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toward these spiritual goals. Such religious ―surrender‖—to a sense of one‘s wholeness,
one‘s connectedness to life, to a loving and creative spirit both within and without—is not
necessarily the same experience as submission to the domination, control, and exploitation
of a particular group and/or leader. The urge to surrender, as understood by Ghent (1990),
a leading theorist of contemporary relational psychoanalysis, can be a move toward inner
freedom, and does not necessarily lead to submission, or enslavement.
Cult leaders, however, practice forms of control, such as intimidation and humiliation, which
demand submission. In Ghent‘s view, masochistic submission is a perversion of surrender.
Cult leaders often use the idea of surrender as bait, and then switch to a demand for
submission. Nevertheless, in so doing, they may not actually be practicing mind control in
any conscious way. They may simply be behaving in ways typical of pathological narcissists,
people whose personalities are characterized by paranoia and megalomania—characteristics,
by the way, that are readily attributable to one of the modern masters of thought reform
techniques, the totalitarian dictator known as Chairman Mao. Totalitarian dictators study
and invent thought reform techniques, but many cult leaders may simply be exhibiting
characteristic behaviors of the pathological narcissist, with the attendant paranoia and
mania typical of this personality disorder. Thought reform is the systematic application of
techniques of domination, enslavement, and control, which can be quite similar to the
naturally occurring behaviors of other abusers, like batterers, rapists, incest perpetrators, in
all of whom can be seen the behaviors of pathological narcissism.
I base my formulation of the psychology of the cult leader in part on the daily close contact
I had with Swami Chidvilasananda (Gurumayi) of Siddha Yoga between 1985 and 1992. I
also support my hypotheses with information gained from extensive work with
psychotherapy clients who have described their cult leaders‘ behavior in detail, as well as on
my extensive reading of biographical accounts of other leaders of cults.1 I propose,
following the profile of the pathological narcissist delineated by Rosenfeld (1971), a leading
figure of the contemporary Kleinian school in London, and similar formulations from the
American self psychological perspective of Kohut (1976), that the cult leader profoundly
depends on the fanatic devotion of the follower. This dependency is deeply shameful to the
cult leader, because, based on traumatic aspects of her own developmental history, any
dependency has come to mean despicable weakness and humiliation to her. Developmental
trauma in those who in later life can be termed pathological narcissists typically consists of
being raised, by parents or other caregivers, under extreme domination and control,
accompanied by repeated experiences of being shamed and humiliated. The pathological
narcissist identifies with this aggression and comes to despise his own normative
dependency, to be contemptuous of dependence, which is equated to weakness. Manically
defending against deprivation and humiliation, he comes to believe that he needs no one,
that he can trust only himself, that those who depend on others are weak and contemptible.
Thus the cult leader, largely unconsciously, compensates for his inability to trust and
depend on others, and defends against the intense shame he feels connected to need and
dependency, by attaining control over his followers, first through seductive promises of
unconditional love and acceptance, and then through intimidation, shaming, and belittling.
This serves to induce the loathsome dependency in the follower, and the cult leader thus
contrives to disavow his own dependency, felt as loathsome and shameful. By
psychologically seducing, and then battering the follower into being the shameful dependent
one, the cult leader maintains his superior position and can boast delusionally of being
totally liberated from all petty, mundane attachments. These processes of subjugating
others, and inducing in others what one loathes and seeks to deny in oneself are extreme
forms of manic defense against the shame of dependency.
In fact, the cult leader does not escape dependency. Instead, he (and also, in many cases,
she) comes to depend on his followers to worship and adore him, to reflect his narcissistic

Cultic Studies Review, Vol. 2, No. 2, 2003, Page 9
delusion of perfection to him as does the mirror to the Evil Queen in the tale of Snow White.
One of the ways in which this perversion of dependency is often enacted can be observed
when the cult leader claims that because he needs nothing, he is entitled to everything.
Thus, cult leaders claiming to be pure and perfect, without any need or attachment, use
manic defenses to rationalize and justify their dependence on extravagant and grandiose
trappings such as thrones, fleets of Rolls Royces, and the trust funds of their wealthy
followers.
For the cult leader, his ability to induce total dependence in followers serves to sustain and
enhance a desperately needed delusion of perfect, omnipotent control. With many cult
leaders, (e.g., Shoko Asahara [Lifton, 1999]), the dissolution of their delusion of
omnipotence exposes an underlying core of psychosis. Sustaining a delusion of omnipotence
and perfection is, for the cult leader, a manic effort to ward off psychic fragmentation.
Again it is useful to consider that this kind of pathological narcissism and defensive mania is
often seen in persons whose childhood development was controlled by extremely
dominating, often sadistic caregivers, or whose developmental years were characterized by
traumatic experiences of intense humiliation. Cult leaders then create elaborate
rationalizations for their abusive systems, while unconsciously patterning those systems
from the templates of their own experiences of being abused.
Cult leaders succeed in dominating their followers because they have mastered the cruel art
of exploiting universal human dependency and attachment needs in others. The lengthy
period of dependency in human development, the power that parents have, as God-like
figures, to literally give life and sustain the lives of their children, leaves each human being
with the memory, however distant or unconscious, of total dependency. Cult leaders tap
into and re-activate this piece of the human psyche. Followers are encouraged to become
regressed and infantilized, to believe that their life depends on pleasing the cult leader. Cult
leaders depend on their ability to attract people, often at critically vulnerable points in their
lives, who are confused, hungry, dissatisfied, searching. With such people, cult leaders
typically find numerous ways to undermine their followers‘ independence and their capacity
to think critically.
In a religious cult, the leader is perceived as a deity who is always divinely right, and the
devotee, always on the verge of being sinfully wrong, comes to live for the sole purpose of
pleasing and avoiding displeasing the guru/god. The leader‘s displeasure comes to mean for
the member that he is unworthy, monstrously defective, and, therefore, dispensable. The
member has been conditioned to believe that loss of the leader‘s ―grace‖ is equivalent to
loss of any value, goodness, or rightness of the self. As the member becomes more deeply
involved, his anxiety about remaining a member in good standing increases. This anxiety is
akin to the intense fear, helplessness, loss of control and threat of annihilation that Herman,
in her discussion of psychological domination, describes as induced in victims of both
terrorists and battering husbands:
The ultimate effect of these techniques is to convince the victim that the
perpetrator is omnipotent, that resistance is futile, and that her life depends
upon winning his indulgence through absolute compliance. The goal of the
perpetrator is to instill in his victim not only fear of death but also gratitude
for being allowed to live [Herman, 1992, p. 77].
Extending this formulation to cult leaders and followers, the cult leader can be understood
as needing to disavow her dependency and expel her dread of psychic dissolution, which
she succeeds in doing insofar as she is able to induce that dependency and fear in the
follower. The bliss that cult members often display masks their terror of losing the leader‘s
interest in them, which is equivalent for the follower to ―a fate worse than death.‖