Memory on Trial

Try to Remember

Psychiatry's Clash Over Meaning, Memory, and Mind

by Paul R. McHugh

Dana Press, 300 pp., $25

In 1993, an elderly couple in Lowell, Massachusetts, were convicted of trapping their grandchildren in a cage in their basement, force-feeding them a murky green potion, and molesting them with a machine the size of a room. The accusation was brought by their daughter, who believed that she, too, had been abused--although she had no recollection of it until the age of 24, when her therapist interpreted a recurring nightmare as evidence of repressed trauma. On the basis of her testimony, and "information" gleaned from contorted questioning of the grandchildren, with no corroborating evidence, Ray and Shirley Souza were found guilty.

Was the courtroom haunted by the spirits of the witchcraft victims of nearby Salem, which had 19 people put to death and more than 150 imprisoned on the basis of "spectral evidence"--visitations, pains, and hauntings that only they could know?

This ghostly explanation of events is scarcely more implausible than the one put forward at the time: that the Souzas were two among thousands of perpetrators in a nationwide epidemic of child molestation and satanic ritual abuse; that the events of the abuse went unnoticed for decades because the victims totally repressed their experiences and no one else was clued in to what was going on; that to cope with the submerged trauma, people "dissociated" into multiple personalities, as distinct from one another as wholly separate individuals and often unaware of the others' existence (one woman counted a duck among her 120 "alters"); and that the whole sordid affair was finally brought to light by the efforts of psychotherapists, who expertly plumbed the depths by means of hypnosis, insisting that their patients "try to remember."