Leaving Psychiatry Chapter 5; Demonology

Chapter 5; Demonology. I Father Merrin

"At first art imitates life. Then life will imitate art. Then life will find its very existence from the arts"

Fyodor Dostoevsky

"Television has done much for psychiatry by spreading information about it, as well as contributing to the need for it"

Alfred Hitchcock

"Is the accuser always holy now? Were they born this morning as clean as God’s fingers? I’ll tell you what’s walking Salem—vengeance is walking Salem"

John Proctor to Hale (Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible”)

**Authors note. Please refers to the introduction for details of the purpose of this chapter series. Note especially this is a work of autoethnography, of reflections and ideas, not a work of “scientific” scholarship for which “references” are necessary.

December 2019

Act I; Multiplicity

From time to time the psychiatric guilds lament at how their profession is portrayed in cinema and popular culture. I say “lament” as these philosopher kings and queens do not like being portrayed as cruel and stupid, or just plain weird, and film never seems to administer ECT humanely under general anaesthesia. Just see how Ellen Burstyn’s character gets zapped in Aronofsky’s “Requiem for a Dream”. And that is made mot in the 50’s, but in the year 2000! Lamentations aside, never is the question turned on its head. Never is it posed if psychiatry itself is the virtual image. That is to say never is it asked if psychiatry is a portrayal of film and imitator of popular culture, if life imitates art.

This chapter will attempt a study of just that very question, and explore a couple of occasions when psychiatry, if not the product of the screen and novel, was at least in an uncritical symbiosis with it. The problem is in the realization that both the film crew and film goer can discern the difference between fantasy and reality when the curtain falls. But can psychiatry do the same? And what might these historical episodes reveal as to the personality of psychiatry and its guilds?

Our story begins with the psychological concept of dissociation, which is to say by way of rough definition a certain degree of consciousness and behaviour persists in the person which is split off from normal perception, memory consolidation or even a loss of continuance of personal identity. And so in war or rape one may dissociate from the body or surrounds so as to feel a sense of separation from the horror of the moment. In a limited sense this stepping back from, or outside of, the self can be said to mimic the cruder less sublime elements of so called out of body or near death experiences. These near death experiences tend to be hyperreal and often life changing, in another sense entirely different to dissociation. The quasi out of body experience is one kind of dissociation. We might also have dissociative fugue and dissociative amnesia, wherein the person claims to have “lost time” after having been otherwise observed going about this or that activity in their own identity or in a trance like state of automatic activity too complicated to be written off as epilepsy of the temporal lobe. Finally we have dissociative identity, in the latter twenty years of the twentieth century known as multiple personality disorder or MPD in which the person as we know them is replaced by another identity with a different name, personality and apparent stream of consciousness. It is optional if these second, third or nth personalities/identities can sit aside and observe the behaviour of the primary personality at the times when they do not hold the reins to the body and their voice remains unheard by the outside world. In this sense dissociative identity can be a parallel topography of consciousness with different identities sitting side by side, rather than the layered up down traditional formulations of seeing consciousness as unitary and conceptually placed above the primitive and alien unconscious or subconscious below.

Behaviour for which we might be inclined to use the descriptor “dissociation” has probably always been with us. Historically we might imagine the first therapist of multiple personality disorder to be the Christ, who cast the multiple identities of the demonic “legion” out of the Gerasene. Yours truly offers such a formulation only with tongue in cheek, without the hubris other authors have had when talking of the allegedly possessed of antiquity as obviously epileptic, obviously schizophrenic, obviously “x” or obviously “y” according to contemporary psychiatric diagnostic nonsense. To the extent Christ might have been an early psycho-therapist of a kind, it is to be noted that remission was achieved in a single session and in record time. Beat that Freud! Insomuch as the Gerasene patient was male, neither was Christ blatantly chauvinist in medicalizing female “hysteria” that has otherwise been the case in the current century and a half of psychiatry and manifest in female dominant MPD. Hence even the secular progressivist must bow their head whilst simultaneously groping to medicalize whatever Christ encountered that day.

Peri and post enlightenment, dissociation was of interest to European occultists and magnetists, such as the German Franz Anton Mesmer in his Dissertatio physico-medica de planetarum influxu of 1766. The connection between communing with the inner selves and others and communicating with the netherworld of the dead and familiar spirits never really went away. However, as a psychological theory with treatments, allegedly serious study only comes into its own in the post enlightenment.

Despite there being many a German or English interest in dissociation, in many ways post reign of terror France was the centre of it all. One early case of extreme dissociation was that of Antoine Despine (1777–1852) who employed “magnetic therapy” (what James Braid would later call hypnosis admixed with mineral waters, forced rest etcetera) on a young 11 yr old girl Estelle L’Hardy in 1836, the case published two years later in monograph form. Estelle did not quite manifest what we might call MPD, though had a severe dissociation with conversion disorder (she was paralysed without any organic explanation in an age when one had limited ability to organically explain anyway). Despines case is emblematic of what would be the attitude of the physician with respect to dissociative disorders in general, i.e. the want to believe there was not the slightest conscious design on the part of the patient, the want to believe they (the physician) could not be fooled. Much to the chagrin of Despines wife, he took Estelle into their home as an honorary member of the family, and described her thus

“because of her age and youthful frankness, she cannot be suspected of emotionality, conceit, or the wish to cause a sensation. Finally, her extreme innocence made her incapable of deliberate deception”

Ergo, children cannot lie, the corollary of which is that the wise physician cannot be deceived. Hubris may cometh before the fall, but only to those intelligent enough to see themselves stumble.

There were other French physicians who took an interest in dissociation. There was Moreau de Tours, who a decade after Despine and a century before the experimental work in the 1960’s studied drug induced dissociation, his drug of choice being hashish. There was also Étienne Eugène Azam, who in the 1958 case of Felida described the “doublement de la vie” of multiple personality, perhaps the earliest case.

But the master of dissociation was to be the alienist, neurologist extraordinaire Jean Martin Charcot at the Hospital de la Salpêtriere. Much has been written about Charcot, who by his own narcissism and others accounts likewise was considered the greatest physician of his age. Most would fawn over Charcot. Few if any would defy him in his own lifetime. One who was not backward in coming forward was the Swedish physician Axel Munthe. Though compassionate to the poor, Munthe was independently wealthy and aristocratic in nature. He was a polyglot and at home pretty much anywhere in Europe, whether in Capri where he often resided or his native Sweden where he was at one point the physician to the royal house. In short he didn’t need Charcot and his sideshow where young women would swoon or convulse and perform under the guise of “medical science” and its hypnotic discoveries of the deeper parts of the psyche. And so in his memoires “The Story of San Michele” Munthe writes of Charcots presentation of dissociated patients at his theatre of medical hypnosis

“…..these performances of the Salpêtriere before the public tout of Paris are nothing but an absurd farce, a hopeless muddle of truth and cheating. Some of these subjects were no doubt real somnambulists faithfully carrying out in a waking state the various suggestions made to them during sleep-post hypnotic suggestions. Many of them were frauds, knowing quite well what they were expected to do, delighted to perform their various tricks in public, cheating both doctors and audiences with the amazing cunning of their of their hysteriques…..”

Munthe knows this as he partook in the hypnotism itself, even on one occasion fighting fire with fire in hypnotizing a girl to attempt program her to escape Charcot’s clutches and return her to the nobler path of assisting her ailing and aging parents back on the farm in Normandy. What Munthe failed to reckon was that Charcot was the greater hypnotist, and more importantly the girl did not wish to relinquish her place as Tuesdays main event at the Hospital de la Salpêtriere. Munthes bitter lesson was to discover that a patient can like their mental illness and benefit from it, hence his conclusion as quoted above. Insomuch as some pathetic hypnotized young french hysterique nursing a top hat in her bosom like it is a baby or walking around on all fours thinking she is a dog are both a step beyond mere multiple personality, it would be a bold step for psychiatrists of today to dare claim they are less gullible than the gentlemen scientists and physicians who fathered their profession before it even had a name.

Neurologist and Sorbonne professor Pierre Janet was one disciple of Charcots, as was Blueler, Gilles de la Tourette, Babinski, an early Freud and most of the other founding fathers of neurology from which we have eponymous diseases, signs and syndromes today. Freud we will mention only in passing. For all his many faults he never embraced the notion of multiple personality disorder. Freud also swung on the pendulum from believing in neurosis and dissociation into multiplicity as a manifestation of bona fide childhood trauma only to later abandon it as a symptom of the fantasy incest within the unconscious. This was Freud’s mistake as he probably missed many a case of genuine sexual abuse in childhood. Notwithstanding the sceptical Freud probably believed in his own shift in view, it was a politically shrewd move. Both the neurological intelligentsia and his Bourgeoisie clientele would not wish to be told the daughters of their social class were neurotic messes on account of childhood sexual abuse. The truth is likely somewhere in between. Some were abused. Some were neurotic for other reasons.

So it was in France and not Vienna that MPD continued its nascent advance with Pierre Janet. Janets prize case was that of “Lucie”, a young woman who could be brought to dissociate by way of hypnosis, behaving in ways inexplicable to herself when not hypnotized. One day whilst hypnotized and dissociated, Lucie qua Lucie was engaged in conversation completely undistracted from what she was suggested to do, i.e. write on a piece of paper. One part of “her” was talking n theme x unbeknownst to that part of her writing of theme y. This is the automatic writing that fascinated neurologists and occultists alike. For if the message was from another part of the self, might it not be channelling a message from the other side of the life/death divide, a spirit from the place beyond death writing through Lucie? Janets own 1889 thesis “L'Automatisme psychologique” includes mention of possession, Spiritism etc

As the French philologist Taine writes

"two thoughts, two wills, two distinct actions, the one of which he is aware, the other of which he is not aware and which he ascribes to invisible beings."

Digressions to the spirit world aside, under Janet’s watchful eye Lucie was conversing and split off from “her” hand which was busily writing. Only on this occasion the letter shockingly came to be signed “Adrienne”. Just who, or what, was Adrienne? Adrienne, as would soon be discovered, was the woman who inhabited Lucie’s body when Lucie was not, so to speak, as a stream of consciousness and identity, “at home”. Janet hypothesised that Lucie had developed this proclivity to dissociate into Adrienne after the small ‘t” traumatic experience of being frightened by two pranksters when she was a small child, a far cry from childhood sexual abuse which many contemporary trauma theorists would assume occurred. Indeed, many contemporary therapists assume the sexual abuse must have occurred in all hysteriques, and so are forever suspicious against family members who may very well be innocent. In any case, Janet developed a complicated though coherent system of topography of consciousness and subconscious as static and dynamic layers of component parts in flux and where traumatic events could result in the perturbation we call dissociation, even onto multiple personality disorder. His was a contribution that printed deeper on the map of what would become psychiatry the connection between trauma and dissociation, of unity and multiplicity.

Outside of the society set that attended Charcot’s human carnival of hysteria and some of the scholarly work that trickled down from those hypnotists and occultists of the fin de siecle who were interested in that sort of thing, arguably the next major seed into multiplicity was sown with R.L. Stevenson’s medically titled 1886 novel. “The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde”. Many cinematic renditions have been made since, commencing almost as early as film in 1908 and ongoing to this day.

On the silver screen this was soon followed up by less science fiction fare, including the overtly MPD themed “The Case of Becky” which first played the stage in 1912 and adapted to film in 1915 and 1921. Hypnosis and childhood trauma were motifs of these and other films since, with Becky flipping between herself and the evil Dorothy. Elmer Clifton directed a variant of the Becky plot with “The Two Souled Woman” in 1918, with Priscilla Dean playing both Joy and her alter ego Edna.

It also not be lost on the reader that following Janet and Jekyll/Hyde (the novel) and before the first eruption of early films, MPD was imported into the USA by Morton Prince. Prince was himself a neurologist/early psychiatrist who and visiting scholar at the Carnival of Charcot. Later he would adopt the same Parisian showmanship in Boston, taking on the same ideology of Charcot after rejecting the rival cult of Freud. Prince realized what is still practiced today, i.e. that in order to retain the prestige and scientific legitimacy one needs publish in scholarly journals, even if the work is nonsense. So as to tailor the peer review to his liking he started his own journal, the Journal of Abnormal Psychology in 1906, this soon followed by the Harvard Dept of Psychology, also his creation. Both continue to this day.

Prince wrote the case of Christine Beauchamp written 1906 in “The Dissociation of a Personality”. Beauchamps real name was Clara Norton Fowler. She was a garden variety neurotic whose first manifestations of multiple personality emerged, not surprisingly, after hypnosis. Like the case of Eve (vide infra), Clara also had three distinct personalities, Clara being the first, Sally being born of hypnosis and later the saintly “B.I”. With shades of the Madonna and the whore complex, turns out Prince didn’t stray too far from Freud after all.

In the 1907 review of “The Dissociation of a Personality” in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases, Beauchamp/Fowler was described thus “an actual case of Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde”. This descriptor is perhaps a trivial flight into literary licence, though perhaps not. It is consonant with the thesis of the present chapter of life imitating art. The comparison misses a key fact that perhaps reveals something of the motive within the patient/therapist dyad. Hyde was not entirely the alternate personality of Jekyll (MPD) so much as Jekyll deliberately wanting to exercise his moral vices behind the disguise of Hyde’s face and brute strength (a choice to give in to evil and hide the choice behind a mask). Jekyll/Hyde and Beauchamp/Fowler open up a confused blurred space between creation and discovery. The narcissism and moral deflection is preserved with creator or discoverer alike. The one who would pretend to be a discoverer can say they did not create the evil alter. The patient likewise can say it is not I, but “she” or “he” or “they” who does wrong.

Later McDougall would write in the 1926 An Outline of Abnormal Psychology

“It has been suggested by many critics that, in the course of Prince's long and intimate dealings with the case, involving as it did the frequent use of hypnosis, both for exploratory and therapeutic purposes, he may have moulded the course of its development to a degree that cannot be determined. This possibility cannot be denied”

In the end Clara was unified and married one of Princes handsome assistants who was involved in her care.

