Demonology without Demons

Repudiating the afterword to Richard Webster’s Why Freud Was Wrong, “Freud’s False Memories.”

(Part One / Part Two / Part Three / Part Four / Part Five / Part Six)

The Perils of Ignorance

In Why Freud Was Wrong, Webster describes, convincingly, Freud imposing his sexual fantasies onto his daughter and other female patients. He then applies this lens as a means to lay the groundwork for what will become, in the next phase of his writing career and up to his death, his witch-hunt spin around (what appear to be essentially) cut-and-dried cases of organized, systemic child abuse in the UK and Portugal.

It’s a curious fact that I keep coming back to this subject, even when I have zero intention or desire to do so; on this occasion, following up a recommendation in the comments to read a book about Freud over Lent, that leads to an 18-part series and that ends—back here again. (This “sync” was intensified by my subsequent exchanges with Laurent Guyénot, who took a similar position with me to Webster.)

As I have commented multiple times over the years—and did to Guyénot—the sort of “satanic panic” pseudo-explanation for multiple cases of ritual abuse never makes clear what, precisely—if there was no real incident to spark it—the initial impetus is for the panic.

It is always some amorphous and fantastical idea that Christians—being half-crazy to begin with—are overtaken by paranoid S & M fantasies of the devil/Satanists raping their children, implying that their own repressed sexual pathologies and religious paranoia are being projected onto the children, and then blamed on innocents.

A truly astonishing conspiracy theory unto itself!

This is what Webster says in his intro to The Secret of Bryn Estyn: The Making of a Modern Witch Hunt:

The Paladin paperback edition of Europe’s Inner Demons, which appeared in 1976, bore on its cover these words of Anthony Storr: “This is a book of real stature which I hope will have wide impact. Only if we begin to understand the horrifying recesses of the human imagination can we prevent the recurrence of those dreadful, irrational persecutions which have so disfigured human history.” Without my fully realizing it at the time, those words influenced me deeply and I have since taken it for granted that the principal reason why we should study the witch-hunts of the past is to enable us the better to recognize and oppose the witch-hunts of the present and the future (p. xv–xvi).

(Anthony Storr, a British psychiatrist who—like Webster—pathologized Jesus, endorsed Webster’s book on Freud.)

What gets ignored, or dismissed by Webster—as well as by Guyénot in our exchange—is all the concrete evidence, the confessions, the physical symptoms of abuse, that prove beyond a shadow of doubt that, in many of the best-known cases, sexual abuse was occurring at the time of the “panic.”

Admittedly, this by no means rules out the possibility that there was an element of panic, of overreaction, misinterpretation, exaggeration, etc.; that this factor played into the hands of real abusers by compromising many of the testimonies—and that this might be an intentional consequence of the extremity of some of the crimes—this is rarely, if ever, considered by debunkers.

That both mainstream and alternate media (in the 1980s, Geraldo Rivera and lurid books like Michelle Remembers; in more current times, QAnon and countless websites, podcasts and movies) tend to sensationalize accounts and create a kind of “titillation panic” around the subject, this should be obvious.

That such material makes it that much easier for serious researchers to dismiss the subject—by the very same token that it renders it accessible to gullible audiences seeking some sort of catharsis and/or thrill—is also undeniable.

Enabling Evil

In his disastrous afterword to Why Freud Was Wrong (“Freud’s False Memories: Psychoanalysis and the Recovered Memory Movement”), Richard Webster writes about a fantasy element in recovered memories of sexual abuse, all the while keeping it firmly outside the context of an actual phenomenon. At the same time, however, he argues that such a hypothetical fantasy element contributes to the continuing denial of sexual abuse, by conflating false with real memories.

This is a proviso Webster only makes to strengthen his case, however, which he does by drawing a line that, while it may be necessary to draw a line somewhere, is based either on ignorance of the reality of the problem or actual dishonesty. This is from his Guardian obituary:

In The Secret of Bryn Estyn (2005), Richard’s compelling account of the lengthy investigations into suspected abuse in care homes in north Wales, he argued that abuse scandals could be phenomena conjured from an atmosphere of public hysteria, fueled by credulous journalists and ratified through inefficient police investigative techniques. The real secret of Bryn Estyn, he concluded, was that there was no secret at all; it was just an ordinary community home where staff did their best to look after difficult adolescents.

Webster is either uninformed about the abuse he’s debunking or he’s complicit with it. There is no third option that I can see. In his afterword, he seems completely ignorant of organized, high-level child sexual abuses throughout history.

Child and teenage sex trafficking, child pornography, MKUltra-style programs of mind control, occult organizations practicing ritual child abuse, all on a large scale, over generations, overlapping and intersecting in ways that make it impossible to separate out the threads (e.g. The Dutroux affair), speaks to a whole universe of organized malevolence in which Webster would drown in no time, if he were ever to dare enter into it.

(As it happens, Webster did enter into this swamp for his last, posthumously published work, on the Pia Casa scandal in Portugal. Yet he also managed to dismiss this as a “witch-hunt.”1)