Cultic Studies Review - Cult Hotline and Clinic

Cultic Studies Review 

An Internet Journal of Research, News & Opinion 

Vol. 9, No. 1 Print Version 2010 

The Last Draw: 

Cults and Creativity 

A Special Issue of Cultic Studies Review 

Guest Editor 

Dana Wehle, LCSW, MFA 

Associate Guest Editor 

Libbe Madsen, LCSW

The Last Draw—Cults and Creativity 

Dana Wehle, L.C.S.W., M.F.A. 

Cult Clinic, JBFCS 

Psychoanalyst, New York City 

Abstract i 

Introducing this special issue of CSR on Cults 

and Creativity, in addition to the articles by 

fellow authors, I draw on current thinking on 

creativity from psychology, neuroscience, the 

socio-cultural science of creativity, 

psychoanalysis, and critical theory. Of 

particular interest to me is how symbol 

creation and use as characteristically human 

intersects with the dehumanization of cult 

members through cult leader suppression of 

symbolic expression of feeling and thought, 

thus creativity. I propose cult-recovery 

treatment as a form of rehumanization 

through emphasis on the emergence or 

reemergence of former members’ or SGAs’ 

subjective use of symbol and creativity. I 

introduce the concept of “joy stopping” as an 

elaboration of “thought and feeling stopping,” 

and suggest the postmodern concepts of 

“lack/gap” and “slippage of meaning” are 

salient for cultic studies. This introduction 

assumes that creativity is critical not only for 

personal well-being but also for the 

enhancement of society. It questions the 

individual and societal cost when creativity is a 

prime target of manipulation/control in cults. 

Guest editing this special issue of CSR has provided a 

wonderful opportunity to continue my studies of cults and 

creativity. I am grateful to Michael Langone for suggesting 

the idea, and for supporting my qualitative survey on cults 

and creativity. I wish to thank Libbe Madsen, associate 

editor extraordinaire; Ashley Allen for efficiently collating 

and evaluating the survey responses; the survey 

respondents for generously helping create the first study of 

this kind and for granting permission to quote; Pat Ryan for 

Cultic Studies Review, Vol. 9, No. 1, 2010, Page 1

technical assistance with the survey; the invited authors in 

this issue, whose insightful contributions—summarized 

below—culminate in this first interdisciplinary compilation on 

cults and creativity. I especially thank them for their 

patience in waiting for this issue to come to fruition during a 

difficult time in my life; and heartfelt thanks to the former 

members, SGAs, and family members of currently involved 

loved ones with whom I have worked clinically and who are 

my most valued and respected teachers. 

I would like to share a bit about the creative journey that 

underlies this special issue. It began with the merging of my 

interest in creativity as a painter and as a psychoanalyst, my 

clinical work at the Cult Clinic of the Jewish Board of Family 

and Children’s Services and privately in New York City, and 

my grounding in cult therapy working with Arnold Markowitz, 

the clinic’s founder and director, and Libbe Madsen, also in 

this context. I had the pleasure of inviting the authors who, 

drawing on professional and, for some, personal experience 

with cults, greatly deepened my inquiry into this mostly 

overlooked theme within cultic studies. ii It is significant that 

this issue on cults and creativity dovetails with the work of 

the Phoenix Project and its founder Diana Pletts, who 

tirelessly encourages and organizes former members and 

SGAs to present their artwork and creative voices within 

ICSA’s supportive venues. 

The survey and the journal articles start with the question 

“What do we mean by creativity?” Creativity is one of those 

terms that in some ways is obvious, but because of its 

complexity is beyond comprehensive definition. Allen notes 

that a frequent theme included as part of the definition in 

the survey responses is freedom: the freedom to express 

one’s self, the freedom to create, the freedom to create new 

ideas, the freedom to use one’s imagination. This view 

seems to reflect the words of social psychologist Morris Stein 

who, writing during the Cold War, states, 

to be capable of [creative insights] the 

individual requires freedom—freedom to 

explore, freedom to be himself, freedom to 

entertain ideas no matter how wild and to 

express that which is within him without fear 

of censure or concern about evaluation. 

