#mass psychology

[dailyanarchistposts]

B.1.5 How is the mass-psychological basis for authoritarian civilisation created?

We noted in section A.3.6 that hierarchical, authoritarian institutions tend to be self-perpetuating, because growing up under their influence creates submissive/authoritarian personalities — people who both “respect” authority (based on fear of punishment) and desire to exercise it themselves on subordinates. Individuals with such a character structure do not really want to dismantle hierarchies, because they are afraid of the responsibility entailed by genuine freedom. It seems “natural” and “right” to them that society’s institutions, from the authoritarian factory to the patriarchal family, should be pyramidal, with an elite at the top giving orders while those below them merely obey. Thus we have the spectacle of so-called “Libertarians” and “anarcho” capitalists bleating about “liberty” while at the same time advocating factory fascism and privatised states. In short, authoritarian civilisation reproduces itself with each generation because, through an intricate system of conditioning that permeates every aspect of society, it creates masses of people who support the status quo.

Wilhelm Reich has given one of the most thorough analyses of the psychological processes involved in the reproduction of authoritarian civilisation. Reich based his analysis on four of Freud’s most solidly grounded discoveries, namely, (1) that there exists an unconscious part of the mind which has a powerful though irrational influence on behaviour; (2) that even the small child develops a lively “genital” sexuality, i.e. a desire for sexual pleasure which has nothing to do with procreation; (3) that childhood sexuality along with the Oedipal conflicts that arise in parent-child relations under monogamy and patriarchy are usually repressed through fear of punishment or disapproval for sexual acts and thoughts; (4) that this blocking of the child’s natural sexual activity and extinguishing it from memory does not weaken its force in the unconscious, but actually intensifies it and enables it to manifest itself in various pathological disturbances and anti-social drives; and (5) that, far from being of divine origin, human moral codes are derived from the educational measures used by the parents and parental surrogates in earliest childhood, the most effective of these being the ones opposed to childhood sexuality.

By studying Bronislaw Malinowsli’s research on the Trobriand Islanders, a woman-centred (matricentric) society in which children’s sexual behaviour was not repressed and in which neuroses and perversions as well as authoritarian institutions and values were almost non-existent, Reich came to the conclusion that patriarchy and authoritarianism originally developed when tribal chieftains began to get economic advantages from a certain type of marriage (“cross-cousin marriages”) entered into by their sons. In such marriages, the brothers of the son’s wife were obliged to pay a dowry to her in the form of continuous tribute, thus enriching her husband’s clan (i.e. the chief’s). By arranging many such marriages for his sons (which were usually numerous due to the chief’s privilege of polygamy), the chief’s clan could accumulate wealth. Thus society began to be stratified into ruling and subordinate clans based on wealth.

To secure the permanence of these “good” marriages, strict monogamy was required. However, it was found that monogamy was impossible to maintain without the repression of childhood sexuality, since, as statistics show, children who are allowed free expression of sexuality often do not adapt successfully to life-long monogamy. Therefore, along with class stratification and private property, authoritarian child-rearing methods were developed to inculcate the repressive sexual morality on which the new patriarchal system depended for its reproduction. Thus there is a historical correlation between, on the one hand, pre-patriarchal society, primitive libertarian communism (or “work democracy,” to use Reich’s expression), economic equality, and sexual freedom, and on the other, patriarchal society, a private-property economy, economic class stratification, and sexual repression. As Reich puts it:

“Every tribe that developed from a [matricentric] to a patriarchal organisation had to change the sexual structure of its members to produce a sexuality in keeping with its new form of life. This was a necessary change because the shifting of power and of wealth from the democratic gens [maternal clans] to the authoritarian family of the chief was mainly implemented with the help of the suppression of the sexual strivings of the people. It was in this way that sexual suppression became an essential factor in the division of society into classes. “Marriage, and the lawful dowry it entailed, became the axis of the transformation of the one organisation into the other. In view of the fact that the marriage tribute of the wife’s gens to the man’s family strengthened the male’s, especially the chief’s, position of power, the male members of the higher ranking gens and families developed a keen interest in making the nuptial ties permanent. At this stage, in other words, only the man had an interest in marriage. In this way natural work-democracy’s simple alliance, which could be easily dissolved at any time, was transformed into the permanent and monogamous marital relationship of patriarchy. The permanent monogamous marriage became the basic institution of patriarchal society — which it still is today. To safeguard these marriages, however, it was necessary to impose greater and greater restrictions upon and to depreciate natural genital strivings.” [The Mass Psychology of Fascism, p. 90]

