To the Editor:

Carol Tavris's essay "Beware the Incest-Survivor Machine" (Jan. 3) has just been brought to my attention. I feel it borders on a dangerous trend in psychology, blaming the victim -- something that harks back to the Freudian days when all stories of incest were sloughed off as patient fantasies.

I have had a great deal of experience with incest survivors. I therefore can cite specific human experiences, not statistical data. When a patient relives the original scene, it is precise in every detail, not fabricated. An incest story can be embellished when a patient recounts an early childhood event through the veil of the adult cortical mind. This is because the early trauma does not have full access to consciousness, so clearly the story must be added to for it to have coherence. When the patient is back in the grip of the child mind, where there is total access of an early event to consciousness, the memory is exact.

To say that the patient fabulates  (to make a fictional account or representation of something)  means that what she or he says is not to be taken at face value -- one step removed from the old Freudian position of not believing anything the patient said. If one could see the hundreds of hours of agony it takes to relive one early event of incest, one would know that no one could do that as a "pseudomemory." And why on earth would a patient want to fabricate such agony? Just to wallow in pain?

We have filmed and measured by sophisticated electronic instruments the reliving process, in which the body temperature can rise three or four degrees, in which the blood pressure and heart rate can double in a matter of minutes when the patient is deep into the memory. That is an unfakable experience. No one has to "focus" a patient on the abuse as the reason for present unhappiness. Not only is incest the reason for the unhappiness, it is also the most psychosis-producing of nearly all childhood traumas. Only academics could deny such a fact and do such an injustice to suffering human beings.

Unfortunately, incest is a major story, not one that a therapist decides is a major story. The victim does have to fix herself. That does not exclude also doing something about her present life. Let me ask you, Ms. Tavris: if "the origins of women's victimization" are not inside the woman, where are they? ARTHUR JANOV Venice, Calif.