Victims of Memory
Incest Accusations and Shattered Lives
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- 65,00 kr
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- 65,00 kr
Utgivarens beskrivning
‘I doubt whether any book of greater importance will be published in 1997.’ Anthony Storr, The Times.
In March, 1995, a Winchester father is imprisoned for eight years on the uncorroborated oral evidence of his daughter, who had recovered memories of sexual abuse while in psychiatric care; a Yorkshire father is freed, seventeen months after his arrest, when the Prosecution finally admit that his 22-year-old’s allegations against him were entirely false.
Victims of Memory examines the whole terrifying phenomenon of repressed memories: the sudden invention/recollection in adulthood of appalling sexual abuse committed by parents and relatives long, long, before, memories that have lain unnoticed at the back of the victim’s mind for decades, only to be ‘recovered’ by an enterprising analyst. The book uses real cases and real lives, here, in America and in Australia, to present all sides of the story: accusers, the accused, the retractors and the analysts in their own words.
Reviews
‘A believable and damning indictment… At the end, even the obvious compromise position – that there may be some cases that are mistaken, but surely many have truth in them – is no longer tenable.’
Jerome Burne, Independent.
‘A sane, comprehensive, well-researched, calming investigation.’
Fay Weldon
About the author
Mark Pendergrast spent over two years writing and researching this book after suddenly being accused by and alienated from his two daughters in 1992. His 1993 history, For God, Country and Coca-Cola, was a Notable Book of the Year for the New York Times.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Pendergrast, an investigative journalist and author of the well-received For God, Country and Coca-Cola, here abandons any pretext of objectivity in an emotionally charged diatribe against the recovered memory movement. Accused of sexual abuse by one of his daughters on the basis of recovered memories, he describes his personal anguish and inability to find out any specifics of the allegations. Prime targets of his wrath are manipulative therapists who ``facilitate'' recovery of childhood memories of abuse, which they claim to be the cause for whatever mental illness their patients (usually, but not always, female) may suffer. Using hypnosis, psychotherapy, age regression, dream work, automatic writing, sodium Amytal, they guide troubled patients into remembering lurid scenes of sexual abuse (graphically described by Pendergrast), satanic rites and demonic possession. The unfortunate ``incest survivors'' usually cut off all contact with their families, becoming dependent on therapists for years. Pendergrast devotes four chapters to interviews he conducted, but without scientific control or scholarly basis, the narratives of therapists, survivors, the accused and retractors (those who have taken back their allegations) lack weight. Also detracting from his thesis are the repetitious accusations and titillating accounts of sexual abuse, which, after several hundred pages, seem obsessive and needlessly sensational. Pendergrast is a skilled journalist, but his book would have benefited greatly from substantive editing and a more scholarly approach to this controversial subject.
