Freudian Slip
by Don Reynolds

Five years ago, I interviewed the director and clients of an incest survivors’ support agency for an article on recovered memory therapy. One woman who spoke was in her mid-twenties. Shortly after her first memories of sex abuse surfaced in therapy, she said, memories of satanic ritual abuse arose; she discovered through introspection that her parents were third-generation Satanists. I learned that an ancient international network of Satanists was to blame for her problems. Then the topic turned to multiple personality disorder. Each woman knew abuse survivors who had MPD. In fact, they told me, Satanists actually programmed personalities into their victims—murderous personalities that could be triggered with a word as the manchurian candidate was. A phone call can do it, the agency’s director told me.

These stories are extreme, as was the Cathleen Byers story. She tried to convince a jury that a complex mental dysfunction kicked in precisely when she acted wrongly—preventing her from realizing that her theft of $630,000 from OUR Credit Union was improper. Her claim was surprising not for its originality but for its audacity. She never denied taking the money, but insisted that the effects of child abuse damaged her health to the extent that her behavior was involuntary. She wanted to bathe in the same pool of belief that many others used to cleanse their guilt: Freudian psychotherapy.

Much to the chagrin of many critics, as the century progresses more of the human condition becomes defined as mental illness. In 1994, the American Psychiatric Association published DSM IV. A searing article in the February 1997 Harper’s asserts that DSM IV allows psychiatric professionals to mine normal human suffering for profit, even providing insurance billing codes. And as behaviors—from drinking in excess to stealing from an employer—become symptoms of psychological conditions, the need for professionals becomes constant. While most mental health workers sincerely seek to help their clients, critics of the field say it often creates more problems than it solves. And while most people who suffer from mental illnesses are in real pain, others fake problems to evade responsibility.

One well-known critic is Frederick Crews, a former English professor at the University of California at Berkeley. A self-proclaimed Freud basher, Crews argues that psychoanalytic theory is a superstition masquerading as an empirical discipline, and that the most extreme versions of recovered memory, Satanic abuse and MPD are the inevitable outcome of Freudian theory. “‘Multiple personality disorder,’ now officially renamed ‘dissociative identity disorder,’ is the strangest fruit of the recovered memory movement—the most extreme outcome, depending on one’s perspective, either of repeated and horrific childhood sexual abuse or of psychotherapeutic malpractice in the here and now,” he writes in The Memory Wars: Freud’s Legacy in Dispute.

Even the origins of the modern MPD movement are in question. Sybil, the 1973 book by journalist Flora Rheta Schreiber, brought MPD to America’s attention, but a doctor who knew Sybil during her treatment casts doubt on the diagnosis. “I told [Sybil’s therapist Cornelia] Wilbur and Schreiber that it would not be accurate to call Sybil a multiple personality,” Herbert Spiegel, M.D., a psychiatrist who taught at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, said in an interview recently published in the New York Review of Books. “Schreiber then got in a huff. ‘But if we don’t call it multiple personality, we don’t have a book! The publishers want it to be that, otherwise it won’t sell!’” Freud and his followers are under heavy fire these days. “The tide now seems to be turning against Freud,” writes professor R.C. Tallis in the British medical journal Lancet, “as the long overdue detailed and systematic appraisal of his contribution to our understanding of the psychobiology and organization of the human mind, of the place of reason and passion in human affairs, and of the aetiology and treatment of mental illnesses has finally been undertaken. The verdict has been uniformly negative: Freud as a scientist, metapsychologist, and diagnostician of society emerges as a quack.” Much of modern psychiatry doesn’t rely on Freud and takes care to avoid excesses, but a serious debate about Freud’s place in the science of the mind is underway. At issue is how we imagine ourselves and what standards of conduct we will accept.