The suppression of natural sexuality involved in this transformation from matricentric to patriarchal society created various anti-social drives (sadism, destructive impulses, rape fantasies, etc.), which then also had to be suppressed through the imposition of a compulsive morality, which took the place the natural self-regulation that one finds in pre-patriarchal societies. In this way, sex began to be regarded as “dirty,” “diabolical,” “wicked,” etc. — which it had indeed become through the creation of secondary drives. Thus:

“The patriarchal-authoritarian sexual order that resulted from the revolutionary processes of latter-day [matricentrism] (economic independence of the chief’s family from the maternal gens, a growing exchange of goods between the tribes, development of the means of production, etc.) becomes the primary basis of authoritarian ideology by depriving the women, children, and adolescents of their sexual freedom, making a commodity of sex and placing sexual interests in the service of economic subjugation. From now on, sexuality is indeed distorted; it becomes diabolical and demonic and has to be curbed.” [Reich, Op. Cit., p. 88]

Once the beginnings of patriarchy are in place, the creation of a fully authoritarian society based on the psychological crippling of its members through sexual suppression follows:

“The moral inhibition of the child’s natural sexuality, the last stage of which is the severe impairment of the child’s genital sexuality, makes the child afraid, shy, fearful of authority, obedient, ‘good,’ and ‘docile’ in the authoritarian sense of the words. It has a crippling effect on man’s rebellious forces because every vital life-impulse is now burdened with severe fear; and since sex is a forbidden subject, thought in general and man’s critical faculty also become inhibited. In short, morality’s aim is to produce acquiescent subjects who, despite distress and humiliation, are adjusted to the authoritarian order. Thus, the family is the authoritarian state in miniature, to which the child must learn to adapt himself as a preparation for the general social adjustment required of him later. Man’s authoritarian structure — this must be clearly established — is basically produced by the embedding of sexual inhibitions and fear.” [Reich, Op. Cit., p. 30]

In this way, by damaging the individual’s power to rebel and think for him/herself, the inhibition of childhood sexuality — and indeed other forms of free, natural expression of bioenergy (e.g. shouting, crying, running, jumping, etc.) — becomes the most important weapon in creating reactionary personalities. This is why every reactionary politician puts such an emphasis on “strengthening the family” and promoting “family values” (i.e. patriarchy, compulsive monogamy, premarital chastity, corporal punishment, etc.). In the words of Reich:

“Since authoritarian society reproduces itself in the individual structures of the masses with the help of the authoritarian family, it follows that political reaction has to regard and defend the authoritarian family as the basis of the ‘state, culture, and civilisation… .’ [It is] political reaction’s germ cell, the most important centre for the production of reactionary men and women. Originating and developing from definite social processes, it becomes the most essential institution for the preservation of the authoritarian system that shapes it.” [Op. Cit., pp. 104–105]

The family is the most essential institution for this purpose because children are most vulnerable to psychological maiming in their first few years, from the time of birth to about six years of age, during which time they are mostly in the charge of their parents. The schools and churches then continue the process of conditioning once the children are old enough to be away from their parents, but they are generally unsuccessful if the proper foundation has not been laid very early in life by the parents. Thus A.S. Neill observes that “the nursery training is very like the kennel training. The whipped child, like the whipped puppy, grows into an obedient, inferior adult. And as we train our dogs to suit our own purposes, so we train our children. In that kennel, the nursery, the human dogs must be clean; they must feed when we think it convenient for them to feed. I saw a hundred thousand obedient, fawning dogs wag their tails in the Templehof, Berlin, when in 1935, the great trainer Hitler whistled his commands.” [Summerhill: a Radical Approach to Child Rearing, p. 100]

