Posted by Postal Carrier on October 03, 2005 at 12:52:33
In Reply to: Traumatic Abuse in Cults: Part I posted by Postal Carrier on October 03, 2005 at 12:48:27:
Reposted with permission from
Cultic Studies Review Vol. 2, No. 2, 2003
Traumatic Abuse in Cults: A Psychoanalytic Perspective, by Daniel Shaw, C.S.W.
Psychoanalyst in Private Practice
New York City
Psychoanalytic Concepts Related to Cult Participation: Kohut and the Concept of the Selfobject.
Having made the case for the importance of considering the psychological history of exiting cult members in working to help them recover from their cult experience, I now discuss various psychoanalytic concepts I have found useful in my work with former cultists.
Christopher Lasch (1979), in describing the "culture of narcissism," used the example of the writer Paul Zweig, a Siddha Yoga (SYDA) devotee, to illustrate his ideas about "the void within" that individuals in Western society have been struggling with in the post-WWII era. Prior to his involvement in SYDA, Zweig (1976) spoke of his growing "conviction, amounting to a faith, that my life was organized around a core of blandness which shed anonymity upon everything I touched . . . [of] the emotional hibernation which lasted until I was almost thirty . . .[of persisting] suspicion of personal emptiness which all my talking and my anxious attempts at charm surround and decorate, but don't penetrate or even come close to . . .[When] the experience of inner emptiness, the frightening feeling that at some level of existence I'm nobody, that my identity has collapsed and no one's there" becomes overwhelming, Zweig encounters Swami Muktananda, or Baba (Father), the original founder of Siddha Yoga. From Baba, he learns to anesthetize his "mental busyness, . . ., obsessive thinking and . . . anxiety" (quoted in Lasch, pp. 21-25).
Cushman (1990) notes that "inner emptiness is expressed in many ways in our culture, such as low self-esteem (the absence of a sense of personal worth), values confusion (the absence of a sense of personal convictions), eating disorders (the compulsion to fill the emptiness with food, or to embody the emptiness by refusing food), drug abuse (the compulsion to fill the emptiness with chemically induced emotional experience of "receiving" something from the world). It may also take the form of an absence of personal meaning. This can manifest as a hunger for spiritual guidance, which sometimes takes the form of a wish to be filled up by the spirit of God, by religious "truth," or by the power and personality of a leader guru (p. 604).
The hunger for spiritual guidance, and relief from varying degrees of despair and fear, is often what impels people to explore religious and secular self-improvement groups. Yet the leaders of these groups typically do not attempt to help the seeker explore and make sense of the difficulties that have led him to seek spiritual consolation or self-improvement. Rather, the cult leader exploits the seeker’s emotional vulnerabilities, and seduces the seeker into a state of dependence. Promising the acquisition of success and power, salvation and redemption, or relief from frustration and inhibition, the leader persuades the followers that the leader’s self-proclaimed perfection can belong to the follower as well. All one must do is totally embrace the leader’s ideology. In cults, this always means securing the leader’s favor by enthusiastically agreeing to recruit others to the leader’s program.
While Zweig’s malaise, referred to above, may provide a recognizable snapshot of the zeitgeist of his pre-guru days (think Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate), Zweig is also implicitly referring to the untold story of his own unique psychological history. Yet Zweig strikingly omits a psychological analysis of his distress, apparently satisfied that the struggle to make sense of and deal with his despair is rendered unnecessary and irrelevant by the magical euphoria granted by contact with his guru.
