Providentia

Becoming Someone Else

William Bates was born in 1860 and earned considerable distinction as a medical researcher (he first identified what would be later known as adrenaline) and as a noted ophthalmologist with a fashionable New York practice.  By 1902, he was already well-known in his profession. 

And then he disappeared in 1902...

When last seen, he had just finished a pleasant note to his wife visiting her mother in another town, and he made arrangements to send her some books.  When the janitor in the building where they lived contacted Mrs. Bates and told her that her husband had not returned to their apartment for days, she hurried back to New York to search for her husband.   Many weeks passed, but she eventually tracked him down to a hospital in London, England, where he worked as an assistant.  He had apparently been brought there as an amnesia patient sometime before.  When Mrs. Bates reached London, she found her husband in a nervous, agitated state and still unable to remember recent events.  She took him to the Savoy Hotel, resting for two days before disappearing a second time.  She never saw him again. 

Despite an extensive search, she died before he was rediscovered by accident in 1910.  A colleague apparently found him practicing as an oculist in North Dakota under a different name and convinced him to resume his old life and practice in New York. He later remarried, published his most famous work, Perfect Sight Without Glasses, in 1920, and died in 1931. 

While the formal diagnosis of dissociative fugue was never made in Dr. Bates' lifetime (his obituary listed him as suffering from aphasia),  it seems to fit the known facts of the case.  The DSM IV classifies fugue as a dissociative disorder and lists the diagnostic criteria as:

• sudden, unexpected travel away from home or one's customary place of work, with an inability to recall one's past,
• confusion about personal identity, or the assumption of a new identity, or
• significant distress or impairment.

Differential diagnosis can be critical as other medical conditions such as dementia, or head trauma can mimic certain aspects of fugue.  An estimated 0.2 percent of the population is believed to experience fugue, although traumatic life experiences may increase the likelihood of occurrence.  Most fugues can last for hours or days and often resolve independently or can be successfully treated through psychotherapy.  While treatment can help recover memories predating the fugue episode, what happened during that episode is usually lost.   More extreme cases where the fugue sufferer can live for years under a different identity are considerably rarer. 

It is likely that many fugue episodes go unreported due to feelings of embarrassment or worry about the resulting stigma.  As to whether other famous disappearances can be linked to a dissociative fugue, who can say?   In any event, dissociative fugue provides a graphic example of the fluid nature of memory and how easily something as basic as personal identity can be lost.         

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The Violinist

He may have been one of the most promising musicians of the twentieth century. Fritz Kreisler reportedly said of him that "a fiddler such as [X] is born every one hundred years, one like [Josef] Hassid, every two centuries."

Born in the Polish town of Suwalki in 1923, Josef Hassid's mother died when he was an infant. After studying with a local violin teacher, Josef was taken by his father to Warsaw to extend his musical education. At the age of ten, he studied with Mieczyslaw Mihalowicz at the Chopin School of Music and, after only two years, went on to represent Poland at the 1935 Wieniawski Competition.  A shy, introverted child, Josef's memory failed him during his final performance at the competition, and he failed to make it to the second round (he still managed to receive an honorary diploma for his performance). The memory lapse devastated Josef, who reportedly cried for more than an hour after leaving the concert hall.

In 1937, Josef's father took; his son to Spa, Belgium, to study with the legendary Carl Flesch who quickly recognized Josef's talent and took over his musical education. During his time in Spa, Josef met and fell in love with a local girl, but their parents forcibly terminated the relationship since she wasn't Jewish.  Flesch later arranged for Josef to be brought to London in 1938 for a private recital at the house of Sir Philip Sassoon.; Josef's playing mesmerized his audience. Due to the Nazi invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, and the Jewish persecution that followed, Josef and his father decided to stay in London, where he continued his musical training with Flesch.

