Where Have All the Babies Gone?
Satanic ritual abuse, or SRA, refers to sexual abuse in the context of a satanic ritual. Reports of such bizarre happenings go way back in history, as do many other phenomena dealt with in this book. A witch panic in seventeenth-century Sweden involved the creation of false memories, false allegations of satanic child abuse, and clear psychiatric symptoms.
In recent times, recovered stories of ritualistic abuse of children seemed to surface more frequently in the mid-1980s. I don't recall seeing the term "satanic ritual abuse" prior to that. Indeed, putting "satanic ritual abuse" into a MEDLINE search yields papers only as far back as 1991 (MEDLINE itself goes back over forty years). It was in the 1890s, of course, that Freud made the concept of repressing a memory into an ordinary event. Then there was a time, during the 1980s, when memories uncovered during hypnosis or psychotherapy were believed to always be true. A lot of these memories concerned sexual abuse, even though many studies have shown that at least eighty percent of victims remember the abuse - all too well.
By the mid- I990s, it had become obvious that most of these memories dredged from the subconscious by well-meaning therapists were not so literally true. Maybe they were metaphors for other types of conflicts. Meanwhile, many families were destroyed. In a recent review of a book, Renumbering Trauma by R. J. McNally (reviewed in the Neu' England Journal of Medicine in the November 6, 2003 issue), the points are made that adults nearly always recall documented sexual abuse, and that such recall is never established without independent confirmation.
But for a while, SRA cases became common among psychotherapists, with informal surveys, including one taken by the American Psychological Association, suggesting that ten to fifty percent of therapists were treating at least one SRA patient. I assume this has dwindled lately, and I was unable to find the words "satanic" or "ritual" in the indexes of several recent editions of textbooks of psychiatry, nor any references to SRA in the sections on childhood sexual abuse.
One unifying feature of reported SRA is the inability to come up with any physical evidence in the aftermath of multiple bloody murders, woundings, druggings, bonfires, etc. In a 1991 paper in the journal Child Abuse and Neglect, thirty-seven adults who had described such abuse during their childhoods were studied. All or most of the patients reported sexual abuse, witnessing and receiving physical abuse or torture, witnessing animal mutilations or killings, death threats, forced drug usage, witnessing and being forced to participate in human adult and infant sacrifices, forced cannibalism, and marriage to Satan. The authors take a neutral stand on the reality issue.
One of these thirty-seven patients described a ritual where her baby was dismembered and consumed. She then informed the rest of the family that the child had suffered a crib death. In an attempt to verify this, a brother was contacted; he knew of the pregnancy and some sort of "funeral" held at the home, although he never saw the baby. The hospital in which the infant was supposed to have been born had no record of its birth. The state's Bureau of Vital Statistics also had no record of either this birth or death.
As for me, I find it impossible to believe that significant numbers of American babies vanish, unbeknownst to society, leaving behind neither birth certificates, blood, nor bones.
Same Show, Many Viewers
What renders SRA interesting, in a book on unexplained phenomena, is the widespread and sometimes simultaneous nature of' the outbreaks, as well as the similarities in the victims' descriptions of the events and circumstances. There is almost a legitimate presumption that all these people read the same book or saw the same movie or TV show (or their therapists did) and, although they've forgotten all about it, this is what informs their SRA accounts now and makes them all similar. Some researchers have found historical SRA panoramas that existed prior to the Inquisition, with similarities to the present time. Professor of pediatrics and psychiatry Frank W. Putnam, at the National Institutes of Mental Health, reviewed, in the same issue of Child Abuse and Neylert, the study of the thirty-seven adults reporting SRA. He believes that such historical accounts are not accurate, and cites medieval scholars who find no evidence of satanic cults' existence during those times. Putnam also feels that rumors, urban legends, and folk tales can disseminate rapidly through society.
