by Richard Beck
Lanning didn’t know what to make of these phone calls. He said that from the beginning the idea that a group could torture and kill large numbers of people and then keep the secret for decades struck him as unlikely, at best. But it would be some time before he made any of these doubts public. Instead, he embraced the BSU’s interdisciplinary approach and called the psychologists and other researchers he knew who worked on child sexual abuse. He knew Roland Summit. He talked to Jon Conte and Lucy Berliner, two academic social workers who had spent their careers on incest and other forms of abuse. He also talked to Ann Burgess, a feminist researcher who, in 1984, published an edited volume called Child Pornography and Sex Rings. These professionals, Lanning said, reinforced the idea that ritual abuse was a problem urgently in need of a solution. “I’m not saying every one of them used these words,” Lanning said, “but the element is, ‘We must believe the children.’ That seemed to be a lot of what I was getting.”6 Meanwhile the consultation requests continued to pour in, and Lanning was told the BSU had a little extra money lying around. He decided to put on a conference of his own.
Lanning’s Day Care Center and Satanic Cult Sexual Exploitation of Children seminar took place over four days in February 1985. The gathering assembled FBI agents and police officers along with a handful of attorneys, social workers, and academics from as far afield as the Bronx, Michigan, and California. Glenn Stevens was there, and so was Sandi Gallant, an intelligence officer with the San Francisco Police Department who for years had been warning of the dangers posed by cults.7 The pamphlets and handouts distributed by the various attendees provide a fairly detailed picture of the proceedings. Years after the fact, Lanning said that he organized the seminar in the hopes of assuaging his doubts about the validity of ritual abuse allegations. His colleagues, however, with the possible exception of Glenn Stevens, did not share these doubts. They were eager to hear just how big the ritual abuse problem really was.
One packet provided a list of more than four hundred “occult organizations” around the country. California, with ninety-five such organizations, had the most, while Delaware, Hawaii, Montana, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, Utah, and Arkansas only managed one each. No information was included regarding the size, activities, or sophistication of any of these groups, nor was any effort made to distinguish between allegedly violent Satanists and the small countercultural spiritual organizations that have existed throughout the United States since at least the 1960s. (Womynscope, for example, a collective of feminist astrologers based in Minnesota, was on the list.) Another handout talked specifically about the importance of promptly obtaining search warrants in child sex abuse investigations, noting that pedophiles “collect sexually explicit materials consisting of photographs, magazines, motion pictures, video tapes, books, and slides which they use for their own sexual gratification” and that they “rarely destroy correspondence received from other pedophiles unless they are specifically requested to do so.”8
The seminar’s star pamphlet was Sandi Gallant’s guide to investigating ritual abuse. A questionnaire promised to help police distinguish between brutal, grisly murders, which may only seem to resemble ritual abuse on the surface, and the real thing. “Were victims forced to devour mutilated parts?” Investigators could check “yes” or “no.” The pamphlet also put ritual abuse into a kind of ersatz historical context, listing the dates of important occult festivals—“February 2nd, Candlemas or Ormelc”—and explaining that a circle is humanity’s “oldest symbol.” Most impressive, however, were the lists of “ritualistic indicators,” which Gallant helpfully divided into subcategories:
A. RITUAL ITEMS/SIGNS
CamerasKey of Solomon
CandlesMasks/Painted Faces
CauldronsPentagram
ChalicesRobes
Circle of PowerSwastikas
Inverted CrossSymbols
Jewelry
B. RESTRAINTS/WEAPONS
ChainsKnives
DrugsRopes
FirearmsSwords
C. RITUALISTIC ACTIVITIES
Blood lettingNudity
ChantingSacrifices
CryingScreaming
Invoking SatanSinging9
The handout provided no guidance as to the specific number of items, weapons, or activities that would actually suggest ritual abuse. In the classic paranoid style, these lists made the ordinary (“singing,” “ropes,” “jewelry”) ominous through cataloguing and classification.
Perhaps more important than the pamphlet’s contents, though, is the fact that it was distributed at the most prestigious law enforcement institute in the country. Many of the attendees had worked on ritual abuse cases in their various jurisdictions, and as they presented their findings to one another, this scattered collection of rumors took on an official, institutional reality that it never would have acquired without the FBI’s help. Some of these presentations were documented in notes made by Glenn Stevens for Lael Rubin and his other superiors back in the district attorney’s office, and in addition to the usual litany of implausible allegations (taken largely at face value), these notes reveal the seminar’s pronounced political conservatism. Although Sandi Gallant said that Satanists were frequently “normal, intelligent, working class men and women,” she also blamed their attraction to Satanism on their inability to get ahead in life. “They will traditionally be underachievers,” she said, people who, despite their “good backgrounds,” will “settle into mediocre lifestyles.”10 She also gave voice to the widely held belief that Satanism was only the most extreme manifestation of a much wider social attack on conservative Christians. “Christians look for faith,” she said. “They do not call out for the obtaining of power.” Satanists, however, intentionally used perverted symbols of Christian worship (such as the inverted cross) in their own rituals “because they call upon powers which they need to obtain more and more in their lives.” Everything Satanists do, she believed, “is done to defame the name of God and Christ.”11 As a law enforcement group whose primary goals are the conviction of criminals and the maintenance of order, the FBI has long been closely associated with political conservatism, and as the emergence of charismatic, law-and-order prosecutors like Ed Jagels illustrates, that association only grew stronger during the Reagan-era 1980s. Lanning’s doubts about ritual abuse notwithstanding, the institution that employed him, the professional class to which he belonged, and the individuals he assembled in Quantico were all looking, first and foremost, to put criminals in prison.
