[csa, incest, ra]
Because sexual abuse often takes place at night when the child is between sleep and waking consciousness, the masking of the perpetrator’s true identity is facilitated by the darkness as she becomes most vulnerable in her bed amidst the shapes and shadows which signal danger and intrusion. With the masking of the perpetrator’s identity, a distorted reality emerges out of the trauma of victimization, a distortion which, according to Karin Meiselman, contains “glimmerings of repressed material.” The form and imagery that these distortions take vary across survivors and are influenced by the sociocultural environment of the incestuous family. […] The psychiatrist Catherine Schieve has described this phenomenon as a “reversion to magic” among abused children whose belief in the supernatural is a creative and imaginative response to victimization.
It is significant to note that the demonization of the incest perpetrator, as described here by respondents, is reminiscent of descriptions of the devil found in the witchcraft confessions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Reading these confessions, one is reminded of the screen memories reported by the respondents. For example, H. R. Trever Rope discusses the confession of Francoise Fontaine, a young peasant girl in France who spoke of the devil entering her room at night, of his cold touch, and her own helplessness against his assaults. This confession, given voluntarily without threat or torture, contains many of the elements of spirituality, evil, fear, and violence that are found in the reports of contemporary survivors.
Janet Liebman Jacobs, Victimized Daughters: Incest and the Development of the Female Self
I get wary and uncomfortable about anything that uses the term ‘screen memories’ unquestioningly, but I am trying to countenance this, trying to work through something about metaphor and memory and how we can hold all these conflicting truths at once:
- this happens, this use of the imagination, this metaphor-as-making-meaning-out-of, and we must honor it, as this text somewhat does, as creative, as productive, as resilience and strength
- but sometimes, as the use of ‘screen memory’ implies, it becomes necessary to somehow move past the metaphor and acknowledge…the concealed reality?
- yet there is no way to divide metaphor from reality as if they had independent existence, the metaphor is the reality, there is no pure, untouched memory which can be peeled away
- and what you remember is your reality, if you remember magic, if you remember demons, that is what you experienced in that moment, you must contend with it as such
- and none of this makes room for perpetrator intent or belief, if they meant you to think it was magic, if they believed it to be magic themselves
- and there’s a basic assumption of atheism here, in the narrative of the religious interpretation as something that’s layered on after the fact, when, if these events are part of your network of belief, then that may be simply what happened, there may be not conflict between it and what we call fact
- often, this kind of rhetoric is a kind, convenient way to deny RA without seeming to deny other kinds of abuse; hence, skepticism, hence caution
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