Regular Episode
#085 – ALIENABLE RITES
July 16, 2014

#085 – ALIENABLE RITES

🎙️ Blake Smith welcomes psychologist and parapsychology researcher Dr. Chris French to discuss the psychology of demonic possession and exorcism. Dr. French is a professor at Goldsmiths, University of London, a longtime editor of the UK magazine The Skeptic, and a regular contributor to The Guardian. The episode pairs academic analysis with a sobering reminder of the real-world harm exorcism can cause — from child deaths in Malaysia and Maryland to ongoing abuse cases in the UK.



🧠 What Actually Causes “Possession”?

Dr. French argues against any one-size-fits-all explanation. At one end of the spectrum sit genuine neuropathological causes — conditions whose symptoms, in an earlier era, would have looked supernatural to any outside observer:

– Epilepsy — the canonical example. Notably, Hippocrates explicitly rejected the demonic interpretation as far back as 400 BCE, diagnosing it as a brain disorder.
– Tourette’s syndrome — involuntary vocal outbursts (including, in roughly 10% of cases, coprolalia) would have read unmistakably as diabolical to a medieval witness.
– Dissociative identity disorder — apparently distinct personas, altered voice, and changed mannerisms map neatly onto traditional possession imagery.

For the majority of cases, however, Dr. French favors a socio-cognitive explanation borrowed from hypnosis research: possession is a learned role, shaped by cultural expectations, performed (consciously or not) in front of an audience that also knows its part in the script.



🎭 Possession as Performance: The Socio-Cognitive Model

The socio-cognitive framework, originally developed to explain hypnotic behavior, holds that subjects are not in a special altered state — they are complying, imagining, and role-playing in ways that can feel entirely genuine to the participant. Applied to possession, the model predicts exactly what anthropologists observe: the form possession takes mirrors the expectations of the host culture almost perfectly.

Dr. French illustrates this with shamanic traditions where a single practitioner cycles through multiple spirit-possessions in sequence, each announced to the crowd with colored scarves and greeted with culturally appropriate reactions — fear for a warrior spirit, laughter for a ribald one. The behavior is not spontaneous; it is rehearsed through observation and imitation.

Glossolalia (speaking in tongues) follows the same pattern. Brain-imaging studies show reduced frontal-lobe activity and increased parietal activity during the behavior — but the “language” produced has no linguistic structure whatsoever. Its dramatic intensity (convulsions and sweating vs. quiet murmuring) tracks the specific community’s expectations, not any consistent supernatural mechanism.



⛪ Exorcism as Propaganda — and as Therapy

Historically, exorcism served nakedly political functions. During the Catholic–Protestant conflicts of the Reformation era, both sides used allegedly possessed individuals as living proof of their own faith’s superiority: a demon that cowered before your sacraments but shrugged off the other side’s prayers was obviously good PR. The exorcist and the possessed person were, to a meaningful degree, jointly working from an agreed script.

Dr. French notes that Pope Francis‘s 2014 formal recognition of the International Association of Exorcists — more than 200 Catholic priests — amounts to a papal endorsement of the underlying worldview at a time when, according to surveys, over half of American adults already believe possession is real. The worry is not only official exorcisms but the legitimizing effect on informal, unsupervised ones.

On the question of efficacy: because possession in the socio-cognitive model is psychological rather than neuropathological, exorcism rituals can sometimes “work” — all parties know the expected script, the ritual plays out, and the subject has a culturally sanctioned framework for behavioral change. The mechanism is purely psychological (closer to placebo or narrative reframing than spiritual intervention), but the behavioral outcome can be real, if temporary.



😴 Sleep Paralysis, Witchcraft, and the Incubus

Blake shares his own 1990s experiences of sleep paralysis — a felt presence, something pressing down on him — which he initially attributed to a haunting before learning the neuroscience years later. Dr. French confirms that first-hand accounts from historical witchcraft accusations frequently read as textbook sleep paralysis descriptions.

The same core experience — paralysis, chest pressure, a malevolent intruder — has been culturally translated into the medieval incubus and succubus, the Cambodian ap (a daylight-passing human whose head detaches at night, intestines dangling, to feed on blood), and the modern alien abduction narrative — particularly in its sexual and paralysis components. The imagery shifts; the underlying neurology does not.



🧬 Dualism, the Hard Problem, and Why Possession Makes Intuitive Sense

Dr. French traces the philosophical root of possession belief to mind-body dualism — the intuitive sense that the mind is something separate from physical matter. If the mind (or soul) can leave the body at death, or during near-death and out-of-body experiences, then logically something else could enter. Dr. French is candid that the hard problem of consciousness remains genuinely unsolved, while still maintaining that the weight of evidence points toward consciousness as a product of brain activity — a conclusion that, as Blake dryly observes, does ruin a perfectly good class of body-swapping fiction.

The conversation closes with a note on confirmation bias as the most universal cognitive pitfall — one that affects skeptics and believers alike — and the value of scientific methodology precisely because it provides external checks that individual introspection cannot.



📚 Further Reading

– Dr. French’s Guardian column on the psychology of demonic possession
– “The child abuse that dare not speak its name” — The Guardian on child exorcism deaths in the UK
– What’s the Harm? — documented cases of harm from exorcism



🔗 Related Links

– Dr. Chris French — Wikipedia
– International Association of Exorcists
– Glossolalia (Speaking in Tongues)
– Sleep Paralysis
– Incubus and Succubus
– Ap / Krasue (Southeast Asian floating-head vampire)
– Merseyside Skeptics Society

Note: ads inserted into the distributed audio alter the timestamps in unpredictable ways, so timing references in these notes are approximate.

WHAT CAUSES A PERSON TO BE POSSESSED? Are there demons? Is it mental illness? Is it abnormal neurology? Does exorcism work? in this episode of MonsterTalk, paranormal researcher psychologist Dr. Chris French joins us to discuss the psychology of demonic possession and exorcisms.

More about Chris French

Further Reading

Music

  • Monstertalk Theme: Monster by Peach Stealing Monkeys
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