(Sawyer, 2006, p. 42) 


Psychoanalyst Marion Milner (1987) describes the freedom to 

be absent-minded—a state hard to imagine in a harmful 

cult—as a requirement for creativity. In this issue, Steven 

Gelberg and others point to external and particularly internal 

freedom as necessary for creativity. Several other authors to 

some degree challenge this idea of freedom as essential. 

Boeri and Pressley note that within the confines of their 

oppressive cults, they experienced the birth of a “secret 

creative self,” while Melinda Haas discusses two composers 

who were famous before their severe confinements and 

continued to produce master works when confined. She 

notes that the composer Messiaen used his creativity to 

tolerate his captivity by the Nazis. I suggest that examining 

pre-cult experience of creativity will refine our assessment of 

the impact of cults on creativity in future studies. 

Over the past years, I have blended my deep involvement 

with art and a keen interest as a clinician in the neo-Kleinian 

and postmodern study of creativity, in trauma studies in 

relation to cults, and more recently in the findings of the 

new science of creativity. Cult-recovery treatment that 

focuses on the emergence or reemergence of former 

members’ or SGAs’ creativity has been my central clinical 

concern. 

I hope this issue will bring cultic studies to the awareness of 

the new science of creativity as an extreme context within 

which to explore creativity. This special issue reflects a 

sociocultural understanding of creativity, looking at the 

creativity of an individual within the context of the cultic 

environment. My interest is in “cults” and “creativity” as 

separate and interrelated fields of inquiry; it builds not only 

on cultic studies but also on the finding from the science of 

creativity that, because creativity is multifaceted, there is no 

one comprehensive tool to measure and define it. This 

finding is supported by neuroscience’s current belief that 

there is no section of the brain that determines creativity, 

nor have biologists identified a specific gene for creativity. 

Psychodynamic, behavioral, and cognitive approaches to 

psychology have always looked to the individual to define 

creativity, while the new science of creativity also includes 

the fields of sociology, history, and anthropology, thus 

broadening the inquiry. 


I began my thinking about the suppression of creativity in 

cults within the context of my psychoanalytic training at the 

National Institute for the Psychotherapies Training Institute 

in New York City. My thoughts expanded in a chapter I 

contributed to Miguel Perlado’s (2007) Estudios Clinicos 

Sobre Sectas (Clinical Studies on Cults), and I thank him for 

that opportunity; they are now further developed in this 

introduction, as well as in my article in this issue. I have 

enjoyed seeing the positive effects of applying these ideas in 

my clinical work. It has been an honor to work closely with 

the associate editor Libbe Madsen and with the other 

contributors of this special issue, Miguel Perlado, Gillie 

Jenkinson, Colleen Russell, Melinda Haas, Karen Boeri and 

Karen Pressley, Joseph Szimhart, and Steven Gelberg. I 

value having worked with the authors who, drawing on 

professional and, for some, personal experience in cults, turn 

their attention to the individual, social, and cultural 

implications of our theme of cults and creativity. 

My creative journey guest editing this issue began many 

years ago with my fascination with clinical examples Libbe 

Madsen, my professor at the time, drew from her work at 

the Cult Clinic and presented. “Did she say ‘cult clinic’?” I 

wondered as I listened attentively to her lectures. I am 

grateful that the clinic represents an environment where my 

own creativity as a cult therapist with psychoanalytic and 

trauma-studies background flourishes. Many years later, 

occupying Madsen’s position at the clinic after she retired 

across the country, I continue to benefit from her wisdom. 

Spending countless hours, we together reviewed, processed, 

and challenged the contributors, each of whom brought 

different roles, skills, and interests to the task. Such fluidity 

of roles would be impossible in a cult. Madsen’s unobtrusive 

support of my creative process represents one of her own 

finest forms of creativity: her attunement to the need for 

linking thoughts and sentences as invaluable not only in the 

development of coherent writing, but also symbolically, 

parallel to the work of creating order out of the chaos found 

in post-cult recovery. I cannot thank her enough. 