Walter C. Young, the psychiatrist at the National Center for the Treatment of Dissociative Disorders who was the lead author of the reviewed study, isn't so sure. He is struck by his thirtyseven patients' similar experiences, despite coming from diverse areas and treatment locations, and having minimal contact with each other. Ph.D. psychologist Frank Leavitt at Rush Medical College in Chicago administered word-association tests to SRA and non-SRA patients and concluded that "an experience base is shared by individuals reporting SRA that is not found in individuals who do not report satanic abuse (even if they report sexual abuse)." Leavitt also believes that SRA patients share common knowledge despite their wide geographic separation.
It is this commonality of memory that led Carl Jung to believe in a collective unconscious. Are SRA scenarios somehow embedded into an instinctive human memory base? The "how," not to mention the "why," isn't obvious, but neither is it clear why diverse individuals can report similar bizarre experiences. The absence of any physical traces left behind from the rituals makes it clear that these didn't literally happen; but why would so many people, from different walks of life, share these recollections? And why can't they be convinced that the actual satanic orgies never took place?
Let's look at what kind of person, psychiatrically speaking, reports SRA. Going back to Leavitt's study, which was published in 1998 in the Journal of Clinical Psychology, three groups of in-hospital psychiatric patients were compared: those who had reported sexual abuse (non-satanic), those who had reported SRA, and patients from a general psychiatric unit. A wordassociation test, which uses responses to single words to glimpse conscious and unconscious meanderings of the mind, was administered to all three groups. For example, the word "table" might normally elicit a response of "chair." But if a patient had been sexually abused on a table, even as a child, the response might be "scary" or "violence."
Sexually abused (but non-SRA) patients and general psychiatric patients were similar in their word associations. SRA experiencers were different. They were less likely to come up with normal-type replies and more likely to have satanic-type connections (like responding to the word "circle" with associations like "chanting" or "cult," as opposed to "ball" or "square"). Leavitt and co-author psychologist Susan Labott find that there is a unique pattern of satanic word associations exhibited by SRA patients that is different from the responses of other psychiatric patients, even those who were sexually abused. What's more, they don't feel that these associations were planted by well-meaning therapists, as the patients came from diverse settings and locations; they also believe that some of the associations are subtle and not likely to have occurred from memory "contamination." As for media influences-magazines, movies, and TV-the authors feel that everyone is exposed to these, including the other psychiatric patients who did not answer the test words with satanic references.
In an earlier paper (1994), Leavitt screened SRA and sexually traumatized (without SRA) patients with the dissociative experiences scale mentioned in the NDE chapter. A score of more than thirty is consistent with a dissociative disorder.8 That chapter's near-death experiencers averaged eleven on this test. Now Leavitt administered it to his two groups. The abused, non-SRA group averaged thirty-six, indicating some ability to dissociate one's perceived self from reality. But the SRA patients averaged fifty, a high score often seen in multiple personality disorders.
The Three (or More) Faces of Eve
Multiple personality disorder, known as MPD (an astounding number of medical diagnoses can be boiled down to three letters), is a psychiatric condition that some feel is extremely rare and others feel is extremely under-recognized. In epidemiologic studies, between 0.5 percent and 3 percent of patien
ts admitted to psychiatric hospitals meet the diagnostic criteria for this curious affliction, currently classified as dissociative identity disorder (DID) and considered the most serious of the dissociative disorders.
Most MPD patients are women; they tend to be well educated and upper middle class. There is a sense that men with this problem become wards of the criminal justice system rather than of the mental health establishment, and are thus under-reported in clinical series. The young, ghost-possessed London man in a prior chapter comes to mind. Possession states are considered a different variation of dissociative disorder, but I can see how the ghost-directed behavior might qualify as another "personality."
There are some data to suggest that MPD can be hereditary. The condition is often compounded by other symptoms, like moodiness, anxiety, eating disorders, insomnia, and suicide attempts. It is similar to, and can be confused with, borderline personality disorder, which is a different psychiatric classification. A traumatic event, usually in childhood, is believed to precipitate MPD, which then becomes a defense mechanism to shield the experience by attributing it to another self, not really you. Ifyou hypnotize easily, you may be more susceptible. Some forms of epilepsy, in theory, can cause similar symptoms.
