Views such as [a licensed psycologist and pastor James] Friesen’s [author of Uncovering the Mystery of MPD, linking multiple-personality disorder to the workings of satanic cults], which one might be tempted to dismiss as those of an extremist minority, find support in unlikely places. Growing interest in ritual abuse has produced alliances between feminists and the religious right, a notable example being Gloria Steinem’s financial backing for an investigation of alleged “molestation tunnels” under the McMartin Preschool in Manhattan Beach, California. (No such tunnels were found.) Law-enforcement officials have proved willing to act on allegations of ritual child abuse, perhaps because of the Manichaean nature of their occupational world. As of 1995 fifty-seven people, many doubtless innocent, were known to be serving long jail sentences for these crimes, and scores more have suffered unspeakable humiliation until declared innocent by skeptical juries. Amid the high drama of this moral panic, two themes stand out in high relief: the metaphor of self-fragmentation (and, by implication, its obverse, self-integration or holism), and the tendency of reflections on multiple personality to move in an eschatological direction, taking on the cadences of dystopian conspiracy.
– The New Alienists: Healing Shattered Selves at Century’s End, in Paranoia within Reason: A Casebook on Conspiracy as Explanation (1999), pp. 142-3