Popular cultures next best exposure to MPD was to be the 1954 novel “The Birds Nest” by Shirley Jackson and the 1957 Richard Boone film adaptation “Lizzie” about the boring Elizabeth sharing the same body with the evil Lizzie. The plot was typical. Both novel and film were successful enough to further the idea of multiplicity trickling down into the American psyche. They were to beat “The Three Faces of Eve” to the market, yet not in becoming a household name. What is ominous in the tale of Lizzie is the treatment, which was to be seen as a success. In the end Elizabeth, Lizzie and whatever else indigenous to her psyche was killed off leaving only “Victoria”, the new creation of therapy. Like Adam naming the products of creation before the fall, the doctor has become the original perfect man, and stands aside God in their own private garden.

The Three Faces of Eve

Eve White (aka Christine Costner Sizemore in reality) was a troubled young woman, separated in a 6 year marriage and “forced” to live apart from her ostensibly dearly beloved 4 year old daughter. She lived with the maternal grandparents whilst Eve worked. According to some sources Eve had been diagnosed with “atypical schizophrenia” and fled from the psychiatrists who wished to give her electro-convulsive shock therapy. And who could blame her. I’d wager there was never any evidence of psychosis.

She soon after attended the primary psychiatrist (Corbett Thigpen) with blinding headaches, dissociative fugue (kind of a state of day walking without memory) and a grab bag of aches and pains. One day a letter arrived at the psychiatrist’s rooms, seemingly started by Eve White and ending with a different emotional tone and a different micrographic handwriting. Soon after during a subsequent psychotherapy session Eves body language and whole demeanour underwent a sudden and temporary metamorphosis. The demure submissive Eve White vanished, along with all her restrained repressed anger. The tacitly seductive devil may care Eve Black emerged. Though Thigpen and Cleckley did not formulate the case thus, the two Eves were also beautiful playing out of the Madonna whore complex, not in the mind of her husband or men in general but in the life of the Eves themselves. That said, one can always speculate on what was projected out from the therapists from their own libido into their suggestive and suggestable patient. Freud would have preferred analyse the psychiatrists than Eve I’d venture to guess. The therapeutic journey as documented by Corbett Thigpen and Hervey Cleckley seems to be little more than exploration and hypnosis, in time effecting a much easier calling out of the alters desired at the time, in this sense adding to the instability of her psyche. As the months progressed in some ways the two Eves deteriorated until one day when a new personality “Jane” emerged disorientated and bewildered into the light of the consultancy room, a birth of a newborn adult. Jane was neither Eve W or Eve B, nor a mixture of the two. By the authors own admission, Jane might well have been a partial iatrogenic product, though they consider themselves “more catalytic than causal”. This is a most interesting metaphor given that in chemistry some reactions will realistically never occur without the presence of a catalyst. And so what is causal here is a matter of semantics, as is the trap to admit what is necessary whilst retaining an innocent distance if one can.

It is worth pointing out at this juncture a deeply moral and ethical conundrum which I have almost never heard raised by any of those who believe in multiple personality disorder and its treatment. Eve White was the patient who first presented seeking help. She was the one who was married, had a child and was the embodied identity known to the community around her. Yet Eve Black claimed to have always been there, with a continuity of historical narrative going back to childhood. Additionally, Eve White qua a stream of conscious identity, vanished into amnestic blackness when Eve Black ascended to take control of the body, whilst Eve Black retained a stream of consciousness at all times, even when just observing from the Cartesian depths what Eve White was doing with her body that they shared. Eve Black was often in control, and could even be the architect of Eve Whites amnesia when the latter held the reigns of consciousness. The pair of psychaitrists commissioned an outsourced psychologist to write a report. He noted that Eve Black was the maiden name of Eve White, and so could be formulated to being a regression of the same Eve, at an earlier time in her adult development. Yet why might the psychologist whom Thigpen and Cleckley consulted call Eve Black the secondary personality? This is all the more the case as Eve Black’s consciousness and memory was an alternate personality that by all accounts emerged at a young age. Eve Black was the original owner of the property.

Accordingly, one can ask themselves who was the real Eve? Who was the bona fide owner over the body whose passport, if she had a passport, might have read “Eve Black” before marriage and “Eve White” after? But that devilish question we will dispense with, for the simple reason is that it is trivial compared to the next. The deeper, darker and much more disturbing question is this? If the deceptively named therapeutic goal of “integration” is successful, this involves the annihilation of all alternate identities but one. For the true believer in multiple personality disorder, these identities all have the phenomenological components that the therapist themselves enjoys. They are living, breathing, embodied persons with emotions, thoughts and memories. These are not identities defined according to a priori qualifiers of subservience or supervenience. No, in MPD circles these are overwhelmingly termed alternate personalities or identities, even if the primary alter is called a host, a misplaced metaphor from the world or infectious diseases and demonology. For the true believer, nominalism does not save us from the essentialism revealed by the encounter with these identities, each who are other persons in the fullest sense. And psychologists and psychiatrists are terribly confused on the basic metaphysical distinctions that the terms personality and identity provoke. One can have a fragmented personality and a unified identity. All over the land one might find in the same person and same identity the lady of the women’s church group and the whore of the bedroom, the extrovert amongst friends and the introvert amongst strangers, the man of impeccable character to the town and the vicious wife beater at home whilst all the while maintaining the same unbroken stream of waking consciousness and awareness of who “I” am. But Eve W, Eve B and Jane were three different persons sharing the same body. And so in their bid to integrate via annihilating one or more alters, there is but one logical conclusion and I mean this in utmost seriousness. Every psychiatrist who believes in MPD is, in the court of their own metaphysics, a cold blooded serial killer, a bringing to an end the life of a person. Even Thigpen and Cleckley, the only authors I have ever known to have scanned the outskirts of such a moral problem as this in understated utilitarian style, were to skirt it only shallowly and to have taken on themselves the assumed mantle of judge, jury and executioner.

In the end their answer that Eve Black would be the better one to die in the gallows of psychotherapy, and like the fictional doctor in “The Birds Nest” they favoured the survival of their own “catalyzed” creation Jane as she had greater capacity to parent and flourish despite Jane being a 4 month old adult (if that makes any sense as she was born from hypnosis 4 month prior). Jane herself pondered making the self-sacrifice after bearing witness to Eve White one day allegedly saving a child from being struck by a car. But the two psychiatrists who were judge and jury became shy and cowardly at the prospect of playing executioner and working towards the annihilation of Eve Black. They speculated that another ought to do that. Their deference was that they knew her as a significant other in their own lives. This is of course to imply a moral logic that Judas and Pilate can both wash their hands in the same bowl as they did not personally drive in the nails. The psychiatrists were able to achieve this distancing from the gravitas of their own conspiracy by concluding also that these were not three separate people, this being incoherent to what they otherwise claimed. Death would not be death they thought. And why? The eyes would stay open they said, the heart would still beat and whatever is unified come the end of the day is the person, with Eve Black merely a personality with the person. Would they not be terrified at their own interior world dying if another’s were to replace it as owner of their own bodies? In this terribly obvious missing of the point, were they merely taking leave of their intellectual faculties? I’d speculate not as these two men write and think as those capable of writing and thinking with quality and adequate self-reflection, a throw-back to times when physicians did not abdicate their intellect to be mere vessels of what a guild or guideline or precooked “evidence” may tell them. No I’d do them the honour at least of speculating that Thigpen and Cleckley were grappling with something unfamiliar and caught in the moment of being out of their philosophical depth. That’s the charitable conclusion. Another is that consciously or unconsciously they knew it was all a charade. Even Christ in casting out the multiples that were the “legion” did not annihilate them, perhaps leaving them to roam the world until that furthest eschatological horizon when even the demon will be reconciled with God. Does not even Eve Black deserve the same right to life as Eve White who in turn deserves the same right to life as Jane?

Thankfully for myself I never been placed upon the horns of the same moral dilemma, for I have only ever encountered two patients who came close to being as convincing as Eve arguably was. On both occasions it was clear that on some level of their consciousness the primary personality gave themselves over the secondary as a deliberate creation of the first. In the sense that they are giving themselves over to a creation that is their own, the alter is a part of themselves, a choice and mask that is never far from the face. In the sense to which they choose to give themselves over, they retain responsibility in the same way that a drug user is culpable for crimes committed after they give themselves over to the drug. Like Munthe, I consider the whole MPD idea a farce. The therapist must treat the hysteric as an adult and refuse to talk to alters. That’s the only acceptable contract and move towards recovery.

To Thigpen and Cleckleys credit, after Eve they kept their wits and did not make of their career ever expansive discoveries of multiples in other women. In their 1984 retrospective they look back to having only ever had the one case that fitted the multiple personality disorder diagnosis apart from the index case that was Eve. This is quite an admission as one would expect the two psychiatrists to have become the mecca for multiples. Indeed, this was precisely what occurred in being referred literally hundreds of patients. They lament at persons successfully using multiple personality disorder as an insanity defence for rape/murder charges and wisely advise thus

“The other cases manifested either pseudo- or quasi-dissociative symptoms related to dissatisfaction with self-identity or hysterical acting out for secondary gain. One particular form of secondary gain, namely, avoiding responsibility for certain actions, was evident in a recent legal case where the person was diagnosed as having the disorder and successfully pled not guilty by reason of insanity. We urge that a diagnosis of multiple personality not be used in such a manner and recommend that therapists consider the hysterical basis of the symptoms, as well as the adaptive dynamics of personality before diagnosing someone as having the disorder. If such factors are considered, the incidence of the disorder will be found to be far less than the “epidemic” recently claimed”

What Thigpen and Cleckley do not state in their brief retrospective was another factor that might have had occasion to given them a jaundiced eye, and that is what happened to Eve herself (i.e. the real person that was Christine Costner Sizemore).

Soon after the 1954 paper was published in a scholarly journal, the case was adapted with a certain level of artistic licence and released in circulation the same year as a semi fiction novel “The Three Faces of Eve”, and soon after that in 1957 a much celebrated film of the same name. Given the chronology of events, one need not be a cynic to see that things were happening with such apace that almost certainly from the beginning the plan was to convert curiosity and psychological science into capital and cold hard cash. The book sold handsomely (somewhere in excess of two million copies) and the film adaptation was likewise highly successful, earning Joanne Woodwood an Oscar for best actress. Christine was stung by signing a contract for $1 for each of the three personalities for the book and earned $7000 in total for the film when she soon realized she ought to have opted for a cut from the profits. And it is to be noted for a film in which the fictional ending was a complete cure, the payment contract was made out to an uncured trio of Eve W, Eve B and Jane. Three faces Christine was also spurned in never having a chance to mix with Hollywood celebrities and MGM executives as Thigpen and Cleckley did. The Three Face of Eve that was Christine were to have a major falling out with the two psychiatrists after mixing business with therapy, and she soon ceased contact with them. Christine’s personalities only amplified though the next half dozen or so therapists, totalling somewhere in excess of 20 alters by the mid 1970’s when, under the fourth year of care by Virginian psychiatrist Tony Tsitos, all the faces were finally and suddenly unified into Christine. By 1975 Christine announced to the New York Post her recovery and was unified sufficiently to tour the talk show and speaking circuit and launch her own 1977 book, with a follow up in 1989. Christine also needed be integrated to file suit against MGM and attempt negotiations to the rights over a remake of the film, though this did not come to pass.

The Eve Effect

According to some accounts, worldwide cases whose description approximated what we might call multiple personality disorder between 1816-1944 (128 years) number 72 persons. According to Thigpen and Cleckley, after the book and film many hundreds were referred to them alone having been diagnosed by other psychiatrists and physicians, or self diagnosed by the patients themselves. How many thousands more never reached the mail box or telephone of these two doyens of multiple personality? We can only speculate that the number is at least an order or two of magnitude greater than the preceding century or more. The expansion in diagnosis seems roughly to map onto those cultures and languages which had access and inclination to take in the “Three Faces of Eve” seriously. Naturally the vast majority of cases were in America, usually bourgeois neurotic white females, or males seeking an insanity defence for violent crimes. The third world had to live with good old fashioned demonology and stoicism.

Thigpen and Cleckley write in their 1984 retrospective

“some patients who ostensibly have the disorder there is a competition to see who can have the greatest number of alter personalities. (Unfortunately, there also appears to be a competition among some therapists to see who can have the greatest number of multiple personality cases.)”

Sybil and Shirley

In the somewhat punctuated retelling of the MPD story, for there were other films and novels, the next success of popular culture was to be Flora Rita Schreiber’s “Sybil”. The book was released in 1973 and the television miniseries three years later. On first release the book quickly sold out 400,000 copies, with further releases topping out somewhere in excess of 6 million copies sold within a few short years. The two night miniseries (later heavily edited for VHS release), though a small screen affair, was arguably just as successful as “The Three Faces of Eve”. By some accounts it was such a success in the ratings as only to be eclipsed in 1976 by the likes of the Superbowl. Sally Field earned an Emmy award. Schreiber, the author of this supposed true story, also had accolades heaped upon her, including eventually an academic chair in a university journalism department. Were there any doubt prior, we can be assured that after Sybil every American not living under a rock knew about MPD.

Though Sybil was marketed as a true story, the real woman behind the pseudonym would not be widely known for many years. Not until 1996 (2 years before the death of the real Sybil) did Mark Pendergrast write the first critique of the case, and the public would wait a full 15 years later until Debbie Nathans excellent expose “Sybil Exposed” in 2011, a decade after access to Schreibers notes of the therapy sessions were unsealed. The plot of the film, brilliantly acted as it was by Field and Joanne Woodword (the latter who played Eve and now played Sybils psychiatrist), was uninspired and typical for MPD. Sybil has vague somatic symptoms and “blackouts” of amnesia, has a suicide attempt perpetrated by an alternate personality and then comes under the care of Dr Cornelia Wilbur. Therapy follows, identities emerge, Sybil remembers the trauma of childhood at the hands of a particularly sadistic mother whose character is assassinated in the makings of this “true story”. Eventually re-integration is achieved to a happy ending and the delight of all. Sybil becomes the well adjusted academic she always aspired to be. The true story, complete with controversy, is much more interesting

The therapists were two, primarily Cornelia Wilbur whose name was curiously retained without change in the book/film adaptation, and sometimes Sybil received therapy from Herbert Spiegel whose name was changed, for reasons that will soon be made clear.

