Following my last blog Trauma – Psychotherapy and a ‘Healing Canopy’ I had some afterthoughts triggered by the rapidly unfolding, or exploding, Jimmy Savile scandal. Like many of my colleagues I struggle to comprehend how, considering the several hundred individuals that have come forward with allegations, this could have been kept quiet for so many decades. This whole unfolding of events does indeed feel like one huge collective afterthought.

Many are quick to react with cynicism that everyone is complaining now that the man is dead and can’t defend himself anymore, ‘jumping on the bandwagon’. Whilst I think that it is important to hold on to ‘innocent until proven guilty’, especially considering how the British media are already doing ‘their thing’, I think it is just as important to not become part of the dynamics of abuse. As mentioned in my previous blog – siding with the perpetrator is easy, since they only ask us one thing: to do nothing. The recent BBC Panorama programme gives reason to think that this is what happened when rumours and suspicions had started circulating around the third and fourth floor of BBC. Allegations were laughed off, by Savile, those around him, and BBC senior staff. Or they were simply not believed or generally ignored. In fact, Liz Dux, solicitor of the victims, states that many coming forward recently say that they did report incidents and that no action was taken. 

Siding with the victims, on the other hand, poses many very difficult challenges, and what abused individuals frequently face after a traumatic experience is a response of disbelief, ridicule and even blame by others. Savile’s alleged abusive behaviour during BBC employment would have started in the mid1960s, which means one has to take into consideration that the victims, children or teenagers at the time, were living in a society that had radically different attitudes towards rape and sexual abuse compared those tentatively developing in Western society today. Not only would they not have had a ‘healing canopy’ which would have provided support and a shared reality, it increasingly appears as if they were also dealing with a societal and institutional ‘silencing blanket’. The Panorama programme starts by stating that ‘The NHS, the Home Office, and local authorities may all face legal actions for failing to protect Savile’s many young victims.’ And the BBC specifically is being accused of having turned a blind eye for decades, and especially in recent months, with the controversy surrounding the shelving of the Newsnight programme exposing Savile’s behaviour and the BBC’s conduct. Renowned BBC journalist John Simpson calls it ‘the worst crisis that I can remember in my nearly 50 years at the BBC.’

In a Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee hearing, BBC Director-General George Enthwistle, admitted that ‘There is no question that what Jimmy Savile did and the way the BBC behaved in the years that the culture and practice of the BBC seems to allow Jimy Savile to do what he did, will raise questions of trust and reputation for us, and one can only look back with horror that his activities went on as long as they did undetected. This is a gravely serious matter. […] I am determined to get to the bottom of this and to put it right.’ There will be two separate reviews, one conducted by Dame Janet Smith looking at BBC culture, and Entwistle states that ‘there are great many people we need to talk to to find out whether anybody did know what was going on.’ The second investigation is led by Nick Pollard and will focus on the Newsnight controversy.

Karen Ward, interviewed in said Newsnight programme and the first to speak on camera about being abused by Savile, explains that when she heard that the programme was shelved she felt very hurt. Her statement exemplifies the fear and risk of humiliation an abuse victim might experience when considering speaking out about such a crime: ‘To me it just meant that yet again I hadn’t been believed. But I’ve spent my whole life not being believed. It was hurtful and it was difficult because I had been pushed so hard to do it when I didn’t want to. […] In the end I said ok. That’s what made me angry, the fact that I had gone through all that stress when I really had to concentrate on getting well and then they never used it, because someone higher up didn’t believe me.’

Some of the responses shown in BBC’s Panorama programme exemplify typical responses to abuse. Martin Young, reporter of BBC Nationwide, worked with Savile and says ‘I thought he was a pervert.’ When asked if he ever thought of reporting anything he replies ‘No, never even crossed my mind. And I take my share of the blame for that.’ Bob Langley, also of BBC Nationwide, remembers seeing some girls coming out of Savile's motor home: ‘They would have been 12 or 13, maybe 14, but certainly not 15. When they had left he indicated to me in a nudge nudge wink wink sort of way that he had just had sex with them. I didn’t believe him! Supposing I had gone to the police or the BBC what would have happened? The answer is nothing would have happened - he would have said it was a joke.’ 

