Discussion Group Report

"A rational society is one that values argument and considers virtually all points of view subject to debate. It promotes inquiry, experimentation, and empiricism, maintaining some faith in objectivity--which is not the same as certainty. The search for evidence is not the same as a search for indisputable proof. Rationalism is founded on skepticism--a commitment to testing all beliefs, including your own-- and a capacity to tolerate doubt. People hungry for absolutes are more likely to choose supernaturalism or unadulterated emotionalism over any system of free inquiry. What is revealed to you in a moment of oneness with your Higher Power is absolutely reliable. What you know 'in your heart' is rarely open to question. What you manage to figure out, given the limits of your knowledge and intelligence, is more tentative.

"That fundamental religious beliefs are not generally subject to debate is part of their charm, and part of the reason alliances of church and state are so alarming. Public officials who are absolutely certain of their own rectitude are less likely to tolerate criticism or dissent than officials who are only relatively sure that their beliefs are true, and just."

With this statement Wendy Kaminer opens her chapter, "The Therapeutic Assault on Reason and Rights" in her stimulating book, Sleeping with Extraterrestrials: The Rise of Irrationalism and Perils of Piety. She asks, if religion soothes people, protects them from debilitating fears of death, and enables them to endure, does it matter if its stories aren't true? To some extent we do judge religion, as we do therapy, by its effects. Major Western religious traditions are seen as essential sources of virtue, while the outré beliefs of small minority faiths are disparaged because of being associated with irritating behavior like chanting and panhandling, because of mental or emotional imbalance like the Heaven's Gate mass suicide, because they attack traditional family life by encouraging members to break away from their families, and because outsiders question the apparent contentment of members. Cults are presumed to threaten society and harm individuals, but mainstream religions are presumed to improve individuals and support the social order. How do we judge religious beliefs that allegedly help individuals, at the expense of families, communities. or culture?

Rationalism, she says, requires control of the emotions and temperamental biases that help shape belief, but not their elimination: you take your convictions seriously and act on them as if they were true. But you acknowledge the possibility of being wrong. A rational society tolerates and even encourages dissent and freedom of expression. It values argument over resolution.

Kaminer argues that the therapeutic culture shaped by the recovery movement is profoundly irrational. "It seeks not truth in debate but in revelation. It values bolstering people's self-esteem over challenging their ideas. It assesses proposed truths partly by the passion with which they are held and partly by their alleged therapeutic effect. True beliefs are those that help you 'heal.' "What is troubling about it is its celebration of victimization, hostility toward reason, and absurdly expansive notions of addiction and abuse. Countless thousands have testified it has saved them from the disease of codependency. One of its more destructive legacies has been the virtual sanctification of individual testimony of abuse. A decade ago a wave of accusations of incest supposedly experienced in childhood and recalled in adulthood, combined with bizarre tales of satanic ritual abuse and conspiracy theories, was in full swing in the United States. "Believe the women" and believe the children" were rallying cries for followers of recovery, including many feminists, who believed that incest and other forms of child abuse and family violence were practically ubiquitous. If you questioned a self-proclaimed victim, or tried to reason with her, and declined to believe her story was true, you were likely to be accused of collaborating in her abuse. Seventy percent of people surveyed by Redbook in 1994 believed in the existence of abusive satanic cults, even though police investigations and a government report found no evidence of the cults' existence. Many believed "the FBI and the police ignore evidence because they don't want to admit the cults exist."

"The recovery movement valorized paranoia," says Kaminer. The mere suspicion that your father had raped you provided entree into the community of survivors, where you were likely to be praised for your bravery in confronting your abuse, and cutting yourself off from family members who had conspired in it." That children routinely buried their worst memories of abuse, which they recovered years later in therapy, was not an established scientific fact. Even common sense might question such a belief. Repressed memory therapy became a highly profitable industry, costing insurance companies (and ultimately consumers) hundreds of millions of dollars. Publishers sold millions of books about recovered memory. People actually were imprisoned when a rash of these accusations hit the courts in the 1980's, only to have their convictions thrown out, in some cases only years later, when it was discovered that there was insufficient evidence for conviction and that a trial is primarily a search for facts, not idiosyncratic feeling realities. Multiple personality cases proliferated.

It is not Kaminer's purpose to minimize the problem of abuse but to point out the irrationalism of the recovered-memory movement. "It is not reason but uninformed emotionalism that exhorts us never to question the account of self-proclaimed victims and leads...survey respondents to believe stories about satanic cults," she says.

Kaminer posits the following as contributing factors in helping foster the recovery movement: 1. Supernaturalism, in the case of the notion of multiple personality disorder, which closely resembled possession and had strong links to spiritism and reincarnation. People who claim to have recovered memories of their past lives might feel inhabited by their own multiple prior selves. 2. Popular feminism. The belief that fathers routinely molested their daughters was the hysterical extension of feminism's critique of the patriarchal family. The assumption that mothers aided and abetted their daughters' abuse was based on the view of women as "enablers," or codependents. The original enablers were women married to alcoholic men, who helped maintain the fiction of normal family life. Adults, taught to label themselves '''adult children," were encouraged to base their identities in early experiences of victimization, at the hands of their parents. With the help of their therapists, women were triumphing over their mothers, giving birth to themselves, and sometimes their alters.

Kaminer's views are provocative, and like many views of human psychology and behavior are discussible and debatable.