A cult is a group or movement that, to a significant degree,

(a) Exhibits great or excessive devotion or dedication to some person, idea, or thing,

(b) Uses a thought-reform program to persuade, control, and socialize members (i.e., to integrate them into the group’s unique pattern of relationships, beliefs, values, and practices),

(c) Systematically induces states of psychological dependency in members,

(d) Exploits members to advance the leadership’s goals, and

(e) Causes psychological harm to members, their families, and the community.
Introduction to My Case Study—Jenny

Jenny is in her 40s. She came from a relatively prosperous family, was intelligent, did well at school and as a young woman enjoyed both studying and having fun. She had had a few boyfriends and had slept with one, but since then felt she wanted to wait until she was in a long-term, stable relationship before she slept with anyone again. In her 20s she became a teacher, and by the age of 25 she became disillusioned with the system and started to look for more meaning in her life.

She had attended her local church as a child but was disenchanted by the sameness of it all. She heard about a new Christian community that had started up a few miles away; and although she heard it was a bit wacky and knew little about it, she was interested in the group’s take on environmental issues and felt there would be no harm in going along and seeing what happened in the community. She was struck by members’ passion, their genuineness, their caring, and their apparent desire to see her join. This touched her deeply because she had never come across such people before, and they were certainly different from those in her local church.

She very quickly became involved with the community and found that they had a leader who was attractive, charismatic, and seemed to think she was rather special. Because Jenny had been struggling with her self-image and with believing she could be attractive to anyone (she had not found a stable, ongoing relationship, and she put this down to some lack in herself), she was excited and enthralled by him.

Jenny visited increasingly often, not seeing anything to put her off. She decided to leave her flat and her job, and to give her life full time to the community. Her friends and family questioned her sense in becoming more involved. However, the community members were teaching her the Bible verses: “Greater love has no-one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command” (John 15:13), and “The man replied, ‘Lord, first let me go and bury my father.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Let the dead bury their own dead, but you go and proclaim the kingdom of God’” (Luke 9: 60). She was told that this meant she should leave her family and old friends and make new friends. She was less and less interested in hearing what her family had to say. Her new friends were pushing her to “lay down her life,” to surrender herself for the work of the community (they said she was laying down her life for Christ).

Jenny was thrilled, and excited, at being accepted into this special group of people—it felt like a new beginning. They suggested she change her name to Magdalene to show her commitment to God and the community. She felt honoured to do this and felt more connected to them than ever.

One day she was asked by a fellow member to do the evening meal. She said she could not because she was busy doing something else. Her fellow’s whole demeanour changed, becoming cold and hard; and she said in a chilling voice that Magdalene had no right to question such a request, that she should stop what she was doing and go this minute to the kitchen and do as she was told. Jenny/Magdalene was shocked by this sudden change. She put it down to this woman being moody and went to the kitchen. She argued to herself that she had committed her life to the community, so she should be helping out. She felt angry with herself and ashamed for questioning in the first place. She soon learned that, if she complied, she would feel accepted and a part of things, and, if she did not, she would receive similar rebukes and, often, silences.

Sometime later the leader told her to make his breakfast. She let him know by a small huff that she did not want to. He insisted, and so she complied. The community met for their worship meeting later, and Jenny/Magdalene started to share how she felt so full of life and joy at the beautiful day. She was received with a chillingly cold atmosphere, was told God was angry with her for her “bad attitude,” and that they wanted to talk to her afterward. She sensed their rage and was filled with dread. Later, they told her God would reject her (she would go to Hell) if she did not change her attitude and become more surrendered to God and the community. They explained that, in order for her to “stay right with God,” they would need to punish her by beating her 40 times with a cane. Jenny/Magdalene was deeply shocked by this and was left shaking and frightened. Following the rebukes and beating, Jenny became Magdalene in actuality—she became quiet, serious, and religious, complying fully with the beliefs and practices of her new group of people, her new “family.” She dressed differently, wore her hair differently: She looked and behaved like a different person.

Not long after, she was told that God wanted new members to join the community. And although at one time Jenny would have questioned this whole “going out and dragging people in” thing, and would have absolutely refused, on some level, Magdalene remembered their anger and her shock at being rebuked and beaten, which had happened unpredictably many more times, and so did as she was told. She was unresponsive when she was told that any tactics at all would be okay to bring people in—she was assigned to bring men into the group. She understood the implications, and Jenny was buried deep within. Magdalene identified with her new community of people, truly believing that sleeping with men in order to bring them in and obeying without question were the work of God.