And then came Ashley Allen, BSW student and SGA, pointed 

in the direction of the Cult Clinic by Janja Lalich and invited 

to volunteer by Arnold Markowitz. Her insightful contribution 

to the collation and evaluation of the survey on cults and 

creativity is rich in symbolic meaning. Bringing professional 


and personal interest to the work, she found that the results 

of the survey elicited a range of responses and raised many 

questions for further study. One respondent states that 

creativity is “a bridge between inner and outer experience,” 

reflecting a psychodynamic leaning that echoes my own. 

Respondents overwhelmingly feel creativity is suppressed in 

cults, perhaps because the bridge between internal and 

external has been to varying degrees blocked or severed. As 

one respondent summarizes, “the cult dealt with creativity, 

like all else, as basically about control and manipulation.” 

Contrast this statement with quotes that capture the essence 

of creativity. Writes psychologist Rollo May, “[e]very creative 

encounter is a new event; every time requires another 

assertion of courage. …. To encounter ‘the reality of 

experience’ is surely the basis for all creativity” (1975, p. 

26); and poet T. S. Eliot, “[f]or the pattern is new in every 

moment, and every moment is a new and shocking valuation 

of all we have been” (1943, p. 26). One task of post-cult 

recovery is finding the courage to experience every moment 

as new, without fear of reprisal for noncompliance. 

A very limited minority of survey respondents feel creativity 

is enhanced in cults. For example, 

I was always interested in music, and the 

cult’s leaders (who were professional music 

teachers) encouraged me to learn as much as 

I could and to create music both as a 

composer and a saxophonist, to write and to 

make visual art. I was doing none of these 

things before joining. 

I suggest that in future studies of cults and creativity, 

specific questions that address variations in available time, 

space, degree of isolation, and workload are considered as 

part of assessing the degree to which the individual’s cult 

experience involved suppression or enhancement of 

creativity. 

Oxford Dictionaries define creativity as “the use of the 

imagination or original ideas, especially in the production of 

an artistic work.” Thinking in terms of productivity, former 

members and SGAs might disdainfully say one of the few 

benefits of having been used as slaves in the cult is learning 

certain skills that make them potentially productive in 

mainstream society. These skills are sometimes described as 


“street smarts,” while others cited might be marketing, 

networking, public speaking, cooking, playing new musical 

instruments, and the like. The question is, at what cost 

might the individual gain these skills? 

Recent creativity research by Howard Gruber (1974), based 

on detailed study of Darwin’s journals tracking his 

development of the theory of evolution, replaces the notion 

of the flash of creative insight with a view that sees creative 

products as resulting from long, complex, involved processes 

that incorporate networks of people and long periods of hard 

work, during which many independent but connected miniinsights 

take place (Sawyer, 2006, p. 50). Many former 

members and SGAs speak of various stretches of time during 

which such a process could take place, while always also 

noting that having to meet the leader’s agenda, not to 

mention the constant fear of interruption or redirection, at 

best compromised the experience. 

A Note About the Cults and Creativity Survey 

The survey results are drawn from a qualitative survey of a 

sample of roughly 175 ex-members and mental health 

professionals who, though not representative of the broader 

population of cultists, have considerable expertise or 

experience with cultic environments. These two subject 

populations—ex-members/SGAs and mental health 

professionals—approach the subject from the perspective of 

personal experience in the former and multiple clinical 

observations in the latter. Despite the methodological 

limitations of the survey and the sample, the agreement of 

the two populations does lend some support to the 

hypothesis that cult environments tend to suppress 

creativity. Analyses of the variations within the subject 

sample (e.g., some saw creativity as enhanced) and of 

subjects’ narrative responses help to illuminate various 

aspects of the topic. My psychodynamic analysis of cultic 

environments suggests that one would expect creativity to 

be suppressed. The responses of my subjects were 

consistent with this analysis. Because there is little or no 

empirical work in this area, ours hopefully will inspire further 

study. 


