The God Effect: How Suggestion and Ritual Shape Religion and Medicine through Placebo Responses

Book review by Lloyd Hawkeye Robertson

The God Effect: How Suggestion and Ritual Shape Religion and Medicine through Placebo Responses by Colin Brewer and published by Imprint Academic.

Lloyd is President of The New Enlightenment Project: A Canadian Humanist Initiative.

It was a pleasure to read Colin Brewer’s new book The God Effect on the invitation of his publisher Imprint Academic. Dr Brewer, who practised psychiatry for more than four decades, has a warm and personable writing style combined with a dry British sense of humour that makes his work a pleasure to read. He evidently pines for the days when medical doctors could prescribe placebos and he relates, from his own varied experience, many examples of where they worked to provide patients with the scaffolding they needed to endure and recover. In modern ethical practice, doctors are now expected to tell the patient that the prescription is inert, which often defeats the purpose.

Practitioners of unproven therapies such as homeopaths and acupuncturists face no such ethical restriction in drawing on the power of ritual and expectancy to help people cope with illness. Nor do priests and shamans in religious practice. In any event, Dr Brewer notes that when delivered in a medical setting with doctors exuding professional confidence, proven therapies are aided by an additional “non-specific (placebo) effect”.

There are limits to the power of the placebo, however. He notes that at Lourdes, France, there are numerous crutches that were left by the cured, but not a single prosthetic limb or glass eyeball.

In a chapter titled “The Empty Cassock” Dr Brewer suggests that while a scientific approach leads to cumulative change, the rituals of priests and non-scientific medical practitioners depend on ritualistic behaviours. For example, the diluted solutions of homeopaths must be struck against a bible or leather cushion exactly 100 times to be optimally effective. He notes further that “provided that he or she looks like a priest, talks like a priest, acts like a priest, neither parishioners nor other priests will be able to detect a priest who lacks what in theory ought to be a crucially important qualification for the job: the possession of a specific religious faith”. He illustrates his point by referencing the 18th century priest Jean Meslier, who left copies of his manuscript denouncing supernatural beliefs by his death bed. Yet, the baptisms, funerals and confessions that he performed while alive were held to be authentic by the Church. Further, there was no evidence that Meslier’s parish suffered with respect to health or economy from his non-belief in comparison with other parishes.

In a chapter promisingly entitled “Psychoanalysis Explains Everything” Brewer explains how Sigmund Freud acted as the holder of a revealed truth. It is well known that while Freud voiced support for science, he did not engage in population sampling or controlled experiments and he did not countenance a null hypothesis in any form. Rather than dwelling on his lack of scientific method, Brewer details how Freud systematically destroyed letters that might challenge his narrative, but this degenerates into a somewhat gossipy account of Freud’s cocaine use with a colleague. It would have been more central to Brewer’s argument, I think, had he focused more on how Freud had dissenters removed from the psychoanalytic circle and how steps were to taken to ensure that the Freudian view became synonymous with psychology, particularly in the United States. Had Brewer mentioned the similar cult-like following cultivated by Carl Jung, he could have drawn a parallel in early twentieth-century psychology with the religious conflicts that divided Europe centuries earlier.

Brewer’s chapter “The Madness of the Crowds” opens with a valuable critique of Freud’s shifting explanations for hysteria, but it leaves the reader wanting more on modern manifestations. His lengthy critique of Freud’s reversal of his initial position that women with this condition had repressed memories of sexual abuse with his subsequent position that children have an Oedipal complex (opposite sex attraction) that can lead to similar symptoms closely parallels that of feminist Florence Rush’s 1971 argument. Having convinced the reader that he is not a misogynist, Brewer was then in a good position to critique possible contemporary examples of mass hysteria, but we were left wanting. For example, did the Satanic cult fears that swept North America in the 1990s fuelled by the “repressed memories” resulting in the imprisonment of men and women, often day care workers, without corroborating evidence meet the threshold of “mass hysteria”? Did the frenzied cancelling and persecution of men found “not guilty” by the courts following the #MeToo movement also qualify for that label? What about the surge in adolescents (mostly girls and young women) developing sudden Tourette-like tics and vocalisations during the SARS pandemic following interaction with social media, particularly TikTok. Such episodes may illustrate how suggestion, ritualised social pressure, and expectancy (placebo-like mechanisms) can produce real symptoms or behaviours without underlying pathology.

Dr Brewer’s central thesis, that the placebo effect has long been used to justify and propagate religion, aligns closely with my earlier work on how organised religion developed to constrain the evolved self’s sense of volition, uniqueness and continuity. These ritual “placebos” gave our ancestors the hope, certainty and resilience needed to face an unforgiving world, but only in exchange for submission to the constraints of religious authority. For this insight, and for his broader exploration of suggestion and ritual, Brewer’s book makes a valuable contribution to both medical and humanist understanding.

Further reading

Lloyd Hawkeye Robertson is the author of The Evolved Self: Mapping an Understanding of Who We Are (2024)