Bennett Braun, psychiatrist who inflamed a ‘satanic panic,’ dies at 83 (2024)

His family announced the death in an obituary published by a funeral home in North Miami Beach, Fla. The obituary did not share details, but one of his former wives, Jane Braun, told the New York Times last week that he died of complications from a fall while on vacation in Lauderhill, Fla. She did not return messages seeking comment.

A charismatic psychiatrist who was often cited by the press, Dr. Braun rose to prominence while treating multiple personality disorder, now known as dissociative identity disorder. The condition, in which patients are found to have two or more distinct identities, was considered extremely rare before diagnoses mushroomed in the early 1980s, amid a wave of growing clinical interest that Dr. Braun helped stimulate.

He co-founded a professional organization, the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation; trained thousands of practitioners at annual conferences; and launched a first-of-its-kind hospital unit at Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke’s Medical Center in Chicago, now known as Rush University Medical Center.

The unit treated “the worst of the worst,” Dr. Braun said, taking in multiple personality disorder patients referred by doctors from across the country. Virtually all of the patients had been sexually abused as children, according to Dr. Braun, who aimed to treat the condition by excavating repressed memories of childhood trauma, at times with help from hypnosis and medications.

While Dr. Braun had several high-profile allies, many experts considered his therapeutic ideas dangerous and unscientific.

“The recovered-memory epidemic is the psychological quackery of the 20th century,” sociologist Richard Ofshe told the Chicago Tribune in 1994. Richard J. McNally, a Harvard psychology professor, described recovered-memory therapy as “the worst catastrophe to befall the mental health field since the lobotomy era.”

“There’s no credible scientific support to the idea that you can be traumatized, like for 10 years, banish this, be completely unaware of it, and reliably recover it later,” Elizabeth F. Loftus, a psychologist who studies memory, said in a phone interview.

The memories that Dr. Braun helped his patients recover could be shockingly lurid, involving satanic rituals, torture and systematic abuse by cloaked figures enmeshed in a purportedly globe-spanning cabal. Amplified by Dr. Braun, who shared the claims in lectures and interviews, the stories helped stoke what is commonly known as the satanic panic, in which thousands of unsubstantiated allegations of ritual abuse proliferated across the United States.

The phenomenon began to take off after the publication of a 1980 bestseller, “Michelle Remembers,” by Canadian psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder and one of his patients (later his wife), Michelle Smith, who claimed to have recovered memories of satanic rites in which Smith witnessed human sacrifices and was held in snake-filled cages.

Before long, the claims were circulating with help from grocery-store tabloids as well as established news programs such as “20/20.” Dr. Braun appeared on a 1988 NBC prime-time special hosted by Geraldo Rivera, spotlighting claims about the occult. He was also promoted by feminist activist Gloria Steinem, who thanked him in the acknowledgments of her 1992 bestseller “Revolution From Within: A Book of Self-Esteem.” Ms. magazine, which Steinem co-founded, ran a cover story headlined, “Believe It! Cult Ritual Abuse Exists.”

Discussing the alleged satanic abuses in public, Dr. Braun veered between caution and conspiracy. “If 10 percent of what we hear is true,” he told the Miami Herald in 1989, “we’re in deep trouble.” Interviewed by the Tribune a few years later, he warned that patients’ claims “have to be taken with a large grain of salt.”

At a 1988 conference, he declared that the Satanists had “a national-international type organization that’s got a structure somewhat similar to the communist cell structure.” He later alleged that cult members were trying to reclaim many of his patients, including by sending coded messages to their hospital beds in the form of flowers and cards.

“If the card is signed ‘Love you,’ then that is a danger signal,” he said.

But authorities found few signs of conspiracy. A 1992 FBI report noted that there was “little or no corroborative evidence” of organized sexual abuse by satanic cults, a conclusion that was reaffirmed by a 1994 survey commissioned by the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect. The study examined more than 12,000 reports of group sexual abuse involving satanic cults or rituals but found no large-scale abuses.

As public opinion shifted, some of Dr. Braun’s patients turned against him. He was sued by at least 11 of his former patients, including Patricia Burgus, who was treated by Dr. Braun for six years and spent more than two years in the hospital. She had initially sought treatment for postpartum depression but, after being diagnosed with multiple personality disorder, came to believe that she had 300 personalities, was a high priestess of a satanic cult and had tortured, raped, murdered and cannibalized thousands of children.

At Dr. Braun’s suggestion, she allowed her two young sons to be hospitalized as well; according to journalist and cultural critic Joan Acocella’s book “Creating Hysteria: Women and Multiple Personality Disorder,” they were treated for multiple personality disorder and “given stickers as rewards for producing memories of murder and cannibalism.” When Burgus’s husband went to a family picnic, he brought a hamburger back for Dr. Braun so that it could be tested for human flesh. (The results were negative.)

As her family’s insurance coverage dried up, Burgus left the hospital and started making trips back home to Des Moines. “That’s when my head began to clear,” she told the Tribune. “I began to add a few things up and realized there was no way I could come from a little town in Iowa, be eating 2,000 people a year and nobody said anything about it.”

Convinced that Dr. Braun was responsible for planting false memories — including, she said, through suggestive questioning, hypnosis and hallucinations brought on by medications he prescribed — she filed a lawsuit against him, a colleague and the hospital, winning $10.6 million in a 1997 settlement. It was reportedly the largest sum ever awarded in a psychiatric malpractice suit.

Dr. Braun denied any wrongdoing and called the settlement “a travesty,” saying that his insurance company had tried to resolve the case without his consent. He was similarly dismayed by a 2004 settlement with another former patient, Elizabeth Gale, who sued Dr. Braun for malpractice and won $7.5 million, once again after Dr. Braun said his insurance company settled against his wishes.

Bennett George Braun was born in Chicago on Aug. 7, 1940. His father was an orthodontist and World War II veteran who became chairman of the orthodontics department at Loyola University School of Dentistry.

Dr. Braun, who was known to friends as “Buddy,” studied psychology at Tulane University, receiving a bachelor’s degree in 1963 and a master’s in 1964. He received his medical degree from the University of Illinois in 1968 and said he saw his first case of multiple personality disorder in 1974, while working at a Chicago psychiatric hospital.

Interviewed by the Tribune, he recalled that he felt a special connection to his multiple personality disorder patients “because as a young child I was the one everybody picked on. I’m the kind of guy who puts himself in someone else’s shoes.”

He also said he was drawn to the unconventional, both in and out of psychiatry. “I take pleasure in risks,” he told Chicago magazine, discussing his love of activities like skydiving, hang gliding, mountain climbing and scuba diving.

His marriages to Renate Deutsch and Jane Dubrow ended in divorce. He later married Joanne Graham Arriola, who died in 2022. Survivors include five children, according to his family’s obituary.

Dr. Braun’s Illinois psychiatric career ended after the Burgus lawsuit. State officials suspended his medical license for two years beginning in 1999 and barred him from treating dissociative identity disorders for the next five years after that.

Declaring that he was “fed up with medicine,” he moved to Montana, fought wildfires and took an administrative job at a hospital. In 2003, he received a state physician’s license and resumed his medical practice.

“I was broke,” he explained to the Associated Press. “I want to help people. That’s the most important thing in my life.”

Dr. Braun was sued in 2019 by one of his Butte patients, who alleged that an improper drug treatment had caused a permanent facial tic. She also filed a complaint against the state board of medical examiners, saying that it should have known about the earlier malpractice claims against Dr. Braun.

He denied wrongdoing. The next year, he lost his license to practice medicine in Montana.