BBC Radio DJ Paul Gambaccini states: ‘This horror was going on while the whole of society was watching. But because it was off the scale of everybody’s belief system, they didn’t really come to terms with it.’ When he was asked why he didn’t report his suspicions he replied: 'So what, I, a junior DJ am supposed to get up there and say my senior is a perve? They're going to laugh at me.’

Later in the Panorama programme it is reported that in 1973 BBC Radio controller Douglas Muggeridge ordered his press officer Rodney Collins to investigate if any of the rumours about Savile having sex with minors were true. Derek Chinnery was asked to confront Savile about the rumours, which he did, and Savile denied everything. Chinnery states ‘if the man’s denied it you don’t then go and hound him. There was no reason to do so at the time.’ This is another example of it being easier to side with the abuser rather than with the victim. It also shows how frequently, in sexual abuse cases, there seems to be more pressure on the victim to prove the abuse rather than on the perpetrator to prove his innocence.

There are also accusations that Savile chose especially vulnerable victims, and this again would tap into the dynamics that frequently occur after abuse – reportedly he ‘targeted’ girls from Home Office approved Duncroft School. It is stated that ‘all the girls at Duncroft were deemed emotionally disturbed’. The former Duncroft pupils who were interviewed for Panorama state that they knew very well at the time that even if they had had the courage to speak out about what they had to go through, because of their history and the stigma already attached to girls at that institution, they would not have been believed or even properly listened to.

Yesterday Savile’s family made a statement of how shocked they are by recent events, and that they are struggling with imagining that the Jimmy Savile they knew could ever have done such terrible things. This reminded me of another difficulty the BBC and people involved or in the know might have been faced with – Jimmy Savile represented something to the British people to the extreme: goodness. As Jim in Jim’ll Fix It he was the one who would make children’s dreams come true; as a Radio 1 DJ and as Top of the Pops presenter he enjoyed almost rock star celebrity status; and his charity work itself seems to have almost catapulted him to sainthood. If that hasn’t then the Catholic Church made sure he was catapulted close to it, when, in 1990, the same year as having been knighted by the Queen, Pope John Paul II honoured him with a papal knighthood, making him a Knight Commander of the Order of Saint Gregory the Great (KCSG). Which, given the Roman Catholic Church’s own troubled history with its dealings with sexual abuse by their own clergy is highly controversial in itself.

What seems to have occurred hand in hand is that the media and Savile co-created his image and persona, whilst the British public increasingly projected their hopes and fantasies of goodness on to his persona too. Both processes were probably increasing and enabling each other. This was something that quite possibly, consciously or unconsciously, played into the considerations of anyone who was thinking of reporting any of Savile’s questionable behaviour they might have seen or suspected. It wasn’t just one person’s life they were confronting, it would be a whole nation’s hopes, and people’s sense of their own goodness in a way too. This, of course, is by no means an excuse, but an attempt at understanding and explaining the situation.

The other issue that hasn’t really been addressed is that there seems to be an inherent conflict of interest in the BBC running a programme that essentially is a damning report of BBC procedure and conduct. It kind of makes sense that it was ITV who eventually ran the story.

When emotions run high things tend to get seen in extreme, quite split ways. The British media and the British public’s idealisation of Savile left little room for criticism. A figure of such perfection has to be kept perfect at all times, at all costs. Doubts were brushed off very quickly. This might explain why, as allegations finally started being publically voiced after the ITV programme, the situation switched rapidly into the other extreme – completely demonising him and judging him without waiting for the outcome of official enquiries and reports. All of a sudden people make statements such as ‘It’s obvious’, ‘I’ve known it all along’, and ‘He looks like a pervert anyway’. On one hand it seems implausible that this story has not exploded into the public sphere much earlier; on the other hand there are many possible explanations why, for so many decades this hasn’t surfaced. A tragic large-scale example of the dynamics of abuse? Let’s wait for the evidence.