Sybil Dorsett’s real name was Shirley Mason (1923-1998). Apart from living in an unusual particularly devout Seventh Day Adventist family who deprived her of the fun of a normal childhood, by all reasonable accounts there is no evidence to suggest she was abused in any way from which to cast aspersions on her mother as worse than any other, and certainly not the monster the film would have us believe. Part of the film’s success was the sordid details of sexual depravity metered out by her mother, such as ice cold colonic enemas and other sexual penetrative abuses, deprivations etcetera. The mother was also portrayed as being a closet psychotic, a lesbian, (something rather uncontroversial and passe in our day and age, though doubtlessly the notion also being an offensive accusation about a lady as religious as Mrs Dorsett (Martha Mason)

Shirley Mason first encountered therapy by Dr Cornelia Wilbur (1908-1992), an intellectually adventurous psychiatrist who embraced every avant garde therapeutic modality. Prefrontal lobotomy was not unknown to her, she regularly performed electroconvulsive therapy out of a suitcase and she was neither wedded to the esoterica of hypnosis or the so called biological paradigm, using mesmerism and sodium pentothal both and many more powerful drugs besides. Masons psychotherapy was extremely lengthy and protracted, somewhere in excess of two thousand sessions. For Shirley this was conducted in two parts, the first in Minnesota and the latter in New York where Wilbur moved to open a successful uptown private practice and Shirley had also moved, ostensibly to attend Columbia University (though one wonders if proximity to Wilbur was an additional motivating factor). In the latter New York phase, Cornelia initially rejected Mason, only for Mason to return manifesting for the first time an alternate personality. Needless to say this latter therapeutic phase followed the release of “The Three Faces of Eve”. Like many a therapist, Wilbur could not resist a multiple at her door, and therapy became so long as to essentially become a part time job for Wilbur. Eventually Wilbur even set Mason up with housing, rent and clothing so as to continue her career as a professional patient. Eventually there would be 16 personalities in total emergent from Masons career therapy. True to the plot of the film, Masons mother was to be demonised and eventually Mason cut ties with all from her past. For the childless divorcee Wilbur who was 15 years Masons senior, she was just old enough to be a replacement mother figure, and the therapy can be formulated to be relational matricide committed under the language of cure. When Wilbur was given a professorial chair at the University of Kentucky, Mason was not far behind in relocating also, eventually moving in with Wilbur who died in 1992 of complications of Parkinson’s disease.

Like Eve White, the fictional Sybil Dorsett enjoyed a happy ending. But like Christine Costner Sizemore, Shirley Mason was to remain with her multiples for many years to come until the book was to be released and their veracity might run the risk of being placed under the light of a more public examination. Then and only then did her alleged disorder remit. Strangely no one ever saw her multiple personalities outside therapy sessions, this despite the fact that some identities would have either been vulnerable children or infants prone to misadventure and unable care for themselves, or antisocial personalities provoking responses from others around the host body. Two identities were male and outside therapy seem never to have encountered the strange answer to what they thought was between their legs. Were they not surprised not to find a penis? Occasionally whilst Wilbur was away, Masons care was transferred to psychiatrist Herbert Spiegel. Spiegel wasn’t taken in by Masons performance, describing her as a “brilliant hysteric”. Records indicate that he refused to talk to the alternate identities, and Shirley Masons response to a question asked from Spiegel “do you want me to be Peggy or should I just tell you” speaks volumes. He refused to be part of the book deal unless the diagnosis be recast and comprehensive of a wider view, and so his name and his character remains essentially unrepresented. We can ask why Spiegel did not cry from the rooftops his inside knowledge of what some might call a scam, this question all the more significant in seeing Sybil not an isolated case, as opposed to the stimulus for social contagion and further miscarriage of justice. He also would likely have been aware that Wilbur served as an expert witness for the defence, another being psychiatrist David Caul, in the case of William Milligan, the armed robber who raped three women and who successfully obtained an insanity defence on account of the rapes perpetrated by his alleged alters. How could poor Billy Milligan be incarcerated they plead, when Billy qua Billy wasn’t the rapist? Milligan and his 14 personalities spent a decade in the mental health system before being released to unsuccessfully plan his own film. And on goes the circus.

The Sybil Effect

It is circumstantial evidence to be sure, as it was following the spike in MPD cases following the Three Faces of Eve. Yet we could also be forgiven for drawing conclusions between the timing of Sybil (1973/76) and a certain inclusion in the best seller and bible of the American Psychiatric Association, the DSM III (1980). Certain members of the DSM working group on dissociative disorders considered Sybil a true story, emblematic of an unusual yet very real psychiatric disorder. In turn we can speculate on the symbiosis between Sybil and the DSM III both, and the explosion of cases of MPD estimated to be at least 40,000 between Sybil and the mid 1990’s. The casualties in terms of character assassinations are many more besides. Given the assumption that childhood trauma begets MPD, family members are not afforded due process in the court of the psychiatrist’s rooms. Every Shirley Mason has a Martha Mason who nursed her from when she was a babe, and who might not be the monster they are portrayed as being when the therapist comes looking for a cause.

A Comment on MPD and Schizophrenia

From the above, it is hardly a subtle I view the construct of MPD with a healthy degree of scepticism, even mockery. In this sense, I may appear to stand together with the mainstream psychiatric opinion in 2020. The average psychiatrist seldom if ever encounters it and would appear similarly sceptical. Many now believe “MPD/DID does not exist” even if they are unmoored, as they all too often are, from any knowledge of the history of the construct and even if this undermines the legitimacy of the entire DSM project. Rather they go along with the herd and will change their mind when next the herd shifts direction. However, yours truly might receive a conditional welcoming into the fold of MPD true believers in the following sense; I do not share the discriminative placing on a pedestal of any of the psychiatric diagnoses, and see schizophrenia or bipolar disorder as no more a sacred cow than MPD. Ponder this for a moment. Schizophrenia, or psychosis generally, can be characterized in many (even disjunctive!) ways with multiple symptoms/signs from which to choose. Take classical non congruent affect. This is the case when the inner subjective emotional state or thematic nature of the conversation would predict one emotional expression, yet what the psychiatrist observes is another. So, for example, the schizophrenic may be grieving the loss of a loved one yet grinning like a Cheshire cat. Is this not congruent with the picture of a “split personality” locked in simultaneous inner emotional being of alter 1 and facial expression of alter 2, each without access to the other? And what of delusions, which could also be said to be the simultaneous expression of the alter in a regressed childlike state or dream state or the personality of the unconscious of alter/s bubbling up within the adult living in the world? A similar argument can be had for hallucinations which are different personalities and neuroses of personalities talking amongst themselves or about themselves or dissociated across time, the voice of the other disavowed from the alter that has the reins of the body in the now.

Finally, we come to “thought disorder” as a diagnostic feature of schizophrenia. This manifests as a breakdown in the architecture of thought, with clauses or even single words lacking articulation with one another towards a coherent response, let alone addressing the narrative or the question asked. If alters were rapidly cycling between one another without ever entering fully into the conversation, would we not expect fragments of dialogue or monologue from the first alter, followed by fragments from the second and so on? And so the architecture of thought and sentence as heard from the other appears to break down against the disunity of different personalities coming in and out. Schizophrenia has a rather weak correlation within monozygotic twins (8-30%) despite sharing an identical genome and an incredibly weak correlation with individual genes or combination of genes. Childhood trauma is orders of magnitude more predictive of developing schizophrenia in adulthood, though this too is unreliable and most traumatized children grow up to be non psychotic, and certainly are not psychotic in childhood. So why not conceive of schizophrenia as just an incomplete or fused switching or rapid cycling between alters, with schizophrenia an MPD subtype? Though I’m as sceptical about this formulation as much as any other in psychiatry, it is easier to defend than the nonsense that schizophrenia is a neurodegenerative genetic disease. This latter formulation is more in keeping with the dementia praecox of Emil Kraepilin and Morel’s pre fascist degeneration theory, whereas Eugen Bleuler, the Swiss born disciple of Charcot, a decade later brought schizophrenia into the psychiatric lexicon with this description of the schiz (split) in the phrein (mind)

“(D)issociation of the personality is fundamentally nothing else than the splitting off of the unconscious; unconscious complexes can transform themselves into these secondary personalities by taking over so large a part of the original personality that they represent an entirely new personality.”

Many other quote besides could be provided to indicate that Bleuler used splitting (Spaltung) in schizophrenia as an alternative to dissociation and similar to what later became known as MPD and DID. Bleurerian schizophrenia is very different Kraepelian schizophrenia which is in turn very different to our current use of the term,

ACT II; The Devil and Psychiatry go to the Movies

The late 1960’s was a time of great foment and political upheaval. It was a time of communes and cults, of 1968 student riots and all manner of ideas and alternate religions filling the void from the slow death of Christianity and whatever conservatism came before. This was a trend not to dissipate until the nihilistic grunge 1990’s. And the late 1960’s was the time Satan the dragon reintroduced himself on the silver screen as the grand conspirator interested in women and children, and willing to battle the white knights in psychiatric armour over the fates of souls.

The first entry to consider in this second act is “Rosemary’s Baby”, a 1967 horror novel by Ira Levin. Not surprising, after selling several million copies it was irresistible for other authors not to cash in on the theme, resulting in the devil and his possessed becoming one of several staples of pop culture. And not surprisingly the year after the novel was released it was made into a film adaptation written and directed by the now infamous Roman Polanski. The plot in the briefest of summaries involves the innocent Rosemary having a disturbing dream. In her dream she had been raped by the devil, something she does not realise consciously is true and that she is impregnated with his child, and not that of her husbands. Several themes are important here, including yet not limited to a) Satan wanting to claim the child, and indeed the demonic nature being within the baby b) Satanic cults can be hiding in plain sight, even our neighbours might be witches and warlocks of the darkest of arts, c) the middle and upper class can be both victim and perpetrator, d) the satanically charged sexual assault can be repressed, save for the royal road of the dream and other unacknowledged clues and finally e) that the damsel in distress will be dismissed as a neurotic. “They won’t believe you” is one of the messages, except of course whatever psychiatrists and psychotherapists might be watching the film and wishing to identify with their own hypothetical character, i.e. the wise and clever therapist who sees through the conspiracy and ostensive hysteria and knows the truth.

An enormous number of other (probably largely coincidental) tangled webs assemble themselves around Rosemary and her child of Satan. We have for example the same year of the film’s release, Polanski’s wife Sharron Tate brutally mutilated and murdered by the cultish Manson family in a manner suggestive of a ritual killing towards apocalyptic ends, though it might have been nothing more than the manifest jealousy of a Charles Manson who would never have succeeded in earning his way to Cielo Drive and the celebrity cliques of the Hollywood Hills. Manson was to fly like Icarus, close enough to visit the Hills, but not rich or talented enough to stay there. Manson was allegedly motivated by the lyrics of the Beatles and the next coincidence involves John Lennon getting gunned down in 1980 when exiting the very uptown Manhattan apartment block where Rosemary’s baby was filmed. In 1977 Polanski took flight from the United States for sexual impropriety with a minor and has been dodging extradition since. And actress Mia Farrow (who played Rosemary) forms a relationship in 1979 with the world’s longest analysand Woody Allen, the marriage finally ending after revelations of Allen’s affair with their adopted daughter. Presumably the affair began after the girl reached the age of consent, for in the court of public opinion it appears the scandal has not negatively affected Allens career any more than Polanski’s scandal has affected his. Perhaps the connection most apt to provoke conspiracy was the gossip by Anton LaVey, the founder of the Church of Satan. LaVey spread the rumour that he cameoed in the film as the devil in Rosemary’s dreams, in so doing existing as a transitional object between the world of film and that of reality. It matters not that LaVey would be quick to say that he was, ipso facto, a materialist atheist who worshipped Lucifer as symbolic of the carnal nature of man and man’s power to self-creation, making of himself a mixture between a second rate neo-Darwinian,  a third rate Nietzsche and a first rate P.T. Barnum rolled into one hedonistic charismatic package. Perhaps he was an atheist, or perhaps his appeal to atheism was mockery to those who believed him, the “magic” being to both reveal himself as believer whilst simultaneously remaining concealed behind a mask of apparent disbelief.

Before and after Rosemary there were many other devil cult films. To name but a few Eyes of the Devil 1966, The Devil Rides Out 1966, Mephisto Waltz 1971, The Wicker Man 1973, Satans School for Girls 1973, Race with the devil 1975, The Devils Rain 1975, (the feminist) Suspiria 1977 and many others.