In later years Lanning tried to reconcile his personal doubts and his professional actions by writing an article that blamed the trouble surrounding the idea of ritual abuse on a lack of professionalism. Those who believed wholeheartedly in ritual abuse, Lanning wrote, were members of a “witch hunt,” whereas vocal skeptics comprised the “backlash.” Lanning wrote that the two groups were as similar in their tactics as they were opposed in their respective outlooks. “Each side,” he wrote, “tends to take an all-or-nothing approach to complex issues . . . relies heavily on raw emotion . . . [and] conveniently fails to define its terminology.”12 He accused both sides of deceiving themselves with “conspiracy theories,” and by placing himself in the middle as an impartial, evidence-driven observer, he hoped to defuse the paranoid atmosphere in which he worked.
The solution he proposed was simple: “For child sexual abuse interveners concerned about the witch hunt or the backlash, the best approach is not to imitate their tactics but to respond with professionalism.” According to Lanning, this meant evaluating information objectively, considering the middle ground, and critiquing oneself while guarding against the impulse to ascribe evil motives to one’s opponents.
Lanning’s principles may offer a nice guide for people involved in a formal debate, but collectively they present a strange and fatally incomplete definition of professionalism. Strange, because
where is the middle ground supposed to be on the issue of organized conspiracies to commit satanic ritual abuse? That there are some national cult conspiracies, though not very many? And incomplete, because professionalism is also a process by which credentials, which signify competence and expertise, are handed out. It was precisely this aspect of the FBI’s professionalism, the way it handed out credentials to police departments in the seventies and eighties, that turned it into an institution that validated local law enforcement’s belief in ritual abuse. And it was precisely this aspect of the FBI’s professionalism that Lanning was apparently unable to see.
The seminar featured a few presentations on topics other than the police investigations themselves. One attendee talked about how doctors obtained medical evidence from the child victims, describing the colposcope that Bruce Woodling and Astrid Heger had used to examine the McMartin children. The therapeutic interviews that produced many of the allegations in the first place received a little less attention. Two representatives of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension talked about how children in the Jordan case had been interviewed too many times.
No mention, however, was made of the therapeutic beliefs that determined how the Jordan interviews were conducted. These beliefs concerned the psychological experience of sexual trauma, the consequences of abuse for child victims, and the relationship between trauma and memory. They had their origins in the 1970s, when a group of dissident psychiatrists, social workers, and activists began to challenge the dominant, largely Freudian mode of American thinking about abuse. And as Lanning convened the Quantico seminar that made belief in ritual abuse professionally respectable in law enforcement, this new thinking about trauma and abuse was also finally making its way into the professional mainstream of American psychiatry.
Within ten years of the publication of C. Henry Kempe’s paper on the Battered-Child Syndrome, a consensus had emerged that abuse represented a serious threat to the physical health of children. But the medical profession was much slower to adopt the idea that child abuse could also have serious psychological consequences. In 1975, two full years after Walter Mondale’s famous hearings on the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act, the nearly three-thousand-page-long Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry still contained no material on the mental health of abused children, nor did it mention any possibility that father-daughter incest could result in psychopathology.13
The connection between child abuse and mental illness would have to be forced on the profession from the outside, and as it happened, the psychological and psychiatric establishments were in the process of embracing large numbers of outsiders. In the 1970s psychoanalytic institutes began to train nonphysician therapists, or “lay” analysts, in an effort to breathe new air into a form of treatment that was seen by many as insular, obscure, and rarified. This opened the doors to those with no medical degree and no deep immersion in psychoanalytic texts.14 Elsewhere in the profession, the invention of interpersonal therapy (IPT) dramatically increased the role of psychiatric nurses and social workers in day-to-day therapeutic practice. IPT was designed to provide short bursts of treatment—typically twelve to sixteen weeks—to people dealing with mild to moderate cases of depression and other common ailments, people who didn’t need an intensive therapeutic intervention so much as sustained, empathetic attention and intelligent emotional advice. In other words, it called for therapists who could provide a slightly medicalized version of the services that social workers had always provided.
