Psychotherapy Cults
Literature review.Temerlin and Temerlin (1982), Hochman (1984), Singer (1986), and West and Singer (1980) each pointed to a new phenomenon: the psychotherapy cult. Cultic therapists use varying combinations of coercive, indirect, and deceptive psychological techniques in order to control patients. In so doing, these therapists violate ethical prohibitions against forming exploitative and dual relationships with clients, misusing therapeutic techniques, and manipulating therapeutic relationships to the advantage of the therapist. Therapy cults may arise from the distortion and corruption of long-term individual therapy (Temerlin and Temerlin, 1982; Conason and McGarrahan, 1986), group psychotherapy (Hochman, 1984), large-group awareness trainings, human potential groups, or any of a variety of groups led by non-professionals (West & Singer, 1980; Singer, 1983, 1986).
Temerlin and Temerlin (1982) studied five bizarre groups of mental health professionals, which were formed when five teachers of psychotherapy consistently ignored ethical prohibitions against multiple relationships with clients. Patients became their therapists' friends, lovers, relatives, employees, colleagues, and students.
Simultaneously they became "siblings" who bonded together to admire and support their common therapist. (p. 131)
These cults were formed when professionals deviated from an ethically based, fee-for-service, confidential relationship with clients and brought clients together to form cohesive, psychologically incestuous groups. Leaders were idolized rather than transferences studied and understood. Instead of personal autonomy being built, patients were led into submissive, obedient, dependent relationships with the therapists. Their thinking eventually resembled what Hoffer saw in the "True Believers" (1951) and what Lifton (1961) termed totalistic. That is, the clients were induced to accept uncritically their therapists' theories, to grow paranoid toward the outside world, to limit relationships and thinking to the elite world created by the cult-producing therapist, and selflessly devote themselves to their therapists. The groups varied in size from 15 to 75 members. Often members had been in groups from 10 to 15 years.
The authors concluded that membership in a psychotherapy cult was an iatrogenically induced negative effect of psychotherapeutic techniques and relationships being used in unethical ways.
Hochman (1984), writing about a now defunct school of psychotherapy, The Center for Feeling Therapy, also spoke of the many iatrogenic symptoms he found in former clients and patients who had been members of this group, which had evolved into a therapy cult. He wrote:
A cult that is destructive...veers toward remolding the individual to conform to codes and needs of the cult, institutes new taboos that preclude doubt and criticism, and produces a kind of splitting where cult members see themselves as an elite surrounded by unenlightened, and even dangerous outsiders. (p. 367)
This group lasted approximately ten years, and consisted of 350 patients living near one another, sharing homes in the Hollywood district of Los Angeles. Hundreds more were non-resident outpatients, and others communicated with "therapists" (some were licensed, others allegedly were patients assigned to be therapists) by letter. Maximum benefit supposedly came only to residents, and patients were led to see themselves as the potential leaders of a therapy movement that would dominate the 21st century. The leaders promulgated a "theory" which maintained that individuals function with "reasonable insanity," but that if individuals learn to "go 100%" in five areas -- expression, feeling, activity, clarity, and contact -- a person could put aside his "old image" and now be "sane," which was defined as the "full experiencing of feelings." This latter, ambiguous objective was purported to be the attainment of the next stage in human evolution. Thus, therapy cults use a technique also commonly seen in religious cults (Singer, 1983): the inhibition of critical thinking by encouraging the use of thought-stopping cliches.
Legal cases. A number of civil suits and hearings of the California Department of Consumer Affairs Board of Medical Quality Assurance have grown out of the activities occurring in the Center for Feeling Therapy. The following are illustrative but not exhaustive: State of California: Psychology Examining Committee Case 392, L-33445 v. Binder; State of California as cited, v. Corriere, Gold, Hart, Hopper, and Karle, Case L-30665, D.3103 through 3107; State of California as cited v. Woldenberg, No. D-3108, L-30664; Hart et al. v. McCormack et al., Superior Court of the State of California, for the County of Los Angeles, No. 00713; Raines et al. v. Center Foundation, Superior Court of the State of California, County of Los Angeles, No. 372-843 consolidated with C 379-789; Board of Behavioral Science Examiners, No. M 84, L 31542 v. Cirincione, Franklin, Gold, and Gross.