The family is also the main agency of repression during adolescence, when sexual energy reaches its peak. This is because the vast majority of parents provide no private space for adolescents to pursue undisturbed sexual relationships with their partners, but in fact actively discourage such behaviour, often (as in fundamentalist Christian families) demanding complete abstinence — at the very time when abstinence is most impossible! Moreover, since teenagers are economically dependent on their parents under capitalism, with no societal provision of housing or dormitories allowing for sexual freedom, young people have no alternative but to submit to irrational parental demands for abstention from premarital sex. This in turn forces them to engage in furtive sex in the back seats of cars or other out-of-the-way places where they cannot relax or obtain full sexual satisfaction. As Reich found, when sexuality is repressed and laden with anxiety, the result is always some degree of what he terms “orgastic impotence”: the inability to fully surrender to the flow of energy discharged during orgasm. Hence there is an incomplete release of sexual tension, which results in a state of chronic bioenergetic stasis. Such a condition, Reich found, is the breeding ground for neuroses and reactionary attitudes. (For further details see the section J.6).

In this connection it is interesting to note that “primitive” societies, such as the Trobriand Islanders, prior to their developing patriarchal-authoritarian institutions, provided special community houses where teenagers could go with their partners to enjoy undisturbed sexual relationships — and this with society’s full approval. Such an institution would be taken for granted in an anarchist society, as it is implied by the concept of freedom. (For more on adolescent sexual liberation, see section J.6.8.)

Nationalistic feelings can also be traced to the authoritarian family. A child’s attachment to its mother is, of course, natural and is the basis of all family ties. Subjectively, the emotional core of the concepts of homeland and nation are mother and family, since the mother is the homeland of the child, just as the family is the “nation in miniature.” According to Reich, who carefully studied the mass appeal of Hitler’s “National Socialism,” nationalistic sentiments are a direct continuation of the family tie and are rooted in a fixated tie to the mother. As Reich points out, although infantile attachment to the mother is natural, fixated attachment is not, but is a social product. In puberty, the tie to the mother would make room for other attachments, i.e., natural sexual relations, if the unnatural sexual restrictions imposed on adolescents did not cause it to be eternalised. It is in the form of this socially conditioned externalisation that fixation on the mother becomes the basis of nationalist feelings in the adult; and it is only at this stage that it becomes a reactionary social force.

Later writers who have followed Reich in analysing the process of creating reactionary character structures have broadened the scope of his analysis to include other important inhibitions, besides sexual ones, that are imposed on children and adolescents. Rianne Eisler, for example, in her book Sacred Pleasure, stresses that it is not just a sex-negative attitude but a pleasure-negative attitude that creates the kinds of personalities in question. Denial of the value of pleasurable sensations permeates our unconscious, as reflected, for example, in the common idea that to enjoy the pleasures of the body is the “animalistic” (and hence “bad”) side of human nature, as contrasted with the “higher” pleasures of the mind and “spirit.” By such dualism, which denies a spiritual aspect to the body, people are made to feel guilty about enjoying any pleasurable sensations — a conditioning that does, however, prepare them for lives based on the sacrifice of pleasure (or indeed, even of life itself) under capitalism and statism, with their requirements of mass submission to alienated labour, exploitation, military service to protect ruling-class interests, and so on. And at the same time, authoritarian ideology emphasises the value of suffering, as for example through the glorification of the tough, insensitive warrior hero, who suffers (and inflicts “necessary” suffering on others ) for the sake of some pitiless ideal.

Eisler also points out that there is “ample evidence that people who grow up in families where rigid hierarchies and painful punishments are the norm learn to suppress anger toward their parents. There is also ample evidence that this anger is then often deflected against traditionally disempowered groups (such as minorities, children, and women).” [Sacred Pleasure, p. 187] This repressed anger then becomes fertile ground for reactionary politicians, whose mass appeal usually rests in part on scapegoating minorities for society’s problems.

