Cornerstone Magazine

Interview With Sherrill Mulhern
By Jon Trott

In 1986, allegations of satanic ritual abuse had become afocal point among multiple personality (MPD) patients and theirtherapists. A group of twenty well-known therapists and clinicians,led by MPD pioneer Bennett Braun (Chicago's Rush Presbyterian St.Luke's Hospital), legitimized these stories by publicly proclaiming them to betrue. Nevertheless, Braun and his colleagues recognized that the repeated failure of intensive law enforcement investigations to turn up corroborative evidence for patients' stories was troubling. Given the psychological profile of MPD patients, they acknowledged that alternative explanations for the spreading satanic ritual abuse (SRA) allegations should be examined. They invited psychiatric anthropologist and cult expert, Sherrill Mulhern, who had been studying the re-emergence of the diagnosis of multiple personality since 1984, to look into the phenomena from the perspective of a social scientist.

In 1988, at the Fifth International Conference of Multiple Personality/Dissociative States held in Chicago, Mulhern confronted therapists with her preliminary findings. What she had found seriously undermined therapists' contentions that MPD patients' satanic ritual abuse memories, recovered after months or even years of intensive psychotherapy, were accurate recollections of factual events. Instead, she directly linked the increase in SRA "testimonies" to the therapy itself. She warned that networking therapists and their patients were propagating the same cannibalistic blood cult legend that fired the Inquisition in Europe and the tragic Salem Witchcraft Trials.

Cornerstone spoke with Sherrill Mulhern, currently based at the Laboratoire des Rumeurs of the University of Paris VII in France, about her findings and her concerns surrounding allegations of satanic ritual abuse.

When did the momentum behind Satanic ritual abuse start building?
Between 1984-85, the satanic cult rumor, the ritual abuse concept, and the whole constellation of allegations surrounding the term satanic ritual abuse became clearly recognizable. We were not talking about somebody being ritually tortured by a serial killer such as the "Nightstalker" [satanic loner Richard Ramirez, convicted of 13 counts of murder —eds.]. In a case like that, there are dead bodies lying around. When the killer is finally found, people are horrified and say, "He was right under our noses!" You must keep in mind that although cases like that feed the very real fears that sustain popular rumors of organized satanic conspirators, they do not corroborate the claims being made by the alleged victims of satanic ritual abuse (SRA).

These adults, the majority of whom have long psychiatric histories, are alleging torture, mutilation, rape, incest and cannibalism, all perpetrated in the context of large group rituals including robes, masks, knives, and other paraphernalia. These are the same kind of accusations which surfaced in the McMartin Preschool case, in numerous other day-care cases, and in some custody cases. What is being described is an all- powerful, evil conspiratorial organization which is allegedly so sophisticated that it has been able to conduct its gory rituals undetected for generations. Experienced law enforcement investigators have pointed out that the constellation of behaviors which make up SRA allegations would generate material evidence. Yet repeated investigations of SRA cases have not only failed to recover material evidence, occasionally they have demonstrated that at least some of what was alleged simply did not happen. For example: the alleged tunnels under the McMartin Preschool were not there.

My research focused on patients' and therapists' stories of repeated, large scale, organized, ritualized tortures, murders, and cannibalism perpetrated by conspirators who leave no material evidence of their activities. The lack of material evidence must be understood as an integral part of the definition of the SRA allegations because, as my research demonstrated, therapists and their patients spend a great deal oftime describing just how the elusive cults dispose of the remains of their victims.

The vast majority of alleged SRA victims do not just walk in and say, "I was tortured by a Satanist!" All of the well-known clinicians who have taught training seminars on the diagnosis and treatment of satanic ritual abuse recognize that these types of memories only emerge in a highly fragmented manner over an extended period of time. Briefly, this means that patients may suddenly "remember" an image of blood, or experience a terrible fear of stars, or hear horrible screaming which they cannot account for in their conscious memory. Many therapists use hypnosis or deep relaxation techniques to facilitate patients' "recall" of the context in which these isolated fragments occurred. Gradually, a narrative of abuse is pieced together. Therapists generally assist patients in "abreacting" (re- experiencing) the reconstructed memories so that they can ultimately recall and deal with their traumatic experiences consciously.

