Eighth Theme: Cliché-Theories

The cliché theories found in the Elvira case belong to two categories. One category derives from certain feminist circles (which we must hope are not typical of feminism in general). The other category is primarily connected with recovered memory therapy.

From the very beginning in the 1890s all variants of psychodynamic therapy essentially consisted in influencing the patient. The two basic therapist behaviours were persuasive techniques, aimed at manipulating the patient to believe in the interpretations, and enraging techniques aimed at producing violent outbursts of impotent rage. The second category will be ignored here. However, the same therapists who have applied these two techniques, have always and forcefully asserted that they were careful never to influence the patient. It should therefore come as no surprise that Mollbeck also asserted that she never influenced Elvira.

From a scientific point of view it is not significant that the kind of sham recollections fabricated and indoctrinated by recovered memory therapists exclusively consisted of events of sexual and ritual abuse, while previous psychodynamic therapists would primarily indoctrinate beliefs in other kinds of childhood events (e.g., that the patient had witnessed parental coitus as an infant). The fundamental difference is that the earlier therapists were content, if the patient verbally agreed that he had experienced certain events, and that these events were the cause of his present ailments. Recovered memory therapists demand that the patient must recall these fictive experiences. And this is a radical innovation.

These new therapists use the Freudian terminology and obstinately claim that they merely lift repression, thereby enabling memories that have been buried in the patient's unconscious mind for years or decades to enter the patient's conscious mind.

Many therapists feel that they need to explain why the patient had not spoken much earlier. One standard explanation is that the victim in the beginning thought that her sexual relation with the perpetrator was a beautiful thing; and that she only later had understood that it was rape. As we might expect, this is exactly what Elvira said to her incest therapist in the session 1992-05-07.

The first police interrogation of Elvira was conducted only 9 days before this therapeutic session. During this interrogation Elvira did not recall one single assault, but she was certain that no assault had occurred during the last 5½ years. If this is true, we are entitled to obtain information about the time at which she thought that sex with her father was a beautiful thing. She can at the very most have been ten when she entertained this view.

She later said that she felt disgust when semen flowed in her mouth, and she felt pain in her rectum. These are not phenomena that are likely to produce feelings of beauty in a 10-year-old (an inconsistency overlooked by the judges).

Next we shall turn to the cliché theories entertained by certain feminists. An apt illustration is found in the police interrogation of Mollbeck 1992-06-24. She "passed on" a recent allegation by Elvira: her mother had forced her to lick the mother's genitals. Mollbeck also described Elvira's state of mind: Elvira had always shown strong emotions when she had told her recollections. But when she told about assaults carried out by her mother, she revealed "a degree of sadness" that Mollbeck had never seen previously. "It was as if her innermost door had been opened".

During the police interrogation 1992-08-24 Elvira repeated a number of times that she was more shocked by her mother's abuse. She also explained why. According to her firm conviction [at that time!], it was not highly surprising that fathers and men might abuse children. But she definitely believed that mothers could not do such things.

This theory has many times been stated in print by certain feminists. But it is unbelievable that a child aged 10 or less could develop such an idea on her own.

Many psychodynamic psychologists and psychiatrists perceive children as small-sized adults. Above, I referred to chapter 87 in Scharnberg (1996, II), where I investigated recurring features in indoctrinated narratives told by pre-school children. But the crucial causal factor is probably neither biological age nor psychic immaturity. It is that the fact that the event that was indoctrinated lies outside the victim's world of experience.

Scharnberg noted that "Indoctrinated allegations will very often contain anachronisms." There is an urgent need for a simple term for a fundamental concept. And for want of a better term, Scharnberg suggested the word "anachronism". Anachronisms comprise all kinds of adult thinking etc. in children. Due consideration must be taken of the fact that many children are much more rational than most people expect, and that some children are what is called – with an even more inappropriate term – "premature". But to qualify as an anachronism, a phenomenon must differ much more from children's "normal" reactions, than "pre-maturity" and similar phenomena would allow for. In a divorce and custody case the father was arrested when 5-year-old Synnöve said that she had fucked her 7-year-old brother, while daddy had fucked granny (Scharnberg, 1993, chapter 28).

It is a typical anachronism that Elvira, when she was ten and younger, thought that sex with daddy was beautiful. Another example is that sexual assaults by mothers are more painful than assaults by fathers, because you are more likely to expect evil acts to be perpetrated by men than by women.

Two further anachronisms are that Elvira thought that her mother was aware of the father's abuse; and that Elvira at the age of four or five had told her maternal grandmother about the mother's assaults – but it was a secret, and Elvira induced granny to promise never to tell it to anybody.

All these anachronisms were "passed on" to the police by Mollbeck.

But they are hardly compatible. The facts of the case are in better agreement with another pattern. When Mollbeck indoctrinated Elvira to say that her mother was aware of the father's abuse, it had not yet occurred to Mollbeck that the mother had performed sexual assaults, and neither that Elvira had told her granny.

Some cliché-theories will be postponed to the next chapter.







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Uppdaterad: 2009-11-19

Yakida