The next novel film duo to which we will our more considered attention is the highly successful “The Exorcist”, these released in 1971 (novel) and 1973 (film) respectively. Most will remember the film as the blockbuster in which the child actress Linda Blair was made up to look as the Hollywood depiction of a girl possessed. So shocking was the film that it provoked at least five cases of what was described in the psychiatric literature by Bozutto as a “cinematic neurosis” (symptoms included dissociation). The viewer might easily remember the characters of the two priests who did battle with the arch-demon Pazuzu dwelling within the girl. But Vvewers might not recall that these priests were like many Jesuits, priests for sure yet also men of academe. The elder, Father Lankester Merrin was the archaeologist who had previously partook in many an exorcism and so was the veteran psychotherapist of a kind. The younger apprentice, father Damien Karras was, strange as it may seem, also a psychiatrist. The exorcist explores the journey of the child character and the priests alike, which includes within the plot of the film primitive medical diagnostic tests of the 1970’s, this placing demon possession side by side with more conventional psychiatric and medical diagnoses. And the priest is the psychiatrist, the psychiatrist the priest, the younger to represent a scientific age integrating the spiritual world with science, a handing over of the baton from the elder archaeologist who is priest and classicist. I liken the two to Feud and Fenenczi/Jung, and the dynamic between the two priests teaches budding therapists much of what they need to know about psychotherapy and its ethics. The elder maintains his distance and pace, and more importantly does not allow his compassion and own inner conflict to be used against him by Pazuzu. The younger rushes in where angels and wisdom would be more circumspect. Ultimately it is the younger priest, like Fenenczi or Jung, to ignorantly transgress the ethical boundaries. I am not about to draw the long bow and suggest “The Exorcist” was the root cause of the troubles that followed. What I will submit is that it was a reflection of the ingredients swirling around America. I will suggest that in its own small way, whether directly in the mind of the psychiatrist or indirectly in the psyche of the patients who are the psychiatrists market, “The Exorcist” made regular therapy with a regular patient trivial, even an MPD patient. A real psychiatrist was one who faced the real devil, and by extension the psychiatrist was a usurper of the church in making the priest redundant. Such is at the heart of the secular project. The real psychiatrist would be a philosopher sage and hero scientist bundled into one package. How irresistibly exciting to one’s narcissistic drives.

Finally there is “The Omen”, directed by Richard Donner and released to the screen in 1976. The Omen spawned two sequels to complete the trilogy, these released in 1978 and 1980 respectively. The Omen furthered the themes that the devil can involve himself in the lives of children, in this case the innocent looking Damien being the antichrist himself. Once again there was conspiracy of Satanists amidst the pre-apocalyptic tension of the coming end to both century and millennium, and the idea that the Devil is a globalist corporation with international ambition.

The Stage was set for the Devil to call the audience up to join him on it.

ACT III. The Satanic Panic; Psychiatry, the Devil and MPD

Moral panics have always been with us. In AD 177 Lyon (then the Roman Empire) Christians were accused of

“holding meetings at which babies or small children were ritually slaughtered, and feasts at which the remains of these victims were ritually devoured; also of holding erotic orgies at which every form of intercourse, including incest between parents and children, was freely practiced; also of worshipping a strange divinity in the form of an animal.”

Then there are the recurrent pogroms against the Jews with concocted allegations of Blood Libel, these but two of many examples.

Circa 1973, around the same year of Sybil the book and The Exorcist, Michelle Smith first attended therapy with psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder in his private rooms in British Columbia. Ostensibly the presenting complaint was depression after a miscarriage. Pazder was very well respected and well credentialed. Working at two of the cities hospitals along with running his own clinic, Pazder was a practicing Roman Catholic with a background in both psychiatry and tropical medicine, once living and working altruistically in Nigeria for at least two years. Sometime circa 1976 therapy was stagnating and Michelle felt she had something within her unconscious she could not quite recall, and yet was nonetheless vitally important. One session in her struggle to remember she regressed to a screaming 5 year old. It was not long before Pazder resorted to hypnosis to bring to the surface what remained hidden. More adventures in psychotherapy followed and in the years 1976-1978 Michelle, with “benefit” of hypnosis, recalled the satanic ritual abuse she was forced to partake in as a child in otherwise boring mid-fifties Canada. The details became increasingly lurid, including many dark robed adults, the satanic black mass, infant sacrifice and even cannibalism. One of these rituals was said to last almost three months, this despite the fact her school records show attendance at the time. The sex within the rituals was salacious and fantastic; orgies, rape, paedophilia and even beastiality were thrown into the mix. Michelles alleged abuses extended beyond being a mere witness to all these devilish acts. She claimed to have been forced into a cage with snakes, buried in a coffin and placed in the trunk of a car with a corpse. The account stretched beyond medical credulity when Michelle also recalled having horns and a tail grafted to her body, something which would certainly fail either from immune rejection alone, if not failure of the grafts to perfuse.

By 1980 Michelle had completed her therapy, this in part on account of remembering Jesus and Mary themselves intervening to save her and miraculously heal her of the physical scars of her abuses. This heavenly intervention failed to cure her of what eventually drove her to therapy, yet another implicit proof of psychiatry’s narcissism to complete a healing that even the Christ and Theotokos could not. Along with Pazder she co-authored the successful book “Michelle Remembers”, which quickly earned them approx. $350,000 in advance fees. The book sold well for several years. I say “them”, as by this time each had brought their mutual affair out of the closet, had left their respective spouses (Pazder had 4 children also) and were set to marry.

Thankfully Michelles mother Virginia Proby, having passed away circa 1964, never lived to hear the allegation that she inducted her daughter into a satanic cult and subjected her to unspeakable torture. Her widowed husband Jack (Michelles father) is quoted to have taken 4 months to read the book and cried every day until the final page, thinking “Dear God. How could anyone say this against their dead mother”. Michelle Smith and Lawrence Pazder were stymied from profiting from a film deal only after Jacks legal counsel issued a letter to the publisher with intent to file suit if they met with Hollywood. The publishers and Pazder/Smith were aiming high, fantasizing that Christopher Plummer would play the Satanist priest and Dustin Hoffman play Pazder.

The couple seem, on the surface at least, to have believed wholeheartedly in the reality of what Michelle remembered. In the battle with the devil and his vast network of covens they even sought advice from Catholic Bishop Remi de Roo, who arranged for a meeting at the Vatican with Cardinal Sergio Pignedoli. The bishop was trusting enough to allow the couple the foot in the door of the Holy See, though not naïve enough give a ringing endorsement. His quote in the preface of the book reads

“I do not question that for Michelle the experience was real. In time we will know how much of it can be validated. It will require prolonged and careful study. In such mysterious matters hasty conclusions could prove unwise.”

What the good Italian bishop may not have realized is that in North America any publicity is good publicity, and the couple had much more besides, be it People magazine, National Enquirer and several other well known publications. In the late 1980’s Michelle appeared on the hugely successful talk show hosted by Oprah Winfrey, another guest being Laurel Rose Willson, author of her own bestselling memoir “Satan’s Underground” which was published under the nom de plume Lauren Stratford. Willsons fraud was undone by, of all authorities, a Christian publication (Cornerstone) which explored her claims and found them untrue. This did not stop her adopting the name Laura Grabowski in the 1990’s and writing award winning poetry pretending to be a survivor of the holocaust and Dr Mengles fiendish experiments. The Holocaust of course was real. Laura wasn’t, and her final fraud was only uncovered when she allied herself with Binjamin Wilkomirski (aka Bruno Gosjean), when he too was exposed as a fake holocaust survivor (and so how could she have vivid memories of time in the camps with him). Both in their own small indirect way served to strengthen the misinformation of holocaust denialists. Winfrey would do her best to then forget her naivety in entertaining these fakes and many others such as James Frey, author of the fabricated memoir “A Million Little Pieces”. But these revelations would take years to emerge and all manner of shenanigans were given carte blanche to wreak American havoc throughout the 1980’s and into the early 1990’s. Lawrence Pazder and Michelle Smith (now Michelle Pazder) were not resoundingly proven to be frauds, and Pazder the psychiatrist achieved much notoriety in the US speaking circuit educating psychiatrists, other mental health workers and law enforcement on the supposed reality and dangers of satanic ritual abuse. His “expertise” also informed the McMartin case (vide infra).

McMartin

Manhattan Beach is a laid back upmarket suburb of south Los Angeles, deriving its natural beauty from the Pacific Ocean and its money from the nearby aerospace industry. In 1983 the place to send your children for day care was the McMartin preschool, the oldest and most successful day care centre in South L.A. Run by matriarch Virginia McMartin, the school was a multi community award winning family business staffed also by her daughter Peggy McMartin Buckey and her son (Vriginia’s grandson) Ray Buckey, in addition to three unrelated teachers Betty Raidor, Mary Ann Jackson and Babette Spitler. Peggies husband Charles, an aerospace engineer, furnished the centre with his own creation of child size wooden animals, rocking horses and playhouses.

Before discussing their fate, the stage must be set with other players, first of these is professor of psychiatry Dr Roland Summit. Summit was effectively L.A. county’s chief psychiatrist, and informed not merely the local understanding of incest and child abuse, yet also the wider American understanding of the same. Summits first formulation of incest in the early 1970’s was the creepily named “the family romance”. He spoke of the semi traditional family, the fathers “horizons and dreams are contracting” and the liberated working mother “depressed at the loss of youth and girlish attraction” and “no longer invested in her husbands ego”. Enter the niece or daughter or young girl next door, drawn to play with the man as a cat is instinctively drawn to play with a mouse. She is “learning to transmit the magical vibrations our society requires of the emergent woman”, a mixture in transition of the “innocence of the child and the allure of the temptress”. The wife is “remarkably oblivious” to these goings on, perhaps not wanting to know who is taking her place as she finds meaning in career or the sedative her physician prescribes. And so the man succumbs. This is the plot which one wonders Summit might not have conjured from his own mind had Nabokov not first published “Lolita” in 1955 and Kubrick not adapted to film in 1962. The parallels are striking.

Summits other claim to fame is his own diagnostic construct, “Childhood Sexual Abuse Accommodation Syndrome”, published in 1983 yet formulated in his 1970’s work, the features of which include; secrecy, helplessness, adaptation and entrapment, delayed conflicted and unconvincing disclosure, and finally retraction after the first brave disclosure.

That is to say, the perpetrator will threaten, seduce, exploit compassion and do whatever is necessary to maintain secrecy. The child will be helpless and aware of the enormous power differential between themselves and the adult perpetrator of sexual abuse. They naturally fall into a state of obedience. Though inconsistent to the family romance, to his credit Summit states that no adolescent is mature enough to consent, however mature they appear. Consequently, adolescents too need be thought of as helpless. Both the perpetrator and the child adapt to the abuse. Given the child is trapped in the situation, they learn to do the necessaries to survive rather than escape. They want to retain power within powerlessness. And yet the drive to disclose and escape is never entirely extinguished. Disclose might be delayed, veiled or cryptic. If and when disclosure is made, this is often recanted out of fear or misplaced compassion for the perpetrator.

Summit would also play into a validation of multiplicity, in describing the possible psychological sequelae from living day after day with sexual abuse and conflict. “This is a mind splitting and mind fragmenting operation” with “inevitable splitting” the child “may develop multiple personalities….”

Channelling the naïve spirit of Despine, another feature of Summits ideology is the premium placed on the testimony of the accuser, most especially children. He has stated “children never fabricate” and “It has become the maxim among child sexual abuse intervention counsellors and investigators that children never fabricate the kinds of sexual manipulations they divulge in complaints and interrogations”. Summits worldview was frightening in its confidence, and equally disturbing in the inclusion of the word “interrogation” as something one could do to a child in order to arrive at what might be said, which having been said, is considered to be the truth. He was essentially proposing that if a child makes an accusation against you, even after hours of “interrogation”, then you are necessarily guilty. What would you not do to secure a successful prosecution of a child molester if you were certain he (or she) was guilty?

Other psychiatrists such as Judith Herman developed different formulations of incest informed by her own particularly strong feminist biases. She proposed that it is man’s patriarchal rule over the traditional family, this “unbalanced sexuality” that creates within the man the idea that his children are his property. Herman is oft quoted to say “As long as fathers rule but do not nurture, as long as mothers nurture but do not rule, the conditions favouring the development of father-daughter incest will prevail.” Which is to say that a man who works and a woman who is homemaker is necessarily an at risk state for incest, remedied only by a reversal of roles and a psychological castration for the father. Only in castration can we assure he is harmless.

The next in the cast are non psychiatric physicians, whose assumptions also played into the panic and whose erroneous teachings sent many to jail for many years. Bruce Woodling was the family physician who moonlighted as the Los Angeles district sexual trauma investigator. It was the caring Dr Woodling who would attend the emergency department in the middle of the night to see to the examination of women who were allegedly sexually assaulted and compile the photographic and other evidence that would be used by the prosecution. Of acute adult sexual trauma he was an expert. But diagnosing vaginal, anal and other traumata minutes or hours after an alleged violent rape is a rather easy matter to the initiated. What of children making claims of something having happened days, weeks or even month ago? Woodling drew upon assumption to write the 1985 Training Syllabus “Medical Examination of the Sexually Abused Child” and collaborated what he thought he knew about the manifestations of childhood sexual abuse with pediatrician (later University of Southern California Professor of Paediatrics) Astrid Heger. Together they essentially promoted, inter alia, the idea that any anatomical irregularity or blemish to the anus or hymen was indicative of childhood sexual abuse, and that an anus which dilated when stroked was indicative of its adaptation to penetrative sexual trauma. The assumption seems to be something of projecting the idea of the moral purity and innocence of youth onto the anatomical substance of the youth’s body. This idea had not been substantiated in case control studies.

Nonetheless the “science” was accepted uncritically by those prosecutors who would use it as evidence within the context of the accusation whose veracity was assumed. Even the lack of evidence could be interpreted as evidence, it being all a matter of the play of words. If no anatomical abnormality is found months after an alleged molestation, the fact of the bodies healing can make for the conclusion in the committed witch hunter “the examination is consistent with the child having been molested” much in the way any intact healthy looking skin is consistent with having had a small cut or burn months prior. Astrid Heger would be one of the key examiners of the children of McMartin, just as Woodling contributed also to many false convictions in the Kern County area in the same period.

