INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY
FOR THE STUDY OF DISSOCIATION
Deutsche Sektion e.V.

zurückTeil 3

These days we receive all the important news on DID, trauma, and dissociation via the Internet, not from the German press. Thus it is small wonder I received comments on my own book from the United States and Australia before any article about it was published in Germany. I would like to use the example of my own experience to show how adversarial the German press is at the moment. After 4 years of intensive research, I had written the story of a German woman with DID. I "*accompanied"* her therapy, got to know her background and her family, gathered an enormous number of official documents, newspaper articles, complete school reports, private letters, photos, X-rays, and found a lot of corroborative evidence. Onno van der Hart knows both the therapist and her client. He mentions the book in his chapter "Ritual Abuse in Europe — a Clinician’s View" in The Dilemma of Ritual Abuse, edited by George A. Fraser, MD FRCP (C), (1997) as "the first in-depth German study of a DID patient with a background of severe home abuse, child prostitution, and SRA" (and heavy Nazi connections, I may add).

The young woman in her teens was a high achiever in sports, had several very opposite trainings (i.e., sisterhood in a Protestant nursing order, weaponry training in a private Nazi camp, kindergarten nurse, arrests for soliciting), and now with the help of her therapist has achieved a high level of internal communication. The police know about this case and in an official document describe her as credible. She is receiving a victims’ compensation pension, officially stating that she has a psychological disorder because she suffered extreme physical and sexual abuse in early childhood. This statement in an official document is quite remarkable in Germany.

It was hard work getting the book published at all; I had to change publishers. The original publisher produces the German version of Psychology Today, which for 2 years has been voicing FMSF opinions. In the summer of 1996, when the book was to be printed, they kept postponing. It turned out they had bought a large preprint of Ofshe’s book *Making Monsters* for Psychology Today and wanted him to have the first say — before I did, although I was their own author. Changing to a different publisher, a large German publisher of educational books, turned out to be the right move. They trusted the research and became so engaged in the project that a team of six people produced the 384 pages in 10 days, in hardcover, just to have it out at the Frankfurt book fair in October 1996. The book, Vater unser in der Hölle (Our Father Which Art in Hell, 1996) has been accepted well in professional and survivors’ circles.

Outlook: Persistence and Small Steps

Michaela and I are just now completing the first German study on SRA, or "dissociative patients who appear to have experienced severe, long-time organised criminal abuse with cult aspects". We have been very careful in evaluating our data. We have decided not to publish the research yet, partly because of the strong backlash in the press.

Here are some of the main data. We have detailed information about 305 cases in 61 cities in Germany. Among these are detailed documents about cases like these: A woman who had to undergo reconstructive surgery 20 times because of severe torture; several heavily dissociative convicted perpetrators of sexual crimes (they have no memories of the crimes and virtually no childhood memories). We got the data from clinics, psychiatrists, medical doctors, and social workers. Until now the study has been mentioned only at the German ISSD meeting and before a state commission dealing with cults and sects. There is a parliament-commission called "Sog. Sekten und Psychogruppen" (So-called Sects and Psychogroups). Its duty is to estimate the possible danger emanating from those groups, especially to young people. They came across my book and invited me to lecture about my findings. They take the problem quite seriously, especially as we in Germany seem to have a problem with small extreme right-wing groups or cults. Just now, for example, a trial is on its way against a member of a White Aryan Alliance who shot a policeman in what appeared to be really cold blood — no motive, no need, and no apparent emotion.

And this is where we are now: Trying to teach the police about dissociation. There have been some crimes, sexual and otherwise, in which the concept of dissociation would really be helpful in explaining and understanding.

Our Wish List

We are very grateful the ISSD exists and watch its progress with delight. Quite a few among the German members (e.g., Thorsten Becker, who for many years has been counseling more than 200 children and adolescents with dissociative disorders) would like to participate more, such as by joining an ISSD task force. We would like to invite ISSD colleagues from the United States to lecture in our yearly conferences. Financial help from the ISSD would make our task much easier.

We are going on the Internet with a German ISSD home page containing English and German articles, task force reports from several countries, announcements of congresses and workshops, and so forth. You can reach us and everybody mentioned above via our Web site: http://www.dissoc.de

As there is no sponsor and all work is done gratuitously, the idea arose whether the ISSD –which really means ourselves– could be our sponsor, with part of our own membership money. We would like to know how ISSD groups in other countries deal with that question. Because, as we all know, together we can and will make a difference!

References:

Fröhling, U. (1996). Vater unser in der Hölle (Our Father Which Art in Hell.) Seelze: Kallmeyersche Verlagsbuchhandlung.

Huber, M. (1995). Multiple Persönlichkeiten - Überlebende extremer Gewalt: Ein Handbuch. (Multiple Peronalities - Survivors of Extreme Abuse: A manual) Frankfurt: Fischer-Verlag.

Borch-Jacobsen, M. (1997). Sybil - The Making of a Disease: An Interview with Dr Herbert Spiegel. The New York Review of Books, 4/24/97, 60-41 (http://nybooks.com/nyrev)

Stanton, M. (1997, July-August). U-Turn on Memory-Lane. Columbia Review of Journalism. Available at http://www.cjr.org

van der Hart, O., Boon, S., & Heijtmajer Jansen, O. (1997). In G.A. Fraser (Ed.). The Dilemma of Ritual Abuse: Cautions and Guides for Therapists (pp. 137-164. Washington DC: American Psychiatric Press.