Overview 

This introduction to the special issue of CSR assumes that 

creativity is critical not only for personal well-being but also 

for the enhancement of society. It questions the individual 

and global cost when creativity is a prime target of 

manipulation and control in cults. May (1975) cogently 

states, “Creativity is ... involved in our every experience as 

we try to make meaning in our self-world relationship” (p. 

134); further, “Creative courage is the discovering of new 

forms, new symbols, new patterns on which society can be 

built,” and “in creating new symbols the creative person 

‘lives out of their imaginations’” (pp. 21, 22). The antithesis 

of this is found in cults, as per Robert J. Lifton (1961) who, 

in his seminal Thought Reform and the Psychology of 

Totalism, states, “In cults, the leader systematically causes 

the member’s imagination to become dissociated from actual 

life experiences,” and it “may even tend to atrophy from 

disuse” (p. 430). I suggest that the concept “atrophying of 

imagination” might contribute to our understanding of other 

concepts regarding the impact of cults; namely, a) the 

symbolic death and rebirth of self in relation to totalist 

conversion processes (Stein, 2007, p. 40); b) “the dedicated 

adherent becom[ing] ‘a true believer’ in the sense of being a 

deployable agent for the group or leader” (Lalich, 2004b, p. 

228); and c) “enter[ing] a social psychological state of being 

that [Lalich] calls the bounded choice: in essence, life 

outside the cult has become impossible to imagine” (p. 228). 

For many former members and SGAs, there is a “last 

draw”—a moment or perhaps many, conscious and 

unconscious, whereby fear of the cult leader and the abuse, 

shunning, and expelling of the member from cult by the 

leader’s surrogates leads to self-renunciation of selfexpression 

as part of the bounded choice. Alex Stein 

describes cultic experience as “a pattern … of 

praise/punishment, leniency and assault; build up your ego, 

then break it down in front of a group of people” (Stein, 

2002, p. 304). It is possible to imagine that, during the 

honeymoon stages of the emotional roller coaster ride Stein 

describes, creativity might be enhanced or at least 

experienced as such. Haas in the issue states that technique 

alone can make a commodity, while true creation requires an 

intuitive leap into the unknown. It is interesting to consider 


the moments of possible enhancement of creativity that 

involve solely development of technique rather than true 

creation. 

A moment of great revelation occurred during post-cult 

recovery treatment when a pre-cult award-winning artist 

with whom I work stated, after some years, that she was 

making things in the cult, not in her own creative process. 

Was the revelation that she was making commodities? In my 

view, the idea that what characterizes a cult is not the 

content of the beliefs but the practice of how people are 

treated parallels the notion that what makes something 

creative is not the product but the process. In this issue, 

Jenkinson’s distinction between cult-induced pseudocreativity 

and true creativity perhaps dovetails with these 

suggestions of commodity versus creation, product versus 

process. 

I am interested in exploring how the new recruit is baited 

with the concept of finding personal freedom in the cult, and 

then often brutally subjected to a switch that defies the 

humanistic values first professed. Associating creativity with 

freedom on various levels, I find that the fundamental 

psychological impact of cults on members is dehumanization 

through suppression of the freedom to subjectively 

symbolize experience. I see cult recovery as rehumanization 

through the emergence or reemergence of subjectively 

created symbolic expression. This issue is a monument to 

those who have been subjected to suppression of creativity 

and imagination in cults, and especially to those who still 

struggle with the insidious after-effects. It is also a 

celebration of the resilience of the creative spirit! 

Since research focuses primarily on the artist, this 

introduction often addresses artistic creativity, although the 

results for the most part also apply to everyday creativity— 

where “the process is the product” (Sawyer, 2006, p. 296). I 

have organized the introduction according to key questions 

and concepts I developed in my exploration of cults and 

creativity as separate yet interrelated phenomena. These 

questions and concepts include the following: 

1. What is meant by creativity? 

2. What is the new science of creativity? 

3. Why is the study of creativity significant? 


4. Cult Recovery Model: Humanism, Dehumanization 

and Rehumanization. 

5. “Joy Stopping” as an extension of “Thought and 

Feeling Stopping” 

6. “Gap” and Combinatory Processes as integral to 

symbol formation. 

