Satanic Ritual Abuse : Principles of Treatment

IV. SOCIETY'S RESPONSE TO SATANISM

11. Extremes of Skepticism and Denial
12. Future Directions

Afterword by Elizabeth F. Loftus, Ph.D., University of Washington

From the Preface

Satanic ritual abuse was a topic unknown to most people in North America as recently as ten years ago. Since then Satanic cults have been the subject of countless media reports, of which about five hundred are listed in a bibliography by Linda O. Blood entitled Satanism and Satanism-Related Crime: A Resource Guide (1989). When I saw my first case of apparent Satanic ritual abuse in 1986, I had never read a book or article on the topic; heard any mental-health professional mention such a case; or been to a lecture, workshop, or seminar on the subject. Since then, two academic collections of essays on Satanic ritual abuse have been published (Richardson, Bromley, and Best, 1991; Sakheim and Devine, 1992), the Journal of Psychology and Theology has devoted a special 1992 issue to Satanism, the Journal of Psychohistory has devoted a special 1994 issue to cult abuse of children, and The New Yorker has published a major two-part article on Satanism, in the 17 and 24 May 1993 issues (Wright, 1993a; 1993b). Additionally, dozens of conferences and workshops dealing with Satanic ritual abuse have been held throughout the United States and Canada.

Personally, I have had clinical contact with about three hundred cases of multiple personality disorder (MPD), now officially renamed 'dissociative identity disorder' (American Psychiatric Association, 1994), in which the person had memories of involvement in a destructive Satanic cult. In about eighty of these cases, I have had considerable direct involvement, as a therapist or attending physician, and in the rest I have been a participant in consultation or in group therapy. In none of these cases has the reality of the memories been objectively verified, and in several of them collateral history has proven that patient claims of Satanic ritual abuse were false. I did not seek verification beyond the level of usual clinical history-taking because that is not my role and because I have not had the available resources or expertise. The patients cite the remoteness of the events in time, fear, and lack of resources as the reasons for not pursuing objective verification of their memories.

In order to understand this troublesome topic better, I began attending workshops on Satanism and talking to colleagues; I also began to read the available literature, and noticed that it had several peculiarities I had never before encountered in my professional reading. For one thing, as is evident from the references in this book, the literature on Satanic ritual abuse comprises more books than journal articles. Usually, in the professional literature dealing with mental-health subject areas, the reverse is true - articles far outnumber published books.

The second peculiarity I noticed, both at professional meetings and in my reading, was an extreme polarization of opinion. Despite the dearth of scientific or empirical literature, strongly worded views were expressed at both ends of the continuum, which ranged between firm belief in the reality of Satanic ritual abuse memories and skepticism about the truth of any of those memories. The reality of Satanic ritual abuse did not appear to be a subject of debate in any serious sense, and seemed, rather, to involve believers and skeptics speaking from preconceived, ideologically driven positions. Discussion focused on whether such cults really exist, which is a reasonable starting point, but had no context and seemed to be conducted in a historical, anthropological, clinical, and law-enforcement vacuum, with little or no organized data to provide a foundation.

The books I read tended to fall into one of four categories: case-studies (Feldman, 1993; Marron, 1988; Mayer, 1991; Smith and Pazder, 1980; Spencer, 1989; Stratford, 1988; Terry, 1987; Warnke, 1972; Wright, 1994); books written from a fundamentalist perspective (Brown, 1987; Bubeck, 1991; Cooper, 1990; Larson, 1989; Michaelson, 1989; Passantino and Passantino, 1991; Schwarz and Empey, 1988) or a twelve-step perspective (Ryder, 1992); and journalistic treatments (Blood, 1994; Hicks, 1991; Johnston, 1989; Kahaner, 1988; Lyon, 1988).

Although these books contain a great deal of useful information, they are limited in so far as they discuss a small number of cases from a single-case perspective or tend to be contaminated by the ideological biases of their authors. In none of this literature did I find a comprehensive context for thinking about the problem of Satanism. Realizing that an adequate discussion would have to be grounded in detailed knowledge of the clinical reality of ritual abuse cases, I sought in vain for a comprehensive study of such cases. The case descriptions tended to be brief, vague, or skewed by the biases of the authors, and none exhibited adequate psychological depth.

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