From "Banished Knowledge" pgs 74-75


HUMANITY'S FATEFUL SLEEP
THEORIES AS A PROTECTIVE SHIELD

". . . toilet training and to keep the memory repressed at all costs. Another law of life is that the idealization of the parents with the aid of fantasy and repression helps the child to survive; thus to attribute bad things to one's nearest and dearest would run counter to natural defenses and the law of life. It follows that a child will never invent traumas. On the contrary, to survive the child must resort to fantasy to make the pain bearable.

Thus, for example, sexually mistreated children often claim to have killed a baby, but because their stories cannot be substantiated they are called liars. If they come to court, all their statements can then be deemed invalid. It never occurs to the judges that these children are experiencing their mistreatment as a murder of the baby each of them had once been and that they are describing their own inner situation. The fantasy of the murdered baby is a way of expressing what really happened-a way that serves to mitigate the actual trauma. For it is easier to see oneself as a criminal than to know and feel that one was, and is, an innocent victim who must be prepared at all times for torture and persecution. Every patient clings to fantasies in which he sees himself in the active role so as to escape the pain of being defenseless and helpless. To achieve this he will accept guilt feelings, although they bind him to neurosis.

The remembered and documented facts often reveal only a small part of the fate a child has had to suffer. The larger part consists of the repressed experiences that cannot be told because they were never consciously experienced. And with therapists who shrink from the reality of child abuse, they will never be found. For a therapist to assert, "I always believe my patients," doesn't mean that he can't still fail to perceive their repression and denial. He cannot, of course, know more about his patient's concrete past than the patient is capable of
finding out himself. The patient must uncover the facts with the aid of his feelings; he must examine his discoveries, query his own statements, until he arrives at the certainty: Such and such actually happened. But the realm of the possible is infinite, and that is what the therapist must know. There is nothing that could not be inflicted on a child. This knowledge enables the therapist to accompany the patient on his journey, a journey that often leads through hells and torture chambers. These must be returned to, again and again, until every detail of the traumatic scene can be experienced, to allow the effect of the trauma to dissolve and the injury at last to heal.

Yet most of the therapists whom I knew as I searched for answers in my own life were totally ignorant of the existence of these torture chambers. They contented themselves with admitting that every childhood encompasses some difficult moments: separation from the parents, for instance, or the birth of younger siblings, or some other "unavoidable frustrations." When they can no longer classify the parents' behavior as unavoidable frustration, they speak of a "latent psychosis" in the mother or father, thus once again circumventing the problem of actual child abuse. It may very well be a case of psychotic behavior on the part of the parents, but the important thing to know is that such behavior continues to be ignored by society as long as it is visited on one's own children. This knowledge is imperative if one is truly to accompany and understand the patient, especially at those moments when he fights tooth and nail against the truth because it is so inconceivable, so at odds with life."