Two or more distinct personalities are required for the diagnosis of MPD; an average patient may have five or ten (think Sally Field in Sybil). These must take control of the person's behavior, and there must be no memory within each personality of what happens in the other incarnations. Sometimes there is a "dominant" personality that does retain memory of all the other personae.
I have a patient with MPD. Years ago, she volunteered this information to me, in the context of why I couldn't control her diabetes. Despite my raising her insulin dosage, her blood sugar never went down. Then she let me in on why: She had multiple personalities, many of whom were not diabetic (and wouldn't be taking insulin). The medical advice I dispensed in the office would not be relevant at other times, to other selves. Usually we call this noncompliance, but hers was a special case. She also told me, more recently, that each personality has no memory of the others. Her life experiences, therefore, are personality-specific. It's like different users logging on, each with their own password, to the same computer, whose hard drive no one can locate. (Remember, the brain's memories cannot be localized.)
Could the Ingram family be seen as having multiple personalities, one straight and one satanic, each with no connection to or memory of the others? To the extent that the second, satanic-experiencing, personality is "distinct," yes. Certainly the lapses, during questioning, into the hypnotic, trance-like states described in Wright's Neu Yorker articles qualify as some sort of clinical dissociation. Indiana University psychiatrist Philip M. Coons studied twenty-nine patients attending a dissociative disorders clinic who had reported satanic ritual abuse. Twenty-two of them had MPD as well. There is likely much overlap between SRA and MPD. Some observers feel that all patients who report SRA also have MPD. Coons tried to corroborate the abuse stories by interviewing relatives and examining old records; in no case could the reports be verified.
MPD may be falling out of favor as a psychiatric diagnosis. In a 1999 paper in the American Journal of Psychiatry, Harrison Pope, one of the authors of the lycanthropy account, assessed attitudes of American psychiatrists towards MPD/DID. Via questionnaires, Pope concluded that there wasn't much consensus about the diagnosis or validity of this syndrome. In a more scathing review in the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry in the fall of 2004, the authors feel that these diagnoses are illogical, not clearly diagnosable, not obviously linked to traumas, and to an extent fostered by health care professionals who look for MPD. The title of the two-part dissertation was "The Persistence of Folly."
Regardless of the label's validity, the medical profession is usually the first port of call for individuals and families disrupted and destroyed by intrusions of strange memories and altered personalities and behaviors. Whatever we call our patients, we still have to treat them; in the case of MPD, we haven't been hugely successful.
Again, where do memories come from? From life experience, of course. From a collective unconscious, perhaps. From dreams? "When Dreams Become Reality" was a paper published in the journal Consciousness and Cognition in 1996, by psychologists Giuliana A. L. Mazzoni of the University of Florence, Italy, and Elizabeth E Loftus of the University of Washington in Seattle. They recruited subjects in their early twenties who could usually remember their dreams. The psychologists created lists of words, some taken from dream content, some not, and subjects were tested as to the source of these words. The people mistook their own dream words with those on the other, non-dream, list "at a very high rate," suggesting that dream elements can easily be remembered as reality. The authors further conclude that "personal dream material seems to have a special quality in terms of its ability to 'become' memory."
Can well-meaning therapists implant memories, just by suggestion to susceptible people that these may be real? Professor of psychology Nicholas P. Spanos published, in 1994, "The Social Construction of Memories," a review of research on odd, evoked memories such as SRA. Spanos believes that a hypnotherapist (many of these memories emerge under hypnosis) can get patients to "recall" things by suggesting to them that certain events may have actually occurred. MPD patients tend to be easily hypnotizable, suggestible folks, and Spanos notes that by the mid-1980s, twenty-five percent of these patients, in therapy, had recovered SRA memories, and that by 1992 this was as high as eighty percent. There is a sense of "seek and ye shall find," and a question as to whether such thoughts were already there, awaiting detection, or were "put in" by the therapist. How easy is it to convince people that they've experienced an inherently bizarre, detailed ritual, anyway? Can some people be that suggestible?
