International Journal of Cultic Studies ■ Vol. 10, 2019 21
precision,11 and that critics of groups used it
when they disapproved of a belief system to
which people had converted (Barker, 1984, p.
135 see Barker, 2003, p. 288). Some years later,
however, she offered observations about social
control and restraint that are central to an
understanding of free will within a sociological
perspective.
In her 2002 presidential address to the
Association for the Sociology of Religion (and
published the following year), Barker reminded
her audience that “the natural sciences describe
laws that clearly impose well-nigh insuperable
limits on our freedom” (Barker, 2003, p. 291).
Specifically, within the social sciences
(particularly sociology), “freedom and control”
were concepts
that lie at the very heart of the sociological
enterprise. [Karl] Marx, [Émile] Durkheim,
[Max] Weber, [Georg] Simmel, and [George
Herbert] Mead ...were all concerned with the
ways in which individuals are, variously,
enabled and restrained by the structures and
cultures within which they find themselves and
how they create, conserve, change and negotiate
those structures and cultures. (Barker, 2003, pp.
286–287)
Likewise, in a 2005 presentation (published in
2006) at a Finnish conference, Barker returned
to the question of free will, this time observing
that
the whole exercise of sociology assumes
that, to a greater or lesser extent, we are
all affected by the social situation in
which we find ourselves. ...The
problem is not usually to declare either
that a person is totally free of society or
11 Barker stated that, often, people use brainwashing
interchangeably with terms such as “menticide, mind-control,
thought reform, coercion, indoctrination, conditioning, conversion,
persuasion, socialization, re-education, influence or simply
changing one’s mind” (Barker, 1984, p. 135 [italics added]).
Singer with Lalich (1995, p. 53) included brainwashing amidst
“Terms Used to Identify Thought Reform.” The other terms were
thought struggle thought reform debility, dependency, and dread
coercive persuasion mind control systematic manipulation of
psychological and social influence coordinated programs of
coercive influence and behavioral control and exploitative
persuasion.
that (s)he is totally constrained by it, but
to assess the degree to which the
position of each is negotiable as part of
an on-going process of interaction that
affects both the individual and the social
environment. (Barker, 2006, pp. 11–12)
A central exercise of sociology, therefore, is to
identify and analyze the degrees of constraint
and negotiation strategies that people use in
organizational and interpersonal settings.
Some of those constraints can be quite severe, as
Barker realized after interviewing a convicted
terrorist who had been groomed to be a suicide
bomber. Based upon those interviews, Barker
concluded “that it was a series of social
variables that had the effect of controlling her
mind to what, it could be argued, was an almost
irresistible and irreversible degree” (Barker,
2013, p. 44 [italics in original] see Dubrow-
Marshall, 2010). Barker’s conclusion seems to
have been that the convicted terrorist had lost
almost all of her free will through social
processes that others would call brainwashing.
Moreover, similar social processes probably take
place with some “members of closed
communities” (Barker, 2013, p. 44). Again,
Barker revealed,
I have repeatedly been struck by how
they have insisted that they now felt
freer than they had before joining what
may seem to others to be an
authoritarian group severely restricting
the freedom of its members. On the
other hand, I have observed groups
which proclaim that they embrace total
freedom and that everyone can do just
whatever they choose when, in fact,
these “free souls” may be perceived to
be quite severely constrained in a
number of ways. (Barker, 2013, p. 45)
Social scientists who have studied people in
controversial groups variously called sects, cults,
or new religious movements have witnessed the
same contradiction that Barker did between
members’ own views about free will and choice
versus the researchers’ outside perceptions of
the (often) severe restrictions under which they
live.

22 International Journal of Cultic Studies ■ Vol. 10, 2019
Among the social scientists who have had
similar perspectives as did Barker about the vast
differences between members’ beliefs in their
free will versus outsiders’ conclusions about
their severe constraints is social psychologist
Alexandra Stein, who spent years in a political
cult (which she simply calls The O). Combining
her own experiences with research, Stein
concluded that
Brainwashing takes place within a wide
variety of social situations. It occurs in
cults. ..,in cultic terrorist organizations
where political violence is an organizing
principle, in totalitarian movements and
in totalitarian states. ...On the other
end of the spectrum, brainwashing can
occur in very small or even one-on-one
cults ....(Stein, 2017, p. 6)
In these contexts, Stein specifically rejected
notions that members exerted their own free
wills in the beliefs that they held and the actions
that they committed (see Stein, 2017, pp. 6 146,
n. iv).