As the psychologist Else Frenkel-Brunswick documents in The Authoritarian Personality, people who have been conditioned through childhood abuse to surrender their will to the requirements of feared authoritarian parents, also tend to be very susceptible as adults to surrender their will and minds to authoritarian leaders. “In other words,” Frenkel-Brunswick summarises, “at the same time that they learn to deflect their repressed rage against those they perceive as weak, they also learn to submit to autocratic or ‘strong-man’ rule. Moreover, having been severely punished for any hint of rebellion (even ‘talking back’ about being treated unfairly), they gradually also learn to deny to themselves that there was anything wrong with what was done to them as children — and to do it in turn to their own children.” [The Authoritarian Personality, p. 187]

These are just some of the mechanisms that perpetuate the status quo by creating the kinds of personalities who worship authority and fear freedom. Consequently, anarchists are generally opposed to traditional child-rearing practices, the patriarchal-authoritarian family (and its “values”), the suppression of adolescent sexuality, and the pleasure-denying, pain-affirming attitudes taught by the Church and in most schools. In place of these, anarchists favour non-authoritarian, non-repressive child-rearing practices and educational methods (see sections J.6 and secJ.5.13, respectively) whose purpose is to prevent, or at least minimise, the psychological crippling of individuals, allowing them instead to develop natural self-regulation and self-motivated learning. This, we believe, is the only way to for people to grow up into happy, creative, and truly freedom-loving individuals who will provide the psychological ground where anarchist economic and political institutions can flourish.

[nihmue]

"Omdat de massa geen twijfels kent inzake waar of onwaar en bovendien haar enorme kracht beseft, is haar intolerantie even groot als haar autoriteitsgeloof blind is. Ze toont ontzag voor kracht en laat zich door goedheid, die voor haar enkel een vorm van zwakte betekent, slechts in geringe mate beïnvloeden. Wat ze van haar helden verlangt, is kracht, zelfs gewelddadigheid. Ze wil gedomineerd en onderdrukt worden en haar meesters vrezen. Omdat ze in wezen aartsconservatief is, koestert ze diepe afschuw voor alle vernieuwing en vooruitgang en onbegrensde eerbied voor de traditie."

Freud, Massapsychologie en ik-analyse (1921)

[immaculatasknight]

They want you stupid

[usunezukoinezu]

''Mass psychology allows people to remain comfortable while making themselves feel like they are doing some kind of deeper work. It really just keeps people stuck and lying to themselves. Actual transformative work will never appeal to the greater masses because most people aren’t willing to experience the level of discomfort associated with deeper transformation.''

-Trevor Runyon via Carl Jung and depth psychology

[gammaraydeath]

waking up with brand new scars

[thee-babbo]

we stan

[fenrichaita]

Sometimes I wonder if people understand that you cannot make people stop comparing mentally ill and neurodivergent people to like serial killers and horror movie monsters without abandoning most of how we conceptualize and categorize mental illness. It's not like an ableism that comes from outside of the DSM or ICD from laymen, it's entirely baked in. The entire mental health system is about categorizing mentally ill and ND people as threats, liabilities, and inconveniences, while blaming it on intrinsic brain illnesses based on the ideas of typically incredibly biased and bigoted psychologists from several decades ago which are not founded in evidence (and said ideas persist mostly unchanged with the reasonings merely altered or justified with a shrug). The fact that after every mass shooting there is more posturing of "mental health awareness" and increasing MH services, when most mass shootings are committed by radicalized cis (and usually white) men tells you that a lot of this is security theatre. The MH system really just makes it more unsafe to seek medical help but it helps "neurotypical" people feel better, and it is the comfort of "NTs" that is most prioritized by this system. And of course, anyone who commits acts of extreme violence like mass shootings will likely be labeled mentally ill first (rather than radicalized, exc.) because of the circular logic that no one can be a Threat without being mentally ill. Do you see The Problem?