Like so many psychological processes, the effect of trauma is characterised by dialectic tensions, of wanting to kill the pain with silence and denial, and of attempting to kill it by shouting it out from the top of one’s lungs and giving it a name. The attempt to make it go away by ignoring and burying it is rarely, if ever, successful - trauma usually finds its way out as a symptom, prolonging and repeating the horror in disguised form. Letting the unbearable unthinkable pain, shame, hopelessness and rage out can come at the cost of disintegration and retraumatisation. This dialectic tension emphasises the need for a combination of  an empathic response as well as putting emotions into words, and Klein (1987) emphasises the latter, putting the ‘talk’ back into talking therapies.

The nature of the psychosomatic symptom in a sense follows the pattern in which we try to deal with traumatic experiences – it screams for the pain to be recognised, trying to drag attention to the story and memory of an atrocity, while at the same time distracting from it, silencing its real origin and nature, and deflecting attention from that unspeakable experience. This leads to an oscillating between feeling numb and having traumatic and retraumatising flashbacks and dissociation. Memories and feelings about the traumatic event often are fragmented, incoherent or absent from consciousness altogether, being the result of defensive mechanisms humans can use to help them survive events that are overwhelmingly atrocious, physically and/or emotionally.

Some of the processes involved in dealing with trauma are denial, repression, and dissociation. These operate at the social as well as at the individual level, and the ways in which we experience, frame and tackle trauma is always closely linked to the social context. In Germany, for example, during and after the Holocaust the traumatic reality of the atrocities was frequently denied and repressed, and only after years and decades did the working through and rediscovery of ‘Forgotten History’ (Herman 1992) take place. In German the term for this kind of process is ‘Aufarbeiten’, which literally translates as ‘working up’ – thinking, feeling, remembering, in order to push the repressed traumatic material, memory and emotional fragments up from the scary depths up into consciousness. Implied in the literal English translation is that one gets ‘worked up’ in such a process, which brings me back to the dialectical tension – psychotherapy, especially working with trauma, is often experienced as an opening of a can of worms.

Without ‘Aufarbeitung’, however, developing a coherent narrative facilitating healing is not possible. Similarly to ‘good enough’ psychotherapy, the German school system provided a safe place in which pupils were taught about the Holocaust and encouraged to face the facts, with all their emotional impact, and process it together, under the pastoral guidance of a teacher. This frequently involved facilitating a re-experiencing of events by remembering, reading accounts and watching films, which frequently was retraumatising. It brought the events that collectively had been repressed into the depths of the German unconscious back to the surface, where for the first time atrocities to an incomprehensible scale could start to be processed. For that generation of Germans this involved experiences that have not been actively experienced but have been passed down as vague and diffuse secondary experience, which probably has a similar nature to primary traumatic experiences that have been distorted by dissociation and fragmentation.

There is a distinction between trauma caused by natural disasters or accidents, and trauma caused by human design. The former is easily met with sympathy and empathy, but in the latter the outsider is caught in the conflict between victim and perpetrator, and has to choose sides. Herman (1992) points out that it might seem easy to side with the perpetrator, who only asks us one thing: to do nothing. In contrast to this, the victim asks us to feel their pain, to act, engage, take sides, protect, remember, and risk becoming subject to attack, ridicule and shame as well.

The perpetrator does all he or she can to promote forgetting, by silencing, ridiculing, denying, rationalising, manipulating, attacking one’s credibility, and arguably worst of all, attacking one’s trust in oneself and one’s perception of, and relationship with, reality. An additional danger is that the perpetrator’s account in isolation from the wider community can seem very convincing and bullet-proof to a bystander. The victim’s account and experience become both invalid and invalidated, and unspeakable. To speak about it makes one vulnerable to even more stigma, shame, disbelief and ridicule.

To hold traumatic events in consciousness requires the weaving of what I call a ‘healing canopy’, (similar to Peter Berger’s (1967) concept of the ‘sacred canopy’), a social context and community that affirms and protects the victim coherently, and that weaves together the victim, witness and bystander in a common alliance, co-creating a coherent and shared sense of reality. It is so immensely important for recovery that the victim, witnesses, friends and family together knit what I call a ‘post-traumatic narrative’, eventually leading to a ‘healing canopy’, which provides respite and a secure base from which to gradually start engaging with life, the world and people again.