That people were seeking any kind of treatment at all for these kinds of everyday problems reflected psychiatry’s growing role in American life. In earlier decades, most forms of treatment had been aimed at those with obvious and debilitating psychological illnesses, with psychoanalysis reserved for affluent and educated people in major urban centers. After the 1960s, however, psychiatry began to involve itself with a wider range of problems and experiences. Those whose marriages or jobs made them sad or anxious started to understand themselves as in need of medical assistance, and even those with no problems at all began to suspect that psychiatry or therapy could help them reach their full potential. Membership in the American Psychological Association grew by a factor of sixteen between the late 1950s and the late 1980s, and that figure does not account for the thousands of counselors, nurses, and social workers who went into practice over that same period. As it expanded, therapy deregulated itself: in most states no license was required to rent out an office and put the word “psychotherapist” on the door.15
Florence Rush was one of these social workers. Her 1971 presentation “The Sexual Abuse of Children: A Feminist Point of View,” had been one of the first public expressions of the idea that Freud had discovered the true extent of childhood sexual abuse in society, been frightened by what he found, and then conspired to cover it up. Kee MacFarlane was another. She built her career entirely on the basis of her University of Maryland master’s degree in social work. Along with their colleagues in rape crisis centers, shelters for abused women and children, and the women’s movement, these people agitated at the margins of mainstream psychiatry for an increased focus on seeking a therapeutic solution to forgotten abuse. But it wasn’t until the psychiatrist who rediscovered Multiple Personality Disorder got involved that they made any really significant progress.
Sybil made Cornelia Wilbur a famous doctor. Her discovery of a disorder as rare and as dramatically compelling as MPD in such an unassuming chemistry student, combined with her account of the sadistic abuse that had caused the condition to emerge, earned Wilbur invitations to many conferences and other professional meetings. There she told audiences that MPD was a fascinating and dynamic disorder, that treating it was an intellectual adventure. She described the process by which she had coaxed Shirley Mason’s alter personalities into revealing themselves, exhibited the paintings “they” had made, and said the alters were talented artists and writers, meaning that Sybil made for interesting therapeutic company.16 Alongside these tales of psychiatric discovery, Wilbur explained to audience after audience that childhood abuse, usually sexual, was the primary cause of MPD. She made this argument so frequently and so consistently that her colleagues started referring to it as the “post-Wilburian paradigm.”17 But Wilbur knew that it would not be enough to hear her name mentioned at conferences and symposia—she wanted to get MPD into psychiatry’s handbook.
The first edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders was published in 1952, and a revised second edition followed in 1968. Both volumes ran fewer than 140 pages, and they were written in a highly technical language aimed primarily, even exclusively at psychiatric specialists. In 1974, however, the American Psychiatric Association decided that a third edition of the DSM was needed to address the rapidly changing state of the profession—not only psychiatry’s expansion into the everyday lives of millions of people but also the emergence of pharmaceuticals as a basic component of psychiatric treatment. An APA committee spent six years preparing the DSM-III, which, when it was finally published in 1980, ran to 494 pages and included 265 diagnostic categories. Written in everyday language designed to appeal to the social workers and other nonphysician therapists who were filling up the field’s professional ranks, the DSM-III employed a radically new diagnostic system and immediately went into widespread use. It is considered a watershed moment in the history of psychiatry, and “Multiple Personality” was diagnosis number 300.14.18
“The essential feature” of Multiple Personality, according to DSM-III, “is the existence within the individual of two or more distinct personalities, each of which is dominant at a particular time. . . . Transition from one personality to another is sudden and often associated with psychosocial stress.” The authors went on to explain that most patients were unaware of the existence of their “subpersonalities,” even though the subpersonalities usually knew about one another. Like Dr. Wilbur’s “Sybil,” the manual’s archetypal Multiple Personalit
y patient had “lost periods of time,” mysterious gaps after which the patient would find herself in some strange part of town. “The individual personalities are nearly always quite discrepant,” the manual said, “and frequently seem to be opposites. For example, a quiet, retiring spinster may alternate with a flamboyant, promiscuous bar habitué on certain nights.”19 Though “the disorder is apparently extremely rare,” enough cases had been documented for the manual to list “child abuse and other forms of severe emotional trauma in childhood” as possible predisposing factors.20 The number, 300.14, was for the therapist to write down on forms when billing the insurance company.
Almost immediately after Multiple Personality made its debut in DSM-III, therapists began to diagnose it with rapidly growing frequency. Until 1970 fewer than two hundred people in the entire world had ever been diagnosed with anything resembling MPD, but in 1980 a psychiatrist who made extensive use of hypnosis in his therapy sessions published an article describing fourteen cases that had recently come to light.21 Dr. Wilbur, having successfully legitimized the diagnosis, now traveled from conference to conference in an effort to convince researchers and clinicians to specialize in the disorder, and that effort was also successful. The International Society for the Study of Multiple Personality and Dissociation (ISSMP&D) was founded in 1984, and it quickly set out to lend a credentialed air, if not actual credentials, to its members. It founded a journal, Dissociation, and it sent certificates designed to look like medical school diplomas to those who became “Affiliates” of the Society. “Display your professionalism,” an attached flyer read. “Be proud of your commitment to the field of multiple personality and dissociative disorders.” A “handsome membership plaque” was also available for eighteen dollars.22