Only in the mid to late 1980’s did San Francisco professor of Paediatrics Dr John McCann bother to ask the question that ought to have been asked at the outset, i.e. using careful methodology to exclude possibly abused children from study and large sample sizes, the question is what is the normal ano-genital anatomy of the non abused child? To which his answer re the hymen was "We were struck with the fact that we couldn't find a normal (hymen).  It took us three years before we found a normal of what we had in our minds as a preconceived normal”

The same he discovered was the case with the anus, which dilated or “winked” in the majority of cases and was very commonly found to be irregular or mildly erythematous (i.e. reddened) with local infections and constitutional discolorations. Despite this, McCann skirts close to coming under the spell of the panic himself when he states. “While medical examiners must maintain a high index of suspicion in this era of unremitting sexual abuse, caution must be exercised during the search for the cause of soft tissue changes discovered in the ano-genital region of a child. If a reasonable explanation is not forthcoming, a more thorough investigation must be instigated if children are to be protected from further exploitation.” But how can a reasonable explanation be forthcoming in the face of an accusation, if this not be the faith that what is found is an anatomical variant? What is his basis for the claim of an “era of unremitting sexual abuse”?

Though these and many more seeds of the crisis were sown before in the assumptions physicians and others brought to the table, the McMartin case proper began in May 1983 in the actions of a disturbed woman by the name of Judy Johnson. Judy was a struggling single mother of a 2 ½ year old Billy, her only other child a 13 year old son dying of a brain tumour. She had no other immediate family in the vicinity as her husband had recently walked out on her. Judy was far from living the American dream. She was desperate and did not take no for an answer when informed that McMartin enrolments were full. Instead she simply left Billy there one morning with a note of identification and a promise she would return. Her bold move was rewarded with the school not reporting her to children’s services. Instead they allowed him to stay that day and return again and again, approx. 10 times in total. Such compassion would be their undoing. In the days or weeks leading up to August, Judy Johnson became increasingly obsessed with her sons anus, which was itchy and red and came to be spotting blood, perhaps from scratching a worm infection (my own guess playing the odds, but we will never know). The blood was too much for Judy, who jumped to the conclusion that he must have been sexually abused. Ray Buckey was the number one suspect. Despite the second wave feminism in 1980’s progressive California, it was weird that a young man would want to work with very young children. But he was a laid back Californian who wished to live and work close to family in the family business. And so what and why not? No one knows how many hours Judy Johnson interrogated her own child to give her the answer her paranoia wanted to hear. In any case, by August 12th she called the police to report her son’s revelations, less than a week later she was received for interview by detectives. Ray was arrested September 7th under suspicion of child molestation and released the same day. Ray was not off the hook. The following day the chief of police issues an extraordinary letter to approx. 200 parents of current and previous McMartin pupils. It read, in its entirety

“September 8, 1983

 Dear Parent:

 This Department is conducting a criminal investigation involving child molestation (288 P.C.) Ray Buckey, an employee of Virginia McMartin's Pre-School, was arrested September 7, 1983 by this Department.

 The following procedure is obviously an unpleasant one, but to protect the rights of your children as well as the rights of the accused, this inquiry is necessary for a complete investigation.

 Records indicate that your child has been or is currently a student at the pre-school.  We are asking your assistance in this continuing investigation.  Please question your child to see if he or she has been a witness to any crime or if he or she has been a victim.  Our investigation indicates that possible criminal acts include: oral sex, fondling of genitals, buttock or chest area, and sodomy, possibly committed under the pretense of "taking the child's temperature."  Also photos may have been taken of children without their clothing.  Any information from your child regarding having ever observed Ray Buckey to leave a classroom alone with a child during any nap period, or if they have ever observed Ray Buckey tie up a child, is important.

 Please complete the enclosed information form and return it to this Department in the enclosed stamped return envelope as soon as possible.  We will contact you if circumstances dictate same.

 We ask you to please keep this investigation strictly confidential because of the nature of the charges and the highly emotional effect it could have on our community.  Please do not discuss this investigation with anyone outside your immediate family.  Do not contact or discuss the investigation with Raymond Buckey, any member of the accused defendant's family, or employees connected with the McMartin Pre-School.

 THERE IS NO EVIDENCE TO INDICATED THAT THE MANAGEMENT OF VIRGINIA MCMARTIN'S PRE-SCHOOL HAD ANY KNOWLEDGE OF THIS SITUATION AND NO DETRIMENTAL INFORMATION CONCERNING THE OPERATION OF THE SCHOOL HAS BEEN DISCOVERED DURING THIS INVESTIGATION.  ALSO, NO OTHER EMPLOYEE IN THE SCHOOL IS UNDER INVESTIGATION FOR ANY CRIMINAL ACT.

 Your prompt attention to this matter and reply no late than Septemeber 16, 1983 will be appreciated.

 HARRY L. KUHLMEYER, JR.

 Chief of Police

 JOHN WEHNER, Captain”

There is no greater invitation to gossip than requesting people keep a secret. From 8th September onwards in every church house, family house, outhouse, hen house, house of ill repute, street corner and corner store there was one story on everyone’s lips, and that story was Ray Buckey and the McMartin School. Parents were understandably immediately placed in a positon of high suspicion of Ray. And like Judy Johnson, some were not secure with their children denying Ray ever interfered with them. Consequently they interrogated their children again, and again, and again, and informal parents groups formed to discuss the case. Stories were cross pollinated and the agitators formed citizens groups with a battle plan for justice against the man they were certain must be guilty. The snow ball became an avalanche.

Judy Johnsons own input continued, became regular and became increasingly strange. Her accusations now inculpated other members of the staff. Despite Billy reporting (via his mother) that Ray et al took him and other children to a Church in which an unholy satanic mass was conducted, a baby was killed in a ritual sacrifice, Ray threatened Billy with a Lion (that is to say a real live lion aka Panthera leo), Ray flew him in a plane, Ray levitating and so on and so forth, despite all this the police did not pull back on pursuing the investigation. The Lion was out of its cage in more ways than one.

The police partially outsourced the investigation to L.A. based Children’s Institute International (CII), whose funding hunter and front person was social worker Kathleen “Kee” MacFarlane. Macfarlane was a fine arts graduate who, being as employable as her fine arts peers, had to find work in another area. And that she did, in her case a children’s home. This prompted an interest in children’s welfare and master’s studies in social work. There she honed her skills as a funding applicant and developed connections in government. Her “research” took her to the top with a bullet. She had barely graduated in Maryland in 1974 before finding herself in an expert role in 1976-1982 for the federally funded National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect (NCCAN)  with the title of "Child Sexual Abuse Specialist." These were the early days in child abuse “research” which, like Heger and Woodling, the “expert” was the one working in the role with the (fallacy of) authority invested in them by the state. Yet they were learning from experience and making plenty of things up as they went along. For Macfarlane the career was from Ohio and Maryland to Washington DC and across the coast to California and the CII. Macfarlane and her team, Heger included, seem to have learned their interview techniques in watching American police interrogations on TV, or soaking up what advice she might (I speculate) have been told to her by friends in the Department of Justice and office of the District Attorney. In the months that followed, Macfarlane interviewed at least 360 children, Heger examining at least half that number. Rates of (concluded) molestation were at least 80% (Heger) and closer to universal for Macfarlanes interviewees and those conducted by staff under her watch. The latter achieved this by subjecting the children to gruelling hours of leading questions and puppet play until the child gave the desired answers by appealing to the children’s desire to help, reward and praise or simply to get out of CII and back to where the child wished to be, that is playing at home and being normal children.

Excerpt from transcript with an 8yr old boy

MacFarlane:

Here's a hard question I don't know if you know the answer to.  We'll see how smart you are, Pac-man.  Did you ever see anything come out of Mr. Ray's wiener?  Do you remember that?

Child:

(no response)

MacFarlane:

Can you remember back that far?  We'll see how ... how good your brain is working today, Pac-man.

(Child moves puppet around.)

MacFarlane:

Is that a yes?

(Child nods puppet yes.)

MacFarlane:

Well, you're smart. Now, let's see if we can figure out what it was. I wonder if you can point to something of what color it was.

(Child tries to pick up the pointer with the Pac-man's mouth.)

MacFarlane:

Let me get your pen here (puts a pointer in child's Pac-man puppet mouth).

Child:

It was ...

MacFarlane:

Let's see what color is that.

(Child uses the Pac-man's hand to point to the Pac-man puppet.)

MacFarlane:

Oh, you're pointing to yourself.  That must be yellow.

(Child nods puppet yes.)

MacFarlane:

You're smart to point to yourself.  What did it feel like?  Was it like water?  Or some-thing else?

Child:

Um, what?

MacFarlane:

The stuff that came out.  Let me try.  I'll try a different question on you.  We'll try to figure out what that stuff tastes like.  We're going to try and figure out if it tastes good.

Child:

He never did that to [me], I don't think.

MacFarlane:

Oh, well, Pac-man, would you know what it tastes like?  Would you think it tastes like candy, sort of trying ...

Child:

I think it would taste like yucky ants.

MacFarlane:

Yucky ants.  Whoa.  That would be kind of yucky.  I don't think it would taste like ... you don't think it would taste like strawberries or anything good?

Child:

No.

MacFarlane:

Oh. Think it would so ... do you think that would be sticky, like sticky, yucky ants?

Child:

A little.

Excerpt of an Interview with an 8 yr old Boy

Kathleen MacFarlane: Mr. Monkey is a little bit chicken, and he can't remember any of the naked games, but we think that you can, 'cause we know a naked games that you were around for, 'cause the other kids told us, and it's called Naked Movie Star. Do you remember that game, Mr. Alligator, or is your memory too bad?

Boy: Um, I don't remember that game.

MacFarlane: Oh, Mr. Alligator.

Boy: Umm, well, it's umm, a little song that me and [a friend] heard of.

MacFarlane: Oh.

Boy: Well, I heard out loud someone singing, "Naked Movie Star, Naked Movie Star."

MacFarlane: You know that, Mr. Alligator? That means you're smart, 'cause that's the same song the other kids knew and that's how we really know you're smarter than you look. So you better not play dumb, Mr. Alligator.

Boy: Well, I didn't really hear a whole lot. I just heard someone yell it from out in the _ Someone yelled it.

MacFarlane: Maybe. Mr. Alligator, you peeked in the window one day and saw them playing it, and maybe you could remember and help us.

Boy: Well, no, I haven't seen anyone playing Naked Movie Star. I've only heard the song.

MacFarlane: What good are you? You must be dumb.

Boy: Well I don't know really, umm, remember seeing anyone play that, 'cause I wasn't there, when - I -when people are playing it.

MacFarlane: You weren't? You weren't? That's why we're hoping maybe you saw, see, a lot of these puppets weren't there, but they got to see what happened.

Boy: Well, I saw a lot of fighting.

MacFarlane: I bet you can help us a lot, though, 'cause, like, Naked Movie Star is a simple game, because we know about that game, 'cause we just have had twenty kids told us about that game. Just this morning, a little girl came in and played it for us and sang it just like that. Do you think if I asked you a question, you could put your thinking cap on and you might remember, Mr. Alligator?

Boy: Maybe.

MacFarlane: You could nod your head yes or no. Can you remember who took the pictures for the naked-movie-star game? That would be a great thing to feed into the secret machine [the video camera], and then it would be all gone, just like all the other kids did. You can just nod whether you remember or not, see how good your memory is.

Boy: [Nod's puppet's head.]

MacFarlane: You do? Well, that's remarkable. I wonder if you could hold a pointer in your mouth, and then you wouldn't have to say a word and [boy] wouldn't have to say a word. And you could just point.

Boy: [Places pretend camera on adult male nude doll using alligator puppet] Sometimes he did.

MacFarlane: Can I pat you on the head for that? Look what a big help you can be. You’re going to help all these little children, because you're so smart…OK, did they ever pose in funny poses for the pictures?

Boy: Well, it wasn't a real camera. We just played…

MacFarlane: Mr. Alligator, I'm going to…going to ask you something here. Now, we already found out from the other kids that it was a real camera, so you don't have to pretend, OK? Is that a deal?

Boy: Yes, it was a play camera that we played with.

MacFarlane: Oh, and it went flash?

Boy: Well, it didn't exactly go flash.

MacFarlane: It didn't exactly go flash. Went click? Did little pictures go zip, come out of it?

Boy: I don't remember that.

MacFarlane: Oh, you don't remember that. Well, you're doing pretty good, Mr. Alligator. I got to shake your hand.

Excerpt on interview with a 6-year-old girl

Dr. Astrid Heger: Maybe you could show me with this, with this doll [puts hand on two dolls, one naked, one dressed] how the kids danced for the Naked Movie Star.

Girl: They didn't really dance. It was just, like, a song.

Heger: Well, what did they do when they sang the song?

Girl: [Nods her head]

Heger: I heard that, I heard from several different kids that they took their clothes off. I think that [first classmate] told me that, I know that [second classmate] told me that, I know that [third classmate] told me. [Fourth classmate] and [fifth classmate] all told me that. That's kind of a hard secret, it's kind of a yucky secret to talk of-but, maybe, we could see if we could find--/

Girl: Not that I remember.

Heger: This is my favorite puppet right here. [Picks up a bird puppet] You wanna be this puppet? Ok? Then I get to be the Detective Dog…We're gonna just figure it all out. Ok, when that tricky part about touching the kids was going on, could you take a pointer in our mouth and point on the , on the doll over here, on either one of these dolls, where, where the kids were touched? Could you do that?

Girl: I don't know.

Heger: I know that the kids were touched. Let's see if we can figure that out.

Girl: I don’t' know.

Heger: You don’t' know where they were touched?

Girl: Uh-uh. [Shakes her head]

Heger: Well, some of the kids told me that they were touched sometimes. They said that it was, it kinda, sometimes it kinda hurt. And some the times, it felt pretty good. Do you remember that touching game that went on?

Girl: No.

Heger: Ok. Let me see if we can try something else and -

Girl: Wheeee! [Spins the puppet above her head.]

Heger: Come on, bird, get down here and help us out here.

Girl: No.

Heger: Bird is having a hard time talking. I don't wanna hear any more no's. No no, Detective dog we're gonna figure this out.

