Cults Faith, Healing and Coercion

by Galanter, Marc

• ISBN13: 9780195123692
• ISBN10: 0195123697
• Edition: 2nd
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1999-05-20
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

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.

Table of Contents

Preface to the Second Edition	ix	(2)
Acknowledgments to the First Edition	xi
1. The Charismatic Group	1	(12)
What Is a Charismatic Group?	4	(3)
A Research Perspective	7	(6)
I FORCES IN THE CHARISMATIC GROUP	13	(64)
2. Group Cohesiveness	15	(19)
A Clinical Model	15	(4)
A Charismatic Religious Sect: The Divine Light Mission	19	(15)
3. Shared Beliefs	34	(26)
Communities of Shared Belief	35	(10)
Shared Beliefs in the Unification Church	45	(15)
4. Altered Consciousness	60	(17)
Meditation	63	(3)
Drug-Induced Altered Consciousness	66	(2)
Social Induction	68	(9)
II A MODEL OF THE CHARISMATIC GROUP	77	(34)
5. Biology and Behavior	79	(13)
The Relief Effect	81	(2)
Evidence in Contemporary Sects	83	(5)
Ethologic Observations	88	(4)
6. The Cult as a Social System	92	(19)
Transformation	92	(4)
Monitoring	96	(7)
Feedback	103	(2)
Boundary Control	105	(6)
III CASE HISTORIES OF CHARISMATIC GROUPS	111	(74)
7. Trouble at the System's Boundary	113	(9)
Jonestown	113	(5)
MOVE	118	(4)
8. A Religious Sect: The Unification Church	122	(45)
A History of the Sect	122	(4)
Induction	126	(10)
Family and Marital Structure	136	(16)
Leaving the Sect	152	(15)
9. The Millenium Approaches	167	(18)
Waco and Antigovernmental Paranoia	167	(5)
Aum Shinrikyo	172	(4)
Heaven's Gate	176	(3)
Suicide, Murder, and Immolation	179	(6)
IV SPIRITUAL RECOVERY AND ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE	185	(42)
10. The Nature of Healing Movements	187	(14)
Finding a Perspective	187	(9)
The Psychology of Membership	196	(5)
11. Alternative Healing in the Medical Mainstream	201	(10)
The Christian Medical and Dental Society	201	(4)
The Self-Help Clinic: Impact on Institutional Care	205	(6)
12. The AA Example	211	(16)
The Charismatic Gift of Alcoholics Anonymous	212	(6)
The Fully Evolved Healing Group	218	(9)
APPENDIX A: The Charismatic Group: A Summary	227	(3)
APPENDIX B: The Charismatic Group: Examples	230	(2)
APPENDIX C: Chronology of the Studies	232	(3)
Notes	235	(14)
Bibliography	249	(16)
Index	265