Introduction to the Monograph
Carmen Almendros, Dianne Casoni, Rod Dubrow-Marshall
IJCS Editors
This special issue of the International Journal of
Cultic Studies (IJCS) emerged from a
conference with the title, Making Sense of Post-
Cult Trauma and the Relational System of the
Traumatizing Narcissist, organized jointly by
the International Cultic Studies Association
(ICSA) and the National Institute for the
Psychotherapies (NIP). The conference took
place on October 13, 2012. Daniel Shaw,
LCSW, organized the conference and put
together this collection.
As the editors of the IJCS, we are pleased that
this special edition of the journal has come to
pass, and we are profoundly grateful to the
authors and reviewers for their work, and for
their dedication and professionalism in
producing this volume.
This collection of articles shines a revealing
light on the phenomenon and the experiences of
people in groups that exhibit undue influence or
harmful cultic influence. The articles also pay
particular attention to the specific characteristics
of the cult leader—a topic which, by its very
focus and definition, has been hard to study
empirically, and about which it has been perhaps
too easy for us to presuppose from a distance
that abusive leaders are “crazy” or sociopathic.
Some leaders may indeed have those
characteristics but the articles in this collection
tell a much more nuanced and detailed story, and
they demonstrate the power and richness of
idiographic data. In doing so, the pieces reveal
common characteristics of narcissism they also
disclose the traumatic effects on individuals and
their families of such leadership and the group
dynamics commonly bound up with those
leaders.
The personal accounts that you will read are
honest and at times harrowing in their detail, but
they all reveal important insights into the
relational influence and binds into which
followers of extremist groups get caught.
Whether people are drawn to leaders with
spiritual or psychotherapeutic prowess or indeed
a combination of the two, it seems that the
dream of a better life and world, and the lure of
a leader who can take you there, are sometimes
irresistible to those who yearn for better
experiences and ways of living. The articles in
this collection reveal the myths about and the
exploitation of such hopeful dreams, and the
post-traumatic effects on those who become
agents of narcissistic leaders whose aims are less
altruistically idealistic and more internally
driven psychically. As Robert J Lifton has
described it, these are tales of individuals’
“dispensing of existence” into the psychic vortex
of the leader yet simultaneously the accounts
demonstrate the long, hard path back of those
same individuals to the rediscovery of authentic
existence and relationships, and the hope that yet
emerges from the ashes of the narcissist’s fire.
We believe that these accounts and the prescient
and insightful theoretical analyses that
accompany them make a significant contribution
to our understanding of the psychological and
psychodynamic processes at work in harmful
cultic groups. This analysis renders human
again those leaders self-defined as superhuman
or messianic deities and deconstructs that which
they intend to be undeconstructable. Brought
back to real life with its pain of everyday
existence, yet released from the double binds of
psychic slavery, the authors of this collection
vividly show how narcissistic cult leaders are
merely flawed human beings who harm others,
whose tricks and lies we can lay bare, and whose
corruption we can combat.
International Journal of Cultic Studies ■ Vol. 5, 2014 1
Carmen Almendros, Dianne Casoni, Rod Dubrow-Marshall
IJCS Editors
This special issue of the International Journal of
Cultic Studies (IJCS) emerged from a
conference with the title, Making Sense of Post-
Cult Trauma and the Relational System of the
Traumatizing Narcissist, organized jointly by
the International Cultic Studies Association
(ICSA) and the National Institute for the
Psychotherapies (NIP). The conference took
place on October 13, 2012. Daniel Shaw,
LCSW, organized the conference and put
together this collection.
As the editors of the IJCS, we are pleased that
this special edition of the journal has come to
pass, and we are profoundly grateful to the
authors and reviewers for their work, and for
their dedication and professionalism in
producing this volume.
This collection of articles shines a revealing
light on the phenomenon and the experiences of
people in groups that exhibit undue influence or
harmful cultic influence. The articles also pay
particular attention to the specific characteristics
of the cult leader—a topic which, by its very
focus and definition, has been hard to study
empirically, and about which it has been perhaps
too easy for us to presuppose from a distance
that abusive leaders are “crazy” or sociopathic.
Some leaders may indeed have those
characteristics but the articles in this collection
tell a much more nuanced and detailed story, and
they demonstrate the power and richness of
idiographic data. In doing so, the pieces reveal
common characteristics of narcissism they also
disclose the traumatic effects on individuals and
their families of such leadership and the group
dynamics commonly bound up with those
leaders.
The personal accounts that you will read are
honest and at times harrowing in their detail, but
they all reveal important insights into the
relational influence and binds into which
followers of extremist groups get caught.
Whether people are drawn to leaders with
spiritual or psychotherapeutic prowess or indeed
a combination of the two, it seems that the
dream of a better life and world, and the lure of
a leader who can take you there, are sometimes
irresistible to those who yearn for better
experiences and ways of living. The articles in
this collection reveal the myths about and the
exploitation of such hopeful dreams, and the
post-traumatic effects on those who become
agents of narcissistic leaders whose aims are less
altruistically idealistic and more internally
driven psychically. As Robert J Lifton has
described it, these are tales of individuals’
“dispensing of existence” into the psychic vortex
of the leader yet simultaneously the accounts
demonstrate the long, hard path back of those
same individuals to the rediscovery of authentic
existence and relationships, and the hope that yet
emerges from the ashes of the narcissist’s fire.
We believe that these accounts and the prescient
and insightful theoretical analyses that
accompany them make a significant contribution
to our understanding of the psychological and
psychodynamic processes at work in harmful
cultic groups. This analysis renders human
again those leaders self-defined as superhuman
or messianic deities and deconstructs that which
they intend to be undeconstructable. Brought
back to real life with its pain of everyday
existence, yet released from the double binds of
psychic slavery, the authors of this collection
vividly show how narcissistic cult leaders are
merely flawed human beings who harm others,
whose tricks and lies we can lay bare, and whose
corruption we can combat.
International Journal of Cultic Studies ■ Vol. 5, 2014 1