Spanos goes on to note that a minority of psychotherapists seems to see the majority of SRA sufferers, and speculates that their therapy may "play an active role in shaping the ritual abuse 'memories' of their patients." Some hypnotists may provide MPD patients with explicit SRA details and ask if any other of their personalities are familiar with them; these may be leading questions. Spanos cites a 1992 paper by psychologist Richard J. Ofshe, "Inadvertent Hypnosis During Interrogation." Ofshe had been called in to evaluate Paul Ingram. This report effectively summarized his conclusions: that the interrogation itself induced hypnosis and the creation of pseudo-memories in a man who was prone to believing whatever he was told.
Just Following Orders
How pliant are people when told to do something by an authority figure? In a famous experiment done in the early 1960s, psychologist Stanley Milgram tested the limits of obedience to authority. At the behest of a stern-looking "authoritative" researcher in a long white coat, test subjects were directed to deliver painful electric shocks to each other, as part of a "learning experiment." Milgram wanted to see just how much pain one person would inflict upon another, simply because they were directed to do so. (These were actually sham shocks, but the person pushing the buttons didn't know that. The experiment would be considered unethical by today's standards.)
It turned out that almost two-thirds of the subjects would administer severely painful electric shocks just because they were told to do so. Some became obviously uncomfortable in their roles as "punishers" but complied nevertheless. The parallel here is that although Paul Ingram was ordered to remember something, rather than to deliver a painful shock, the basic concept of obedience to authority still applies.
If your belief system allows that the devil walks this earth searching for conscripts, you may take SRA literally. If you are a health care professional who believes in MPD/DID as a valid diagnosis based on a child's defense mechanism, then you must consider why many children have survived concentration camps, floods, wars, famines, physical abuse, and other traumas without developing the syndrome. If you don't agree that MPD is a legitimate diagnosis, then what, exactly, i.I wrong with these people? While most of us don't have "photographic
" minds, we can still retain a reasonable sense of what has happened in our lives. But why can some people remember, as manifestly real, events that can never be verified? And why can other people have no memory whatsoever of real life (like failing to remember that they have diabetes), because of identity hops, skips, and jumps? We don't really know.
Twelve
Dream On: The Meaning of Dreaming
Great mysteries of the brain still exist. One, already mentioned, concerns the storage of long-term memories. Another is why we sleep. Birds do it, perched on a tree branch. Dolphins do it, half a brain at a time, still swimming. All mammals do it, in some form. A third of our lives is spent sleeping; and to this day, we don't know exactly why.
Sleep is obviously a biologic necessity. Get less of it one day, you'll need more the next. Humans (and animals), if totally sleep-deprived, will die. Slumber may be restful, but no amount of rest or immobility will render it unnecessary. We know some restoration of brain chemistry occurs while we sleep, but this doesn't as yet explain why we need our beauty rest to survive.
To Sleep, Perchance to Dream
In 1953, University of Chicago professor of physiology Nathaniel Kleitman and his graduate student, Eugene Aserinsky, performed an elegantly simple experiment. They awakened subjects whose sleeping eyes were noted to be darting around (periods of eye motility), and found that about threequarters said they were having a dream. When they awakened subjects whose eyes were relatively still, less than 10 percent reported dreaming. Their publication in the journal Science was entitled "Regularly Occurring Periods of Eye Motility, and Concomitant Phenomena, During Sleep." Their work was replicated by others, and the current era of dream-study began: You now more or less knew when someone was dreaming, and when they were not, and you could study them accordingly.
The Witch in the Waiting Room: A Physician Investigates Paranormal Phenomena in Medicine Page 11