Going back to the history of psychoanalysis, Charcot laid the groundwork in the 19th century, and by 1890 Janet, Freud and Breuer agreed that the so-called hysterical symptoms they observed were the result of psychological trauma which has caused an alteration of consciousness, a state of dissociation. They discovered that psychosomatic symptoms disappeared when traumatic events were called back into consciousness, together with the accompanying intense feelings, in what they called a process of ‘abreaction’ or ‘catharsis’, and what Freud later termed psychoanalysis, (also termed ‘the talking cure’ by Breuer’s client Anna O), by following back ‘the thread of memory’.

Interestingly, there seems to be a typo on page 13 in Herman (1992) ‘Trauma and Recovery’, spelling ‘thread’ with a ‘t’ in the end, which says it all - a parapraxis symbolising the paradoxical tension between wanting to remember and to speak about it, but also wanting to employ all sorts of defenses to cut off the thread/threat of memory, because it is so intolerably threatening, frightening and painful. Freud followed the thread of memory back to sexuality as possible origin of hysterical symptoms, and frequently more specifically childhood sexual abuse.

The nature of disorders and symptoms is closely connected with the social context in which they appear – for example the oppression of women and hysteria, war and shell-shock/PTSD and ‘the combat neurosis of sex war’ (Herman 1992), in which women’s reality and existence in the private sphere was denied, which made them vulnerable to all sorts of sexual and domestic abuse, and simultaneously robbed them of the opportunity to speak out about it without shame and facing disbelief. There was no concept or terminology for the abuse they often were subject to, which left them unable to name and identify the wrong-doings in the first place. Neither was there a social framework which would have enabled the moral calibration of their experiences.

American feminist Betty Friedan called a woman’s situation ‘the problem without a name’ – I believe that one of the most damaging things after a traumatic event has occurred is the fact that abuse robs a woman (or any victim) of a voice, making him or her literally and metaphorically suffer in silence. The feminist movement created therapeutic self-help groups practicing ‘consciousness-raising’, which again reminds of the term ‘Aufarbeitung’. Their codes are similar to psychotherapeutic relationships, based on intimacy, confidentiality and honesty. This enabled women to overcome barriers of denial, secrecy, shame, guilt, denied experience, denied feelings and denied reality, (which had prevented them from naming their injuries), and enabled them, often for the first time in their lives and maybe even history as a whole, to find and use a voice. In these groups, frequently in contrast to the consulting rooms of their time, women were surrounded by supportive women who believed them when they were talking about being raped, often sharing that very experience. The existence of these groups also led to consciousness raising at the social level, and gradually also towards a change in legislation, as well as a change in attitudes within the mental health profession. In 1975, as a direct result of feminist pressure, a centre for the research of rape was established within the National Institute of Mental Health in the USA. For the first time women were seen as informants, not just subjects; their emotional experiences were honoured and validated. The results confirmed what Freud had initially established but then repudiated (maybe itself as an act of defensive denial of traumatic reality): sexual assaults against women and children were pervasive and endemic, at least in Western culture.

For the first time this allowed women to define sex against their will as rape and atrocity, and maybe for the first time allowed them to realise the traumatic impact these experiences have had on them. This led to the discovery that men might have been ‘using their genitalia as weapons’ (Herman 1992), whether they were suffering from ‘combat syndrome’ or not, and that the different kinds of trauma, including the newly termed ‘rape trauma syndrome’ and ‘battered woman syndrome’, were all closely intertwined, in a destructive, dirty ‘abusive canopy’, passed down from generation to generation. This canopy has also become soiled by the abuse and silent pain that has been swept under the carpet. It is the difficult and delicate task of the therapist to help the traumatised client unpick the fabric of this old, dirty and fragmented canopy or carpet with holes, following back both the thread and the threat of the trauma, and together weaving a ‘narrative canopy’ to facilitate healing.

Berger, P. (1967) The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion, Open Road Media

Berger, P., Luckmann, T. (1966) The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge, London: Penguin Books

Herman, J. L. (1992) Trauma and Recovery: From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, London: Pandora

Klein, J. (1987) Our Need for Others and its Roots in Infancy, London: Tavistock Publications