On April 4, 1940, Josef Hassid gave his first public performance at London's Wigmore Hall. Billed as the "Polish Boy Violinist," Josef played works by Bach, Schubert, and Paganini. Three weeks later, he premiered at the Queen's Hall in a performance with the London Philharmonic.  His brilliant playing attracted record producer Walter Legge, who arranged for Josef to give his first (and only) recording engagement. Josef recorded four RPM records at the HMV studios on Abbey Road. Those precious albums are the only surviving record of Josef Hassid's brilliant talent (most of his recorded pieces are available on Youtube).

Shortly after his recording session, Josef's father noticed that his son became increasingly withdrawn and moody. While he had always been prone to depression and performance anxiety episodes, Josef became even more erratic over time and often went for weeks without even touching his violin. He lashed out at his father and frequently insisted that he would be giving up his music.  Worried about Josef's mental state, Flesch arranged for Josef to be assessed by Thomas Horder (Winston Churchill's personal physician), who arranged for him to be admitted to his private hospital.   In informing the hospital of Josef's arrival, Horder told them: "I am sending you a genius."   After several hospital stays, Josef Hassid was diagnosed with acute schizophrenia.

As Josef's condition worsened, he renounced music and denied ever having played the violin. Carl Flesch wrote numerous letters pleading for Josef to return to his performing career.  In one letter, he stated that: "I hope you will do everything within your will-power to get well again as soon as possible. A great artist like you owes it to the world to become active again". After a year in hospital, Josef Hassid returned home and tried to return to his music, but he continued to find reasons against giving another performance. As his health worsened, Josef was later diagnosed as having a brain tumour. Following a dangerous and unsuccessful brain operation (not a lobotomy, as some accounts stated), Josef Hassid died in 1950. He was twenty-seven years old.

While child prodigies such as Josef Hassid and Yehudi Menuhin routinely face years of grueling training to develop their talent, we may never know why some musicians can succeed when others fail. Whether or not the pressure to perform played a role in Josef's mental illness, the few available recordings of his playing continue to serve as a testimony to an amazing talent that burned out too soon.

Hazy memories in the courtroom: A review of alcohol and other drug effects on false memory and suggestibility.

Alcohol and other psychoactive drugs are oftentimes implicated in legal cases. A pertinent question herein is whether such substances might adversely affect testimonies of victims, eyewitnesses, or suspects by propelling the formation of false memory and increasing susceptibility to suggestion. In a new review published in Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, researchers amassed all available evidence on the effects of intoxication on false memory formation and suggestibility, including the substances alcohol, benzodiazepines, cannabis, stimulants, hallucinogens, and antipsychotics. The review indicated that alcohol and cannabis under certain conditions increased the susceptibility to false memories and/or suggestion with effect sizes ranging from medium to large. When intoxicated during an event, alcohol is most likely to increase this susceptibility at high intoxication levels or after a delay, whereas cannabis exerts detrimental effects during acute intoxication but not necessarily once sober. For other substances, ecologically valid research separating different memory phases is needed. Overall, differences between substances regarding false memory effects exist, suggesting that a nuanced approach is needed when dealing with intoxicated individuals in a legal context. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved)

For the abstract

Woman Declared Not Guilty By Reason of Insanity In the Killing of Her Three Children

A South Dublin Court has found Deirdre Morley not guilty of murdering her three children because of insanity.  After deliberating for over four hours, the jury in the case handed down the verdict on all three murder charges laid against the forty-four-year-old former nurse following a trial that has attracted international attention.

Morley reportedly killed her three children, Connor (9), Darragh (7), and Carla (3), on January 24, 2020, at their home in Newcastle, South Dublin.  She later admitted to smothering her children using sticky tape and plastic bags while the children's father was away at work.  While she had planned to kill herself as well, she passed out from medication and alcohol before she could carry this out.   The bodies were later found by their father, Andrew McGinley, that evening.   

During the subsequent trial, during which her attorney pleaded insanity on her behalf. The court heard evidence that the accused had a long history of depression and that this had escalated to a full-blown psychosis at the time of the killings.  This included testimony from two psychiatrists who described Morley as suffering from bipolar disorder and genuinely believed killing her children was for their benefit as she considered them as having no future due to her mental illness.  

