Inconsistencies in the Information Supplied by the Incest Therapist

The incest therapist may not have invented or indoctrinated any of Elvira?s pseudo-memories. But at the very least she actively contributed to the consolidation of the pseudo-memories indoctrinated by Mollbeck.

For years, Steve Harvey, who visited Sweden in 1992, propagated that ritual and Satanist child murders were common in the United States, although the FBI has been unable to find one single example. The incest therapist testified in the final court of appeal that she had arranged five therapeutic sessions with Harvey because of the similarity between his ideas and Elvira's narratives. These sessions took place at the incest therapist's office. Harvey construed this similarity as proof that Elvira had talked about authentic occurrences.

A patent oddity is involved in this case. It is worth noticing that it was overlooked by all the judges, other jurists, police officers, psychiatrists and psychologists.

The incest therapist played a double game. The first meeting between Elvira and Harvey took place on 1992-09-23. On the one hand, it is impossible for the incest therapist to have arranged such a meetings, unless Elvira had told her about ritual murder of children before that date. On the other hand, Elvira did not mention these murders to the police until two months later, on 1992-11-22.

There is therefore strong reason to believe that Mollbeck and the therapist had agreed that Elvira should keep silent about such things in the courts. And their motive must have been to avoid the risk of Elvira's father being acquitted of the other two charges: sexual abuse and pimping.

He was actually convicted by the court of appeal on 1992-11-05. According to Swedish law he had thereafter exhausted any right to further appeal. Seventeen days later Elvira ceased to conceal the murders from the police.

Helena was tried in the court of appeal in April 1993. Even during this trial both Elvira herself, the prosecutor, and his witnesses kept their mouths shut about the child murders.

During this set of proceedings Elvira also kept quiet about the Lucia assault. And one reason must have been that Ingrid denied having participated in such an event.

When the case was re-opened and re-tried in 1994, the chairman of the court did not permit cross-examination of the incest therapist on any non-trivial topic; inter alia, whether she believed in Elvira's narratives. He may have realised that the therapist would otherwise have had much difficulty in explaining why she believed in the accusations about sexual abuse and pimping, but not in the accusations about the child murder. Most clinicians (including this incest therapist) boast of possessing a unique capacity for seeing through people. But it would have been a weakness if the incest therapist had stated, say, that she had merely accepted the results established by the police.

The police had thoroughly investigated the murder accusations and found them to be palpably false. The pimping accusations had been superficially investigated. Nevertheless, the outcome of this investigation would normally have been sufficient for withdrawing this charge. The sole reason why it was not withdrawn was the ongoing sex abuse craze. – It must also be added that the truth-value of the abuse accusations had not been investigated at all.

The incest therapist only made two clear statements: she never believed that Elvira herself had killed anyone. And it was not her task as a therapist to assess the truth-value of what her patients told her. – The chairman of the court strongly supported the latter statement.

Several aspects are important here, however. First, the incest therapist belonged to one of the psychodynamic schools. During most of the 20th century almost all (possibly literally all) psychodynamic therapists have agreed upon three premises:

		(a)The cause of psychic illness consists essentially in false beliefs entertained by the patient. (b)Therapy consists essentially in removing the patient's false beliefs and substituting them with other, true beliefs. (c)Correction of these false beliefs will necessarily produce symptom removal.

This calls for a passing remark. These three statements are not discrepant from Albert Ellis's rational-emotive therapy (although Ellis might disagree whether this is true of all illnesses, all symptoms, and absolute necessity). But the main difference is found in the kind of false beliefs suggested by Ellis and the psychoanalysts, respectively. One typical belief listed by Ellis is this. "The idea that it is a dire necessity for an adult to be loved or approved by everyone for everything he does – instead of his concentrating on his own self-respect, on winning approval for necessary purposes (such as job advancement), and of loving rather than being loved."

