views we will examine later. But all parties do share the core tenet of repression — namely, that the mind can shield itself from ugly experiences, thoughts, or feelings by relegating them to a special “timeless” region where they indefinitely retain a symptom-producing virulence. Clinical experience, the therapists agree, has proven the cogency of this tenet in numberless successfully resolved cases. " [mijn nadruk] (163)

"Of course, repression cannot be experimentally disproved, either. Since the concept entails no agreed-upon behavioral markers, we are free to posit its operation whenever we please — just as we are free to invoke orgone energy or chakras or the life force. Indeed, as Elizabeth Loftus and Katherine Ketcham remark in their lively new book, The Myth of Repressed Memory, belief in repression has the same standing as belief in God. The idea may be true, but it is consistent with too many eventualities to be falsifiable — that is, amenable to scientific assessment.

It is possible, however, to mount experimental challenges to corollary tenets that are crucial to recovered memory therapy. That is just what Loftus, a highly regarded researcher and a professor of psychology at the University of Wash­ington, has done in her own experimental work — and that is also why she has been pilloried by the recovered memory movement as an enemy of incest survivors. The Myth of Repressed Memory recounts some of that vilification and tries to head off more of it by taking a conciliatory tone wherever possible. But there is simply nothing to negotiate over. The burden of Loftus’s argument is that memory does not function in anything like the way that writers such as Bass and Davis presuppose. " [mijn nadruk] (163-164)

"Once we have recognized that a memory can disappear because of factors other than repression, even the best anecdotal evidence for that mechanism loses its punch."(165)

"Once understood in its true lineaments, the Franklin/ Lipsker matter turns out to be highly typical of other recovered memory cases. There is, in the first place, the eerily dreamlike quality of the ‘ memories” themselves, whose float­ing perspective, blow-up details, and motivational anomalies point to the contribution of fantasy. There is the therapist’s reckless encouragement of the client to indulge her visions and worry “later ” — usually never — whether or not they are true, along with his “supportive” absence of concern to check the emerging allegations against available knowledge. There is the interpretation of the “survivor’s” moral frailties as further evidence that she is a “trauma victim.” There is also, we can infer, the therapist’s false promise that excavation of the repressed past will lead to psychic mending instead of to the actual, nearly inevitable, result — disorientation, panic, venge­ fulness, and the severing of family ties. And there is the flout­ing or overlooking of what is scientifically known about memory, leaving the field free for dubious theories exfoliating from the original dogma of repression."(178-179)

"Until the recovered memory movement got properly launched in the later 1980s, most Satanism charges were brought against child-care workers who were thought to have molested their little clients for the devils sake. In such prose­cutions, which continue today, a vengeful or mentally unhinged adult typically launches the accusations, which are immediately believed by police and social workers. These authorities then disconcert the toddlers with rectal and vagi­nal prodding, with invitations to act out naughtiness on “anatomically correct” dolls with bloated genitals, and, of course, with leading questions that persist until the child reverses an initial denial that anything happened and begins weaving the kind of tale that appears to be demanded." [mijn nadruk] (187)

"The criminal cases we have examined suffice to show that the “return of the repressed,” however bland its uses with­ in the amorphous aims of Freudian therapy, can turn noxious when it is considered by police, prosecutors, jurors, and even accused malefactors to be a source of unimpeachable truth."(189)

"Even today, our criminal justice system is just beginning to erect safeguards against the error that makes such outrages possible: the assumption that children are still reliable witnesses after exposure to their parents’ and inquisitors’ not-so-subtle hints that certain kinds of revelations are expected of them.

Not even that much progress, however, is being made with respect to curbing parallel travesties involving the therapeutically manufactured memories of adults who decide that they must have been molested in their own childhood. On the contrary: by extending their statutes of limitation to allow for thirty years and more of nonrecollection, our states have been codifying a pseudoscientific notion of repressed-yet-vividly-retrieved memory that can cause not merely injustice but enormous grief and havoc. Obviously, the impetus for such legislative backwardness is not coming from rep­ utable psychological research — which, as we have seen, offers no support to the concept of repression even in its mildest form. The momentum comes rather from a combination of broad popular belief and a relatively narrow but intense crusading fervor. " [mijn nadruk] (192)

"No single book, of course, can make a social movement. Although The Courage to Heal had already sold over three quarters of a million copies before its recent third edition appeared, and although its spinoff volumes constitute a small industry in their own right, Bass and Davis have been joined by a considerable number of other writers who share their slant. Moreover, the recovered memory business quickly outgrew the motives of its founders. By now, as the books by Pendergrast and by Richard Ofshe and Ethan Watters show, it has evolved into a highly lucrative enterprise not just of therapy and publishing but also of counseling, workshop hosting, custody litigation, criminal prosecution, forced hospitalization, and insurance and “victim compensation” claims. "(193-194)