Following investigation by local church leaders, the community was disbanded. Unfortunately, the leaders did not know the full extent of the abuse in the community or understand the impact the experience had had on Jenny/Magdalene. She therefore continued her church involvement, not realising how traumatised and abused she had been, or how compliant she still was. Over time, she learned to question more, although doing this was challenging for her because she was still fearful of punishment. Nevertheless, Jenny began to re-emerge; and at that point, she began to experience real depression and post-traumatic stress. She felt trapped: She HAD to be part of a church; otherwise, God would kill her (so she had been told). But she could not stay part of a church and survive psychologically. Looking back at this time in her life, she saw that Jenny, her “old self” or pre-cult personality, was re-emerging over a long period of time; and as this happened, life was much more painful than when she was complying with her cult pseudo-personality, Magdalene. As she became more aware, she did not know which side she should be on. Others had noticed this split, and she confused those who thought she was one sort of person and then discovered she actually thought quite differently. For example, other ex-members of the community thought she was serious and judgmental, whereas she was actually quite playful and compassionate.

Magdalene, was “born” so I could become the person they expected me to be, hating my parents, rejecting all outside the community, and doing things I would never have done before—I was a stranger to myself. Magdalene is still present in me, and her voice is different from mine. I fight her a lot of the time because they told us our parents deserved to die. I am exhausted and mixed up.

Let us call “self” the system of contacts at any moment. As such, the self is flexibly various, for it varies with the dominant organic needs and the pressing environmental stimuli; it is the system of responses; it diminishes in sleep when there is less need to respond. The self is the contact-boundary at work… (p. 235)

As part of the intense influence and change process in many cults, people take on a new social identity, which may or may not be obvious to an outsider. When groups refer to this new identity, they speak of members who are transformed, reborn, enlightened, empowered, re-birthed, or cleared [my addition: saved, surrendered]. The group-approved behavior is reinforced and reinterpreted as demonstrating the emergence of “the new person.” Members are expected to display this new social identity. (2003, p.77–78)

Contemporary cults, which operate in open society ... cannot forcibly restrain prospects and run them through a debilitating regimen. Instead they must fool them. They must persuade prospects that the group is beneficial in some way that appeals to the targeted individual.

Jenny brought her natural vulnerabilities—for example, her sense of not being attractive enough, and her spiritual hunger—but her personality was destabilised by the shock of the sudden and prolonged change in behaviour when the members of the community ended up shouting at, beating, and punishing her. She had to adjust to this in order to remain a part of the community, and over time her personality changed almost beyond recognition, developing as a cult pseudo-personality, created in the interaction between Jenny, the new recruit, and the cult environment.

Lifton’s eight components of thought reform (Lifton, 1989) are helpful in explaining why the processes that occur in cult members ensure this change in behaviour. For example, the “demand for purity” mixed with the “cult of confession” ensures that cult members believe their former self, which may be understood as their pre-cult personality, is not good enough, whilst the cult of confession maintains the cult personality as the members confess their “sins” or independent thought, ensuring that they continue to be compliant and submissive. 

The experience of ex-cult members endorses this view (quotations with permission):

The cult personality is superficial. What I mean is that it does go deep because it has been there a long time (23 years) and it has affected my core, my deep personality. But it is not me; it overlays me. I was forced to be who they wanted me to be.

This process … of transformation involves a reorganization of the person’s inner identity or sense of self. Typically it occurs through a mixture of emotional appeals, rituals, instruction, self-examination, confession, and rejection, all in a context that deftly combines stress and harmony. Most often guilt, shame, and anxiety are integral to this process. Responding to the demands can be exhausting and stressful, for it requires repeated acts of self-renunciation; at the same time, the person experiences relief at having “found the answer,” which is associated with a kind of personal freedom. (p. 16)

Doubling

Lifton (2000), in his research into the mentality of the Nazi doctors working in concentration camps, interviewed some of the surviving Nazi doctors who had had the power of life and death over prisoners and also continued to live a “normal” life outside of the camps. He suggests that doubling is the psychological vehicle used to describe this phenomenon, which explains how they could live with themselves and commit such atrocities.

