Talking Point

Prior to the set up of our discussion forum on our website, we wanted to air an issue concerning a comment from a fellow of the Human Givens Institute who discussed a case history about a woman who lived a restricted life without many of her emotional needs being met. She described the client, “Her need to feel accepted fully in an intimate relationship was also not being met. Her difficult family relationships as a child and a history of repressed sexual abuse were a deeply held trauma.”

The question is, what does the therapist mean by ‘repressed sexual abuse’. Does she mean “forgotten”, “unknown” or “suppressed”? The dictionary gives a definition for the psychological use of “repressed” as ‘actively exclude (an unwelcome thought) from conscious awareness’. How is a memory actively excluded? Where does it go?

As background reading we include here a link to an article that appeared in the 1996 edition of the BFMS newsletter entitled 'Does the Unconscious Mind Really exist?' by E M Thornton.

We now have a Google Group up and running entitled False Memory Matters - click the link to request membership.

Responses (most current appears first)

BFMS recently received a response from the therapist in question. She is grateful for the point raised which, she says, is fully supported by the Human Givens approach. She told us that her original article was altered for the Human Givens Newsletter and the mistake could have happened at that stage. However, she agrees that she should have been more vigilant in her use of language and proof reading and assures us that she will be more observant in the future.

Why not ask the therapist what she means by 'repressed sexual abuse'? Has it been defined anywhere else in her assessment? Or is it so completely a 'human given' that to initiates it needs no definition? If that is so, all the more reason to ask those who use it what the term means. Is this a lazy use of in-group jargon? A modish argument stopper? Prick the bubble, if that is what it is. Also, I recognise that 'ancient wisdom' includes many truly valuable teachings but I fear that, popularised by 'New Age' theories, it may give rise to cults, with their potential for brainwashing. I see that 'ancient wisdom' is included in influences listed by the Human Givens Institute on its website. Cults resist objective challenge.

Norman Brand

BFMS Response: We have written to the therapist to ask what she means by 'repressed sexual abuse' - see above for her response.

The therapist’s description of her client’s problem raises more questions than answers. The therapist does not specifically use the word “memory” so it needs to be established whether the diagnosis is based on her recollections of abuse or on the therapist’s opinion (in the Freudian tradition) that this is the cause of her present problems.

It is difficult not to be sceptical of the therapist’s view that her client “lived a restricted life without many of her emotional needs being met” and that “her need to feel accepted fully in an intimate relationship was also not being met.” It seems that the therapist is focussing overly on the past, whatever the problems this may hold, thus perpetuating (and exacerbating) the client’s sense of emotional loss. It is likely that the phrase “repressed sexual abuse” (presumably “repressed memories of sexual abuse” is what the therapist has in mind) is a product of the therapist’s own wish-fulfilment; a desire to lead the client towards the belief that there are hidden memories of something awful in her childhood that, with the therapist’s help, can be remembered. Would CBT have been a better option?

I would certainly be extremely suspicious of any therapist who uses such terms. It worries me that this comes from a graduate of Human Givens. Before trying to answer the question, “what does the therapist mean by repressed sexual abuse” she (the therapist) should be asked the following questions:

Were the memories of abuse “always remembered” or forgotten and then “remembered”?
If they were forgotten and then remembered, how did this occur? Was it while undergoing psychotherapy or after reading a self-help book? If while undergoing psychotherapy, what was the form of therapy used?
At what age did the woman allege the abuse took place? Was it during the period of “infantile amnesia”?
Were the events remembered in outline only or did she remember them in considerable detail, including emotional reactions, conversations and location and description of the place?
Were the recollections “progressive”, that is did they start with a general feeling that something unpleasant happened, and this was then elaborated over a period of time? Was the starting point a discussion of the “difficult family relationships as a child” from which developed the “history of repressed sexual abuse?
Has the woman received a full medical, to eliminate as far as is possible, genetic and clinical causes? Did this include a check on the woman’s medical history, dating back to childhood? Is there evidence of a communications problem, such as Asperger’s syndrome?

William Burgoyne, author, Counselling or Quackery?

I think that the definition of "repressed memory" is clear enough in the context of how it is normally used. It refers to a theory promulgated by Freud in the late 19th century that human beings can and do "repress" memories of traumatic events because they are too painful for the conscious mind to deal with. These memories supposedly remain somewhere in the brain and can be brought back to consciousness years later by a proper trigger. There is no scientific basis for this theory. People do forget things and then recall them later sometimes, but there is no reason to call this process repression of memory. Indeed, the things we tend to remember most clearly are the best and the worst things that happen to us. From the standpoint of evolutionary survival, this makes some sense - we remember the good things so as to repeat them, and we remember the bad things so as to avoid them. I did find a few cases in which people actually did forget and then later recall incidents of childhood sexual abuse. But in most cases these were single incidents, or very limited in time, and they involved something like fondling, which may not have been perceived as very traumatic at the time - confusing, perhaps, but not so upsetting as to be recalled clearly. Other cases involve abuse that took place on the "cusp" of infantile amnesia, around the age of five. But I am mostly concerned with the theory of "massive repression," which theorizes that people can forgot prolonged traumatic abuse and then remember it later.

From what we know of human memory, prolonged traumatic abuse beyond the age of infantile amnesia is impossible to forget, barring organic brain damage.

Mark Pendergrast, author Victims of Memory

A couple of thoughts based on personal experience.

After my acquittal, I was shown a briefcase which I declared was not mine. Yet inside it were all my personal things in the manner I would have placed them had it been mine and when I visited someone who had known me before my imprisonment she immediately recognised the briefcase as one I had used before my imprisonment.

I later came across a number of handouts I had written in the months before my trial of which I had no memory.

It has gradually become clear to me that I have no memory of quite a few things that happened to me in the six months preceeding my trial. Being shown or finding things has not resulted in any memory recall. I still have no memory of the circumstances or dates when I did these things even though, for example, the computer shows when things were written.

After I was imprisoned I often found it difficult to remember things which would have been on the tip of my tongue earlier - telephone numbers, well-known references. Interestingly as the years went by I recalled many of these.

So I had two types of experiences - complete forgetting with no memory recall of things that happened in the months up to my trial even with concrete prompts to recall and temporary forgetting of things which I had learned much earlier. Each was associated with a different form of stress.

While in prison I encountered a lot of evidence of denial in the sense used in the loss and bereavement literature, that is to say, in the immediate aftermath of being confronted with an offence many offenders 'denied' the offence and only with time became able to talk about it. Those convicted of the most serious offences talked about periods of years - four being a common one - before they could acknowledge their offence; those convicted of lesser offences took correspondingly shorter periods to come to the point where they could acknowledge the offence. Interestingly victims often talk of similar periods before they can come to terms with the reality of the offence.

Though the loss and bereavement literature does not suggest that memory is involved, the phase of 'denial' or 'disbelief' leads people to say that things did not happen which did.

So I think we need to explore in more detail the impact of 'disbelief' on victims of stressful events.

What is common to my experience of 'memory loss' after my imprisonment, the 'denial' phase for offenders and the 'disbelief' phase for victims is that the memories are recovered or the reality acknowledged naturally.

The therapy offenders needed was to come to terms with the reality, in some cases so that they did not commit suicide, not to recover it.

Robert Shaw