In instructing the jury before deliberations, Mr. Justice Coffey stated that the psychiatric testimony clearly showed that the defendant was acting on an irresistible impulse and that she was not aware that her actions were wrong.  “The doctors are unanimous in their view she was legally insane when she smothered and killed her three children,” he said.  “This is not a case where the prosecution seeks a finding of murder on any count.”

Under the U.K.'s  Criminal Law (Insanity) Act 2006, the judge is now obligated to commit Ms. Morley to a designated centre, which is believed to be the Central Mental Hospital in her case.  While at the centre, a consultant psychiatrist must now be reviewed to determine her future care.  Proceedings are adjourned until May 31 to allow for a report on Ms. Morley to be furnished to the court.

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The Freud-Frink Fiasco

Despite becoming a household name later in his life, Dr. Sigmund Freud was not well-known outside of his native Austria during the first two decades of the Twentieth Century.  Along with his relative anonymity, he also had money woes courtesy of the soaring hyperinflation occurring in Austria and Germany following the First World War.   Not only was he having trouble supporting himself and his family, but promoting the psychoanalytic movement he founded was increasingly difficult as well.    Even his medical practice suffered as many patients found themselves unable to afford years of psychoanalysis.

Efforts to expand psychoanalysis to North America through a 1909 American tour helped raise Freud's profile slightly despite his misgivings about American innovators twisting the purity of his theories.  He dreaded the idea of psychoanalysis becoming “Americanized,” especially considering how puritanical Americans were about sex.    Freud even turned down generous offers for further American lecture tours due to his concerns about the “notoriety” involved.  While he managed to publish English-language versions of many of his works (featuring introductions from prominent psychologists such as G. Stanley Hall),  he fought continually with his publicist Edward L. Bernays (who also happened to be his nephew).   Although the royalties from the translated books brought in some revenue, it would be many years before becoming financially independent. 

All of which may have played a role in the peculiar case of Horace  Westlake Frink…

One of Sigmund Freud’s first American disciples, Horace Frink, was a founding member of the New York Psychoanalytic Society and one of the first American books on psychoanalysis, Morbid Fears and Compulsions.  He even traveled to Vienna in 1921 to undergo psychoanalysis from “the master” himself as part of his training as a psychoanalyst.   But Frink had problems in his own right since he suffered from episodes of depression and hypomanic behavior (which would likely get him a diagnosis of bipolar disorder today).   Despite these symptoms, he became Freud's chief American disciple when he began psychoanalysis with Freud.

It was during the course of this psychoanalysis that a brewing scandal was uncovered.  Though Frink was married with two children of his own, he was also having a sexual affair with one of his former patients, Angelika Bijur.  She was a New York heiress married to a much older man, Abraham Bijur. The prospect of breaking up both marriages over this relationship was naturally frightening for the two of them.  This was especially true for Frink since it would have meant losing contact with his children.   And so, Horace Frink and Angelika Bijur both became patients of Freud as a way of avoiding divorce. 

Which, as it happened, was precisely what Sigmund Freud advised for them.   Completely ignoring Frink's depressive episodes and the possibility that he was borderline psychotic,  Freud focused on his sexual frustration issues instead.   Drawing on Frink's history of serious emotional losses (including losing his mother to tuberculosis at an early age), Freud concluded that Frink was an unconscious homosexual.    This was a pet theme for Freud, and he tended to focus on unconscious homosexuality and the Oedipus complex with many of his male patients.    Not only did he recommend that Frink divorce his wife, but he also told Bijur to divorce her husband as well.  He even went so far as to tell her that Frink would likely develop homosexual problems if she didn’t do as he advised.    The fact that Angelika Bijur was also independently wealthy (she had paid for her own therapy and Frink's) may have influenced Freud as well.