Lifton notes that, unlike in dissociation and Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) (in which parts split off from each other— see below), in doubling there is both autonomy and connection between the Auschwitz (concentration camp) self and the prior self. He states that there is a dialogue between the two selves. The Nazi doctor needed his Auschwitz self to function psychologically in an environment so antithetical to his previous ethical standards, and he needed his prior self in order to continue to see himself as a humane physician, husband, and father. The Auschwitz self, therefore, had to be both autonomous and connected to the Prior self that gave rise to it. I visualise the split in doubling as a vertical split with a connection:

I do not think the cult-pseudo personality is doubling, nor is it what we are seeing with Jenny/Magdalene. Although it is commonly held that the Nazis were a cult, I believe this dialogue between the Auschwitz self and the prior self allowed the prior self to be more or less untouched and allowed the Nazi doctor to continue normally. The cult-pseudo personality is different because if the cult member internally challenges the pseudo-personality, or leaves the cult, the control begins to break down, and the pre-cult personality may begin to break through the layer of cult pseudo-personality (see my thoughts later in “The Machine” subsection about the tarmac or asphalt). The cult member will feel okay so long as he or she is compliant and there is no dialogue between, for example, Jenny and Magdalene. But, to reiterate, once a dialogue is set up between the two parts (Jenny and Magdalene), then guilt and confusion might well ensue, even to the point of mental illness because the cult control will be challenged internally. Singer (2003) notes that it is the cult environment itself that produces and keeps the cult-pseudo personality in place. 

False Self

The “false self” is a term coined by Donald Winnicott (1965) and refers to that structure formed in response to frustration of the “real self.” The false self presents itself to the world in order to get needs met but withholds its natural spontaneous self (Johnson, 1985).

I believe Magdalene is more than a false self. I suggest that Jenny adapted to the onslaught of the cult machine that enforced Magdalene, the pseudo-personality, from the outside, and that she took it in. Magdalene is not a structure formed within her to present to a world that was not meeting her natural spontaneous self, so it is more than a false self in this sense.

I visualise the false self as a vertical split.

Adaptation 

Adaptation is, in social psychology and sociology, “a shift in sociological or cultural disposition. Thus, one is said to ‘adapt’ to a new environment” (Reber & Reber, 2001, p. 11).

It could be said that joining a cult is simply an adaptation: Individuals are choosing to be the way the cult wants them to be, and they want to change. This suggests that the individual has a choice, and free will. Even though there probably is an adaptation occurring in the individual when he or she first joins the group, there is, in many cases, a more fundamental, enforced change (my conceptualisation of the machine in the next section), which I suggest is therefore not just adaptation. The pseudo-personality is much more than adaptation. An adapting personality is not split into a Jenny and a Magdalene, for example; it maintains inner coherence while exhibiting external change. The pseudopersonality of cult joiners, on the other hand, is changed centrally, rather than peripherally (Ofshe & Singer, 1986), as in adaptation.

Used generally to characterize the process (or its result) whereby a coordinated set of activities, thoughts, attitudes, or emotions becomes separated from the rest of the person’s personality and functions independently. Mild forms are seen in compartmentalization ... more extreme forms are observed in the dissociative disorders. (Reber & Reber, 2001)

Dissociation therefore occurs on a continuum, and we all dissociate to some degree (West & Martin, 1994). At one end of the continuum, we may experience the sensation, for example, of driving a familiar route and not recalling the journey. At the other end is complete memory loss, and there is much in between. At the more serious end of the continuum, Van der Hart et al. (2006) propose the following conceptualisation of dissociative disorders. The simplest division of the personality in traumatised individuals is primary structural dissociation, wherein there is a single split—one apparently normal part (ANP) and one emotional part (EP) of the personality [see diagram 4 following], also sometimes referred to as alter personalities (Putnam, 1989). Secondary structural dissociation, as a result of prolonged and repeated traumatisation, has a wide range of complexity and involves one ANP and a number of EPs. Tertiary structural dissociation is characteristic of Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), previously known as Multiple-Personality Disorder (MPD), in which there are multiple ANP and EP parts of the personality.

Jenny/Magdalene’s experience supports Langone’s assertion that many members end up “proclaim[ing] great happiness yet hide great suffering.” He states that this is a “state of dissociation in which members are ‘split’ but not ‘multiple.’” (1993, p. 9). They do not exhibit an alter, as in structural dissociation.

Hassan (2000) says, “Cult mind control dissociates a person from his authentic identity, and makes his new cult identity dependent on the group. From a mental-health perspective, cult mind control splits elements of an individual’s psyche into another distinct personality” (p. 55).