On a more theoretical level, sociologist Janja
Lalich (who also had spent years in a different
political cult, the Democratic Workers Party)
developed a perspective about imposed
restrictions in high-demand groups that she
called bounded choice, which involved “a
narrow realm of constraint and control,
dedication and duty,” in which members
operated (Lalich, 2004, p. 15). Under conditions
of bounded choice, “free will has not been taken
away, but it has been restricted and distorted.
The individual cult member acts and is
responsible for his or her actions—but these
actions must be recognized as occurring in a
specific context” (Lalich, 2004, p. 260). Many of
these contexts involved “brainwashing,” which
“is the result of a series of intense social-
psychological influences aimed at behavior
modification. It is a complex, multilayered, and
time-consuming process. Typically, it is not
used during the introduction and recruitment
stages of cult contact” (Lalich, 2004, p. 6).
Autobiography, Topic Choice, and Agency
For sociological critics such as Stephen Cole,
the autobiographical elements behind Stein’s
and Lalich’s selection of brainwashing as a
research question reflects a problem for
sociology. A similar problem also would exist
regarding the autobiographical backgrounds of
two of the major critics of brainwashing,
Thomas Robbins and Dick Anthony, who had
been in an alternative religious movement
(Anthony &Robbins, 1974, p. 482),12 and which
12 In an article that Anthony and Robbins published on the Meher
Baba movement, the two researchers revealed that
it should be noted that both researchers are, in varying
degrees “in” the movement which they endeavored to
study. Both researchers are “involved” with the Meher
Baba movement, and have been personally “interested”
in the thought of Meher Baba for several years prior to
embarking on the present study. Of the two researchers,
Mr. Robbins has the more “academic” orientation, with
a tendency toward reductionistic explanations. Mr.
Anthony, on the other hand, is a committed devotee
with a penchant for explanations based on the
perspective of Meher Baba himself. (Anthony &
Robbins, 1974, p. 482)
Anthony’s “penchant for explanations based on the perspective of
Meher Baba himself” was based at least in part upon supposedly
mystical experiences that he had involving Meher Baba.
Before Meher Baba’s death on January 31, 1969 (see Anthony,
1982, p. 9), Anthony visited the Meher Baba Center in Myrtle
Beach, South Carolina. While there, Anthony went into a cabin in
which Meher Baba had held private interviews, and reported
having an experience of the spiritual teacher coming into the cabin
and talking to him about his quest to “regain transcendence, and
how it related to various social concerns” (Anthony, 1982, p. 8 see
also p. 7). He felt “an uprush of consciousness” when he believed
that Meher Baba said to him, “‘I’m not outside of you I’m inside
of you’” (Meher Baba, reputedly quoted in Anthony, 1982, p. 8).
Anthony reported to have experienced a “transformed
consciousness,” and “was swept away into a feeling of love and
reverence” (Anthony, 1982, p. 8).
Then in 1969, while walking out of Meher Baba’s tomb in
Meherabad, India, Anthony indicated that he “fell to the ground in
a very intense state of consciousness.” In that state, he reflected
later that he felt “a sort of divine wind,” “a sense of omnipotence
and benevolence,” and “of being capable of blowing any obstacles
away” (Anthony, 1982, p. 10). Anthony indicated that his “own
experiences in relation to Meher Baba have been relatively private,
and not socially created, so I’ve never thought of it [sic] as
something that could be explained on the basis of brainwashing or
something like it, or even on the basis of various kinds of
sociological conversion theories” (Anthony, 1982, p. 20).
Later, at a conference, he heard an anticult lawyer report on
winning a case “concerning somebody who had been kidnapped
and deprogrammed because the person had dropped out of medical
school, and spent his time working as a janitor and meditating
under the influence of involvement in a new religious movement.
That served as evidence in a court of law that this young person
had been brainwashed by a cult into a mentally unbalanced state”
(Anthony, 1982, pp. 12–13). Anthony realized that he had done
something similar, having “dropped out of graduate school shortly
after my first contact with Meher Baba and spent a year writing
mystical poetry and supporting myself working as a clerk in a
bookstore” (Anthony, 1982, p. 13). He also knew of a Meher Baba
devotee whose Christian fundamentalist parents had hired a “well-
known deprogrammer” to “return her to their own more restricted
way of seeing the world” (Anthony, 1982, p. 13). About these