By Autumn the interview content of the children in aggregate was becoming more strange and not unlike that reported by Judy Johnson regarding her own son Billy. Children would speak of trap doors and a network of underground tunnels and rooms under McMartin Pre School. They disclosed being placed in shipping boxes and taken on planes and hot air balloons to castles and forests and of also being threatened by staff who sacrificed babies and animals and used wild beasts as tools of fear. They alleged to have been photographed naked and sexually abused in unspeakable ways, of shadowy figures in robes and staff flying like witches (which begs the question why the need for a hot air balloon if they were so adept at levitation). The hysterical citizen groups, headed by a McMartin parent Bob Currie, arranged for an excavation of the neighbouring lot to discover entrance and exit points for “the tunnels”. This was an effort soon replicated under the public purse by an engineering firm hired by the district attorney. Police investigated airports, purchased tens of thousands of dollars of pornography in the hopes of finding evidence of the children’s involvement and staked out dozens of properties and businesses. Enough man power was invested in the case to police a small city.

At the hazard of stating the obvious, by early 1984 Virginia McMartin closed forever a business that went from highly successful for three decades of continuous service to being unable retain enough students to stay afloat. Other day care centres also began dropping like flies over the Los Angeles area, some from being implicated in the alleged satanic network and some merely from the fear of parents at what might happen to their child. By March 1984 the MacMartin seven (i.e. every employee including Ray and an almost Octogenarian matriarch Virginia McMartin) were arrested and indicted by a grand jury. Preliminary hearings began and both Ray and his mother Peggy remained in jail. Every member of staff was forced to hire their own legal counsel and go up against the might of a state and its district attorney Robert Philobosian, who wished to use McMartin as a spring board to greater political heights. Meanwhile Macfarlane was busy writing funding applications and dating ABC affiliate journalist Wayne Satz, who always seemed to be one step ahead of fellow journalists to the latest scoop. Both the media and the expert industry were having a field day. Lawrence Pazder had entered the fray, as had Roland Summit. By early 1986 the preliminary trial was over. The new district attorney Ira Reiner concluded there was insufficient evidence to continue a prosecution against all but Ray and his mother Peggy, this despite the fact that the methods used by, and strength of evidence against, these two were identical to the methods and evidence against the seven as a whole. Peggy was bailed after spending close to 2 years in prison. But Ray would stay there. The trial proper (though the preliminary was itself a protracted two years) began July 1987. Not until early 1989 was Ray’s application for bail accepted. And yet the trial marched on. By early 1990 the judge was faced with a hung jury, this coinciding with the first signs that the satanic panic might be cracking as peoples appetites moved onto other trends and scandals. Peggy was acquitted, though the state would not yet release its grip on Ray who was held for a second and final trial, this one ending July the same year, again from a hung jury. Thankfully the district attorney did not pursue a third trial.

Only in the aftermath did the staggering costs of the McMartin affair come to light. It remains the most expensive criminal trial in United States history at something in excess of 15 million dollars, inclusive of investigation costs, with tax payer funding of CII during the 1980’s adding an extra 15 million. Parenthetically, Mcmartin surpassed the previous expenditure record, that being the case of the Hillside stranglers Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono Junior. Bianchi managed to convince a few gullible “expert witness” psychiatrists that he suffered from MPD and it was not he who did the killing but his alters. Returning to McMartin, it was also the longest trial, with proceedings in total lasting the better part of 6 years. It chewed through 6 judges, 17 attorneys, 12 primary jurors and several reserve jurors, some jurors spending as much as 560 days in total in the dock, essentially making of their role a de facto career. Ray would spend 5 of these years in prison, his mother 2. But none were spared. Babette Spitler lost access to her infant child in the early phase of the trial, and he lost access to her. The matriarch Virginia went from the recipient of many community awards to a pariah, embittered by the community who suddenly turned against her. She died from one too many strokes in 1995. Betty died five years later. Every one of the defendants were frightened, jaded and bankrupt, their homes and every penny of their savings exhausted on legal fees. The day care centre on a piece of blue chip real estate had long been salivated over by property developers, some of which were at the front of the lynch mob. They got the property in the end. And Ray disappeared somewhere to attempt salvage a normal life under a different name. None of the aforementioned professionals faced any loss of liberty or capital.

A Brief Eulogy for Judy Johnson (contra psychiatry)

Judy Johnson was never afforded the opportunity to take the stand and confront Ray and his coven of Luciferian levitators, and not for reason of the prosecution wishing to protect their case from the damage of her testimony. No she died December 1986 from the complications of alcohol dependence. This being no mean feat and not something achieved over night, Johnson dying at the tender age of 42 years must have been drinking heavy for some years. When the panic was breaking she was taken to be what was convenient for those who wished to profit from the destruction of the McMartin seven, that is a brave and caring mother whose story was assumed to be true unless and until proven otherwise. Summit would give her a posthumous backhand defence as someone later made schizophrenic by the stress, further suggesting she had also a heroic mix of character and eccentricity to effect such a paradigm shift in public consciousness necessary to reveal ritual abuse. Now the panic is over one does not have to go far to see Johnson described as an unrecognized schizophrenic. Or so they say.  Once again even when psychiatry loses (in the sense that Summit, Pazder and others derive their authority from their credentials) the outcome is psychiatry winning, both in the explaining away of something more complex than a label, and in the use of the label to scapegoat an individual and it being held up as something that exists as a meaningful descriptor. And yet where and what is this thing called schizophrenia as any more existent than the tunnels under McMartin? Johnson was an immensely strained solo mother of two, one of which (her first) had a brain tumour. And Judy Johnson herself was killing off both brain and liver with alcohol, the realities of these pathologies being something much more real than “schizophrenia”. As she went deeper and deeper into her excursions into her interrogation of Billy her efforts were reflected in the beliefs and behaviours of the greater Los Angeles area, and much of the United States as a whole. Was it her leading questions that make of Johnson a schizophrenic? Was it her belief in the infallibility of child testimony? Was it the belief that a child who shows no evidence of having been abused has a physical examination consistent with having been abused sometime in the past, i.e. a belief in a thing not seen? (at least her child had an erythematous anus). Was it her belief that Ray and the McMartin seven were pedophilic necrophilic zoophilic (and zookeeping) homicidal Satanists with supernatural powers, merely the tip of the ice berg to a vast international ring of the same, that made Johnson a schizophrenic? But this was a belief ardently shared by hundreds if not tens of thousands of parents, police, countless psychiatrists and psychologists, the judicial machine and the fourth estate at the height of the panic. Are not all these many hundreds if not tens or hundreds of thousands (even millions!) of persons also schizophrenic? Circa the time of the trial Duke University completed a survey of Los Angeles residents, the finding being a staggering 98% thought the McMartin Seven were guilty, rendering it nigh on impossible to find an unbiased juror. The initial pool required to front court from which the 12 were chosen was approx. 500 persons.

The irony is that a psychiatric witness for the prosecution is an expert in virtue of being a psychiatrist. Same is the case for the defence. And the psychiatrist can be viewed through the lens of one who, in virtue of their expertise qua psychiatric credential, can determine if your child has been sexually abused, and you too perhaps. This despite perhaps neither you or your child may remembering it until you have seen the psychiatrist yourselves. Should you or your child come to later believe false memories were “implanted” or you were in any way mentally injured by your interaction with psychiatry, many a member of the public of Manhattan Beach took the choice to pursue therapy with, you guessed it, the very species of experts who first bruised them. That is to say that many an American bruised by the panic and its psychiatrists decided get therapy, a conscious leap from the frying pan into the fire, an addiction to therapy. Now that is madness!

But McMartin was a one off?

Whilst it is true the McMartin saga was the most high profile and memorable day care case of the Satanic panic, it was far from being the only one. As stated, dozens of day cares centres fell in the Los Angeles area, some from accusation and some by association, for many a parent thought it just too risky to place their child in any day care centre at all. One wonders if McMartin et al did not contribute in its own small way to the helicopter parenting we observe today. Yet there were many other centres besides. In California, Kern County was scorched by multiple panicked investigations. Across the fly over states to the Atlantic, in New York at least a dozen preschools were investigated. In North Carolina the Little Rascal case broke state legal records of expenses just as McMartin took the nation. All up across the country the estimate is conservatively in excess of 100 preschools implicated in Satanism. Probably over 10,000 persons had their reputation permanently ruined or brought into danger as a result of the panic and many dozens were imprisoned, some even to this day. No one has really counted their number, and some false convictions may have resulted from false confessions and the faults of coercion within the practice of “plea bargaining” that imprisons innocent persons all the time.

MPD/DID and the Satanic Panic

Heretofore we have been looking at multiple personality disorder in cinema and psychiatry on one hand, and on the other Satanism in film and its panicked interface with psychiatry. Given that both played upon the motif of childhood trauma, the innocence of the child accuser, and repressed memory with dissociation in the victim, it was only inevitable that these two plot lines were to converge on the same stage of what is taken for reality. And converge they did in the psychiatrists and psychologists rooms of thousands of patients across in the US at the height of the panic. Here we will consider a select few.

The Strange Case of Patricia Burgus

Patricia Burgus was an ordinary American mother of a son (John Paul). Normal that was until she had an extremely complicated birth of her second child (Michael), this leaving her emotionally as well as physically bruised and fearful of her newborns recovery from a delivery that threatened the life of mother and child. He was to have an Erb’s palsy for his first 4 years. These challenges placed Patricia and her husband, both devout Roman Catholics, in a state of conflict. They both wanted a large family, or at least this was what their public persona desired. But once bitten twice shy after a traumatic delivery, and so she developed what other psychiatrists might jump to call “postnatal depression”. By all accounts Pat had some measure of resilience, having recovered from the post traumatic stress of having been previously a hostage in a grocery store armed robbery more or less a decade earlier. Despite this, she was happy before the day of delivery and the real stresses came after childbirth.

Following the birth of Michael, on/off between 1982 to 1984 she sought help from social worker and psychotherapist Ann-Marie Baughman, who it is said encouraged her to name her various emotional states, i.e. to personify them, this apparently leading to a fracture in the unity of Patricia’s psyche and the first emergence of multiple personality, MPD being Baughmans diagnosis (it being my contention that Baughman could not have made the diagnosis were it not for Sybil, the psychiatric machine and DSM III). Patricia might well have encouraged this in referring to herself in the third person or the collective “we”, and we must not judge Baughmans technique so strange. It was common then and extremely common now in the care of anorexic girls who are encouraged to speak of “Anna” as some alien force in their psyche whom they best challenge and disavow. I have personally seen a couple anorexic patients develop a multiple personality like hysteria as a result of Annasaurus Rex being split off from their own sovereign mind. Anna did this. Anna is telling them that. And yet who is Anna but for a part of them, but an iatrogenic subclinical MPD? Enough of digressions into anorexia nervosa! Returning to Patricia Burgus, she was motivated to obtain a disability pension, for which psychiatrist opinion was sought. She saw six whom apparently could not agree on the diagnosis. Such is the lot of psychiatry, a broad church only appearing united on the surface. Perhaps revealing something of Pats suggestibility and personality matrix, her 1985 stay at the Menninger Clinic was short, this after they denied her wish to stay with the teddy bears she kept for her child personalities to play with. Rather than choose the Menninger, she remained loyal to her bears and infantile regression both. And so Pat found herself at a loss, that was until she called the National Institute of Mental Health (the peak national psychiatric research body), who referred her to Chicago’s Rush Hospital, a Dissociation unit headed by psychiatrist Bennett Braun and psychologist Roberta Sachs, both who were also two of the American Psychiatric Associations leading lights and part of the DSM working group on dissociative disorders. By 1986 Pat was an inpatient at Chicago Rush, and the therapy had begun. She was told in no uncertain terms that she must have been abused as a child, and her protests were denied on the assumption she must be repressing the memory. Brauns logic was circular and typical of psychiatry. Childhood trauma leads to repressed memory and dissociation. To be traumatized implies the outcome, the outcome implies the alleged cause. The logic is circular. Once you have the diagnosis of MPD, the witch hunt for the perpetrator/s begins.

On Satanic cults Braun said “international organization that’s got a structure somewhat similar to communist cells”. And using language perfectly suitable for demon possession Braun describes MPD thus; “you would never know it existed. Patients develop so many personalities to hide behind …unless they can be coaxed out of the dark shade of the mind you’d never know they were there”

And so at Chicago Rush it was not long before under hypnosis and with what would become countless hours of psychotherapy, Pat was to remember being abused by both parents, in ways unimaginable. From this she would be estranged from the parents who brought her into the world for the next 6 years. Patricia and many of her 300 troupe of personalities were not merely to recall childhood sexual abuse. They, like the other multiples on the ward (hundreds of personalities more than available hospital beds), also began to recall ritual satanic abuse. She would recall being the high priestess of a cult taking in not just her parents yet beyond, a royal bloodline before the founding of the America’s. She would come to believe that her personalities were programming to accomplish the cult objectives whilst remaining hidden from the world at large, Pat’s conscious mind being part of those duped. (The reader might see in this programming the similarity here to another creation of Hollywood, “The Manchurian Candidate”). There would be talk of rituals, sexual, zoophilic and paedophilic, and of sacrifice and cannibalism. both the sacrifice and cannibalism involving babies of course, and I’ll leave it to the psychoanalyst readers would to make of this in light of the basic plot of Pats neurosis of conflict over parenthood. Pats husband, who was allowed visitation, at Brauns request brought in meat from an extended family BBQ to be assayed if it contained human protein. Pats and other patient’s dolls and stuffed toys, rather than being seen for what they were, (i.e. objects of hysterical regressions to childhood) were interpreted differently. Instead they were interpreted as replacement objects for the animals and children sacrificed, these stand in’s in turn standing in for a recognition of the murders they were responsible for and the children who could never return from the portable incinerators that left the forest without trace of the moonlit witchcraft. The staff, true to the biopsychosocial model, were soon to draw Pats two young boys into the net. MPD was said to be hereditary (bio), Pat was programmed to train her children in the dark arts as she had been (psycho) and she lived within the milieu of witches who also had their designs to protect their own, or trigger a pre-programmed suicide program or assassination rather than risk exposure (social). Pat herself was by now perhaps acting in diminished capacity as she was largely cut off from the rationality of the world outside, in addition to being administered large doses of psychoactive medication (1200mg and 100mg per day respectively of propranolol and fluoxetine, as well as many milligrams of alprazolam and sodium amytal). Consequently, for the alleged protection of the children, both were admitted. First admitted was John Paul soon followed by Michael. The children were under the care of child psychiatrist Elva Poznanski, who had a knowing yet permissive role in the works of Braun upon the children, and so the therapeutic team expanded to include Poznanski, Sachs, Braun, a junior doctor and nursing staff, with the hospital executive aware of the general formulation of the cases and what was being treated (satanic ritual abuse). The children were themselves exposed to hours of interrogation and “remembering” their own roles in the cult, of having shot and stabbed people. Braun would later provide testimony that the children had knowledge of what disembowelment looks and smells like, knowledge that only a surgeon or serial killer could know (though as Pat later thought, such knowledge could have been acquired from a certain scene in any VHS copy of the blockbuster “The Empire Strike Back”). The boys were even provided an unloaded handgun as an aide de memoire, and their revelations rewarded with stickers just as happens when a child does well on a task. Halloween was an incredibly trying time for Rush hospital. What would the children do? Might the Satanists be circling the building? Would there be murder, escape, suicide or perhaps all three?