I am not going to discuss Ellis here. I shall merely mention that Rachman & Wilson (1980) noted, that the belief just quoted as well as the other beliefs listed by Ellis, are actually rare among neurotics. In addition, I myself have never encountered one single instance in the literature of a patient who entertained such beliefs – not even in Ellis's own writings.

What is crucial here is that the beliefs suggested by Ellis are much more "down-to-earth" than the beliefs applied by psychoanalysts.

As for the later: The Greek-Danish princess Marie Bonaparte never had an orgasm during coitus. Freud was her analyst, and he requested her to believe that the cause of this symptom was that she before the age of two had witnessed her wet nurse practicing fellatio on her father's illegitimate half-brother.

It can easily be seen from Freud?'s writings that he does little else than forcing his interpretations on his patients. The same feature is apparent in the writings of many of his followers.

Admittedly this feature is absent in some recent writings. But this cannot be taken as evidence that recent psychoanalysts have changed the nature of their treatment. In fact, Scharnberg (1993) devoted an entire chapter to showing that psychoanalytic writings have, during the past hundred years, become increasingly drained of empirical information. Hence, we can today hardly learn anything from them about what the patient does, and what the psychoanalyst does. There is little evidence of whether contemporary analysts work as Freud did in this respect, or if they are doing something quite different. This draining of information is now so extreme that it can only be intentional.

It is not difficult to understand the draining, because all concrete information has eventually turned out to be compromising for the authors.

Around the 1960s psychoanalysts faced the problem of convincing their sceptical colleagues of the truth of their interpretations. Some therapists chose to admit to their colleagues that their interpretations were not really true. But they did not admit the same thing to their patients, and they continued to force the same interpretations on them, just as if they still believed in the three statements listed above.

Recovered memory therapists faced a much greater challenge when the indoctrinated pseudo-memories were taken to court. Like their predecessors they persistently denied that they had influenced their patients. Many of them testified in the courts that the patients' accounts were true recollections of authentic events.

But in cases where some accusations were blatantly false, psychiatrists' and psychologists' testimonies often include the declaration that, because they are therapists it is not their task to assess the truth-value of their patient's narratives.

Therefore, the testimony of Elvira's incest therapist should come as no surprise.

Another declaration is likewise frequent among psychiatrists, both inside and outside the courts. "It is impossible to conduct psychotherapy with an alleged abuse victim without basing the treatment on the premise that the patient has really been sexually abused."

Both these declarations constitute a fundamental break with psychodynamic tradition. Freud (GW-XVI:94/SE-XXIII:250) wrote: "Finally we must not forget that the analytic relationship is based on a love of truth – this is, on a recognition of reality – and that it precludes any kind of sham or deceit."

Suppose I imagine that my neighbour every night sends magnetic waves through the wall, which throw me into a somnambular trance. And then he goes into my apartment and sleeps with my wife next to me. – It is easily seen to be nonsense that it would be impossible to give me any therapeutic help, unless the therapy was based on the premise that my imaginations were true.

What is true, is a much more modest statement. From the therapeutic point of view, correcting my fantasies may not be the task that should be undertaken first.

Note a further absurd consequence of the second declaration. If it was not the task of my therapist to assess the truth-value of my fantasy, then I could well be completely cured, even if I still had the same fantasies.

Preschool children as well as adults have become seriously ill from indoctrination. Maintaining that therapy is impossible unless their illness is consolidated is absurd. And maintaining that a responsible therapist should not help the patient to be free of the indoctrinated pseudo-memories, is equally absurd.

A quite different aspect cannot be stressed too much. Judges are no experts on psychotherapy. It is a frightening development if a judge imagines that he can know whether or not it is a part of a therapist's job to assess if a patient's alleged recollections are authentic or not.

Elvira told the social services that she had been pressed to tell narratives that were false. She insinuated the same to the police and even asked the interrogation officer for a small amount of support, so that she would have the courage to tell the truth. It is known that she became ill from the requests for pseudo-recollections. It is an odd view that any adequate therapy that could be given to this girl should involve exposing her to the same influence that made her ill.





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Uppdaterad: 2009-11-19

Yakida