Noot 1, p.194

"1. Other key movement documents include Renee Fredrickson, Repressed Memories: A Journey to Recovery from Sexual Abuse (Fireside/Parkside, 1992); E. Sue Blume, Secret Survivors: Uncovering Incest and Its Aftereffects in Women (Wiley, 1990); and Patricia Love, The Emotional Incest Syndrome: What To Do When a Parents Love Rules Your Life (Bantam, 1990). "

"From the standpoint of public health, what’s most disturbing here is a likely growth in the number of “false positives” — women who were never molested but who are enticed into believing that they were. The mavens of recovered memory concern themselves almost entirely with means of reinforcing incest suspicions, not with means of checking them against solid evidence pro or con. Their advice to friends and counselors of a woman who has been led to suspect early molestation is generally the same: never cast doubt on those suspicions. So, too, she herself is urged to stifle all doubts." [mijn nadruk] (195)

[Dat werkt dus op dezelfde manier in de huidige #MeToo-beweging.]

"The “false positives” problem has been exacerbated by the checklists of telltale symptoms that adorn the movements self-help manuals and advice columns."(196)

"The recovered memory movement’s feminist affinity should not lead anyone to suppose that its incitement to militant victimhood serves the best interests of women. It is precisely women who make up most of the movement’s casualties."(198)

"Although much of this woe is irreparable, there is no need for fatalism about its indefinite extension to new cases. On the contrary: the tide is already being turned. The current books that are hastening this shift of opinion follow upon influential exposes by such courageous journalists as Michael Morris, Debbie Nathan, Stephanie Salter, the late Darrell Sifford, and Bill Taylor, along with trenchant warnings by academics like Carol Tavris, Paul McHugh, and Robyn Dawes. And a number of other book-length critiques are just now arriving on the scene. Above all, steady progress in public enlightenment has been forged, over the past two and a half years, by the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, most of whose members are themselves slandered relatives of “survivors.”" [mijn nadruk] (199)

Noot 7, p.199

"7. See Michael D. Yapko, Suggestions of Abuse: True and False Memories of Childhood Sexual Trauma (Simon and Schuster, 1994); Hollida Wakefield and Ralph Underwager, Return of the Furies: An Investigation into Recovered Memory Therapy (Open Court, 1994); Claudette Wassil-Grimm, Diagnosis for Disaster: The Devastating Truth about False Memory Syndrome and Its Impact on Accusers and Families (Overlook, 1995); and Charles R. Kelley and Eric C. Kelley, Now I Remember: Recovered Memories of Sexual Abuse (K /R Publications, 1994). Other important recent books include Eleanor Goldstein and Kevin Farmer, Confabulations (SIRS Books, 1992) and True Stories of False Memories (SIRS Books, 1993)."

"Making Monsters is a book about iatrogenesis, or the molding of a patients illness by the incompetent doctor’s own ministrations. The authors carry this theme quite far, not just in explaining individual cases but also in challenging an entire disease entity linked to false memory cases, so-called multiple personality disorder (MPD)."(202)

"Despite their feminist affiliation, the champions of survivorship cheerfully acknowledge Sigmund Freud, the male chauvinist par excellence, as their chief intellectual and clini­cal forebear (see, e.g., Bass and Davis, pp. 479-480). They are quite justified in that opinion. Indeed, the ties between Freuds methods and theirs are more intricate and enveloping — and immeasurably more compromising to both parties — than they imagine. Precisely that kinship explains why other therapeutic descendants of Freudianism ought to be doing some soul-searching just now. " [mijn nadruk] (206)

"Critics of recovered memory have remarked on the movement’s puritanical alarmism, whereby a mere touch or look gets invested with traumatic consequences that supposedly remain virulent for thirty years and more.(...) The early Freud’s truest contemporary heirs are those adults who see toddlers playing doctor and immediately phone the police. " [mijn nadruk] (210)

"When all this is said, however, there remains an important core of shared assumptions between psychoanalysis and its hyperactive young successor. These are:

1. To become mentally healthy, we must vent our negative feelings and relive our most painful psychic experiences. The deeper we delve, and the harsher and more bitter the truths that we drag to the surface, the better off we will be.

2. Through the aid of an objective therapist in whom we invest authority, trust, and love, we can not only arrive at an accurate diagnosis of our mental problems but also retrieve the key elements of our mental history in substantially accurate form, uncontaminated by the therapist’s theoretical bias.

3. Our minds don’t simply keep functioning when consciousness is absent; they feature an unconscious, a unique agency possessing its own special memories, interests, and rules of operation.

4. Everything that we experience is preserved in either conscious or unconscious (repressed) memory; “even things that seem completely forgotten are present somehow and somewhere. . . ” (SE, 23:260).

5. The content of our repressions is preponderantly sexual in nature. Therefore, sexual experiences can be regarded as bearing a unique susceptibility to repression and can accordingly be considered the key determinants of psychic life.