I have found the work of Heinz Kohut, the founder of the school of self psychology, whose ideas about narcissism have been highly influential, to be particularly useful in thinking about the allure of cults (see also Kriegman & Solomon, 1985). Kohut coined the term selfobject to refer to providers, initially parents, of basic psychological functions required by infants in order for the sense of security, vitality, and connectedness to develop and consolidate. Dedicated and loving caregivers, using their capacities for empathic attunement, perform three crucial functions for the developing child’s sense of self: 1) by mirroring, taking delight in, the child’s efforts to connect and be recognized, the child comes to feel basic self-worth; 2) by providing a model of strength and effectiveness the child can idealize, the child internalizes a sense of security; and 3) by encouraging the sense of belonging and sameness, what Kohut called twinship, the child feels comfortable in and a part of the human community (not isolated and alienated). The successful collaboration of parent and child in negotiating these selfobject needs would lead to the child’s experience of a firm sense of self as a center of initiative and agency, with the confidence to develop ambitions and ideals, and to realize them. Good enough selfobject provision is the basis from which an individual learns to sustain and regulate adequate self-esteem (healthy narcissism) throughout all the vicissitudes of maturation. Selfobject provision (or more simply, parenting, when it is children that are being provided for) is by nature empathic and respectful, as distinguished from the controlling, dominating, scapegoating and/or exploitive behaviors characteristic of pathologically narcissistic provision.
Selfobject experience is vitalizing, and provides a sense of connectedness. Different cults offer different kinds of selfobject experience. One common denominator is the offer of unconditional love, especially in spiritual groups. Another is the offer of purpose and meaning. Both of these experiences are vitalizing and can help dispel the sense of disconnectedness. For those whose development is marked by chronic deprivation of selfobject experience, or for those even temporarily deprived, the offer of these kinds of experiences at the right moment of vulnerability can be irresistible. Whether or not selfobject provision has been adequate in development, humans are potentially vulnerable, either because of early deprivation, or later due to unforeseen life circumstances, to the experience of alienation and isolation. When such vulnerability is present, the glamorous, charismatic cult leader can come to represent for many a longed-for, impossibly perfect selfobject parent who banishes powerlessness and loneliness.
Another highly seductive idea advertised in meditation-based cults is that "it is not necessary to be logical, rational, or even reasonable. The ultimately dominant criterion of what is good is a totally subjective feeling state. The goal of life becomes a good feeling, a never-ending high" (Garvey, 1993). This is not as hedonistic as it sounds. The search for this kind of unending happiness is often fueled, consciously or unconsciously, by a sense on the part of the recruit of unending failure and defeat, in vocational and/or interpersonal realms of his life. Many, who in their development, have not experienced adequate selfobject provision, live with a powerful emotional hunger, like that which Zweig describes, which the cult leader appears ideally suited to satisfy. Loyal members of a cult believe that their leader has magically transformed their lives and relieved their longing and suffering. On that basis, they will staunchly defend their leader even when his or her crimes are exposed. The "good feeling" of their initial conversion experience might consist of feeling "redeemed," "coming home at last," having been "lost, but now found," or being "saved." These intensely emotional experiences are attributed directly to the power and will of the leader. In the SYDA group, members were repeatedly instructed to refer all questions and doubts to their original conversion experience, and to "trust their own experience"—meaning to ignore, discard and feel ashamed about doubts and questions. In this way, objectivity—e.g., any negative information about the leader—is devalued. The guru, along with one's own subjective feeling state, is idealized. The bunker mentality response to any critical information about the group and its leaders then becomes: "That isn't my experience."
There are strong reasons for this need to banish objectivity. If one believes that the guru's power has healed one's pain and satisfied one’s hunger, then for some, keeping the pain from returning means preserving the guru, at any cost. The pain of life that has been magically erased by the guru may indeed return if one rejects the guru. It may, and often does, return, along with many other warded off emotions, and these will need to be experienced, felt, understood, worked through, and made meaningful, if real transformation, not magic, is to occur. This is part of the complex process of human self-development that the cult solution can only pretend to address. For many who successfully exit cults, the process of transformation and expanded self-awareness they sought when they joined the cult only really begins once they have left the cult.
The history of SYDA provides a good example of how far devotees will go to defend the person they perceive as their savior. In the early 80s, the Siddha Yoga community was shocked to learn that Muktananda, a monk in his late 60s and supposedly a lifelong celibate, had been secretly having sexual relations with western female devotees for at least ten years. While many women thought of themselves as willing participants, others felt coerced and traumatized by the experience. Often his victims were female children in their early teens. Many who were SYDA devotees at the time heard these allegations and ignored them, in spite of wide acknowledgment among those closest to Muktananda that they were true. When several devotees spoke out publicly about Muktananda's sexual abuses, two loyal devotees were dispatched by Muktananda to threaten these whistle-blowers with disfigurement and castration (Rodarmor, 1983). Nevertheless, to this day, Muktananda is worshiped by SYDA devotees as a deity.
