Bennett Braun, psychiatrist triggered a ‘satanic panic’

Bennett Braun, a psychiatrist who inflamed the 1980s “satanic panic” with his controversial treatment of multiple personality disorder, including in patients who alleged that he misused drugs and hypnosis while spawning false memories of devil worship, human sacrifice and child sex abuse, died March 20. He was 83 and lived in Butte, Mont.

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 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, 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 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 firstof-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,” Braun said, taking in multiple personality disorder patients referred by doctors from across the country.

While 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.”