This is in response to a recent article denying all aspects of Satanic Ritual Abuse.
Clinicians should be wary of being drawn into this debate. The real issue is the impact of past trauma into present experience. One should not be sidetracked by a debate about the ontological aspect of SRA and therefore miss the point about Dissociative Identity Disorder.
War veterans reliving PTSD flashbacks are not interrogated as to the accuracy of their traumatic memory, while victims of child abuse are met with scepticism and disbelief. The purpose of psychiatry is to treat patients, not to cross-examine them as if their treatment sessions are taking place in a court of law.
Patients traumatized in childhood decades ago, by powerful abusers and under inescapable circumstances, have difficulty reconstructing their experience from non-declarative memory. In converting that experience into words, it is understandable that they will express it as a memory of satanic ritual abuse. After all, if someone who is conventionally seen as your protector violates you in unspeakable ways, that is close enough to an archetypal satanic experience to be seen, at least, as metaphorically true. There may be no other words to describe this indescribable experience of betrayal. The false memory debate pre-supposes that there is only one “true” memory – one that can satisfy a judge and jury. Perhaps those who are fixated on denying SRA should watch Kurosawa’s Rashomon again.
To call it false memory because it might not survive a court challenge will prevent a psychiatrist from helping patients to heal. People abused in childhood are already convinced by their abusers that no one will believe them, no one will take them seriously. For a clinician to do the same thing is to reinforce that abusive imprint.
After years of scientific and liberal education, psychiatrists should understand the difference between factual and metaphorical accounts. The conversation between the fox and the crow in Aesop’s Fable surely did not take place an a historical provable event but it represents metaphorically a deep truth.
I would not dismiss the possibility of ritual abuse. The current unveiling, surely not complete yet, of international child pornography and child sex slave selling rings promoted throughout the Internet is not far removed from what a victim may say using language of SRA in an effort to communicate their experience.