This raises the question: Is the cult-pseudo personality a dissociative phenomenon or even DID? I agree with Langone that it is not DID (“multiple personality”), and this view is backed by West & Martin (1993, pp. 273-4). They note the following differences between DID and the pseudo-personality: DID is more likely to be related to early childhood trauma (also Van der Hart et al., 2006); DID patients may have more than one “alter” or part; and DID is notoriously hard to treat.

West and Martin (1994, p. 274) also assert that the aims of therapy differ between DID and pseudo-personality, further highlighting the differences. With DID, “reconciliation and integration of alters” is the aim, while with pseudo-personality, the aim is “restoration of the original identity.” They note that residual PTSD will usually need to be treated.

It is generally held that the split in primary, secondary, and tertiary structural dissociation is a vertical split:

Given the terrible childhood abuse and trauma suffered by those born and raised in a cult (Jones, Jones and Buhring, 2007), it is possible that DID and dissociative disorders resulting from their cult upbringing may be present in this population. Because many members recruited as adults suffer deep trauma within cults, there might also be dissociation that forms as a result of the cult trauma. This trauma can include beatings; sexual abuse; abusive and harsh encounter groups, and shouting and loud commands to change, to hate one’s parents, and to hate one’s “old self” or “worldly self.” There might also be structural dissociation present in individuals before they joined the cult. The cult will nevertheless cause wounds in their life.

I envisage this split both horizontally and vertically:

I suggest that the individual cult member might dissociate to cope with the trauma, but I believe the formation of the cult pseudo-personality is a different process and is not a dissociated part, alter, or ANP/EP. 

The Machine

“I feel as if my real self was like a little dot, like a seed that was buried in deep soil, and then a layer of tarmac (asphalt) laid over me” (ex-cult member quotation).

I suggest that the cult was, for Jenny/Magdalene, like a relentless machine, like a steam roller on hot tarmac with hooked spikes in it, pressing and pushing its ideology, beliefs, and culture on to her, the unsuspecting individual, hooking into Jenny using her vulnerability and parts of the pre-cult identity to establish itself (Hassan, 2000). She eventually became buried under the tarmac. Jenny/Magdalene was recruited and “love bombed” through deceitful recruitment techniques (Martin, 1993), and what she got was not what she expected.

This process reflects an exchange: The machine relentlessly overlays the individual as the individual welcomes the machine, not realising what she is getting into or what is behind what seems like love. Jenny/Magdalene thought she was “laying down her life” for God; others believe they will become enlightened, see the world become a better place through a worthy political cause, and so on. And they become buried under the tarmac. As Hassan (2000) notes, the cult anchors itself to parts of the cult members’ past experiences. For Jenny/Magdalene, the cult of confession ensures that the community knows more about Jenny than she realises and gives them ammunition to control and manipulate her by playing on her “confessed” personal vulnerabilities.

I envision the pseudo-personality overlaying the pre-cult personality like tarmac on a road, a horizontal split:

The tarmac “takes” to one degree or another. For some it sits comfortably, but for others it is uncomfortable from the start; and when the individual leaves the cult, it will begin to break up (Singer, 2003).

I suggest the pseudo-personality mimics dissociation—the machine relentlessly moves forward, overlaying the personality of the new cult members, causing them to adjust to this new world view—it is not them and it is them. I suggest the greater part of the process of forming the pseudo-personality is not doubling, false self, or simply adaptation, not dissociation nor DID, but introjection.

In Gestalt theory, introjection may be thought of as

...material—a way of acting, feeling, evaluating—which you have taken into your system of behavior but which you have not assimilated in such fashion as to make it a genuine part of your organism—your self. (Perls et al., 1951, p. 189)

Physical food properly digested and assimilated, becomes part of the organism; but food which “rests heavy on the stomach” is an introject [emphasis added]. You are aware of it and want to throw it up. If you do so you get it “out of the system.” Suppose, instead, you suppress your discomfort, nausea, and tendency to spew it forth. Then you “keep it down” and either succeed, finally, in painfully digesting it or else it poisons you.

eliminate introjects from your personality the problem is not to accept and integrate dissociated parts of yourself. Rather, it is to become aware of what is not truly yours, to acquire a selective and critical attitude toward what is offered you, and, above all, to develop the ability to “bite off” and “chew” experience so as to extract its healthy nourishment. [bold added]