Interlude: What I Learned From the Edenton “Little Rascals” Sex Abuse Trial

Dr. Shopper writes about his experience as a forensic psychiatric expert in the case of The State of North Carolina v. Robert F. Kelly, Jr. A giant in the field of psychoanalytically trained forensic experts, Dr. Shopper shares his shock primarily at the four mental health professionals who functioned as psychotherapists to the “traumatized” preschool children who attended the day-care center where alleged sexual abuse occurred at the hands of the husband of the day-care center owner. These psychotherapists planted created information into the psychotherapy sessions of the children and conducted the psychotherapy under the premise that these preschoolers had been sexually abused. They also, in their work with the parents of these preschoolers, stimulated parental regression, in that the parents' own sense of reality was suspended. Instead, the parents assumed the reality presented by the police interrogators and child therapists. When parents suspend their own reality testing, the parenting function suffers, since parents relinquish their own fantasy-reality distinctions and, as a result, cannot encourage the child to make his own reality–fantasy distinctions. Relying on a constructed reality by police officers and therapists allows for both children and parents to regress, and naively believe the distorted created reality of those taken in by mass hysteria. This process actually creates symptoms that did not previously exist. The ability to discriminate between these created symptoms and symptoms that honestly develop can be distinguished by the psychoanalytically trained expert.

Parental alienation, a process often seen in divorcing families, is similar to this, in that a child is encouraged, maybe even persuaded, to relinquish his own sense of reality, and adopt the “reality” of one parent and therefore turn against the other parent. Whether in a day-care center allegation of child abuse or a divorcing family, the vulnerable child is not treated as an