[quotesfrommyreading]

In the terrible winter of 1932–33, brigades of Communist Party activists went house to house in the Ukrainian countryside, looking for food. The brigades were from Moscow, Kyiv, and Kharkiv, as well as villages down the road. They dug up gardens, broke open walls, and used long rods to poke up chimneys, searching for hidden grain. They watched for smoke coming from chimneys, because that might mean a family had hidden flour and was baking bread. They led away farm animals and confiscated tomato seedlings. After they left, Ukrainian peasants, deprived of food, ate rats, frogs, and boiled grass. They gnawed on tree bark and leather. Many resorted to cannibalism to stay alive. Some 4 million died of starvation.

At the time, the activists felt no guilt. Soviet propaganda had repeatedly told them that supposedly wealthy peasants, whom they called kulaks, were saboteurs and enemies—rich, stubborn landowners who were preventing the Soviet proletariat from achieving the utopia that its leaders had promised. The kulaks should be swept away, crushed like parasites or flies. Their food should be given to the workers in the cities, who deserved it more than they did. Years later, the Ukrainian-born Soviet defector Viktor Kravchenko wrote about what it was like to be part of one of those brigades. “To spare yourself mental agony you veil unpleasant truths from view by half-closing your eyes—and your mind,” he explained. “You make panicky excuses and shrug off knowledge with words like exaggeration and hysteria.”

He also described how political jargon and euphemisms helped camouflage the reality of what they were doing. His team spoke of the “peasant front” and the “kulak menace,” “village socialism” and “class resistance,” to avoid giving humanity to the people whose food they were stealing. Lev Kopelev, another Soviet writer who as a young man had served in an activist brigade in the countryside (later he spent years in the Gulag), had very similar reflections. He too had found that clichés and ideological language helped him hide what he was doing, even from himself:

I persuaded myself, explained to myself. I mustn’t give in to debilitating pity. We were realizing historical necessity. We were performing our revolutionary duty. We were obtaining grain for the socialist fatherland. For the five-year plan.

There was no need to feel sympathy for the peasants. They did not deserve to exist. Their rural riches would soon be the property of all.

But the kulaks were not rich; they were starving. The countryside was not wealthy; it was a wasteland. This is how Kravchenko described it in his memoirs, written many years later:

Large quantities of implements and machinery, which had once been cared for like so many jewels by their private owners, now lay scattered under the open skies, dirty, rusting and out of repair. Emaciated cows and horses, crusted with manure, wandered through the yard. Chickens, geese and ducks were digging in flocks in the unthreshed grain.

That reality, a reality he had seen with his own eyes, was strong enough to remain in his memory. But at the time he experienced it, he was able to convince himself of the opposite. Vasily Grossman, another Soviet writer, gives these words to a character in his novel Everything Flows:

I’m no longer under a spell, I can see now that the kulaks were human beings. But why was my heart so frozen at the time? When such terrible things were being done, when such suffering was going on all around me? And the truth is that I truly didn’t think of them as human beings. “They’re not human beings, they’re kulak trash”—that’s what I heard again and again, that’s what everyone kept repeating.

  —  Ukraine and the Words That Lead to Mass Murder

[noknowshame]

I don't believe in the devil so you probably can't sell your soul to him but I do believe that if you get famous enough that people start treating you like a two-dimensional character instead of a real human being you run the risk of getting trapped on the other side of the fourth wall and once that happens the narrative can Get You. which is basically the same as selling your soul for fame but who knows

[thepopculturearchivist]

SIR!, August 1954

[astradyke]

Ok so if there was a dnp sex tape going around but u had to pay actual money to see it would u? Be honest

oh absolutely not, mate. i might make posts about them having sex with one another or whatever but i don't have the easiest time with things like that to put it vaguely. also like actual real money? i could do so much with that. i could like book another therapy appointment with that. probably not i don't really know how much sex tapes cost sorry.

[redkoi1]

Twin Flame

You terrorized my faith because I lacked the strength, when it's been Patience, not a wait

That played it out that type of way, and You're really not that worried? Well, I just wonder, still afraid?

