Extreme? Yes, but hardly unique. In recent years, law and psychotherapy have developed a potent symbiotic relationship based on the dynamics of “memory recovery”–a controversial combination of techniques by which patients suffering from depression are assisted in recalling repressed memories of childhood abuse. In some instances. therapists also encourage patients to sue their alleged abusers as a necessary resolution of the psychotherapeutic process. In others, psychologists justify legal action as a legitimate way for patients to obtain the funds to pay for continuing therapy. On the legal side, meanwhile, a new species of lawyer has emerged: the specialist in prosecuting sex abusers–clergy, parents and even grandparents are the usual targets–for crimes that were sometimes committed decades earlier. Already, about two dozen states have amended their statute-of-limitations laws to allow suits based on recovered memories to be filed up to six years after the repressed recollections surface.
Many defense lawyers are outraged by their colleagues’ cozy-relationship with psychotherapists. “You have a combination of two professions that are overpopulated and underregulated,” says Patrick Schiltz, a Minneapolis lawyer who has represented a dozen religious organizations in 350 sexual abuse cases. “One is the field of psychology, the other is the field of law.” Mark Chopko, general counsel for the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, is appalled by what he sees as a disturbing trend. Four years ago, he claims, “five out of six sex-abuse cases against Catholic priests involved real risks to real children. Today,” he says, “six cases out of seven are delayed discoveries.”
Lawyers who represent sex-abuse victims generally support memory recovery as a valid technique. Jeffrey Anderson, a St. Paul, Minn., lawyer whose firm specializes in clerical-abuse cases and has tripled in size over the last eight years, calls the therapy “a very legitimate psychological phenomenon.” He also considers it an essential aid in his legal crusade against churches that have protected abusive clergy for decades.
The odd thing is that the courtroom has now become a forum for debating the merits of a therapy that deeply divides mental-health experts. Few psychologists doubt that memories of childhood sex abuse can be repressed. But many do question both the techniques and the results of assisted memory recovery. Among the methods used by therapists are hypnosis, thiopental sodium (the so-called truth serum) and “guided imagery” to help patients recover painful episodes from the past. Critics point out that these stimulants render the patient open to suggestions from the therapist, anxious to please and willing to flesh out vague recollections with imaginary detail. “Memories recovered through any of these suggestive procedures create the very kinds of fictitious memories that become a problem,” says Dr. Michael Yapko, a psychologist and an expert on suggestive therapies. “In essence, therapists create the problem they have to treat.”
In one recent case, retired Roman Catholic Archbishop Gerald O’Keefe of Davenport, Iowa, was accused by two women of molesting them 30 years earlier. The plaintiffs’ “memories” had been recovered during therapy. But the case was dropped this year for lack of evidence, and now the therapist, Dr. Diane Humenansky, is herself a defendant in lawsuits brought by three other women with the same therapist. The charges, which she denies: medical malpractice, psychiatric negligence and fraud.
Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the legal-therapeutic connection is the damage it can do to the accused–who, after all, deserves the presumption of innocence. For example, Cardinal Joseph Bernardin of Chicago is currently defending himself against charges–which be flatly denies–that he sexually abused an adolescent seminarian 17 years ago. Plaintif Steven Cook, now 34 and dying of AIDS, had his memory therapeutically assisted just last October. Although experts like child psychiatrist Richard A. Gardner of Columbia University believe that “it’s extremely unlikely that abuses that occurred at 17 would only be remembered under therapy,” this is precisely the sort of issue the court must now decide. But Cook’s charges against Bernardin were aired in an exclusive interview with Cable News Network before the cardinal himself was even notified. For Cook, the public wounding of Bernardin may have been therapeutic, but truth and justice were hardly served.
