You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
One of the questions I am most frequently asked when I speak to groups of mental health professionals about my deep involvement, for more than a decade, in a religious community I ultimately came to identify as a cult, is “what kind of person joins a cult? What is the underlying psychopathology of the person who joins these groups?”
There are so many things wrong with those questions, it is hard to know where to begin: but, for starters, I am one of “those people” who was once in a cult, which seems to be getting overlooked by the questioner. So far I have resisted the temptation to reply, “you know I can hear you, right?” Interestingly, after the workshops I give related to the subject of my book, Traumatic Narcissism: Relational Systems of Subjugation (Shaw, 2014), there are typically five to ten people who line up to speak with me briefly when I've finished. Almost every one of these people, mental health professionals all, want to tell me privately about the cult they were in, or think they might be in. And the seminars I'm referring to are actually not about cults, but about the subjugating relational system of the traumatising narcissist. Clearly, the phenomenon of cultic abuse, from which the mental health profession is not immune, is far more widespread than the mental health community has been willing to acknowledge.
In her lucid, rigorous, immensely readable, and illuminating study of cults and totalitarian systems, the book that is the subject of this review, Alexandra Stein draws from her own experience as a young woman in a political cult, and from her later doctoral studies in social psychology. She focuses on understanding ideological extremism and other dangerous social relationships through the lens of attachment theory. Her ideas go a long way to making sense of what seems, to those unfamiliar with these phenomena, so deeply senseless.
The traumatic damage done to individuals in cultic groups is not well studied in the mental health field. When I put