Numbed to my core; another day My soul locked up with rust My spirit snuffed, I'm forced to pray

I woke up from a rest "It was a setup", disregarded in array If I really cannot love you, I'll just force myself to hate

[immaculatasknight]

Invasion of the brain snatchers

[news4dzhozhar]

THIS is ethnic cleansing. During Hanukkah, a coalition of settler groups funded by the state of Israel held a conference to discuss a “practical” plan to build the first settlements in Gaza, all while the Israeli government is actively waging a genocidal war on Palestinians.

@hareyzahav an Israeli real estate firm with a history of building illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank, unveiled a plan for the homes in Gaza.

Their advertisements say: “A house on the beach is not a dream! We have begun clearing rubble and fending off squatters.” Another ad calls Gaza the “Land of Israel. Fight. Liberate. Settle.” and includes a hotline to register for a place in the future settlement.

Just as the Israeli government was crystal clear in its plans to commit genocide, the Israeli government’s post-genocide colonization strategy is explicit and blatant—and a war crime.

We can stop this. Don’t look away. All eyes on Palestine.

[fiftysevenacademics]

April 12, 2024

Bennett Braun, a Chicago psychiatrist whose diagnoses of repressed memories involving horrific abuse by devil worshipers helped to fuel what became known as the “satanic panic” of the 1980s and ’90s, died on March 20 in Lauderhill, Fla., north of Miami. He was 83.

Jane Braun, one of his ex-wives, said the death, in a hospital, was from complications of a fall. Dr. Braun lived in Butte, Mont., but had been in Lauderhill on vacation.

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 said, were responsible for the splintering 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); became a frequently quoted expert in the news media; and helped to found what is now the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation, a professional organization of over 2,000 members today.

It was from that sizable platform that Dr. Braun publicized his most explosive findings: that in dozens of cases, his patients discovered memories of being 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 supposed revelations keyed into a growing national panic.

The 1980s saw a vertiginous rise in the number of people, both children and adults, who claimed to have been abused by devil worshipers. It began in 1980 with the book “Michelle Remembers,” by a Canadian woman who said she had recovered memories of ritual abuse, and spiked following allegations of abuse at day care centers in California and North Carolina.

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

Such stories were fodder for popular TV formats that reveled in the salacious, including talk shows like “Geraldo” and newsmagazines like “Dateline,” which broadcast segments that promoted such claims uncritically.

The psychiatric profession bore some responsibility for the growing panic, with respected researchers like Dr. Braun giving it a gloss of authority. He and others ran seminars and distributed research papers; they even gave the phenomenon a quasi-medical abbreviation, S.R.A., for 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 a woman from Iowa named Patricia Burgus. After interviewing her, Dr. Braun and a colleague, Roberta Sachs, claimed not only that she was the victim of satanic ritual abuse, but also that she herself was a “high priestess” of a cult that had raped, tortured and cannibalized thousands of children, including her two young sons.

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

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

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

The satanic panic began to wane in the early 1990s. A 1992 F.B.I. investigation found no evidence of coordinated cult activity in the United States, and a 1994 report by the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect surveyed over 12,000 accusations of satanic ritual abuse and found that not a single one held up under scrutiny.

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

Many people distanced themselves from their earlier enthusiasms; in 1995, Geraldo Rivera apologized for an episode of his show that covered the falsehood. However, even in 1998, the NBC series “Dateline” ran an episode claiming to show widespread satanic activity in Mississippi.

Mrs. Burgus sued Rush, Dr. Braun and her 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 began to add a few things up and realized there was no way I could come from a little town in Iowa, be eating 2,000 people a year, and nobody said anything about it,” Mrs. Burgus told The Chicago Tribune in 1997.

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

Bennett George Braun was born on Aug. 7, 1940, in Chicago, to Thelma (Gimbel) and Milton Braun. His father was a professor of orthodontics at Loyola University. He graduated from Tulane University with a bachelor’s degree in psychology in 1963 and earned a master’s 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 both ended in divorce. His third, to Joanne Arriola, ended in her 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 state license and opened a private practice.

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

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

[lexxieannie]

i love when history repeats itself like in 200 years no one will believe this