Ironically, the problem, and the potential media disaster, of Freud’s role in the breakup of two marriages neatly solved itself.   Frink’s wife died of pneumonia in 1923 (whether or not the trauma of her divorce from Frink contributed to her death is open to question).   As for Abraham Bijur, who was furious at Freud for interfering in his marriage, he died of cancer in May 1922.  The timing of Bijur’s death was extremely fortunate as far as Freud was concerned.   Not only did it make the divorce from Angelika unnecessary, but it also ended Bijur’s planned media campaign against Freud.  Before his death, Bijur had written a  letter denouncing Freud, which he intended to run as an advertisement in several New York newspapers.  Though the letter was never published, Bijur’s denunciation of Freud and his anguished question of whether he was a “savant or charlatan” would likely have destroyed the good doctor's reputation in the United States if he had lived just a little longer.

As for Horace Frink, his mental condition worsened, likely aided by guilt over his first wife’s death.   Despite his marriage to Angelika on December 27, 1922, Frink's mental state deteriorated and ultimately led to being institutionalized.  He and Anjelika were divorced in 1925. 

Sigmund Freud continued pressuring both Horace and Angelika throughout the entire fiasco for money to support the psychoanalytic movement.  In one letter he wrote to Frink in 1921, he suggested that his patient’s failure to acknowledge his own homosexuality was linked to his need to contribute to Freud’s psychoanalytic fund.   When Angelika later told him that her marriage to Frink was falling apart,  Freud sent a telegram which said, “Extremely sorry.  The point where you failed was money.”   As a result, Anjelika abandoned the psychoanalytic movement and felt personally betrayed by Freud.

 With further therapy under his old mentor Adolf Meyer, Frink managed to recover to the point of regaining custody of his children and becoming a stable father to them for years.   Despite hopes for a professional comeback, Frink was expelled from the American Psychoanalytic Society, largely because Freud had lost confidence in his ability to continue as a psychoanalyst.    As a result, Frink and his children were forced to rely on the money they had inherited from his first wife and the divorce settlement he had received from Anjelika.    While he later remarried,  Frink eventually suffered a relapse along with serious heart disease.   He experienced a final psychotic break and died of heart disease at the age of fifty-three.

Though Horace Frink had become disillusioned about psychoanalysis, he continued to hold Freud in high regard.   When asked about him shortly before his death, Frink commented that Freud was a great man, "even if he did invent psychoanalysis."   As for Sigmund Freud, he apparently viewed Frink's mental breakdown as a justification for his anti-American attitudes.   Since Frink had been his choice to lead the psychoanalytic movement in the United States,  this mental instability helped reinforce Freud's mistrust of Americans as a whole.  As he would comment in 1924, "My attempt at giving them a chief in the person of Frink which has so sadly miscarried is the last thing I will ever do for them, had I to live the one hundred years you set down for the incorporation of psychoanalysis into Psychiatry."   The role he played in destroying Frink's first marriage and his later tragedy was conveniently overlooked.   Luckily for Freud, the most embarrassing details of the whole affair would not come out for decades after his death.

Did the prospect of gaining a wealthy patron override Freud’s judgment concerning what was best for his patients?   Although Abraham Bijur's convenient death saved Freud from the public scandal over his role in breaking up two marriages, Sigmund Freud seemed not to have learned any real lesson about needing to separate clinical judgment from his own financial needs.   His desperate search for money during the 1920s seemed to have taken him in some strange directions. Still, the bizarre episode with Horace Frink and Anjelika Bijur represents one of the most serious ethical breaches of his career.    Though Sigmund Freud was still years away from attaining the iconic reputation he would enjoy by the middle of the 20th century, much of that fame depended on keeping his biggest disasters out of the public eye.

How Does Being Premature Affect Social Cognition?

Social cognitive abilities are affected by preterm birth, but pathways to, and risk factors for this outcome are not well mapped.   A new study published in the journal Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviewse examines direct assessment tasks including objective coding of parent-child play to chart social development in infancy and pre-school years. A systematic search and data-extraction procedure yielded seventy-nine studies (4930 preterm and 2109 term children, aged birth - five years), for inclusion. The authors detected a pattern of reduced social attention in the first 12 months of life with evidence of reduced performance in social cognitive tasks later in the preschool years. However, they did not identify a consistent, distinctive preterm social phenotype in early life. Instead, the interactive behaviour of preterm infants reflects factors from outside the social cognitive domain, such as attention, language, and socioeconomic status. By combining data across samples and measures we revealed the role of domain-general skills, which may in future prove fruitful intervention targets. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved)

