But if you decide you have a genuine case of possession, then it's kind of full-scale war. An exorcism is a way of doing massive battle against one's demons, or if you wanted to say, one's mental illness.

This is one of the sort of dangers of it, because it's potentially like a kind of gang rape, much like in the old days with cults, there was de-programming. An exorcism is much like de-programming.

What you just said about mental illness-were you equating "demons" with mental illness?



I would include possession among mental illnesses. I think...

And yet it can't just be dealt with by medication or psychological therapy. You feel at times it needs this spiritual...?

It definitely does. But it is a real condition and one of the things that I would argue, as a psychiatrist, is that it ought to be recognized as a psychiatric diagnosis.

So you think it should be in the DSM.

I think it should be in the DSM-IV and have equal status with multiple personality disorder, which people have come properly to be very skeptical of.

An exorcism [is] sort of comparable to major brain surgery where you might have a team of seven in the operating room. You use not just one kind of technique but anything that you possibly can to help your patients. There's a mixture of techniques ranging from prayer and orders to the demonic and talking to the demonic to try to figure what the hell is going on if you can. And it was notably successful in the case of Jersey, the first case. Unless we had spoken with the quote "demons" unquote, we would not have known that each demon represented a kind of false idea.

Why do you put demons in quotes?

I put "demons" in quotes because this is really a frontier in psychiatry. As a scientist, I try to be very careful as to what is theory and what is fact. I cannot swear to you in a court of law that these initial demons were demons in their own right, as opposed to Satan or the devil.

So you're talking about the hierarchy of demons?

Right.

So you're saying it definitely is one of these, but you put demons in quotes because you're not sure which one it is?

I'm not sure they were so much demons in their own right as they may have been reflections of the big guy, Satan. Both cases described in the book--and this is very rare--are cases of Satanic possession, not just possession by ordinary little demons.

Meaning the kind of demons you refer to when you mention the charismatic hierarchy like a demon of lust or a demon of overeating? You're talking about the `big guy.'

Or even other real demons, as in the second case. Judas seems often to be a real demon. In the first draft of the book, I included things other than those two cases of full-scale possession. I had a vignette [about] a friend in medical school who had also become a psychiatrist.

He got in touch with me and asked if I'd come to dinner. He had become an expert in multiple personality disorder and he proceeded to regale me with this case that he was fascinated with.