MacKenzie Phillips' Lurid Confession Sets Her Free From Shame
SEXUAL HEALING
Revolting Yes, But MacKenzie Phillips' Lurid Confession Frees Her From Shame
A COLLECTIVE GAG GURGLED ACROSS THE WEB TODAY AS READERS REACTED to MacKenzie Phillips' revelation that she had sex for 10 years with her father, John Phillips of the Mamas & the Papas.
The news provoked widespread jeers and sneers.
"If she could keep it a secret for 30 years,'' someone named Jill wrote on EW.com, "she could keep it for another 30."
"Phillips had an alleged long-term consensual sexual relationship with her father AS AN ADULT, which makes her just as screwed up as he was,'' spewed someone writing as TK. "There is a vast difference between therapeutically airing harmful secrets versus indiscriminately vomiting this distastefulness into yet another "tell all" book.
But an empathetic Jeff commented, "How long would your personal problems last if you were molested by your own father? This latest problem seems to explain the others. Check to see if you left your humanity under the sofa, when you get home tonight."
Oprah took a lot of heat for airing the vile claims the same day the book Phillips' new book was released. But to Catholics, fans of Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment and psychologists, the public confession is more understandable.
The "need to reveal embarrassing and disturbing secrets might be expected to exist in direct proportion to the importance that the experience …
has for the speaker or writer's personality as a whole,'' wrote E.J. Brill in is 1975 book, The Psychology of Confession. "This need finds expression in two ways: either in personal confidences to a trusted friend or as a written description.
"In the latter case, the memories involved have perhaps left the writer no peace until he got them out of his system." He goes on to say that confesson's catharsis is "the genesis of all literary confessions since
Saint Augustine's Confessions.
MacKenzie's half sister Chynna reveals that is just how she found out about the allegations. In an online interview, she recalled her sister calling her in 1997 and saying, "'I don't know why, but I just really felt the need to call you and tell you something that I think you need to know. And she went on to tell me that she had had an incestuous relationship with our dad for about 10 years."
The revelation depressed her "but I knew it was true. I mean, who in their right mind would make such a claim if it wasn't true?"
I've seen the healing affects of confession while personally working at Oprah's talk shop. Guests who had just confessed to everything from poor judgment to felonies would be buoyant afterward. And while I agree there's something unseemly about going on national TV to confess "my husband's not my daddy's baby" to "I slept with my father on my wedding's eve," both shrinks and talk show producers can attest that confession is good for the soul.
In Crime and Punishment, when Raskolnikov confesses his crime to to Sofia, he cries out, "I murdered myself, not her! I crushed myself once for all, for ever." Through confession of terrible events, the guilty seek absolution.
As Brill wrote in his book, the shame of dark secrets "induce[s] a psychic pressure which can create worry and depression. The pressure, as if by its own forces, impels release ; the process may take the form of a powerful need to make disclosures, to speak openly about oppressive secrets."
So while we all gag at MacKenzie's news, know too that by revealing the ugly truth she sets herself free.
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