Bennett Braun, a Chicago psychiatrist whose diagnoses of repressed reminiscences involving horrific abuse by satan worshipers helped to gasoline what turned referred to as the “satanic panic” of the 1980s and ’90s, died on March 20 in Lauderhill, Fla., north of Miami. He was 83.
Jane Braun, certainly one of his ex-wives, stated the dying, in a hospital, was from problems of a fall. Dr. Braun lived in Butte, Mont., however had been in Lauderhill on trip.
Dr. Braun gained renown within the early 1980s as an skilled in two of the most well-liked and controversial areas of psychiatric remedy: repressed reminiscences and a number of character dysfunction, now referred to as dissociative id dysfunction.
He claimed that he might assist sufferers uncover reminiscences of childhood trauma — the existence of which, he and others stated, had been answerable for the splintering of an individual’s self into many distinct personalities.
He created a unit devoted to dissociative issues at Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke’s Medical Middle in Chicago (now Rush College Medical Middle); turned a steadily quoted skilled within the information media; and helped to discovered what’s now the Worldwide Society for the Examine of Trauma and Dissociation, an expert group of over 2,000 members immediately.
It was from that sizable platform that Dr. Braun publicized his most explosive findings: that in dozens of instances, his sufferers found reminiscences of being tortured by satanic cults and, in some instances, of getting participated within the torture themselves.
He was not the one psychiatrist to make such a declare, and his supposed revelations keyed right into a rising nationwide panic.
The 1980s noticed a vertiginous rise within the variety of folks, each youngsters and adults, who claimed to have been abused by satan worshipers. It started in 1980 with the ebook “Michelle Remembers,” by a Canadian lady who stated she had recovered reminiscences of formality abuse, and spiked following allegations of abuse at day care facilities in California and North Carolina.
Components of popular culture, equivalent to heavy metallic music and the role-playing sport Dungeons and Dragons, had been looped in as supposed entry factors for cult exercise.
Such tales had been fodder for fashionable TV codecs that reveled within the salacious, together with discuss exhibits like “Geraldo” and newsmagazines like “Dateline,” which broadcast segments that promoted such claims uncritically.
The psychiatric career bore some accountability for the rising panic, with revered researchers like Dr. Braun giving it a gloss of authority. He and others ran seminars and distributed analysis papers; they even gave the phenomenon a quasi-medical abbreviation, S.R.A., for satanic ritual abuse.
Dr. Braun’s inpatient unit at Rush turned a magnet for referrals and a warehouse for sufferers, a few of whom he saved medicated and beneath supervision for years.
Amongst them was a girl from Iowa named Patricia Burgus. After interviewing her, Dr. Braun and his colleague, Roberta Sachs, claimed that she was not solely the sufferer of satanic ritual abuse, however was additionally herself a “excessive priestess” of a cult that had raped, tortured and cannibalized 1000’s of kids, together with her two younger sons.
Dr. Braun and Dr. Sachs despatched Mrs. Burgus and her youngsters to a psychological well being facility in Houston, the place they had been held aside for practically three years with minimal contact with the surface world.
By then Mrs. Burgus, closely medicated, had come to consider the medical doctors, telling them she recalled torches, reside burials and consuming the physique components of as much as 2,000 folks a 12 months. After her dad and mom served her husband meatloaf, she had him get it examined for human tissue. The checks got here again detrimental, however Dr. Braun was not satisfied.
Dr. Braun saved different sufferers beneath comparable circumstances at Rush or elsewhere. He persuaded one lady to have an abortion as a result of, he satisfied her, she was the product of ritualistic incest; he persuaded one other to bear tubal ligation to forestall having extra youngsters inside her supposed cult.
The satanic panic started to wane within the early 1990s. A 1992 F.B.I. investigation discovered no proof of coordinated cult exercise in america, and a 1994 report by the Nationwide Middle on Little one Abuse and Neglect surveyed over 12,000 accusations of satanic ritual abuse and located that not a single one held up beneath scrutiny.
“The most important factor was the shortage of corroborating proof,” Kenneth Lanning, a retired F.B.I. agent who wrote the 1992 report, stated in a cellphone interview. “It’s the form of crime the place proof would have been left behind.”
Many individuals distanced themselves from their earlier enthusiasms; in 1995, Geraldo Rivera apologized for his episode overlaying the falsehood. Nevertheless, even in 1998, “Dateline” ran an episode on NBC claiming to point out widespread satanic exercise in Mississippi.
Mrs. Burgus sued Rush, Dr. Braun and her insurance coverage firm over claims that he and Dr. Sachs had implanted false reminiscences in her head. They settled out of court docket in 1997 for $10.6 million.
“I started so as to add a number of issues up and realized there was no approach I might come from a little bit city in Iowa, be consuming 2,000 folks a 12 months, and no one stated something about it,” Mrs. Burgus advised The Chicago Tribune in 1997.
A 12 months later Dr. Braun’s unit at Rush was shut down, and the Illinois medical licensing board opened an investigation into his practices. In 1999, he obtained a two-year suspension on his license — although he didn’t admit wrongdoing.
Bennett George Braun was born on Aug. 7, 1940, in Chicago, to Thelma (Gimbel) and Milton Braun, a professor of orthodontics at Loyola College. He graduated from Tulane College with a bachelor’s diploma in psychology in 1963 and earned a grasp’s in the identical topic in 1964. He obtained his medical diploma from the College of Illinois in 1968.
Dr. Braun was married 3 times. His marriages to Renate Deutsch and Mrs. Braun each resulted in divorce. His third, to Joanne Arriola, resulted in her dying. He’s survived by 5 youngsters and 5 grandchildren.
After quickly shedding his medical license in Illinois, Dr. Braun moved to Montana, the place he obtained a brand new license in that state and opened a non-public observe.
However in 2019, certainly one of his sufferers, Ciara Rehbein, sued him for overprescribing medicine that left her with a everlasting facial tic. She additionally filed a grievance in opposition to the Montana Board of Medical Examiners for permitting him a license, regardless of understanding his previous.
Dr. Braun misplaced his license to observe drugs in Montana in 2020.