For the abstract

Doctors in India Warning Against Use of Cow Dung As Protection from Coronavirus

With over twenty-four million COVID-19 cases already reported in India, a quarter-million fatalities thus far,  and thousands of new fatalities being reported daily,  panic is running rampant across the country.   But India's medical doctors are warning that shortages in critical medical supplies have driven many Hindus to seek alternative 'cures' of doubtful validity.  One of the most bizarre of these reputed cures involves people bathing themselves in cow dung, believing that it will save them from becoming infected.

Since cows are regarded as holy animals by Hindus, cow dung and urine have been used in Hindu healing rituals for centuries because of their supposed antiseptic and therapeutic properties.   Since the pandemic began, however, cow shelters throughout India have been besieged by people wishing to douse themselves in excrement and having it washed off with milk, hoping that it will boost their immune systems and protect them from COVID.    Many Hindu monasteries and schools actively promote cow-dung treatment, and news stories of people insisting that their treatment cured them of the virus remain popular.

But a news release by Dr. JA Jayalal, president of the Indian Medical Association, warns that the cow dung 'cure' is actually useless and may well worsen the pandemic since many people who are already infected often gather in groups with no attempt at social distancing or mask-wearing.  "There is no concrete scientific evidence that cow dung or urine work to boost immunity against COVID-19," he said. "It is based entirely on belief.  There are also health risks involved in smearing or consuming these products - other diseases can spread from the animal to humans."   He lamented that many medical doctors also seek the treatment hoping that it would allow them to tend to patients without safety precautions.

Cow dung therapy is hardly the only alternative remedy people seek out to protect themselves from the pandemic.  Medics in rural parts of Maharashtra state are also warning that patients are being brought to them with marks from hot irons held against their skin by witch doctors in an attempt to "drive the virus out."

With the pandemic showing no signs of easing and international health agencies warning that new COVID-19 variants are already being reported across India, the death toll, which already accounts for a third of all fatalities, will certainly drive the search for a miracle cure.   So cow dung therapy will remain popular, at least for now.  

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The Case of the Black Widow Medium

Louisa Lindlof may not have been a particularly successful spiritualist and medium, but she certainly had a style all her own.   She was also one of the most ruthless murderers in Chicago's history.

Claiming to have been blessed with the "gift" of prophecy since she was a young girl in Germany, she also told visitors to her home in a Chicago neighbourhood that her greatest visions of the future came courtesy of a priceless crystal ball she had reportedly purchased for $500 (a heft sum in those days).  Though it appeared to be ordinary glass, Louisa insisted that it contained one of Cleopatra's tears and, as she would later insist, "That one tear enables me to read the future,” she avers. “When I gaze into the ball, I see the tear at its center expand in size, and within I see what will come to pass in future years.”   Along with private readings and seances she provided to her willing customers, she also conducted "weekly circles" where she tore up a handkerchief and laid the pieces in front of each of the people present.   She then "went into a trance" and gave each people in attendance a special prophecy or "inspired" answer to any question they might have had.

Still, for someone with the "gift," Louisa had the most bizarre run of bad luck considering all of the close family members who seemed to die around her.  The first was her then-husband, Julius Graunke, who died in 1905 while still living in Milwaukee.   Even though he was heavily insured, nobody seemed too curious about the circumstances of his death (though mystified by his symptoms, doctors eventually concluded that he died of sunstroke).  Not long afterward, one of the boarders living at the rooming house owned by Lousia and Julius also died for unexplained reasons, though, again, Louisa was still able to collect the insurance.   

Despite her tragic loss, life certainly went on for Louisa, considering she married her second husband, William Lindloff, barely more than a year later (she was thirty-five, he was twenty).   The next person to die was William's brother, John Otto Lindloff, in 1908, just a few months after becoming her brother-in-law.  Even though Louisa despised him for being an "unsuitable" boyfriend to her own daughter, Frieda, the fact that he died soon after she took out an insurance policy on him naming herself as a beneficiary also failed to raise serious questions.   If anyone asked about these tragedies in her life,  she would respond that she had received "visions" of their impending deaths.

