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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

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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