7. Denial of loss, filling of gap, and vulnerability to 

impairment of symbol formation. 

8. Multidisciplinary emphasis on emotion and cognition 

as intrinsic to creativity. 

1. What Is Meant by Creativity? 

I explore the concepts of cult and creativity in this 

introduction as two separate yet interrelated areas of study. 

This special issue of CSR helps introduce the field of cultic 

studies to the new science of creativity—a discipline that 

arose in the 1980s. Researchers in this new discipline have 

started asking the questions “How are you creative?” rather 

than “Are you creative?”; and “Where is creativity?” rather 

than “What is creativity?” Is motivation for creativity intrinsic 

or situational (Gardner, 1993, p. 37)? I suggest that an 

understanding of the vicissitudes of creativity within the 

extreme setting of the totalist environment of cults can 

greatly inform the science of creativity as it explores the 

individualist versus contextualist perspectives of creativity. 

This approach reflects a sociocultural view of creativity that 

considers equally the individual, the domain (particular areas 

of mastery with specific symbolic systems such as painting 

that include a history of innovators, of techniques, and of 

values), and the field (the judges within society’s 

institutions, such as museums, art institutes, and so on) that 

determines whether a domain will allow change within it. 

Why, for instance, was Cubism allowed to shift the domain of 

painting and the course of the history of art thereafter? 

Howard Gardner (1993, p. 9), creativity researcher and 

psychologist, extends Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s (1993, p. 

38) schema to illustrate the sociocultural understanding of 

the components of creativity—i.e., the individual, the 

domain, and the field (figures 1 and 2). 


Figure 1. Schema by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi 

(I suggest Cult occupies the position of Field in Figure 1.) 

Figure 2. Schema by Howard Gardner 

(I suggest Cult occupies the position of Other Persons as 

judges in Figure 2. Figures reproduced by Jeff Gherman.) 

Figures Copyright © 757400400000 Howard 

Gardner. Reprinted by permission of Basic 

Books, a member of the Perseus Books Group. 

A sociocultural approach to understanding creativity looks at 

both the individual’s creativity in terms of talent, biography, 

personality, and brain function, among other factors, and at 

a broader societal context that includes “social factors like 

collaboration, networks of support, education, and cultural 

background” (Sawyer, 2006, p. 4). Writes Csikszentimihalyi 

(1996), 


the point is not that external opportunities 

determine a person’s creativity. The claim is 

more modest, but still extremely important: 

No matter how gifted a person is, he or she 

has no chance to achieve anything creative 

unless the right conditions are provided by the 

field. … It is possible to single out seven major 

elements in the social milieu that help make 

creative contributions possible: training, 

expectations, resources, recognition, hope, 

opportunity, and reward. (p. 330) 

He further states, “it is impossible to understand creativity 

without understanding how fields operate, how they decide 

whether something new should or should not be added to 

the domain” (1996, p. 330). 

Cult, thought of as a symbolic system (Lalich, 2004), can be 

placed in the position of field in the creativity triangle since 

the cult leader as “field” attempts to control the creation and 

use of members’ symbolic expression. According to the 

postmodern thinking of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, “any 

culture may be looked upon as an ensemble of symbolic 

systems, in the front rank of which are to be found 

language, marriage laws, economic relations, art, science, 

and religion” (Laplanche and Pontalis, p. 440). Using the 

three-part schema, one might say that the domain—the 

particular symbolic system of an art form such as painting, 

in which the individual member is well trained, is co-opted 

by the particular symbolic system of the cult in its position 

as field. The individual’s creativity is then subject to this 

“self-sealing environment,” to use Lalich’s term. I situate 

psychodynamic, cognitive, and neuroscientific aspects of 

creativity within the individual pole of the schema, asking 

what impact the cultic system, field, has on those aspects 

explored within those fields. 