But the string of mysterious deaths hardly stopped there.   On January 11, 1908, just a few months after John Otto's death, Louisa's 22-year-old daughter Frieda also died.  This time around, doctors attributed her death to typhoid fever, but, like all the other recent deaths, Frieda was heavily insured, and, yes, her mother was the beneficiary again.    Not long afterward, Louisa, William, and her two surviving children moved to Chicago.

Despite establishing herself in Chicago and launching her mediumship business, tragedy still seemed to follow Louisa.   Not that long after their move to Chicago, William Lindloff came down with a mysterious illness that puzzled his doctors.   Though he was a raving lunatic when he finally died on August 3, 1910, the official cause of death was listed as "heart disease,"  and Louisa pocketed another hefty insurance payment.    Even as neighbours were scandalized at how little emotion she showed at her husband's funeral, nobody took official notice - yet.

But Louisa's two surviving children would follow poor William soon enough.   Alma Graunke Lindlof, aged seventeen, died on August 4, 1911, just over a year after William died.  While the cause of death was listed as "heart disease," the doctor who had tended to Alma would later testify that Louisa had used her supposed psychic powers to predict the exact date her daughter died.   

Finally, there was her last child, Arthur, who became seriously ill in June 1912.   This time around, however, the doctor  Louisa brought in to tend to her son became suspicious.   Not only did Arthur's symptoms suggest that he had been poisoned, but the boy himself also mentioned the "weird-tasting" water that his mother had given him. Louisa emphatically denied that Arthur's symptoms could be due to poisoning, but her doctor overrode her and had him taken to a hospital (Louisa strongly objected).   Though this failed to save Arthur from dying on June 13,  the doctor was still suspicious enough to reject the initial verdict of pancreatic illness and arrange for an autopsy instead. 

After discovering traces of arsenic in Arthur's system, the coroner then had Louisa arrested.    She was indignant at being charged with killing her son (apparently with no warning from her crystal ball) and emphatically denied any wrongdoing despite extensive grilling by police.   A thorough search of her house turned up a virtual pharmacopeia of lethal substances, including a box of rat poison, mercury, and several bottles with "poison" right on their labels.   Police also found a wig and evidence that she had been planning to leave Chicago in a hurry, though she refused to explain why.  They also determined that she had spent virtually every cent of the thousands of dollars she had previously received from insurance payouts (making Arthur's death even more convenient).   Considering the sizeable insurance policy she had on her son, prosecutors considered this to be enough to convince any jury.   

It also likely didn't help that Louisa had sent a trusted boarder, Henry Kuba,  to the Prudential insurance office on the very day of Arthur's death to pick up the insurance cheque she assumed would be waiting for her.   Henry was arrested as well but was released after only a few days.  As word spread about Louisa's arrest, she continued to play the outraged mother being arrested for a crime she had never committed.   She insisted that her psychic gifts had told her when her relatives would die and, though she profited from these deaths, they were all due to natural causes alone.  

But the investigators were just getting started, and, sure enough, after the bodies of her suspected victims were exhumed, the coroner found elevated traces of arsenic in each of them.  Friends and relatives of the deceased came forward with their own stories about Louisa and how her "psychic gifts" had allowed her to predict their death dates.   Not only did this allow her to collect on their insurance policies, but her successful predictions also helped reinforce Louisa's reputation as a seeress.

Other people came forward describing their own near-fatal experiences with Louisa.  This included one former housekeeper, Sadie Ray, who told police about how she was suddenly taken ill while dining with the Lindloffs just a week before Arthur Lindloff's passing.  Most damningly of all, police found a notebook carefully hidden in Louisa's home, where she had listed all the deaths, complete with the insurance payments she had received for each of them.    They also found the crystal ball, "Cleopatra's tear," and all, along with a horoscope prepared for her by a New York astrologer.   Prosecutors otherwise ignored the horoscope though it did contain one fateful prophecy:   it said, “You shall have a little trouble in 1912, and one of your immediate relatives to die. You will heir to some property and cash but will have trouble in collecting it. After you have secured your legacy, you will spend the rest of the year traveling.”  Prophetic words, indeed.