Fairbairn and the Moral Defense
I link this determination to protect the cult leader at all cost to one of the most central formulations in the work of Fairbairn, the influential British Middle School psychoanalyst. Fairbairn (1943) spoke of a “moral defense,” a way that developing children who are being neglected or abused by (or receiving inadequate selfobject provision from) their caregivers will subconsciously agree to “bear the burden of the badness.” By excusing and protecting their abusers and blaming themselves for the neglect/abuse they are exposed to, these children choose, speaking metaphorically, to live in a world ruled by a benevolent God (“good” parents), where there is at least hope for redemption, rather than to confront the helplessness and hopeless despair of living in a world ruled by the Devil (“bad” parents). The child feels, “if it is me that is bad, there is hope. Maybe I can try to be good. But if it is my parents that are bad, there is nothing I can do -- I am doomed.” Cult followers are in a similar position once they have become dependent on their leader. In cults, the leader depends on her ability to persuade her followers that she is always right. If anything is wrong, the follower is always to blame, never the leader, and the leader never lets the follower forget that those are the rules. By blinding themselves to the corruption and abuse of their leader, and taking on a sense of sinfulness, guilt and unworthiness in themselves, followers sustain their tie to the leader, and along with that tie, their hopes for redemption and salvation. Cult members are constantly obsessed with how they are perceived by the leader, whether they are good or bad, up or down. While obsessively striving for the leader’s approval, they must also learn to accept the leader’s need to humiliate others, and to be ready at any time to assume the guilt and shame the leader is constantly seeking to project on to others.
Fromm and the Magic Helper and Miller and the Prisoners of Childhood
As the world watched the rise of the Nazi Party in the 1930's and 40's, a literature developed during and after the Holocaust which attempted to come to grips with, among other things, how virtually an entire nation of people, the Germans, could be persuaded to give up their morals, values, autonomy, and integrity, by one man, a charismatic megalomaniac named Adolf Hitler. Many authors have attempted to find explanations for this inexplicable horror. The ideas of Erich Fromm, the prominent interpersonal psychoanalyst whose work was quite popular from the post WWII era and into the 1960s, as presented in his book Escape From Freedom, are particularly relevant here. (Also see Becker [1973], especially the chapter entitled "The Spell Cast by Persons—The Nexus of Unfreedom." and Berger [1967], particularly the chapter entitled "The Problem of Theodicy.")
Fromm (1965) examines the relationship of human developmental processes to social, religious, economic, and political forces in the environment. He notes that the process of individuation frees a child to "develop and express its own individual self unhampered by those ties which were limiting to it. But the child also becomes more free from a world which gave it security and reassurance" (p. 46). Fromm continues:
"If the economic, social and political conditions on which the whole process of human individuation depends, do not offer a basis for the realization of individuality . . ., while at the same time people have lost those ties which gave them security, this lag makes freedom an unbearable burden. It then becomes identical with doubt, with a kind of life which lacks meaning and direction. Powerful tendencies arise to escape from this kind of freedom into submission or some kind of relationship to man and the world which promises relief from uncertainty, even if it deprives the individual of his freedom" (p. 52) (italics mine).
Fromm is describing the predicament of a life which lacks meaning and direction, in a society which offers too many dead-end destinations. This is where Paul Zweig found himself—adrift in Lasch’s “culture of narcissism.”
While Fromm speaks of the securing ties that are lost in the process of becoming separate, there are those who would argue that many children possess little more than false security, at best. Alice Miller (1981) suggests that the development of the true self, the goal of separation and individuation, is thwarted when parents excessively need and use their children to fulfill their own egoistic wishes. These are not only mentally ill, abusive parents, although such parents certainly exist. These are also well-functioning, often well-meaning parents, who like all humans, have flaws, weaknesses, and blind spots. Parents, according to their own habits, values, and emotional needs, can teach a child to judge his own natural needs, feelings, and attempts at self-expression, as sinful, destructive to the parent, and shameful. Such children learn to hide or suppress these rejected parts of themselves and to develop a personality that is disconnected from their real feelings, but which is focused instead on skillful accommodation to the needs of the parents—in essence, an act of self-annihilation (Winnicott, 1960). Such children know that to maintain needed ties to parents, they must develop the ability to attend to the parents’ needs at the expense of their own. While the developmental conflict between attachment and separation invariably elicits feelings of isolation and powerlessness, these feelings may be especially exacerbated when the child's drive to separate is threatening to a needy and narcissistically vulnerable parent, or thwarted by neglectful or sadistic parents. Miller sees the problem of the child who becomes a prisoner of the narcissistic parent as a pervasive cultural phenomenon of our time.
