Bennett Braun, a Chicago psychiatrist whose diagnoses of repressed recollections involving horrific abuse by satan worshipers helped to gasoline what grew to become generally known as the “satanic panic” of the Eighties and ’90s, died on March 20 in Lauderhill, Fla., north of Miami. He was 83.
Jane Braun, one in all his ex-wives, mentioned the loss of life, 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 Eighties as an professional in two of the preferred and controversial areas of psychiatric remedy: repressed recollections and a number of persona dysfunction, now generally known as dissociative identification dysfunction.
He claimed that he may assist sufferers uncover recollections of childhood trauma — the existence of which, he and others mentioned, had been accountable 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 Heart in Chicago (now Rush College Medical Heart); grew to become a continuously quoted professional within the information media; and helped to discovered the what’s now the Worldwide Society for the Examine of Trauma and Dissociation, knowledgeable group of over 2,000 members at this time.
It was from that sizable platform that Dr. Braun publicized his most explosive findings: that in dozens of instances, his sufferers found recollections 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 Eighties noticed a vertiginous rise within the variety of folks, each kids and adults, who claimed to have been abused by satan worshipers. It started in 1980 with the e-book “Michelle Remembers,” by a Canadian girl who mentioned she had recovered recollections 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 steel 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 well-liked TV codecs that reveled within the salacious, together with discuss reveals like “Geraldo” and newsmagazines like “Dateline,” which broadcast segments that promoted such claims uncritically.
The psychiatric occupation 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 grew to become a magnet for referrals and a warehouse for sufferers, a few of whom he stored medicated and underneath 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 youngsters, together with her two younger sons.
Dr. Braun and Dr. Sachs despatched Mrs. Burgus and her kids to a psychological well being facility in Houston, the place they had been held aside for practically three years with minimal contact with the skin world.
By then Mrs. Burgus, closely medicated, had come to imagine the medical doctors, telling them she recalled torches, reside burials and consuming the physique elements 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 exams got here again destructive, however Dr. Braun was not satisfied.
Dr. Braun stored different sufferers underneath related circumstances at Rush or elsewhere. He persuaded one girl 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 stop having extra kids inside her supposed cult.
The satanic panic started to wane within the early Nineties. A 1992 F.B.I. investigation discovered no proof of coordinated cult exercise in america, and a 1994 report by the Nationwide Heart on Baby Abuse and Neglect surveyed over 12,000 accusations of satanic ritual abuse and located that not a single one held up underneath scrutiny.
“The largest factor was the shortage of corroborating proof,” Kenneth Lanning, a retired F.B.I. agent who wrote the 1992 report, mentioned in a telephone interview. “It’s the type 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 recollections in her head. They settled out of courtroom in 1997 for $10.6 million.
“I started so as to add a number of issues up and realized there was no approach I may come from slightly city in Iowa, be consuming 2,000 folks a 12 months, and no person mentioned 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 thrice. His marriages to Renate Deutsch and Mrs. Braun each led to divorce. His third, to Joanne Arriola, led to her loss of life. He’s survived by 5 kids 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, one in all his sufferers, Ciara Rehbein, sued him for overprescribing treatment that left her with a everlasting facial tic. She additionally filed a grievance towards the Montana Board of Medical Examiners for permitting him a license, regardless of figuring out his previous.
Dr. Braun misplaced his license to observe medication in Montana in 2020.
