The cardinal’s ordeal is not unique-nor is it limited to clergy. In recent years, at least 7,000 families have been torn apart by charges of sexual abuse, according to the False Memory Syndrome Foundation in Philadelphia. in most cases, the accusations are brought by adult daughters against fathers long after the alleged incest. Fully one quarter of the charges involve both parents. And in one recent survey nearly 20 percent of alleged victims claim abuse through satanic rituals. The charges are always shocking, but not always true. The memory foundation, which has led the charge against the so-called assisted-memory movement, contends that hypnosis and other psychotherapeutic techniques are being misused in order to “recover” memories of early-childhood sex abuse. Many psychiatrists and other mental-health practitioners believe that these memories are actually induced-innocently or by design-by the therapists themselves. And experts are alarmed by the ill-founded lawsuits and damaging publicity in the media that often follow. “Many of us believe we have another Salem-type witch-hunt situation,” says Dr. Paul McHugh, head of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. “The Bernardin case demonstrates that false charges are being generated out of invalid means.”
The case against Bernardin wobbled from the start. Cook, who has AIDS. initially accused another priest, Father Ellis Harsham, of sexually seducing him in the mid-’70s, when Cook was 17 and considering entering the priesthood in Cincinnati. (Harsham denies the charges; his civil trial opens in May.) Sometime later, Cook claimed to remember that Bernardin, who was then archbishop of Cincinnati, also seduced him. Exactly when or how these memories surfaced-or who prompted them-is still buried in sealed depositions. But in a letter two months before the lawsuit, attorney Stephen Rubino of Ventnor, N.J., a flamboyant veteran in pressing pedophilia charges against the clergy, acknowledged that he was “gravely concerned about Cook’s inability to remember the specifics of his visit when he was a junior in high school to the private quarters of Cardinal Bernardin,” where the alleged seduction took place.
In October, Cook went to Michele Moul, a Philadelphia therapist, for help relating to the stress of his AIDS infection. During hypnosis administered by Moul, Cook reportedly recalled being seduced by Bernardin. Rubino then allowed his client to air his accusations in an exclusive inter-view with CNN. The tape was held until the morning of Nov. 12, when Rubino filed his civil suit, then aired repeatedly as part of a promotion for a CNN special on priests and pedophilia, Bernardin immediately denied all charges.
Cook’s case depended heavily on memories “recovered” under hypnotism. But by last month, it was clear that Moul had none of the training or the credentials necessary for producing credible court evidence. Her master’s degree is in applied psychology earned on weekends from a school founded by a New Age guru, John-Roger, who claims to be the embodiment of a divine spirit. At the time she treated Cook, she had completed only three of the 20 hours required in a course on hypnotism. Apparently, she also had no idea that her session with Cook would be used as evidence in a lawsuit. During pretrial procedures, Cook was sent to a specialist in hypnotism, Cincinnati clinical psychologist William Wester II, who had treated Cook many years earlier, for a second opinion. That meeting persuaded Cook to drop the case.
Psychiatrists have long debated whether memories of infantile sexual abuse are real or, as Freud came to believe’ normal fantasies to be outgrown. In the past decade new attention to abuse was fueled by some feminists who worked hard to demonstrate that incest is more prevalent than previously supposed and that assisted memory recall is an essential tool in exposing perpetrators. Harvard University psychiatrist Judith Herman believes that society is going through a “messy” transition from denying incest and disbelieving victims to recognizing and punishing molesters. Until that social transition is complete, Herman expects a lot more “confusion” in both the therapeutic and the legal communities over reliable evidence. “Children are being abused at an alarming rate,” insists Lenore Terr, a San Francisco psychiatrist and author of a recent book on how children retrieve memories. “We can’t minimize that because we have a few adults saying they are being fed bad memories.” But feminists are now divided over the validity of assisted memory. “The polarization that has taken place within the women’s movement over this issue is disastrous,” says social psychologist Carol Tavris. Most worrisome, she says, is the extreme position she hears voiced by some partisans: “All that matters is your belief that you were molested as a young person. Don’t look for corroborating evidence. The accusation is enough.”
Critics do not deny that child abuse is a problem. What concerns them is the proliferation of unsubstantiated pseudomemories of childhood molestation. On the basis of a recent survey of more than 1,000 therapists, San Diego clinical psychologist Michael Yapko says he “became acutely aware of the degree to which they were misapplying hypnosis to recover memory, unaware that they were creating the very problem that they would then have to treat.” As a result, the patient finds herself in a double bind: if she doesn’t accept the diagnosis, she is in denial; if she does, she’s an abuse victim. “We have a large number of poorly trained, inept therapists who are propagating a cottage industry of discovering child abuse in their patients,” warns New York psychiatrist Herbert Spiegel. A careless therapist, or one with an agenda, can actually lead his tranced clients wherever he wants them to go, he believes. “And a good hypnotic subject will vomit up just what the therapist wants to hear.”
The American Psychological Association has created a task force to investigate the validity of recovered memories. The central problem is not hypnosis, which few therapists use. Rather, it is the use of suggestion in any form to implant false memories, Moreover, mental-health experts are passionately divided between those who think that repeated sexual abuse in children can never be fully repressed-producing nightmares, perhaps, but not amnesia-and those who think that repression is the only way that very young children can survive such abuse.
But there is little that any organization can do to stem the popular belief-fed by recovery groups, victimization books and talk shows that many people have abusive memories in need of recovery. TV comedienne Roseanne Arnold is a walking billboard for the current culture of abuse, charging in her new autobiography, “My Lives,” that she, her sister and her daughter were sexually molested by her father an accusation that her parents heatedly deny. “Therapists don’t even have to suggest child abuse to clients now,” says psychologist Ulrich Neisser of Emory University in Atlanta. “Patients come in the door saying, ‘I’m sure I was abused but I can’t remember. Can you help me?’” In such an atmosphere, the burden of proof, it almost seems, is on those who believe they have no bad memories to recover.