In my own work with former members, I have often encountered the conditions described by Miller, as well as other, more concrete disruptions in family stability prior to cult involvement. Such disruptions include divorce, the premature death of a parent, parental or sibling mental illness, parental alcoholism or other addiction, abuse and neglect, or incest. Often in these cases, children blame themselves for the disruption, as in Fairbairn’s “moral defense” referred to above, and they develop a sense of badness, guilt, and unworthiness. They are then left vulnerable to selfobject hunger, to longing for the sense of being totally good, totally loved and accepted. By no means do I wish to suggest that every cult member will have such a background. I do observe, however, that many cult members have experienced some form of disruption in the stability of their families, which they have not sufficiently been able to integrate psychologically, and for which, unconsciously, they blame themselves. Seeking freedom from unconscious guilt and shame, the promise of purification and ennoblement through devotion to a cult leader can seem like finding an oasis in the desert. The abuse and punishment they receive from the cult leader then seems like the appropriate price to pay to achieve the longed for redemption, or freedom from conscious and/or unconscious guilt.
For the person who is tormented with anxiety about separation from dependence, whether this torment stems from larger social forces, or more specifically from within the relational matrix of the individual family, Fromm considers masochism to be one of the primary mechanisms of escape. When the parental and/or social environment cannot provide the security required for the separation effort, then adopting the masochistic stance of feeling small and helpless, or overwhelmed by pain and agony, can be a way of avoiding and protecting oneself from having to fight what would only be a losing battle. Between self-annihilation, which provides a kind of control, and unsupported separation and independence, which feels out of control, self-annihilation may seem like the less terrifying of two evils.
Those who become self-annihilating often turn to self-injurious behaviors. However, annihilation of self is only one side of the attempt to overcome unbearable feelings of powerlessness. There is an alternative to outright self-destructiveness which bears more directly on the subject of cults:
"The other side is the attempt to become a part of a bigger and more powerful whole outside of oneself, to submerge and participate in. This power can be a person, an institution, God, the nation, conscience, or a psychic compulsion. By becoming part of a power which is felt as unshakably strong, eternal, and glamorous, one participates in its strength and glory. One surrenders one's own self and renounces all strength and pride connected with it, one loses one's integrity as an individual and surrenders freedom; but one gains a new security and a new pride in the participation in the power in which one submerges. One gains also security against the torture of doubt" (Fromm, 1965, p. 177) (italics mine).
Fromm calls the power one submerges oneself in the "magic helper." When one feels helpless and hopeless to express and realize one's individual potential, dependence on a magic helper provides a solution which shifts the emphasis off the self, which is experienced as empty and worthless, to the magic helper. The magic helper, in our fantasy, has all the answers, can take care of everything, and loves and accepts us perfectly, thereby confirming and validating our existence. Merging with the magic helper banishes emptiness, loneliness and anxiety—and magical security is established. Then separation, individuation, and its accompanying terrors can be averted altogether. One can join a cult and effect a kind of separation from one's family and background—but the actual task of individuation is not undertaken. The pseudo-separation attempt degenerates into a regression to deeper levels of dependence and enmeshment.
Before further elaborating Fromm’s concept of the magic helper, it is important to note that Fromm, who was himself deeply interested in spirituality and religious mysticism, did not intend to suggest that the idea of God is always and only a delusional, masochistic idea. On the contrary, Fromm saw the magic helper concept as a perversion of spirituality and did not intend his concept to be used as an argument against spirituality or religion.
