Do you want to know what incest is? What it really is? No ...

that the results of many studies are suspect owing to the unreliability of statements by
offenders, many of whom lie. According to one study, a 38 percent dropout of
participants can be anticipated in any program. Of those who receive the full course of
treatment, 13 percent reoffend during the first year. After that, who knows?
The rare offender who voluntarily seeks help can get trapped in a bind. Therapists are
legally required to inform the local police if they hear about a specific child-abuse crime.
Massachusetts therapist Mike Lew cautions his clients at the outset that if they tell him
they have offended, he must report them. Even so, the authorities tend to look more
favorably on those who turn themselves in than on those who get caught or accused.
Ruth Mathews believes that women may be easier to rehabilitate than men because, as
noted, they may feel more empathy for their victims than male offenders do. But she
points out that her opinion is based on the women she sees, who have come voluntarily
for treatment. A sample of women in prison for sex crimes would probably yield very
different results. Child offenders who receive treatment, on the other hand, do much
better than adults. They need less long-term help and are less likely to re-offend.
Mental-health providers are key to spotting and treating offenders and their victims. But,
says psychologist Mary W. Armsworth, the Houston trauma specialist, "we don't train
mental-health providers properly." Incest victims who need psychiatric care are often
misdiagnosed. Victims of child sexual abuse who suffer symptoms of post-traumatic
stress disorder have been hospitalized for everything from manic depression to
schizophrenia and have been subjected to shock treatments, insulin shock, and other
inappropriate therapies.
Freud was Wrong
Misdiagnosis occurs because the therapist, psychiatrist, or doctor doesn't know what to
look for, doesn't consider childhood sexual abuse a possibility, or doesn't believe the
patient's account of what has occurred. For almost a century, Freud and his followers
have led us astray.
Vienna, Austria. April 21, 1896. Sigmund Freud stands before his colleagues at the
Society for Psychiatry and Neurology, reading his paper " The Aetiology of Hysteria. " He
informs his listeners that mental illness is the result of childhood sexual abuse. The
words he uses to describe the abuse are rape, assault, trauma, attack.
He has based his findings—which he has used to formulate what he terms the
seduction theory—on the testimony of his patients. These are both women and men
who have told him of their childhood abuse, often by their fathers. He has listened to
them, understood them, and believed them. He has reason to. As he has written to his
friend and colleague Wilhelm Fliess, "My own father was one of these perverts and is
responsible for the hysteria of my brother . . . and those of several younger sisters. "
But Freud is soon under attack by his colleagues, many of whom denounce his
argument. He retracts the seduction theory. The accounts of incest, he now says, were
fabricated by hysterical women who were not assaulted. Like Oedipus, he says, they
yearned for intercourse with one parent and wanted to murder the other, and these
yearnings produced such a profundity of guilt and conflict that they caused a lifetime of
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