The Memory War

When Jennifer Freyd accused her father of sexual abuse, her parents set out to discredit her—creating a controversial school of psychology that has bolstered the defense of countless sex offenders.

- By Katie Heaney

The last time Jennifer Freyd saw her parents was in December 1990. At 33, Jennifer was a tenured professor of psychology at the University of Oregon and the mother of two young boys. Her folks, Peter and Pamela Freyd, were coming for a visit over Christmas. In years past, Jennifer’s sister, Gwen, would have been there too. But that fall, a few months before their parents were scheduled to arrive, Gwen had called Jennifer to say she wouldn’t becoming. Something, she said, was deeply wrong with their family. By then, Peter Freyd, a renowned mathematician, had been through rehab at Silver Hill, an elite psychiatric hospital in Connecticut favored by the famous and the wealthy. Still, Peter’s years of heavy drinking weighed especially on Gwen, who is six years younger than Jennifer. She had lived at home, without her sister, for the worst of it.

Jennifer tried to talk Gwen into coming, but she refused. It wasn’t that the sisters didn’t recall the same things; they agreed that their father’s behavior had been strange, even inappropriate, at times. But then Gwen said something that prompted a recontextualization in Jennifer’s mind— something that made her see her entire childhood in a new light. “You know our father was sexually abused, right?” Gwen asked her.

“That was like an earthquake for me,” Jennifer recalls 30 years later. “It was the first time those words were put to our family in any way.”