Bennett Braun, a Chicago psychiatrist whose diagnoses of repressed recollections involving horrific abuse by satan worshipers helped to gas what turned often 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, considered one of his former wives, stated he died in a hospital from issues 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 knowledgeable in two of the preferred and controversial areas of psychiatric remedy: repressed recollections and a number of persona dysfunction, now often known as dissociative id dysfunction.
He claimed that he might assist sufferers uncover recollections of childhood trauma — the existence of which, he and others stated, was chargeable 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); was ceaselessly quoted within the information media; and helped to discovered what’s now the Worldwide Society for the Research of Trauma and Dissociation, an expert group that in the present day has greater than 2,000 members.
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, kids in addition to adults, who claimed to have been abused by satan worshipers. It started in 1980 with the e book “Michelle Remembers,” by a Canadian lady who stated she had recovered recollections of formality abuse, and it spiked following allegations of abuse at day care facilities in California and North Carolina.
Components of popular culture, comparable to heavy metallic music and the role-playing sport Dungeons & 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 speak reveals 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 stored medicated and below supervision for years.
Amongst them was a girl from Iowa named Patricia Burgus. After interviewing her, Dr. Braun and a colleague, Roberta Sachs, claimed not solely that she was the sufferer of satanic ritual abuse, but additionally that she herself was 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 consider the docs, telling them she recalled torches, dwell burials and consuming the physique components of as much as 2,000 folks a yr. After her mother and father served her husband meatloaf, she had him get it examined for human tissue. The checks got here again destructive, however Dr. Braun was not satisfied.
Dr. Braun stored different sufferers below related situations 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 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 the USA, 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 below scrutiny.
“The largest factor was the dearth of corroborating proof,” Kenneth Lanning, a retired F.B.I. agent who wrote the 1992 report, stated in a cellphone 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 an episode of his present that lined the falsehood. Nonetheless, even in 1998, the NBC collection “Dateline” ran an episode claiming to indicate 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 court docket in 1997 for $10.6 million.
“I started so as to add a couple of issues up and realized there was no manner I might come from a bit of city in Iowa, be consuming 2,000 folks a yr, and no one stated something about it,” Mrs. Burgus informed The Chicago Tribune in 1997.
A yr 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 acquired a two-year suspension of 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. His father was 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 acquired 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 dying. He’s survived by 5 kids and 5 grandchildren.
After briefly dropping his medical license in Illinois, Dr. Braun moved to Montana, the place he acquired a brand new state license and opened a non-public observe.
However in 2019, considered one of his sufferers, Ciara Rehbein, sued him for overprescribing remedy that left her with a everlasting facial tic. She additionally filed a criticism 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 drugs in Montana in 2020.