Even many of the former customers who had attended the seances Louisa conducted came forward with their own stories about her eccentricities.   Others who reported becoming ill after eating meals she had prepared also gave testimony.  One woman even accused Louisa of poisoning her baby, though, again, much of this testimony had little in the way of actual physical evidence to back it up.   Since Louisa had no financial motive for these deaths, investigators would later accuse her of committing them as practice for her more lucrative crimes.  

During her trial, which was held in late October 1912, forensic specialists testified concerning the large quantities of arsenic found in the bodies that had already been exhumed.  They also heard from the other witnesses while Louisa, defiant to the end, emphatically denied ever harming her family members.  Louisa's famous "predictions" allowing her to announce the death dates of all her family members (and arranging for hefty insurance policies) also came under scrutiny.  She also told the court that those same spirits guiding her prophecies also promised her she would be acquitted, though, oddly enough, the spirits were dead wrong about th. 

On November 5, the jury only took five hours of deliberations before finding Louisa Lindloff guilty of murdering her son.   The verdict came as a surprise to the entire courtroom, considering that women were so rarely convicted for murder.  After reading the verdict, the judge presiding over the case commented that '“It has been so long since a white woman was convicted on a murder charge in Cook county that I cannot remember the last case that resulted in that way. It must have been something like twenty years ago.”

Louisa accepted the verdict stonily though she needed to be supported out of the courtroom.   She would later be sentenced to twenty-five years in prison and immediately launched an appeal.   Whether she would have won that appeal eventually proved moot since she died of cancer only two years later, never regaining her freedom.  Presumably,  the spirits failed to warn her not to bother.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Inspiring The Exorcist

Decades after "The Exorcist" premiered in 1973 continues to thrill audiences the world over.  Based on a book by William Peter Blatty, the movie showed the demonic possession of a twelve-year-old girl in a performance that made Linda Blair a horror icon.   But what about the 1949  possession case in St. Lou, MO, that reportedly inspired it?  And what can we say about that case today?

All that we know about the boy at the centre of that case is that his true name remains anonymous, although he was assigned the pseudonym of "Roland Doe" by the Catholic Church (later sources changed the name to "Robbie Mannheim").    Doe, who was thirteen years old in 1949 when the alleged exorcism occurred, was an only child who was born into a German Lutheran family and raised in Maryland.   Later moving with his family to St. Louis, supernatural activity began shortly after the death of a favourite aunt who had been a spiritualist.   Allegedly, she had introduced him to the supernatural along with how to use an Ouija board. 

According to various reports, unexplained occurrences began in the house in which "Robbie" and his family lived.   This included moving furniture, strange noises, and a picture of Jesus rattling on the walls.   When the frightened family turned to their Lutheran pastor for help,  Robbie was examined by clerics and psychiatrists who could find no explanation for what was happening. 

After Robbie spent an evening at the pastor's house, various occurrences led the pastor to conclude that "evil was at work" and arranged for a Lutheran rite of exorcism to be carried out.    According to most accounts, Robbie underwent an Anglican exorcism. When that failed, the case was referred to Reverend Edward Hughes, a Catholic priest, who carried out an exorcism at Georgetown Hospital near Washington, D.C.    During that exorcism, Robbie injured the priest and required him to receive stitches.   The ritual was then stopped, and he was sent home to his family.   

In desperation over Robbie's worsening problems, his family took him to St. Louis University, where two Jesuit priests examined him.   According to the eyewitness accounts still available, Robbie showed many of the classic signs of possession, including aversion to holy symbols,  flying objects, and Robbie speaking in a guttural voice.   After receiving permission from the Archbishop, the Reverend William Bowden and two other priests conducted the exorcism in the psychiatric wing of Alexian Brothers Hospital in St. Louis.    In a diary which Reverend Bowden kept of the exorcism, he reported that words such as "evil" and "hell" erupted on Robbie's skin, and he broke the nose of one of the priests during his violent thrashing.   When the exorcism was finally complete, witnesses reported a loud noise in the hospital.