I contextualize my thinking of cults as the field that 

professes higher purpose within Lalich’s (2004b) description 

of cults as symbolic systems in which transcendent belief 

represents a “symbol system provid[ing] a template for 

going beyond the ordinary everyday reality; offer[ing] grand 

solutions by means of authoritative concepts and persuasive 

imagery” (p. 232). Her discussion of the member’s devotion 

to the transcendent belief that will bring personal freedom 


eminds me of the common notion of the artist’s and 

creative person’s urgency for personal freedom and 

passionate encounter with experience. It suggests one 

reason cults might appeal to the artist in particular, 

especially when the cult uses the arts as proselytizing 

vehicles, unbeknownst to the new recruit. 

The search for personal and universal freedom that finds a 

cult fully aligns with the humanistic and perhaps 

counterculture values of the 1960s. Singer (1995), 

describing this period, states, 

...a new set of disturbances in U.S. culture 

welled up during the 1960s with the expansion 

of an unpopular war in Southeast Asia, 

massive upheavals over civil rights, and a 

profound crisis in values defined by 

unprecedented affluence on the one hand and 

potential thermonuclear holocaust on the 

other. These glaring contradictions aggravated 

an already disjointed society into an even 

more unsettled state. (p. 36) 

She continues that the 1960s were “fertile ground for cults. 

… As the nation went through massive social and political 

changes … the social climate was ripe for cult leaders to 

appear” (p. 37). 

In other parts of society, skeptical “critical theory” was 

developing within the antiauthoritarian movement of the 

1960s; while in contrast, within the walls of cults, the cult 

leader was viewed as owner of knowledge and language, and 

author of all doctrine. Radical changes occurred within the 

domains of theater, such as in the drama of Pinter, Becket, 

and others; at the same time within cults, the domain of 

theater, among others, reflected the vision of the cult 

leader’s mission. 

According to Sally Francis, former member of the Fourth 

Wall Repertory Company of the Sullivanians, early on during 

auditions, sketch artists performed cutting-edge material 

that caught the attention of Second City producers (2007, 

personal communication). At the coercive prompting of Joan 

Harvey, one of the leaders, members turned down this 

opportunity and instead remained with the theater that soon 

became a vehicle for repetitive, rhetorical material that 


Harvey controlled. By contrast, Russell, in this issue, cites 

that being given permission to explore and question within 

the context of an acting studio facilitated her departure from 

Eckankar, where she too suffered suppression of her 

creativity. 

The potential severity of this control of creativity in cults is 

well expressed by one survey respondent, who writes, 

Creativity wasn't suppressed... it was coopted, 

harnessed, used, channeled... from an 

emotional level, I want to use the word 

“raped”… 

In cults, when the leader tells people they are or are not 

creative (Aesthetic Realism is notorious for this), we must 

ask, “According to what and whose definition of creativity?” 

Turning to the science of creativity to support the assertion 

that creativity is multifaceted and cannot be 

comprehensively defined, I list three salient findings 

(Treffinger, Young, Selby, & Shepardson, 2002) that are 

most relevant to my inquiry into the impact of cults on 

creativity: 1) “No one person possesses all the 

characteristics, nor does anyone display them all the time” 

(p. viii); 2) “No single assessment instrument or test 

provides evidence about all the possible meanings or 

elements associated with the construct of creativity” (p. xiii); 

and 3) “The definition you adopt will determine the factors or 

characteristics you consider to be essential to 

understanding” (p. viii). Creativity researchers argue that 

“any one indicator does not generalize across all domains of 

creative performance or accomplishment, nor does it assess 

all the elements of creativity” (p. 28). Further, no part of the 

brain, nor a distinct gene has been identified as a marker for 

creativity. Recently, The New York Times reported that 

scientists are trying for the first time to track neurology of 

the creative process in the brain by observing “biochemicals, 

electrical impulses, and regions”; and the closing statement 

by an MIT professor of cognitive neuroscience is “It seems 

that to be creative is to be something we don’t have a test 

for” (Cohen, 2010). 

I stress these findings to underscore the presumptuousness 

of cult leaders defining who is and who is not creative. 

