False Repressed Memories
“Longtime Northwest suburban resident Elizabeth Gale thought she was the victim of a satanic cult, a ‘breeder’ whose children had been stolen to be exploited in pornography, sex abuse, incest and bestiality… Turns out it was all in her head. Gale had never had any children, and there was no cult. The ideas were put there, her lawyers said, by three psychiatric doctors who employed the now-controversial technique of ‘repressed memory’ therapy on Gale for a period of more than 5 and a half years… The belief behind repressed memory therapy is that sometimes people suppress events that were too horrible to face and can recall those events only by a combination of hypnosis, drugging and extensive questioning. [Gale’s lawyer] said the doctors used overly suggestive questioning and unsafe levels of drugs that caused hallucinations. They also did not follow protocols for keeping patients separated, leading to what is known as ’symptom sharing.’ ‘On hundreds of occasions, Ms. Gale was tied down, over-medicated with Inderal, a heart medication not appropriate for psychiatric disorders, and essentially brainwashed by these three defendants…’” — Daily Herald (US)
(Thanks to hludens for the link.)
There have been other stories recently about “false” repressed memories, though this one is possibly the most extreme of them all. Poor Ms. Gale was so fearful of what the non-existent satanic cult was doing to her children that she had her tubes tied — even though she didn’t even have any children. (Plainly the obstetric surgeons were not in touch with her psychiatric team.) For this and general psychological trauma, the doctors settled out of court with her for a cool $7.5 million.
When you first read that you think, “Wow, seven million smackeroos for a sustained non-event.” It seems ironic that she should get so much money without being really — physically — maltreated somehow. Then you remind yourself that, even though the abuse was primarily mental, that certainly has its own reality — and then bingo! Suddenly you see the whole case in a new light. For if these headshrinkers can induce such a realistic experience through medication, hypnosis, leading questioning, symptom sharing, and bad vibes, do they not hold the key to an entirely new sideshow of experience?
Why not turn a negative into a positive, a liability into an opportunity? There are people who want to hallucinate, people who willingly pay for psychodramas of every kind. Why not offer this intensive brainwashing as a service? Suppose that you think satanism is cool, but in reality it’s hard to find a satanic cult anywhere. So you go to a brainwashing boutique where these headshrinkers convince you that you take part in ritual murders, virgin sacrifices, lurid dances on a witches’ sabbath. You can have all the fun of subjectively experiencing it without any of the dangers involved in objectively perpetrating demonic deeds.
It would be interesting to find out what these three psychiatric doctor’s believed in. Were they apart of the church that wanted to create propaganda? Or did they have a personal enslavement of lust for power? Whatever the reason it still manages to sound quite cruel. I believe celeberity serial killer Charles Manson did the same by ‘helping’ his peers get under the influence of LSD and then brain-washing them with his enigmatic racist philosophies. Although I dont know how much truth is in that since the whole Charles Manson case was sodomized by sensationalism. So who’s to say this story isn’t as well? But I dont think it would really matter if you end up with $7.5 million. With that money I would leave to a country with a far less corrupted society.
It’s been a few days, so I had to dig around for the actual story, but one report stated:
“Brinton said Braun currently lives and practices in Montana with a restricted license, Martinez reported.”
A Restricted License!
These “therapists” were paid to assist a troubled woman, and instead - pumped her full of drugs and used hypnosis and suggestion to convince her of the most ludicrous nonsense. Some kind of criminal prosecution seems far more appropriate. The idea that this person has already had her license reinstated once after previous allegations should be enough to revoke her license permanently. The “therapist” is obviously more delusional than her patient. Murderous Satanic cults always have been and always will be little more than Christian propaganda. People like Manson and Ramirez and Berkowitz were hardly Satanists - they were simply psychotics using “demonic forces” to justify and give meaning to their behavior.
The findings stated in a 1992 FBI investigation show that “Satanic Ritual Abuse” simply does not happen.
http://www.skeptictank.org/fbi1992.htm
As a Satanist, I’m appalled to see that this sort of thing is still going on. It’s a recurring public hysteria prodded on by paranoid Christians, but I thought the results of the report cited above had finally laid to rest the Geraldo-fueled Satanic Panic of the 1980s.
The interesting thing to me about your comment, of course, was that Satanic Ritual (such as it is, and not as it is imagined to be) IS psychodrama and can make use of these fictional visions of “Satanic Cults” (history of such goes back for ages) for the benefit and enjoyment of the individual participants.
No quack therapists required.
People often refer to that “FBI report” as proving there’s no “satanic ritual abuse,” but actually (having read it and written a whole review of it recently) that’s not what it says at all. First of all it’s not actually an FBI investigation — it’s a report written, apparently unsolicited, by an FBI agent who has investigated a lot of what he calls “these kinds of cases” over about ten years. (Which, mind you, was about ten years *ago* by now.)
More importantly though, he’s not actually making the claim that there’s no ritual abuse or that there’s no Satanic ritual abuse; the only concrete statement (iirc) that he can make about it is that he hasn’t found any evidence in those ten years of Satanic ritual *murder* — that is, of a murder that was committed specifically as part of a Satanic ritual.
He also conflates the terms “ritual abuse” and “satanic ritual abuse” like crazy, as people did back then — meaning that when people can’t find proof of an international Satanic cult conspiracy, they assume ritual abuse never exists. Even though he cites a number of examples of what *I* would call ritual abuse by people in (or perverting) *other* religions.
Most of the ritual abuse I’ve seen (and I actually do know people who have had enough evidence to bring these things to court, for whatever that’s worth) has been by people practicing some twisted (or regular, or fundamentalist, or….) form of a mainstream religion, actually. Or government ritual abuse, which is probably more prevalent in a lot of ways. But people often don’t count that - they like to exploit Satanism to “prove” that these things don’t happen, just as they used to exploit it to “prove” that all ritual abuse was Satanic and all Pagans and Satanists were Bad.
anyway :)
apparently I can’t use HTML when I post - “government ritual abuse” should have linked to
http://everything2.com/index.pl?node=project%20monarch, which mainly cites the CIA’s own documents about stuff they do to people. And
http://everything2.com/index.pl?node=1992%20fbi%20report%20on%20satanic%20ritual%20abuse
is my review of the 1992 FBI blah blah report.
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