Bennett Braun, a Chicago psychiatrist whose diagnoses of repressed memories involving horrific abuse by devil worshipers helped fuel what became known as the “Satanic Panic” of the 1980s and 1990s, died March 20 in Lauderhill. , Florida, north of Miami. He was 83 years old.

Jane Braun, one of his ex-wives, said the death, in a hospital, was due to complications from a fall. Dr. Braun lived in Butte, Montana, but had been vacationing in Lauderhill.

Dr. Braun gained renown in the early 1980s as an expert in two of the most popular and controversial areas of psychiatric treatment: repressed memories and multiple personality disorder, now known as dissociative identity disorder.

He claimed that he could help patients uncover memories of childhood trauma, the existence of which, he and others believed, was responsible for the division of a person’s self into many distinct personalities.

He created a unit dedicated to dissociative disorders at Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke’s Medical Center in Chicago (now Rush University Medical Center); he became a frequently cited expert in the media; and helped found what is now the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation, a professional organization that today has more than 2,000 members.

It was from that important platform that Dr. Braun unveiled his most explosive findings: that in dozens of cases, his patients discovered memories of having been tortured by satanic cults and, in some cases, of having participated in the torture themselves.

He was not the only psychiatrist to make such a claim, and his alleged revelations sparked growing national panic.

The 1980s saw a sharp rise in the number of people, both children and adults, claiming to have been abused by devil worshipers. It began in 1980 with the book “Michelle Remembers,” by a Canadian woman who said she recovered memories of ritual abuse, and skyrocketed after allegations of abuse at daycare centers in California and North Carolina.

Elements of pop culture, such as heavy metal music and the role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons, were included as supposed entry points for cult activity.

Such stories were fodder for popular television formats that reveled in the salacious, including talk shows like “Geraldo” and news magazines like “Dateline,” which aired segments uncritically promoting such claims.

The psychiatric profession bore some responsibility for the growing panic, and respected researchers like Dr. Braun gave it a sheen of authority. He and others conducted seminars and distributed research articles; They even gave the phenomenon a quasi-medical abbreviation, SRA, to refer to satanic ritual abuse.

Dr. Braun’s inpatient unit at Rush became a magnet for referrals and a warehouse for patients, some of whom he kept medicated and under supervision for years.

Among them was an Iowa woman named Patricia Burgus. After interviewing her, Dr. Braun and his colleague, Roberta Sachs, claimed that she was not only a victim of satanic ritual abuse, but was also a “high priestess” of a cult that had raped, tortured and cannibalized thousands of children. . including her two young children.

Dr. Braun and Dr. Sachs sent Mrs. Burgus and her children to a mental health facility in Houston, where they were kept separate for nearly three years with minimal contact with the outside world.

By then, the heavily medicated Mrs Burgus had come to believe the doctors, telling them she remembered torches, live burials and eating the body parts of up to 2,000 people a year. After her parents served meatloaf to her husband, she asked him to do a human tissue test. The tests came back negative, but Dr. Braun was not convinced.

Dr. Braun kept other patients in similar conditions at Rush or elsewhere. He convinced a woman to have an abortion because she, he convinced her, was the product of ritual incest; he persuaded another to undergo tubal ligation to avoid having more children within her alleged cult.

The Satanic Panic began to subside in the early 1990s. A 1992 FBI investigation found no evidence of coordinated sectarian activity in the United States, and a 1994 report by the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect examined more than 12,000 allegations of satanic ritual abuse and found that none of them stood up to scrutiny.

“The biggest thing was the lack of corroborating evidence,” Kenneth Lanning, a retired FBI agent who wrote the 1992 report, said in a telephone interview. “It’s the kind of crime where evidence would have been left behind.”

Many people distanced themselves from their previous enthusiasms; In 1995, Geraldo Rivera apologized for the episode in which he covered up the falsehood. However, even in 1998, “Dateline” ran an episode on NBC that claimed to show widespread satanic activity in Mississippi.

Ms. Burgus sued Rush, Dr. Braun and their insurance company over claims that he and Dr. Sachs had implanted false memories in her head. They settled out of court in 1997 for $10.6 million.

“I started adding some things up and realized there was no way I could come from a small town in Iowa, eat 2,000 people a year and no one would say anything about it,” Ms. Burgus told the Chicago Tribune in 1997. .

A year later, Dr. Braun’s unit at Rush was closed and the Illinois medical licensing board opened an investigation into his practices. In 1999, he received a two-year license suspension, although he did not admit any wrongdoing.

Bennett George Braun was born on August 7, 1940 in Chicago, the son of Thelma (Gimbel) and Milton Braun, a professor of orthodontics at Loyola University. He earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Tulane University in 1963 and earned a master’s degree in the same subject in 1964. He received his medical degree from the University of Illinois in 1968.

Dr. Braun was married three times. His marriages to Renate Deutsch and Mrs. Braun ended in divorce. The third, to Joanne Arriola, ended with his death. He is survived by five children and five grandchildren.

After temporarily losing his medical license in Illinois, Dr. Braun moved to Montana, where he received a new license in that state and opened a private practice.

But in 2019, one of his patients, Ciara Rehbein, sued him for overprescribing medications that left her with a permanent facial tic. She also filed a complaint against the Montana Board of Medical Examiners for allowing her to obtain a license, despite knowing his past.

Dr. Braun lost his license to practice medicine in Montana in 2020.