By 1988 the hospital was approaching the point of scraping the bottom of the family’s 3 million dollar health insurance barrel, this coinciding with the time Pat Burgus’s level of care was reduced from full time inpatient to discharge and to return to day programs. She ceased her medication cold turkey, somehow endured the discontinuation side effects and embarked on a trip back to Iowa. Gradually an idea began to dawn on Pat, that idea being “where was the evidence?”. Not a single satanic artefact hidden anywhere in the home. No talk of missing persons about the town. No bodies in the basement. Pat was in the grip of the paranoid’s dilemma. The absence of proof may indicate just how wily the conspirators are. But it might also mean that the story wasn’t true. She wasn’t a high priestess. She was just plain boring Patricia Burgus. It was then that Pat decided lawyer up.

The Strange Case of Mary Shanley

Mary Shanley was, like Patricia Burgus, exposed to her own traumas of the past. In Burgus’ case it was a grocery store holdup and difficult birth. In Shanleys case it was alcoholic parents, a rape in the late teens and placing the resultant child up for adoption. Not surprisingly she had a fragile personality structure, and her admission to Rush Hospital was not her first. True to Freudian form, Mary married alcoholic Joe and together they had a son Ryan in 1981. Joe cleaned up his act in 1984. 1987 was a tough year for Mary. Joe wanted more children and Mary had, for some reason occasion to have a hysterectomy. She was attacked at her son’s school and became depressed with panic attacks. Despite all the above traumata of adolescence and adulthood, her first therapist suggested MPD and ritual abuse of childhood. And so, via a short stint in another hospital she found herself in 1990 the old Orchard wing of Rush. Much of Shanleys case mirrors that of Burgus. An extremely prolonged expensive admission, hypnosis. a potpourri of ultra-high dose psycho-pharmaceuticals, the diagnosis of MPD and the multiplication of her multiples, the exploration into her involvement in occult Satanism with all the macabre bloody appurtenances of its praxis, the iatrogenic estrangement from accused family and so on. The case is made more bizarre by the one off review by Utah professor of psychology Corydon Hammond, who warned that Shanley was an occultly programmed killer and the activation of her program was imminent. The move was prompted by Hammond asking her about the Greek alphabet. Never the classicist, Shanley could only think of gamma. This Hammond “decoded” as being proof of her unconscious containing a killer program. Anything seemingly innocuous might activate it, a bunch of flowers with a colour trigger, a magazine article with encoded words etcetera. In 1991 Shanley and her then 9 year old son Ryan were spirited off in secret from Chicago to Spring Shadows Glen Hospital under the temporary care and inquisition of Psychologist Dr Judith Peterson, psychiatrists Dr’s Gloria Keraga and Richard Seward and psychotherapist Sylvia Davis, all of whom practiced with the same diagnostic formulation to that of Braun et al in Chicago. Peterson in particular was said to be an expert in “deprogramming”, though not so expert to shorten Shanleys hospital stay which continued until 1993 (the child Ryan was returned to Chicago Rush after a few weeks). Shanley was held against her will, and was often ambivalent about her beliefs re her role in satanic ritual abuse. She too was discharged circa the time insurance monies were depleted. Upon her release she too lawyered up. An excerpt of her discharge summary reads

"Patient is a victim of satanic ritualistic abuse. Diagnosis of MPD. Apparently someone outside the family is activating her or an alter personality to attempt suicide
... One of the inside parts states that the body will be in danger from March 22nd to April 13th. The right side remembers cult activities such as the rites of spring occurring on March 21st. This is apparently a time for initiation into one of three levels and also a time for blood sacrifice...One of the goals [of therapy] was to
teach Mary some self-hypnosis techniques in order to help the alters communicate more appropriately between [sic] each other...by the end of March, Mary was working quite hard, but some internal parts were sabotaging her progress in therapy...She was struggling with the acceptance of the diagnosis of MPD and dissociation, having a high level of denial, frequently refusing her Inderal, not participating in group activities, maintaining an isolative [sic] and withdrawn demeanor...At this point, Mary was able to identify five generations of cult involvement, going back to Ireland, and an alter named Nura came out..."

Burgus and Shanley; The Aftermath

Having acquired legal counsel and successfully filing suit, the aftermath of the Burgus and Shanley cases had their brief and long forgotten moment on the national news. Burgus settled out of court for 10.6 million dollars (ironically on Halloween). Eventually she reconciled with her parents, who forgave her for the grievous accusations she raised against them, though in their dotage none could never reclaim the 6-8 years they lost away from their daughter and two grandsons, and only then at the expense of seeing their daughter as a victim without agency in their own demonization of psychiatry (that is to say they could only forgive their daughter by convincing themselves of the convenient lie that she was brainwashed and no part of her chose what the therapists offered). Instead the Burgus family externalized responsibility to the treatment providers and let their daughter completely off the hook. Part of Burgus claim for compensation was, inter alia, the need for finance further psychiatric therapy for the children to treat the trauma brought upon them by the psychiatric therapy they received at Rush. It just goes to show in this subtle Stockholm syndrome, one can escape fantasy Satanism without escaping the more pernicious fantasy that psychiatry somehow somewhere simply must have something meaningful to offer. One just needs more therapy to cure one of the wrongs that therapy has wrought. Madness again!

The dissociative unit of Rush was closed in 1998 and Bennet Braun was to lose licence to practice in Illinois for two years, moving his career in private practice in rural Montana and barred for 5 years from working with MPD patients. The self-styled “counterphobic” Braun later sued his own insurance company for allegedly settling the case without his consent and he remained unrepentant. An unrepentant Sachs also moved into another state and continued to practice psychology. Poznanski’s career was also never the same, though she was aging and testified against Braun, essentially plea bargaining her way to walk off stage with dignity. It is to be noted that the children were last to be released from hospital, and Poznanski fought to keep them under state sanctioned (i.e. tax payer funded) stay after the insurance money expired, under the dogged belief that it was not safe to return the children to their mother. Corydon Hammond continued to teach and practice, and no gamma programmed assassin has ever targeted him or these other arch foils of Satanism either for that matter.

Spring Shadows Glen Hospital Dissociative unit was itself to close in 1994, the hospital renamed and all the aforementioned staff facing charges of insurance fraud, in addition to certain staff on hospital administration. Mary Shanley herself enjoyed an undisclosed though undoubtedly multimillion dollar settlement. Sadly, the only happiness in her ending was money. Had she wished, Shanley was never able return to her profession (teaching) as she remained on a national list of suspected child sex offenders. She and her husband divorced, perhaps on account of the drama of the satanic panic though one speculate upon impact of marital problems that predated the Rush admission. Less disputable is the situation with her son, who could never accept she was not as he had been indoctrinated to believe she was. They programmed him to believe his mother was a witch. Judith Peterson and her psychiatrist colleagues were unrepentant, and all continued to practice and lead workshops after the end of the panic. Peterson was to give a reply in an interview with Mark Pendergrast that became typical of many practitioners when confronted with the need to control the damage to their reputation, and that is the fall back on extreme American philosophical pragmatism.

"It doesn't particularly matter if it's true or not. I wasn't there. The dilemma of true or not true is up to them."

As was the case with day care centres and the satanic panic, Patricia Burgus, Mary Shanley and their respective families were to be just two of hundreds of casualties of the panic, with countless others across the country in the hands of other less illustrious therapists and in other hospitals. In total, other cases from Rush alone were settled to what has been estimated a total of at least triple to five fold the 10.6 million dollars Patricia Burgus herself received. One can only speculate on how the insurance companies might have displaced the resultant liability onto patients and practitioners alike. And these were not the only strange cases either. At Rush, there was Elizabeth Gale, who spent near 2000 days in hospital, agreeing to a tubal ligation as she did not wish to be a “breeder” for children to be used for ritual abuse. Gale was later awarded over 7 million dollars. From Colorado came Kathryn Schwiderski and daughter Kelly Schwiderski known as the “Colorado fetus factory”, another family destroyed. The list goes on and on.

Only in America?

There is no denying that the dynamism of the new world was for the Satanic Panic, like many a fad, something that could not be repeated elsewhere on the same scale. And yet in the case of Michelle Remembers we must remember that the Satanic Panic emerged in Canada before the United States, and the panic did find itself being exported to other Anglo countries, just as MPD was exported from France. The panic reflected back into Canada at a greater intensity before it was finally to end in the early-mid 90’s. In the UK circa the same years there were mirror cases of families separated and lives destroyed under the weight of satanic ritual abuse allegations, including Cleveland (i.e. the Cleveland of Englands north) in 1987, Nottingham in 1989, Rochdale in 1990, Orkney in 1991 and approx. 80 cases in total across the UK petering out by the mid-nineties with a post millennial outlier in Lewis (Scotland) in 2003. In Australia, the nation that not so coincidentally first published its own first case of MPD the year The Three Faces of Eve was released and whose psychiatric guild in the early 1980’s embraced a Melbourne conference of the International Society for the Study of MPD and Dissociation in the lead up towards the panic, in Sydneys upmarket North Shore certain kindergartens were also implicated in the panic. The local fourth estate wrote of 200 women claiming to be ritual satanic abuse survivors in Sydney alone. Cases of ritual satanic abuse were also investigated in the smaller cities Perth and Adelaide, the former supposedly having 13 witches covens involved in ritual abuse and the latter provoking such lurid headlines such as “human sacrifice at Adelaide University”. In Melbourne the conspiracy included allegations of the Roman Catholic Church being on the villainous side. Insomuch as the international crisis in the reputation of the Latin church was yet to break, one can retrospectively ask how much truth was present in the general notion of institutionalized child abuse, whilst we remain sceptical to the extent to which Satan was at the scene of the crime. We must not mock the United States though, for the rest of the Anglo speaking world was saved the full extent of the panic only by the unintended benefits of being slow behind its leader. Sometimes the last to catch an idea are the first to be cured of it.

And what of the Psychiatric Guilds?

Todays younger psychiatrists and those trained outside the Anglo speaking world know nothing of the Satanic Panic or the degree to which their psychiatric elders had buy in (at worst), or turned a blind eye (at best). Psychiatric residents are assiduously trained to see the particularly egregious mistakes of the past as having been made at least two generations prior. Imagining sins of a long distant past establishes a greater temporal disconnect between themselves and risking insight into their own professional vulnerabilities. And so we are always living in the age when depravities such as prefrontal lobotomy and many more besides were done by those primitives before our truly scientific, truly evidence based and truly ethically well founded practice came to life in us. The truth is of course that a proper study in the history of psychiatry must pull our pessimistic verisimilitude right up to the moment in which we live, the day in which we work and the patient now right in front of us. Therapists insight into the sins and limitations of their profession, though something which is the spirit and goal of good psychotherapy, is too painful and destabilizing an experience for the profession of psychiatry to bear. In the defense of its own ego it fails to confront itself, instead erecting its own fantasy that the sins were way back then and way over there somewhere else by men long dead. And we see in the case of Bennett Braun, arguably a scapegoat if ever there was one, even his penalty was terribly light and was not to become precedent to bring his specialist colleagues into a place of danger, either professionally or financially. Yet where was the vocal public condemnation of psychiatry as a whole as vulnerable to its own form of madness, and vulnerable to the present day? Perhaps there was critique from the psychiatrists George Ganaway and Paul McHugh (the latter of whom was to become persona non grata for later opposing the ideology of transgenderism). And there was anthropologist Sherrill Mulhern and psychologist Richard Noll who offered robust critique. Ganaway once wrote of those who recovered repressed memories and alternate personalities

“I’ve Personally encountered “demons, angels, sages, lobsters, chickens, tigers, a gorilla, a unicorn, and ‘God’,” to name only a few. “. McHugh described it beautifully “MPD is an iatrogenic behavioral syndrome, promoted by suggestion and maintained by clinical attention, social consequences, and group loyalties.”

But amongst the profession as a whole, which must have included many sceptics, there was nothing but near total silence. The unwritten method is simple and not to be unexpected for a profession thoroughly infused with philosophical pragmatism.

-Do as much as is possible to maximize the status and power of the profession.

-Avoid anything that might bring the profession into disrepute.

-Only if absolutely necessary throw a colleague under the bus and only to the extent necessary to satiate the herds thirst for justice.

-And if possible deflect from, or reframe the interpretation of, the problem or externalize responsibility.

And so we have practitioners who behave as if satanic ritual abuse is as real as the nose on their face coming to say afterwards that they were working with the patients truth without commitment into their own. Or we have psychiatry blaming psychology, “untrained” social workers or family general practitioners.

