DEMONIC FOES

A professor of clinical psychology at New York Medical College chronicles his decades of experience with people who believe they are demonically possessed.

In his foreword, Joseph English, past president of the American Psychiatric Association, writes that this book “may be unique in history: the serious treatment of a long-disputed topic by a superbly credentialed academic physician.” Gallagher was drawn into the world of demons by a priest who asked him to help rule out medical causes for a woman who said she was being beaten by invisible spirits. He’s been working in this field, mostly as an unpaid consultant to Catholic priests, ever since. Gallagher provides helpful context and background, including the history of belief in demons and the role of the Catholic Church in their exorcism, and he explains signs of the presence of demons: superhuman strength, speaking in foreign or archaic languages, abusive attacks, unexplained knowledge of the exorcist’s personal life. The author defines a continuum between demonic possession and oppression (possession is more serious) and describes the suffering of the possessed. He speculates on how victims came to be pursued by demons (several subjects indulged in satanic worship) and analyzes cases where a belief in demonic possession masked true mental illness. Skeptics be forewarned that Gallagher truly believes in demons. A Catholic, he calls them “cosmic” terrorists who despise humans and seek to “negate our loving personalities, destroy us spiritually…even cause our physical death.” The author doesn’t provide an explicit cosmology or theology for the origin of demons. In the name of confidentiality, he changes names and locations of his victims and the priests he worked with and doesn’t provide anchoring dates, making it difficult to further research his account. Nevertheless, this is a cogently written book on a fascinating subject. Believers will love it, unbelievers will relish an argument with its premises, and even the most skeptical will marvel at the mysteries of human behavior it investigates.

An unsettling, absorbing account of the phenomenon of demonic possession by a medical expert.