Further, we must recognize that in this issue and the recent 


cults and creativity study, the definition of creativity as 

freedom to imagine, feel, and express one’s internal world is 

reflective of a Western humanistic conception of creativity at 

this particular time in history and is not comprehensive. In 

any case, this precise definition is particularly relevant to 

cultic studies. When freedom is at stake, creativity is at 

stake. 

Lifton writes: “...penetration by the psychological forces of 

the environment into the inner emotions of the individual 

person is perhaps the outstanding psychiatric fact of thought 

reform” (1961, p. 66). Speaking of two of his subjects in his 

study on POWs in China in the 1950s, upon which he based 

his theories about cults, he writes, 

Each was reduced to something not fully 

human and yet not quite animal, no longer the 

adult and yet not quite the child; instead, an 

adult human was placed in the position of an 

infant or a subhuman animal, helplessly being 

manipulated by larger and stronger “adults” or 

“trainers.” Placed in this regressive stance, 

each felt himself deprived of the power, 

mastery, and selfhood of adult existence. 

In both, an intense struggle began between 

the adult man and the child-animal which had 

been created, a struggle against regression 

and dehumanization. (p. 67) 

Building upon Lifton’s description of thought reform in this 

extreme circumstance as a dehumanizing process, my thesis 

is that dehumanization occurs in cults by suppression of 

symbol formation to communicate subjective feeling, and 

therefore creativity. Lifton's identification of “the loading of 

language” as one criterion of mind control specifically speaks 

to the replacing of subjectively created symbolic language 

with what he describes as “thought-terminating cliché. The 

most far-reaching and complex of human problems are 

compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding 

phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed. These 

become the start and finish of any ideological analysis” (p. 

429). 

Particularly cogent to an understanding of loading the 

language as a vehicle for dehumanization in cults is that 


“man is the symbol-using (symbol-making, symbolmisusing) 

animal” (Burke, 1966, p. 16). Sawyer (2006), 

speaking from an anthropological perspective, states that 

In The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin 

speculated on the evolution of art, suggesting 

that our sense of beauty is shared with other 

animals including birds and apes, and that 

music was the origin of human language. (p. 

90) 

Sawyer says that experts disagree about when, where, and 

how creative and symbolic thinking first occurred. People 

closely resembling modern humans appeared more than 

130,000 years ago. Many cave paintings in Europe date 

back 20,000 years, but other creative objects were found 

from much earlier periods, and some claim that artifacts 

possessing esthetic qualities appeared as far back as 

2,000,000 years. Whatever the historical truth, it is clear 

that artistic sensibilities have deep roots in human evolution. 

Csikszentmihalyi (1996) discusses humans as having the 

particular sensory equipment to create symbols as a way to 

make sense of the world, linking this capacity to the 

development of domains. He states, 

[T]he knowledge conveyed by symbols is 

bundled up in discrete domains— geometry, 

music, religion, legal systems, and so on. Each 

domain is made up of its own symbolic 

elements, its own rules, and generally has its 

own system of notation. ... The existence of 

domains is perhaps the best evidence of 

human creativity. (p. 37) 

The notion of man as the symbol-using animal underlies a 

key premise of this introduction and my article in this issue— 

i.e., that cults often dehumanize members by impairing, 

suppressing, restricting members’ subjective creation of 

symbols. 

Philosopher Susanne Langer, who has wide-ranging influence 

on the neo-Kleinian and postmodern orientations of 

psychoanalysis upon which I draw, expounded upon the 

salience of symbol use as intrinsically human. Her thinking 

draws on Sigmund Freud and Alfred Whitehead. The views of 

all three thinkers focus on the interdependence of thought 


and emotion for symbol formation and use as a feature of 

mental health. The fate of these mental processes in cults 

thus informs this discussion about the impact of cults on 

creativity. 

I was interested to learn that the term creativity was 

associated with demonic possession in Greek and Roman 

times; and during the Christian Middle Ages it was thought 

that creativity was associated only with the divine, that only 

the divine creates. During the Renaissance it was believed 

that art production was all about reason. It is only since the 

Romantic Period 200 years ago that emotion and 

imagination have been of interest to the arts and humanities 

(Sawyer, 2006). It is interesting that across several fields— 

history of Western art and philosophy, humanistic and 

psychodynamic psychology, and neuroscience—emotion 

increasingly is becoming central in the study of the creative 

process. 

