24 ICSA TODAY
or like Benedict Arnold, who betrayed his country during
the Revolutionary War? As I retain sympathy for her, am I
blinding myself to meanness and denying a natural, angry
feeling about that?
A few weeks after my mother died, I received a thick
envelope in the mail. It contained a copy of her will, which
her estate attorney sent me as her next of kin.
On the first page of the will, my mother wrote,
My late husband … and I … are not including our
daughter … in our wills because she betrayed the
education which benefitted her life, … besmirched
it and its founder, with deliberate malice spreading
lies. I say this because I must say what is in my heart,
and be true to the ethics which have given my life its
meaning.
I was shocked and stung. She put this in her will? It was as
if she was shaking her finger at me from the grave. Then,
as the language sank in, stilted, archaic, taken straight
from AR jargon, I laughed, and the anger went away.
My mother succeeded in having the last word by talking
to me when I could not respond. But why was this
necessary? Was she sincere? Or was she trying to convince
herself? Or both? Should I be angry with a woman who
chose a false god over a true child? Or should I sympathize
with a woman who could not resolve her own conflicting
passions?
I don’t know the answers to these questions—perhaps it is
yes to all of them. I continue to explore. n
Bibliography
Aktar, S. (2002). “Forgiveness: Origins, dynamics,
Psychopathology, and technical relevance. Psychoanalytic
Quarterly, 71(2), 175–212.
Luskin, F. (2002). Forgive for good: A proven prescription for
health and happiness. New York, NY: HarperCollins.
About the Authors
Lorna Goldberg, LCSW, PsyA,
board member and past president of ICSA,
is a psychoanalyst in private practice and
Director at the Institute of Psychoanalytic
Studies. In 1976, she and her husband,
William Goldberg, began facilitating a
support group for former cult members
that continues to meet monthly in their home in Englewood,
New Jersey. Lorna and Bill received the Hall of Fame Award
from the authentic Cult Awareness Network in 1989 and the
Leo J. Ryan Award from the Leo J. Ryan Foundation in 1999. In
2009, Lorna received the Margaret T. Singer Award from ICSA.
Along with Rosanne Henry, she cochaired ICSA’s Mental Health
Committee from 2003 to 2008. Lorna has published numerous
articles about her therapeutic work with former cult members
in professional journals, including, most recently, Goldberg,
L., (2012), “Influence of a Charismatic Antisocial Cult Leader:
Psychotherapy With an Ex-Cultist Prosecuted for Criminal
Behavior,” International Journal of Cultic Studies, Vol. 2, 15–24
and Goldberg, L., (2011), “Diana, Leaving the Cult: Play Therapy
in Childhood and Talk Therapy in Adolescence,” International
Journal of Cultic Studies, Vol. 2, 33–43. She also wrote the
chapter “Guidelines for Therapists” in the book Recovery from
Cults (1993), edited by Michael Langone. She cowrote with Bill
Goldberg the chapter “Psychotherapy With Targeted Parents” in
the book Working With Alienated Children and Families (2013),
edited by Amy J. L. Baker and S. Richard Sauber. Most recently
Lorna co-edited (along with William Goldberg, Rosanne Henry,
and Michael Langone) Cult Recovery: A Clinician’s Guide to
Working With Former Members and Families (2017).
Ann Stamler, MA, MPhil,
graduated from Brooklyn College summa
cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 1965,
and earned graduate degrees in Latin from
Columbia University. She was in the Aesthetic
Realism movement from birth until she left at
age 41, in 1985. In 1987 she married Joseph
Stamler, whom she had first met in Aesthetic Realism. From
1985 to 2006 she was a senior executive of a nonprofit agency
in New York that worked with the labor movements in the U.S.
and Israel. She has served on the boards of various civic and
cultural organizations. In 2007 she was elected to the legislative
body of her town in Connecticut, a position she held until 2013.
In 2014 she received ICSA’s Margaret T. Singer Award. She is
Associate Editor of ICSA Today. n
Should I be angry with a
woman who chose a false
god over a true child?
Or should I sympathize
with a woman who could
not resolve her own
conflicting passions?

23
Book Reviews
The Knowledge Illusion:
Why We Never Think
Alone
By Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach
Riverhead Books, 2017. ISBN-10: 039918435X ISBN-13: 978-
0399184352 (hardcover). $17.98 (Amazon.com $11.74, paperback
$12.99, Kindle). 304 pages.