My goal was to determine whether or not patients' therapeutically recovered memories which had been evolving over time into stories of increasingly horrible tortures, horrible crimes, were probably true or the probable result of a complex of factors. These included the patients' psychological profile, the socio/cultural environment, therapists' and patients' shared beliefs, and finally the therapy itself. I began by comparing the descriptions of satanic cults being proposed by therapists with descriptions of real criminal cults which I had studied previously. It immediately became clear that no comparison was possible; the satanic cults described in SRA conform to none of the known behavioral profiles of human conspiratorial groups or secret societies.

As I mentioned before, the blood cult conspiracy legend has plagued human history for centuries. Consequently, the only thing that was available for me to study was the ways in which SRA was being talked about. How were the therapists talking about it? How were self-proclaimed cult experts talking about it? How were patients coming to talk about it? How, where, and when were people being trained to look for it? What kind of therapy was being done? Could the complex interplay of these many factors possibly account for the spreading rumor?

One of the keys had to be the therapy because in the overwhelming majority of cases, the therapy has been absolutely crucial to the disclosure of SRA memories. Experienced therapists generally recognize that in those rare cases when a patient walks in with a story of satanic ritual torture—for example, in a custody case— the influence of a distraught parent on the child's statements must be taken into account.

Are some of those walk-in stories for real?
Possibly. But remember, SRA is now in the media. Let me give you an example of what mass media can do. For nearly seventy years, nobody walked into therapy saying they had multiple personalities. However, after the film The Three Faces of Eve was broadcast on television, her therapists reported receiving a flood of calls from patients claiming that they also suffered from MPD. Although her therapists expressed serious reservations about the validity of those self-diagnosed cases, I am not suggesting here that all of those cases were fraudulent. That is something that only competent clinicians can judge. I am simply pointing out that you must factor in the impact of the media.

Ritualistic abuse has followed the same pattern. Historically, since the early 1980s, therapists had been seeing patients who eventually disclosed SRA type allegations. However, once those types of allegations were heavily publicized on the TV talk shows, many patients and therapists started gravitating towards them. Recently, some MPD experts have documented fallacious adult walk-in cases of SRA.^[1]

The number of stories is so large, and so confusing. How certain can we be that the SRA myth is in fact mythical?
I'm the first to admit that I do not know everything. It took me many years to learn what I know about the multiple personality diagnosis and the emergence of the satanic cult ritual abuse rumor within that diagnosis. Subsequently, I had to extend my research to the field of child psychotherapy and the diagnosis and treatment of child sexual abuse. In addition, I had to familiarize myself with the techniques of law enforcement investigations into criminal child abuse. Even so, I fully recognize that there may be aspects of this phenomena which have eluded me. For the past four years I have told clinicians I am prepared to look at anything they feel I might have overlooked. I have said, "If you can show me something I have not looked at which invalidates my research, I will give you a full hearing. If I am wrong, I will publicly admit it." However, I will not back down simply because my research has made me unpopular.

I often wonder just how many times we will have to prove the extreme improbability of individual cases before those who are propagating the SRA rumors take the burden of proof upon themselves. It is impossible to absolutely disprove a negative statement like: "Prove that my patient is not the victim of a satanic cult." The best we can offer is probabilities. Careful research into an individual's alleged biography is so costly and time-consuming that few researchers—or journalists for that matter—can afford it. You know how long it took you to investigate the Lauren Stratford book ["Satan's Sideshow," Cornerstone, issue 90]. You made a very good case and yet I hear that Stratford's book is being reissued with an introduction by therapists who have written a psychiatric defense of its contents. It's very discouraging.

The proponents of SRA demand that we absolutely prove that it isn't true. However, they are incapable of providing us with a concise definition of just what that it includes. For example, I actually sat through an ostensibly scientific SRA training seminar where a famous adult survivor claimed that she had had ovaries sewn in so that she could produce more babies. None of the two hundred clinicians present objected to that statement. When I mentioned the improbability of successful satanic fertility surgery, one of the SRA experts retorted: "That's just the effects of the drugs that they made her take when they were torturing her!" My objections were not only disregarded, I was challenged to disprove something which the patient had not even claimed, i.e., directed hallucinations.

Unfortunately, the criterion for many therapists' belief in a given SRA narrative seems to be, "If it was physically possible, it happened—if it defies the laws of physics, the evil conspirators must have done something which is physically possible (albeit improbable) to trick the victim." Therapists tend to rationalize both the flagrantly impossible statements of their patients and the lack of corroborative evidence for their allegations, because their belief in SRA springs from the interactions which they have had with their patients during therapy. My field research has shown that clinicians list four factors which they feel constitute evidence that their patients are the victims of real satanic rituals: (1) the violence of the abreaction of the recovered memories; (2) the abundance of vivid detail and what they refer to as the logical consistency of their patients' descriptions of the abuse; (3) the manifestation of body memories, such as spontaneous bleeding, muscle contractions, the appearance of marks on the skin, etc., prior to or during the remembering process; and (4) their conviction that patients, who have never met, are saying the same things.

