Beyond Fear. Dorothy Rowe

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СКАЧАТЬ ideas and said that the prime cause of neurosis was the young child’s sexual fantasies directed at its parents. So attached did Freud become to this theory that he not only ignored actual sexual abuse but also the physical abuse his patients suffered in childhood.³⁴ When Jeffrey Masson, who had access to the Freud archives, wrote about Freud’s change of theory and described the reasons for this change as politic, not scientific,³⁵ all hell broke loose in the psychoanalytic community. Jeffrey Masson and all his works became anathema for all Freudian disciples. But what better way was there to protect abusive adults than to say that anyone who told of being abused in childhood was merely reporting childish fantasies?

      A number of members of the women’s liberation movement in the 1970s were very critical of psychoanalysis, saying that Freud had not understood women and consequently belittled them. Some women now felt strong enough to speak publicly about their experiences of sexual abuse in childhood, and a number of books were published in which the writers revealed their experiences and described the long-term effects of these experiences.³⁶ However, it was not until the late 1980s that the seriousness of sexual abuse began to be recognized by the mental health professions. Many mental health professionals were reluctant to change their theories about mental illness because to do so meant changing significant parts of their meaning structure, and this required courage. Other mental health professionals who were highly critical of the psychiatric system quickly saw how important it was to acknowledge the seriousness of the problem. Lucy Johnstone, in her excellent book Users and Abusers of Psychiatry, wrote:

      Surveys indicate that about one in eight women are victims of sexual abuse in childhood, with the figure rising to as much as 50 per cent in women who use psychiatric services. Among the recognised long-term consequences are eating disorders, substance abuse, self-harm, anxiety and depression, as well as more general difficulties with relationships, self-esteem and sexuality. Women with a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder often report a history of child sexual abuse as well.³⁷

      Therapists had to find a new way of working with clients who had been sexually abused. Some therapists in the USA developed the practice of advising a client who had been sexually abused by a parent to confront the offending parent. Therapists can argue the pros and cons of this method and never come to a conclusion, but the immediate effect of this method was that the client’s family was thrown into turmoil. Jack’s story, which I shall recount later on, tells of a family who accepted the truth of one such revelation. Other families did not, and ferocious battles in and out of the law courts followed. In the USA, where every problem in life is turned into a medical condition, False Memory Syndrome was discovered. Whole forests of trees were sacrificed as arguments raged between those who said that all accusations of sexual abuse were completely true and those who said that all accusations of sexual abuse were completely false. Quiet voices of reason were lost in the clamour.

      Eventually the dust settled and quiet voices of reason can now be heard saying that stories of sexual abuse in childhood may come from three sources:

      1 Where the person has always clearly remembered the events of sexual abuse.

      2 Where the person repressed memories of sexual abuse in childhood but certain events in later life triggered recall of these memories.

      3 Where the person had not been sexually abused by the parent but in other ways had been hurt by the parent, thus leading them to harbour a deep hatred and a need for revenge on the parent.

      With sources two and three it is safe to assume that the person has suffered such a threat to their sense of being a person that a desperate defence, that of massive repression or a passion for revenge, is seen as necessary. When the person clearly remembers the abuse it can be that as a child they found the abuse extremely threatening and shameful. As an adult the person still feels besmirched, guilty and worthless. Or it may be that the person as a child did not find the actions of the abusive adult personally threatening. The child may merely have been intrigued with what went on, in the way that children can be intrigued by strange or bizarre scenes which an adult might find unpleasant, even revolting. As an adult I do not want to see any living thing killed, but as a child I would not miss seeing my father dispatch a chicken with an axe and proceed to pluck and eviscerate it. Or it may be that, for the child, the abuse brings comfort and pleasure, as the story of Jack will show, but this reaction can have the unhappy outcome that the child identifies with the abuser and goes on to become an abuser himself. Often the damage that is done to a child comes not from the actual abuse but from the behaviour of adults when they discover the abuse. The child may discover that adults see him as damaged or dirty, or as being responsible for the abuse. I was not sexually abused as a child, but, when I was fourteen, a man inveigled me into witnessing him exposing himself. I was amazed and somewhat disconcerted, because in our prudish household penises were certainly not on view, but not for a moment did I consider telling my mother about this event. I knew full well that she would blame me for what had happened. I should not have been on my bicycle, on that road, coming straight home from a swim on a hot Saturday afternoon. If I were not such a bad child this event would not have happened.

      These three possible sources of the accounts of sexual abuse seem straightforward, but the stumbling block is a clear and agreed definition of sexual abuse. Some of the fathers accused of sexual abuse by their daughters insisted that they were lying and defined sexual abuse as sexual penetration. They would have agreed with Bill Clinton’s assertion that he did not have sex with Monica Lewinsky. However, all women know that there is more to sex than penetration. For a girl, a father’s lewd comments about her developing bosom or her sexual potential, or the father’s refusal to recognize the boundaries a girl creates to maintain her privacy, can seem to the girl as threatening and dangerous as a full sexual onslaught. A girl can clearly distinguish the warm, loving, sexual gaze of a man who accepts her as the person she is from the hard, sexual, threatening gaze of a man who sees her as an available sexual object. To women the first gaze is delightful; the second terrifying.

      It was this second kind of gaze on the part of the father of a fourteen-year-old girl which made me certain that there was something seriously amiss in the family of this girl, who had been brought halfway across Britain to be a research patient in the psychiatric unit where I was working. This happened thirty years ago, in the early 1970s, when psychiatrists were completely convinced that there were such things as mental illnesses, and that these illnesses had a physical cause. My psychiatrist colleagues were researching what was called the biological basis of mood change, and this young girl, Karen, was deemed to be a suitable patient for a physiological study.

      At that early stage in my career I was prepared to accept the psychiatric theories of mania and depression, and so I took part in the research by being a proper psychologist who administered tests. Karen seemed to exhibit only one mood, that of terrified shyness, but she submitted patiently to my demands and to those of the psychiatrists who were measuring certain physiological changes.

      Karen’s degree of shyness suggested that she was frightened to do anything in case she made a mistake and displeased someone. This came out clearly in my tests, during which, if she made a response at all, it was guarded and extremely limited to the point of seeming childish, far below the level of intellect and maturity she had shown before she became ill. However, as the weeks went by, she gradually relaxed, though she remained shy, and this relaxation was reflected in her test responses, which became more able, various and creative.

      There were a number of young patients in the unit, and I took it upon myself to try to make their time with us more interesting. The unit, an old house set in large grounds, was reasonably pleasant and comfortable, infinitely better than the traditional asylum where Karen had first been incarcerated, but there was little for patients to do except sit in the dayroom or carry out a few very simple tasks in occupational СКАЧАТЬ