Reviewed by Doug Duncan
At first glance, one might not think of The Knowledge Illusion: Why
We Never Think Alone, by Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach,
as a book about cults, but reading it caused me to reexamine
some of what I thought it means to be in a cult. In particular,
I have spent a lot of time studying critical thinking in general
and groupthink specifically since exiting my cult. I thought if I
could understand the pathology of groupthink, I would better
be able to understand what happened to me and how it all
fell apart. However, after reading The Knowledge Illusion, I now
see that groupthink is really the norm for humans. All of us are
participating in groupthink. Perhaps the point is not so much
about whether groupthink is a pathology as it is about examining
whether you are thinking as part of a pathological group.
The authors begin in the introduction by looking at how thinking
as a group can go terribly wrong. Of course, human history
is replete with examples of this, from wars to space-shuttle
explosions but the authors chose to examine the test explosion
of a nuclear bomb on Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean on March
1, 1954. In spite of the fact that the people involved in planning
this test were, presumably, among the smartest people around
(they were, after all, nuclear scientists), the explosion that day
was three times as large as what the planners anticipated, with
catastrophic consequences for the crew of a nearby Japanese
fishing vessel who endured being rained on with radioactive
debris for several hours—in spite of the fact that they were at a
distance from the test that the U.S. Navy declared was safe. The
authors ask, “How is it possible that people can simultaneously
bowl us over with their ingenuity and disappoint us with their
ignorance? How have we mastered so much, despite how limited
our understanding often is?” (p. 3).
To answer these questions, the authors begin by drawing on the
latest understanding in psychology and neuroscience to look at
what we know, why we think, and how we think—in fact, those
are the titles of the first three chapters. Taking the first question,
it turns out that each of us individually knows much less than we
think we do.
The authors take some time to illustrate how shallow our
understanding is of many things that surround us, even though
we think we understand these things. For example, how many
of us truly understand how a flush toilet really works? Certainly,
some of us do, but not everybody. What about how a ballpoint
pen actually works? We all think we understand these things,
but what we really understand is how to use them, not why
they work. Fortunately, that is not necessary for most of us to
know, because the people who specialize in those branches of
knowledge are able to produce these goods while they depend
on the rest of us to specialize in and produce other things.
Indeed, the system works pretty well most of the time but very
few of us have anything other than a shallow understanding of
things in which we do not specialize.
Why should this be the case? Why do we not understand
everything around us? Because, argue the authors, thinking is
not about understanding, it is about action:
Thinking evolved as an extension of the ability to act
effectively it evolved to make us better at doing what
is necessary to achieve our goals. Thought allows us to
select from a set of possible actions by predicting the
effects of each action and by imagining how the world
would be if we had taken different actions in the past.
(pp. 10–11)
In an evolutionary context, this all makes sense. Beings who
are adapted to take the best course of action are the ones who
are most likely to survive. The authors point out that “Storing
details is often unnecessary to act effectively a broad picture is
generally all we need” (p. 48). In other words, we do not need to
understand (in terms of our modern lives) how to manufacture a
toilet, only how to use one. As long as we can do that, we can use
our precious brain power for other priorities.
So what do we use our brain for? In the chapter entitled “How
We Think,” Sloman and Fernbach describe what we do as “causal
reasoning.” We are constantly figuring out what will happen if we
take some action or another. “What we do is excel at reasoning
about how the world works” (p. 53). Unfortunately, we are still
quite limited in how deeply we understand why things work
as they do, but we are skilled at predicting outcomes in spite
of our lack of what the authors term “explanatory depth.” How
are we able to do this? The authors go into a lot of explanation
about how our thinking extends outward into our bodies, our
technology, and even our communities. They go back through
some of the contrast between intuitive and deliberative thinking
that has been explored in great depth by Daniel Kahneman in
Thinking, Fast and Slow.
Most of the time, the type of thinking we do works pretty
well for us. We are able to interact with people, take care of
our homes, and do our jobs. We learn from the stories told by
our communities about how we should behave and what the
consequences would be if we choose to behave badly. However,
The authors ask, “How is it
possible that people can
simultaneously bowl us over
with their ingenuity and
disappoint us with
their ignorance?
VOLUME 9 |ISSUE 3 |2018