In these legal cases, defendants were charged with extreme departures from the standards of psychology, the standards of medicine, and the standards of psychotherapeutic care. The State alleged that the staff, while purporting to be providing psychotherapy:
instituted and participated in a systematic social influence process and an enforced dependency situation which fits the recognized criteria of cult brainwashing or coercive persuasion. Respondent and his co-therapists initially created a sense of powerlessness in their purported patients by stripping them of social support (friendship, kinship, ordinary environment, central occupational roles, wealth) and psychological confidence (through ridicule and creating states of physical exhaustion) and then enforced massive new learning demands through a reward/punishment mechanism (including threatened loss of status, anxiety and guilt manipulations and physical punishment, as well as sexual harassment). Learning demands included financial manipulations to respondents' benefit in the context of the alleged victims being in a particularly weakened and susceptible state due to their perceived psychological problems.
Respondent, in order to break down and control Center members, utilized racial, religious and ethnic slurs, physical and verbal humiliation, physical, especially sexual, abuse, threats of insanity and violence and enforced states
of physical and mental exhaustion as more particularly alleged herein below. In order to isolate Center patients and render them particularly susceptible to coercive persuasion, respondents routinely represented to Center patients that they should hate and blame their parents for making the patients "crazy," give up their children for adoption and abort pregnancy, ostensibly because Center members were too “crazy" to be parents. Therapists allegedly engaged in sexual intimacies with patients, beat and caused patients to be beaten by other patients, allowed and encouraged nonlicensed "therapists" to conduct unsupervised therapy sessions. Clients were instructed to strip to their underwear and stand in a "stress position" with legs bent for an hour and a half, collected "donations" running into thousands of dollars from individual patients for the proposed building of a gym on the Center grounds but used the money to buy a ranch with other therapists in Arizona. When patients said they wanted to leave, some were violently thrown to the floor, beaten by therapists, and their clothes torn. Some patients allegedly were beaten for about two hours. Patients were made to stand naked in front of groups; patients were ordered to inspect the genitals of other patients in front of groups. A male patient, who wanted to
return to college to study music rather than work as a mechanic in a Center business, was made to wear diapers, sleep in a crib and eat baby food for eight weeks because his therapist said the patient wanted to live his life like a baby. Some patients were made to put on 25 or more pounds as a punishment. Nude photographs were routinely made during group therapy sessions and retained in files, but destroyed when the Center collapsed, purportedly to conceal the abusive nature of the treatment.
False and misleading advertising was alleged. It was represented that six to twelve months were needed to complete therapy for stated amounts of money, whereas patients were intimidated during sessions into paying amounts greatly in excess of those advertised and Center therapy was designed to keep patients in therapy as long as the Center existed. (p. xx).
Timnick (1986), calling the Center "a once trendy 'therapeutic community,"' reported that the above legal hearings have "become the longest, costliest and most complex psychotherapy malpractice case in California history" (p. 3). In this case, more than 100 former patients filed complaints of fraud, sexual misconduct, and abuse. Already, civil cases have settled for more than six million dollars on behalf of former clients. Testimony at hearings depicted the group as a psychotherapy cult using deceptive, manipulative, and coercive techniques to retain and control clients. The welfare of the patients was subverted to the welfare of the therapists. Treatment plans and goals were subverted to financially and personally benefit the therapists and the Center. Instead of the usual standard of practice of patients being aided to achieve greater independence and self-direction, the therapists instituted a systematic social influence process and an enforced dependency situation that was cultic and controlling. |