Cults: Faith, Healing and Coercion

Cults: Faith, Healing and Coercion
by Marc Galanter

Cults: Faith, Healing and Coercion
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Book Summary Information

Author: Marc Galanter
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1999-05-20
ISBN: 0195123700
Number of pages: 304
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Book Reviews of Cults: Faith, Healing and Coercion

Book Review: Charismatic Coercion Studies
Summary: 5 Stars

This is a fairly rigorous scientific study of the processes composing cults and charismatic groups. The author provides many examples and case studies, then develops a general theory into a process model. In engineering, we call this a control system. A system has various inputs and outputs and setpoints, or references. The setpoints are the desired results (outputs). Effective systems have a feedback mechanism assuring that the group produces the correct results. This is called monitoring. The leader of the group monitors the thoughts and the actions of the members almost fanatically and foresees contradictory evidence from the outside world and immediately attempts to rationalize it and reinterpret it in the mindset of the group. The group induces extreme stress, then provides relief of that same stress by conformance to the group's doctrines or ideas.

So great can be the stress induced on suspecting people, that sometimes the sanity of the person is threatened. There is a conflict between what the person's needs are and what the group's needs are. The person is expected to meet the needs of the group. The group provides stress relief after the member conforms. Of course, this constant stress inducement and relief is the technique used by the leaders to assure themselves that the people are in line both in mind and in action. Someone who sacrifices so much for the group is more likely to be a true believer. It also gives an idea of those most likely to join such groups: those in the midst of great personal problems and distress; in response to the recruit's current psychological distress where the world seems so messy and hard to understand, the group gives the person a false sense of certainty in their doctrines. Of course, I give here only a rough sketch.

The techniques identified are eye-opening and scary. It appears that not too many people are immune to some sorts of mind coercion. I suppose that knowledge is power and the more one knows about cults and charismatic groups and their repressive psychological terror tactics, the less the subject will be suceptible to recruitment. This study explains who some seemingly rational people can fall for such obviously deviant groups.

Summary of Cults: Faith, Healing and Coercion

From the mass weddings of Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church to the ritual suicides at Heaven's Gate, charismatic cults and their devotees have become facts of American life. Using material gleaned from twenty-five years of direct encounters with cults and their detractors, as well as extensive research, Marc Galanter offers the most extensive psychological analysis of these organizations available. Cults explores not only how members feel and think at all stages of their involvement, but also how larger social and psychological forces reinforce individual commitment within the cults.
For this revised and newly-illustrated second edition, Galanter has added three new chapters on cult development in the 1990s, spiritual recovery movements, and alternative medicine.

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