I would point out that this type of evidence is remarkably similar to the evidence which was accepted during the Salem Witchcraft Trials. In those cases, the lack of corroborative material evidence for the existence of any organized witches' cult was completely disregarded. Instead, the judges accepted as proof of the accused's guilt, "spectral evidence," the mental images of being tortured recounted by the alleged victims as they writhed on the floor of the court in obvious excruciating pain. Their agony was compelling; they were believed. However, their vivified memories were false.

But the therapists say, "We don't care what objective evidence you offer. We believe the victims."
Now I fully recognize that therapists are not working under the same constraints as law enforcement. They are not in the business of checking out patients' stories. And I quite understand that, given the actuality of child sexual abuse, they are reluctant to be overly skeptical of even the most extraordinary allegations. However, I would suggest that when therapists state that they are simply believing what their patients "report" they are glossing over the fact that therapy entails much more than just listening to talk. One of the most alarming findings of my past few years of research has been the discovery of the discrepancy which often exists between therapists' accounts of what they sincerely believe they have done in therapy and what appears in video and/or audio tapes of those same sessions.

Clinicians often underestimate to what extent they are effectively acting on and reacting to the images, affects, and behaviors that their patients exhibit in therapy. It is particularly difficult for many to accurately evaluate the extent and the ultimate effects of their suggestions in a given therapeutic exchange. One must keep in mind in the case of MPD, the patients who do the "reporting" are highly suggestible individuals who spontaneously move in and out of hypnotic trance states and who suffer from serious memory disorders. Today, in the relative privacy of the therapeutic milieu, these grade five patients are reacting extraordinary tortures which they have "remembered" with the help of their therapists. [See "The Grade Five Syndrome"] There comes a point in this type of therapy when clinicians must pause and consider the direction which a narrative of abuse is taking; when they must ask themselves whether or not the patient is recovering memories of probably experienced events; screen memories which may be covering up experiences which the patient is reluctant or unable to recall; or self- generated memories which are being produced by patients in altered states of consciousness to "document" the ongoing narrative which is being "inter-acted" out in the therapeutic milieu. It is important to remember that there is no clinical technique by which a therapist can determine whether or not any given memory narrative which has been elaborated and abreacted in therapy is in fact historically true. Working through highly traumatic memories may be meaningful and may produce a therapeutic effect for the patient, but this does not guarantee their factuality. It is true, however, that after these re-experienced memory narratives have been integrated into conscious memory, patients tend to remember them as if they were true.

Today, an extraordinary number of patients in therapy have come to believe that they have not only been subjected to, but have also committed, terrible atrocities. They have abreacted not only being raped but committing murder and cannibalism, often of their own children. Therapists may very well believe their patients. However, we have reached a critical point where they can no longer simply sit back and accuse criminal investigators of incompetence when the latter protest that this type of activity on this scale necessarily generates material evidence. They cannot simply continue to assist their patients in the elaboration of narratives of extraordinary abuse when, in all probability, most if not all of the vividly described abuse never happened. Remember we are not speaking only of adults. What of the children, who began therapy when they were two or three years old? They are now entering adolescence and are still in treatment for the traumatic sequela [diseased condition resulting from a previous disease] of satanic ritual torture, participating in infant sacrifice, etc.

How has your reception been as you've aired these views?
Well, I can't say that my position has made me particularly popular. However, I really don't think much about that anymore. I am much more concerned by the fact that very little has been done to actively reexamine the therapy which underpins the spreading SRA rumor. Even worse, I am alarmed by the fact that proponents of SRA continue to organize SRA training seminars, many of which are accredited by medical associations.

You may be aware of the fact that last year, several SRA panics occurred in England. Children were seized from their families during dawn raids by social workers who had come to believe that the children's parents were organized Satanists. Most of these children have now been returned to their parents. However, the effects of these panics is still being felt. It goes without saying that these families have suffered terribly. Moreover, the indispensable working relationship between law enforcement and child protective services has been seriously compromised.

Just what triggered these cases is still under investigation. However, we do know that in at least some of the cases, thesocial workers had received training by American proponents of SRA.