In the relationship to the magic helper, "the question is then no longer how to live oneself, but how to manipulate 'him' in order not to lose him and how to make him do what one wants, even to make him responsible for what one is responsible oneself" (Fromm, 1965, p. 199). Paradoxically, obedience and goodness are among the most common methods used to attempt to manipulate and control the magic helper. Yet the enslavement to the magic helper that is then experienced is resented and creates conflict. This conflict must be repressed in order not to lose the magic helper. Additionally, people who pose as magic helpers eventually and inevitably demonstrate their imperfection, if not their complete fraudulence. Thus, the underlying anxiety about the authenticity of the magic helper, or about losing him through not being worthy, constantly threatens the security sought for in the relationship. This is a real double bind. As Berger (1967) notes, "the masochistic attitude is inherently predestined to failure, because the self cannot be annihilated this side of death and because the other can only be absolutized in illusion" (p. 56).
Kliger (1994), in her study of devotees of a leader named "Guru,” demonstrates that it is precisely this conflict in the devotees that results in the high degree of somatization she found among them. Unhappiness and dissatisfaction amongst members was considered by Guru to be hostile, a threat to the community. Guru demanded that devotees show a happy face at all times, claiming that their unhappy faces made him physically and psychically ill. (This is also what Gurumayi teaches her SYDA staff.) Because the devotees were stigmatized by Guru for any expression of dissatisfaction, devotees suppressed these feelings, which then emerged through somatization. Physical illness was more acceptable to Guru, because he saw himself as a healer and could use a devotee's illness to demonstrate his power. If his healing efforts failed, however, devotees' illnesses were deemed a manifestation of their resistance, proving that they were hostile to Guru's mission. Punishment by shunning followed, which led either to devotees' further submission, or to their excommunication (Kliger, 1994, pp. 232-233). These kinds of shizophrenegenic mixed messages were pervasive in SYDA as well. For most of those SYDA members that I knew personally who worked directly with Gurumayi, attempting to please her would eventually lead to breakdowns in physical and mental health. Gurumayi resented people who were confident, and she was contemptuous of people who were weak. Trying to be what Gurumayi wanted you to be so that she would remain pleased with you was impossible, because she changed the rules at whim. It was common for staff members to disappear suddenly because they had been sent to rehabilitation centers for various addictions or disorders, or to a SYDA center in Honolulu for rest. In cults, breakdown is often the only option for members who have humiliated and diminished themselves as far as they could, and who unconsciously seek some sort of escape from the leader’s insatiable demands for further abasement and submission.
When the magic helper is a drug such as heroin, the annihilation of the self may culminate in the death of the body. If it is food, the self is concealed in obesity, or enslaved to anorexia and bulimia. When the magic helper is an idealized but traumatizing parent who is ambivalently both hated and totally depended on, annihilation of the self manifests as the inability to separate and individuate.
What makes cults so insidious is that when the magic helper is a cult leader, the annihilation of the self, the loss of one's own voice, personal values, and integrity, can be paradoxically experienced as a triumph, a conversion from hopeless badness to potential perfection.[2]
Again, SYDA provides useful material in support of this point. In SYDA philosophy, the "ego" is devalued as something small and selfish that must be surrendered to the guru, to be magically transformed into pure awareness of the transcendent "inner Self," which is one with the guru and with God. The sense of "doership," of taking credit for or enjoying the fruits of one's own actions, is in particular a sure sign of "wrong understanding." The right understanding is that whatever the guru says or does is a direct expression of God's will, and that everything good flows from the magic grace of the guru. By surrendering the ego and the sense of doership to the guru, the sins of pride and selfishness are supposedly expiated. Practically, this means that experiencing oneself as a center of agency and initiative, as a creative person capable of taking pleasure in the use of one's own talents and skills, should be a source of shame—because nothing belongs to oneself; it all belongs to and comes from the guru. On the other hand, one must always be ready to confess and take credit for one's sins and transgressions—which in this system, are the sole property of the follower and his small, impure, selfish ego. The cult leader depends on maintaining the smallness, guilt, and shame of her followers as an essential means of sustaining her own delusion of impeccable perfection. And the cult follower can come to believe that his enslavement is the highest form of liberation, his alienation the highest form of connection.