Robbie went on to have a normal life and reportedly has no memory of the exorcism.  As they reported afterward, all of the priests in attendance were consistent in their belief that it was an actual possession.   Along with inspiring William Blatty's book and the movie of the same name, the case of Robbie Doe/Mannheim was also depicted in the 2000 movie Possessed and a 1997 documentary In The Grip of Evil.   While Robbie himself has never gone public with his experiences, several of the priests who took part in the exorcism, including Father Walter Halloran, insisted that the possession was genuine.

But skeptics examining the various statements made afterward noted key discrepancies that cast doubt on the eyewitness accounts.   In an investigative piece for Strange magazine published in 1997, journalist Mark Opsasnick examined the diary that had been reportedly kept by the lead priest carrying out the exorcism.   He also interviewed Father Halloran and determined that many of the statements attributed to him about the exorcism had been exaggerated by previous reporters seeking to play up the sensational aspects of the story.    The claim that Mannheim had spoken in tongues during his possession was also dismissed by Father Halloran, along with the words that had "miraculously" appeared on his skin.   All of the "supernatural" phenomena reported by eyewitnesses could have been faked by Mannheim himself, possibly as a way of getting attention.   In his own investigation of the Mannheim case, skeptical investigator Joe Nickell largely confirmed the conclusions raised by Opsasnick.

Without being able to interview Robbie directly, there is no way to determine whether he was behind what occurred in 1949.   Despite speculation that mental illness may have played a role in the case, no evidence that he suffered from any of the different diagnoses attributed to him over the years (including Tourette's syndrome,  obsessive-compulsive disorder, and schizophrenia) has ever surfaced.   What evidence there is focuses on eyewitness testimony and all-too fallible memory. 

In the decades since the St. Louis exorcism,  the cultural impact resulting from the events of 1949 has been profound.   Along with The Exorcist, virtually every movie featuring exorcisms has drawn on the long-ago case, either directly or indirectly.   Regularly invoked as proof that demonic possession exists, the case may also have inspired "copycat" possession cases, including the 1978 exorcism-related death of Anneliese Michel, which led to the conviction of the 23-year old woman's parents and the two priests who conducted the exorcism. 

While no clear link was ever proven, there seems little doubt that reports of demonic possession rose sharply in the years following the release of the 1973 movie and that exorcism continues to have strange popularity.    Exorcists are being trained in increasing numbers, and the demand for their services has risen as well.    Almost inevitably, deaths resulting from exorcism continue to be reported but seem not to have dampened people's enthusiasm for believing themselves to be possessed.  

Until "Robbie Doe/Manheim" comes forward or until more reliable evidence surfaces, the mystery surrounding the St. Louis exorcism case will continue to be invoked by the true believers as "proof" that the Devil is at work in the world.   What that might mean for future exorcism cases is anybody's guess.

When The Brain is Under Stress

Psychosocial stress is an omnipresent phenomenon whose neural correlates in humans are still poorly understood. Several paradigms have been developed to induce acute stress in fMRI settings, but it is unclear whether there is a global brain activation pattern related to psychosocial stress. In a recent paper published in the journal Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, researchers  examined different neuronal activation patterns through an activation likelihood estimation analysis on 31 studies totaling 1279 participants. Studies used the ScanSTRESS, Montreal Imaging Stress Test, aversive viewing paradigm (AVP), Social-Evaluative Threat or Cyberball. The analysis revealed bilateral activation clusters comprising the claustrum, insula and inferior frontal gyrus. This indicates that exposure to psychosocial stress leads to activations in brain areas involved in affective processing and the endocrine stress response. Furthermore, in a systematic review, Cyberball and AVP presented themselves as outliers due to increased activation in motor areas and lack of induction of stress related activity changes, respectively. As different paradigms emphasize different dimensions of psychosocial stress such as social evaluation or performance pressure, future research is needed to identify differences between the paradigms. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved)

For the abstract.