And then there is the technique of rebranding and simply forgetting. Formed in 1983, the International Society for the Study of MPD and Dissociation at its height had over 2000 professional members, who were also part of the working groups towards the DSM section on dissociative disorders and many of whom were the colourful figures who rode the panic and many more conspiracy theories besides. By 1994 when the Satanic Panic, false memories and iatrogenic MPD were being exposed, the organization rebranded as “International Society for the Study of Dissociation”. And then when childhood sexual abuse was fashionably accepted as real yet detached from its satanic implications, in 2006 the organization rebrands again as the “International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation”. To this day it hands out the Cornelia Wilbur award and its guidelines assert that 1-3% of the adult population has MPD/DID.

In the American Psychiatric Association and its diagnostic bible the DSM, the advisory committee for the DSM III (1980) ANXIETY AND DISSOCIATIVE DISORDERS section included the following names; Jean Endicott, Ph.D. George Saslow, M.D., Ph.D. Michael Gelder, M.D. Michael Sheehy, M.D. Donald F. Klein, M.D. Robert L. Spitzer, M.D. Isaac Marks, M.D. That said, Dissociative disorders were given their own chapter, with multiple personality disorder appearing mid chapter, with a prevalence described thus “The disorder is apparently extremely rare”. Like any major publication there was significant work done in lead up to the release of DSM III, the release date being a mere 3 years after the screening of Sybil. On the differential diagnosis, last is listed malingering (i.e. lying) with the comment “Malingering can present a difficult diagnostic dilemma. The presence of secondary gain suggests Malingering. Hypnosis or amytal interview may be of help in resolving especially difficult cases.”

That is to say that as recent as 1980 psychiatry thought that hypnosis and the erroneously called “truth serum” of sodium amytal can be a guide to discerning one who lies to the psychiatrist from one who lies to themselves. The premise behind the use of sodium amytal was the lie psychiatry told itself. Ergo the battle was over before it had begun.

By 1987 the post Sybil effect and Satanic Panic with MPD as a psychological defence against, or programming by, satanic ritual abuse at their diagnostic peak and were not yet robustly challenged. The revised third volume of the manual, the DSM III R 1987 included working group members as follows; Bennet G. Braun, M.D., Philip M. Coons, M.D., Richard P. Kluft, M.D., Frank W. Putnam, M.D., Robert L. Spitzer, M.D., Marlene Steinberg, M.D., and Janet B.W. Williams, D.S.W.

Spitzer was the editor and his involvement in the proliferation of psychiatric diagnoses has been heavily criticised elsewhere (see for example James Davies book “Cracked”). We have encountered the name Bennett Braun above. Richard Kluft, the then Professor of Psychiatry at Pennsylvania’s Temple University School of Medicine, Editor-in-Chief of now out of print journal Dissociation (circulation ran between 1988-1997) and Past president of the dissociation society was quoted in 1989 as describing ritual satanic abuse as a “hidden holocaust” and "the average MPD patient is misused twice a week, perhaps 50 weeks of the year for an average of 10 years". Kluft is famous for marathon psychotherapy sessions of many hours. Riding the wave, MPD was placed first in the chapter, the rationale being “increased awareness that Multiple Personality Disorder is in many ways both the paradigm and the most pervasive expression of the spectrum of dissociative phenomenology”

Regarding the explosion in cases, the DSM III-R describe MPD thus

“Within a few years a disorder thought to be rare, apocryphal, or even extinct emerged as a long neglected, underdiagnosed, and frequently misdiagnosed condition, highly associated with significant childhood traumatization, and rather responsive to intensive (and often long-term) psychotherapy. Many patients long thought to have other disorders and relatively unresponsive to the therapies appropriate for those disorders have proven to have this condition”

And

“Recent reports suggest that this disorder is not nearly so rare as it has commonly been thought to be."

Regarding the idea that personalities can be opposites, so limiting the potential of multiplication of the personalities within the given patient to two or three, the DSM IIIR writes

" this reflects an outdated and over-simplistic view of the disorder”

By 1994 the American Psychiatric Association, savy Machiavellians that they are, could see the writing was on the wall for the diagnosis of MPD becoming bad public relations and many of their key influencers becoming liabilities. And so there was a massive sea change in the branding of MPD, all deflecting from what we might speculate to be the real reasons. Not a single member of the original working group were retained, and dissociation buried within a more eclectic working group termed “Psychiatric Systems Interface Disorders (Adjustment, Dissociative, Factitious, Impulse-Control, and Somatoform Disorders and Psychological Factors Affecting Medical Conditions) Work Group” Names included Robert E. Hales, M.D., Chairperson Ronald L. Martin, M.D. C. Robert Cloninger, M.D., Katharine Anne Phillips, M.D. Vice-Chairperson David A. Spiegel, M.D. Jonathan F. Borus, M.D. Alan Stoudemire, M.D. Jack Denning Burke, Jr., M.D., M.P.H. James J. Strain, M.D. Joe P. Pagan, M.D. Michael G. Wise, M.D. Steven A. King, M.D.

MPD itself was no more. Instead in its place was the newly constructed “Dissociative Identity Disorder”, DID returning to being wedged inconspicuously in the centre of the chapter. DSM IV hedges the bet both ways and refuses to state anything as a matter of principle, though DSM IV does caution

“Prevalence; The sharp rise in reported cases of Dissociative Identity Disorder in the United States in recent years has been subject to very different interpretations. Some believe that the greater awareness of the diagnosis among mental health professionals has resulted in the identification of cases that were previously undiagnosed. In contrast, others believe that the syndrome has been over-diagnosed in individuals who are highly suggestible.”

In the same year that DSM IV was released, a survey of some over 1,100 psychiatrists and psychologists suggested that almost 100% believed in the reality and commonality of dissociative disorders in general. 80% still took MPD seriously.

It should be noted that the vice chairperson of the DSM IV group was David A Spiegel, the psychiatrist son of psychiatrist Herbert Spiegel, the silent sceptic who described Shirley Mason of Sybil fame as a “brilliant hysteric”. The father in the son, the latter an object of historical cleansing.

The rebranding and forgetting strategy was to continue into the DSM IV TR (text revision) of 2000. Today, in the DSM 5 (the roman numerals being cast aside) Dissociative Identity Disorder is back to first place in its chapter, and said to have a prevalence in the community of about 1.5%. Can we seriously believe that in a small city of 1 million adults there are 15,000 Sybils, enough for every citizen to know one personally? Does psychiatry even consider the absurdity of such statistics before they toss them around? Perhaps soon with the forgetting of the Satanic panic DID will once again become the new seasons fashion. Everything old becomes new again.

But Why the Panic?

In the current chapter I’ve put forward the hypothesis that the rise and fall of MPD/DID and ritual satanic abuse was heavily influenced by psychiatry losing the objectivity it never possessed in riding and being ridden by a wave of popular culture, a professional series of recursive reflections with an inability to distinguish reality from fantasy. This is not to imply that the psychiatrist is the only professional species to which the finger may be pointed when blame is due. As we have seen there were psychologists, social workers, paediatricians and family physicians along with certain members of the police and judiciary all whom were involved. And yet it is taken as a given that the world need’s its police and its paediatricians, this despite the need from time to time for this or that reform in their practice. But can we take as a given the same putative indispensable need for psychiatry as that of the policeman, in light of the harms done by psychiatrists in the satanic panic? We have already made clear the sins of omission and pragmatism in the guilds and profession as a whole, and can hardly scapegoat individuals such as Bennett Braun, in so doing missing the forest for the trees. The current chapter is just one of a dozen blows from which to fell the assumption that psychiatry is necessary and the world would be the worse without it. Moreover we must place the tentacles of psychiatry in perspective, not as one amongst equals in the league of the helping professions, and not even an isolated one. When fault is at question in the world of mental health, the profession is minimally if at all influenced by the world of social work, psychology and occupational therapy. On the other hand, psychiatry provides thought leaders and influencers that dominate and contaminate many other helping professions. Boards and clinical teams have a multidisciplinary staff, almost overwhelmingly chaired by a member of the psychiatrist class as the keeper of authority. A professor of psychology may trump a common or garden variety psychiatrist in stature in a court of law, though the same common psychiatrist will carry more weight for the attorney than a common psychologist, social worker or any other allied health worker. And we have seen that Kee McFarlane’s and others ideology were influenced by the likes of Roland Summit, and a whole cottage industry in MPD was enlivened by psychiatry and underwritten by its guild and publication (what is in the DSM can be billed to the taxpayer or insurance company, along with granting a certain immunity against prosecution to the diagnostician. What is in the book is kosher because it is in the book you see). Let us not therefore allow psychiatry to diffuse outwards responsibility. Counterfactuals are hazardous to be sure. Yet it is entirely possible the panic would not have occurred if psychiatry were not to have existed. After all, psychiatry did not sure history of the witch trials. The most charitable conclusion is that the profession of psychiatry did nothing to bring it to its close, and everything to make it worse.

Psychiatry bashing aside, no doubt there are many more contributions to the panic, perhaps something even so vague and stochastic as the publics need for melodrama from time to time, when any old drama will do. There was also not so subtle foundational work done on the political level and the therapeutic state. In the 1970’s and 1980’s, members of both sides of American politics sought to make their mark and capitalize on the plight of children, concern for children being a perennial tactic of the politician. As Richard Beck writes in his excellent book “We Believe the Children”, Walter Mondale was one such politician seeking to pass his Child Abuse and Protection Treatment Act. Two principal “experts” informing the debate were Professor David Gil, whose research published as “Violence Against Children - Physical Child Abuse in the United States” supported the politically incorrect conclusion that child abuse in toto (i.e. neglect, sexual, and physical violence) is a large scale problem present in those from every walk of life to be sure, yet very much disproportionately more common amongst the poor and undereducated. Ergo its best indirect remedy was to be in the expensive large scale projects to lift the poor into the more affluent and educated middle class. Also a leftist of another corner sat sat Jolly K, founder of parents anonymous, who argued that child abuse was an individual and not a class issue, even a matter akin to an addiction. Jolly K arrived at this belief after her own psychotherapy had stagnated. She could not help lashing out at her own children, and so her therapist threw up his hands and suggested she form her own group (hence the modified model of alcoholics anonymous, in drawing upon a higher power, in this case to cure the parent of their addiction to aggression against their own children). Mondale, arguably not wishing to alienate whole electorates and demonize the democrat voting urban (often non white) poor, sided against Gil when he stated “this is not a poverty problem. It’s a national problem”, by which he meant individuals across the nation from all walks of life, a target that was everywhere and nowhere. The resultant was to push child protection further towards the model suggested by Jolly K, medicalization of child abuse and abuser and the growth of the child abuse therapy industry.

So much for child maltreatment in the general sense. The vast majority of MPD patients are single white females who may or may not have been abused as children (for the accuser is always holy and MPD and its assumed traumatic event and the diagnosis dance together in circular reasoning). Disturbingly, over 15% of MPD patients work in the helping professions. Insomuch as the diagnosis is female dominated, in some feminist circles MPD was to be formulated as both the outcome of patriarchal oppression on one hand, and on the other also a proclivity indicative of the special nature of womankind. Of Truddi Chase and her alleged 92 multiple alters in the 1987 book “When Rabbit Howls”, celebrated feminist and former CIA stooge Gloria Steinem speaks of MPD as being a “gift”, a proof of women’s connectedness with untapped potential of personal expression and creativity. Kind of like a celebration of the ultimate form of multitasking, Steinem called for a future when women would be able to live MPD without the antecedent trauma. This was to be a theme played out again thirty years later in the attitude of Dr Fletcher. the treating therapist of the (admittedly male) character in Shayamalan’s 2016 fictional film “Split” as she plead for her colleagues to embrace an interest in MPD/DID “and perhaps now they are capable of something we are not. We have brain scans now. DID patients have changed their body chemistry with their thoughts.” This is the sentiment reminiscent of Jekyll and Hyde. What a monster Jekyll was to be sure. But what strength and power!

Of McMartin Preschool, the progressive left would see the panic as falling into the hands of those critical of what day care centres might do to the traditional conservative Christian family and traditional women’s roles. This speculation can only go so far and cuts both ways. Day care centres equals Satan equals bad. But as cases such as Burgus and Shanley and others illustrates, Satanism was considered home grown and intergenerational also, a product of tradition. Families equals Satan equals bad. We might just have easily have conceived of the secular state and its separation of powers, secular day care included, as a saviour from Satan at home. And Roman Catholic Pazder aside, many if not most of the mental health community who bought into the panic were supposedly enlightened non believer’s, their folly was in believing people were plagued by a religion of a different, Luciferian, kind. Many sceptics were also believers who did not think Satan actually worked that way, and was playing a longer game. As the character Roger Kint said in the film “The Usual Suspects”, “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist.”. are Satanists real? Is satan? Are they simply more sophisticated, even to the point of creating false flags and red herrings? I’ll let the reader decide.

When searching for reasons, we additionally cannot discount the symbolic power of numbers. The panic was coming at a time not merely the end of the century, yet also the end of the millennium, this being remarkable as, well, it only happens once every thousand years. No one will know we ever existed by the time the third millennium rolls around. One need not be in any away attuned to astrology to attach significance written into the changing of the times. From the second coming to the panic around the millennium bug, protean formulations of both religious and secular eschatology were also there ripe for the picking as the year 2000 drew closer. Occasionally the secular and religious worlds would become blurred, in many Americans seeing communism not as atheistic but literally Satanic. This was, after all, the rhetoric of Regan. And so Satan was here, there and everywhere. But Satan can also exist in post Soviet void. The height of the satanic panic also came at a time of perestroika, and there were signs aplenty that either the cold war may end in a hot ball of thermonuclear explosion, or the dying out altogether of the USSR as actually came to pass. As there were signs in the late 1980’s of the USSR unravelling and Sept 11th 2001 was not yet dreamed of, the United States and her allies were at imminent peril of losing something that defined them for almost half a century. As Georgi Arbatov would presciently say when describing the greatest blow that a dying USSR was to inflect upon the United States, “we have deprived you of an enemy”. What better enemy to serve as a replacement object than the perennial eternal Satan himself? He would never let them down.