6. The difficulty we meet in trying to recall our earliest years is attributable not, as neurologists believe, to the incomplete infantile development of our hippocampus and pre­ frontal cortex, but rather to extensive repression (see, e.g., SE, 7:174-176), which in some instances can be successfully lifted. Inability to recall any other part of our past may therefore be assigned to that same cause.

7. The repressed unconscious continually tyrannizes over us by intruding its recorded-but-not-recalled fantasies and traumas upon our efforts to live in the present. “A humiliation that was experienced thirty years ago acts exactly like a fresh one throughout the thirty years... ” (SE, 5:578).

8. Symptoms are “residues and mnemic symbols of par ticular (traumatic) experiences” (SE, 11:16), and “dreaming is another kind of remembering” (SE, 17:51). Consequently, a therapist’s methodologically informed study of symptoms and dreams can lead (through however many detours) to faithful knowledge of an originating trauma.

9. Challenging though it may be, this work of reconstruction is made easier by the existence of a universally distributed store of unconscious equations between certain symbols and their fixed sexual meanings.

10. As a result of all these considerations, the most pru­dent and efficient way to treat psychological problems is not to address the patient’s current situation, beliefs, and incapac­ities but to identify and remove the repressions that date from much earlier years.

All ten of these principles are, I believe, erroneous or extremely open to doubt. Yet they are so widely believed as to constitute what Richard Wollheim and Thomas Nagel, among others, regard as the psychological common sense of our era." [mijn nadruk] (216-218)

(225) Exchange

Opnieuw ingezonden brieven en Crews reactie daar op. Over The Courage to Heal zegt hij tegen de auteurs:

"In their letter, Ellen Bass and Laura Davis present themselves as innocents who are unaware of any social damage caused by The Courage to Heal. Their chapters, after all, consist mostly of tender advice and instructive stories and testimonials, all designed to comfort and guide victims of sexual molestation. Where, they want to know, is the harm in that?

The catch is that, by and large, the “survivors” to whom their book makes its strongest appeal are not women who have always remembered early sexual abuse. Most such women have long since forged their individual strategies for coping with painful memories and emotional wounds. By contrast, those who desperately cling to Bass and Daviss counsel are struggling to convince themselves or to stay convinced, in opposition to everything they have previously believed or recalled, that they were chronically raped in childhood, usually by their fathers and/or other related males. The active core of The Courage to Heal is precisely its “supportive” encour­agement of that belief. The authors exhortations to self-esteem are thus quixotically premised on a shattering of their readers’ prior sense of identity and trust. And the recommended path to healing is strewn with tragic confrontations and with the civil or criminal prosecution of heartbroken relatives. " [mijn nadruk] (262)

"The authors dispute my account of the “knowledge base” underpinning The Courage to Heal but they misrepresent both my argument and the known sources of their movement. In the early 1980s, both Bass and Judith Herman, who says that her intellectual home for the past two decades has been the Women’s Mental Health Collective in Somerville, Massachusetts, belonged to an informal Boston-area network of militant feminists who were gathering (always recalled) molestation stories from workshops, patient surveys, and support groups. By the mid-1980s, influenced in part by such writers as Alice Miller, Diana Russell, and Jeffrey Masson, those theorists of trauma were adding repression and dissociation into the mix, with the result that virtually any unhappy woman, with a little effort and assistance, could now lay claim to full membership in the corps of survivors. " [mijn nadruk] (264)

"One might say that the recovered memory movement was born when Herman, along with Bass and other anti-patriarchal activists, failed to greet such “new memories” with appropriate skepticism. "(265)

(285) Afterword - Confessions of a Freud basher

"As several correspondents [die op het artikel in de New York Review of Books reageerden - GdG] remarked in injured tones, the main burden of “The Unknown Freud” could have been predicted from several earlier writings of mine. In my essay “Analysis Terminable” of 1980, and in several following, I had made a similar two-pronged argument: that Freuds scientific and ethical standards were abysmally low and that his brain­ child was, and still is, a pseudoscience. Why, then, did this recent essay prove so upsetting?" [mijn nadruk] (288)

Hij beschrijft de van Freud zelf bekende ad hominem aanpak die veel correspondenten volgden.

"In rendering their diagnoses-at-a-distance, my critics appear to have been guided by a principle that struck them as too obviously warranted to bear articulating — namely, that “Freud bashing” is itself a sign of mental illness. They simply knew, after all, that Freud, despite some occasional missteps and out-of-date assumptions, had made fundamental discoveries and permanently revolutionized our conception of the mind." [mijn nadruk] (294)

"What passes today for Freud bashing is simply the long-postponed exposure of Freudian ideas to the same standards of noncon­tradiction, clarity, testability, cogency, and parsimonious explanatory power that prevail in empirical discourse at large. Step by step, we are learning that Freud has been the most overrat­ed figure in the entire history of science and medicine — one who wrought immense harm through the propagation of false etiologies, mistaken diagnoses, and fruitless lines of inquiry. Still, the legend dies hard, and those who challenge it continue to be greeted like rabid dogs." [mijn nadruk] (298-299)