Csikszentmihalyi (1996) notes that, “in cultures that are 

uniform and rigid, it takes a greater investment of attention 

to achieve new ways of thinking” (p. 9). Preoccupation with 

fear of being thrown out of the cult or otherwise distanced 

from receiving the leader’s love and approval often precludes 

the attention or state of uninterrupted concentration 

necessary for creativity. As one respondent said, “. . .the 

emotional energy of trying to live every day while in this 

group left little energy for or desire to be creative.” 

Csikszentmihalyi (1996) eloquently argues for the 

significance of studying creativity, stating, “. . . the most 

important message we can learn from creative people is how 

to find purpose and enjoyment in the chaos of existence” (p. 

20). Many people, particularly those self defined as creative, 

are drawn to cults precisely out of the desire to find purpose 

and enjoyment in the chaos of existence. Often it is not 

until post-cult recovery that a former member recognizes 

that their pre-cult internal and/or external experience of 

chaos is not solved but rather masked or even repeated 

within the cult. Russell in this issue observes how the 

pathogenic beliefs developed by an early trauma were 

reinforced while she was in a cult. 

I now turn to Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of “flow” to 

elucidate our theme of cults and creativity. His model looks 

at societal institutions to determine whether flow or 


creativity is promoted. He suggests that better training, 

higher expectations, more accurate recognition, a greater 

availability of opportunities, and stronger rewards are among 

the conditions that facilitate the production and assimilation 

of potentially useful new ideas. His research suggests to him 

that in addition to these factors, the experience of creativity 

as flow results from inward motivation as well as a perfect 

match between the challenge of a task and the individual’s 

level of skill (1993, pp 200-201). And, in a later book, 

(1996) Csikszentmihalyi writes, “If too few opportunities for 

curiosity are available, if too many obstacles are placed in 

the way of risk and exploration, the motivation to engage in 

creative behavior is easily extinguished” (p. 11). 

Perlado’s (2004) [S1] description of cult involvement as an 

addiction relates to Csikszentmihalyi’s description of seeking 

flow as a potentially addictive high. 

One might say that, as a species, we are 

addicted to flow. It is that condition that has 

enabled us to evolve to the point at which we 

are now, and it is why we may change into 

even more complex beings in the future. 

Ideally, we can derive such deeply satisfying 

experiences from the real challenges of 

everyday life, from work, from creative 

expression, from family relationships, and 

from friendship. If we can’t, then we will 

continue to invent substitutes such as 

chemicals or rituals that will project 

phantasms of flow onto our consciousness. 

Because, however, some of these substitutes 

can be very dangerous, it is worth 

considering.” (Csikszentmihalyi. 1993, pp. 

198-9) 

Csikszentmihalyi (1996) discusses the spontaneous passion 

of flow as an optimal experience that involves effortless 

concentration and enjoyment. He refers to the hard work 

that along with joy is intrinsic to creativity, and states, 

“creative individuals. . . show how joyful and interesting 

complex symbolic activity is” (p. 125). Some cults refer to 

themselves as “school” and their mission as “the work,” 

deceptively recruiting creatively motivated and hard-working 

students who seek the rigor of training and joy that leads to 


the experience of flow. Instead, the member often faces an 

imperfect match between challenge of task and skill level as 

well as an environment that discourages curiosity. 

According to Csikszentmihalyi, this leads to anxiety or 

boredom, the two emotional states that indicate an absence 

of flow and therefore a lack of well-being. (p. 111) 

Addressing obstacles to flow, one survey respondent writes: 

While a member of the church, my "artistic 

flow" decreased incredibly. Before joining I 

would write poetry and stories as well as 

produce drawings on a frequent basis. After 

joining, my inspiration nearly disappeared. I 

was able to direct this in some ways to my 

faith but it still took a toll. 

In the following section, I discuss a key element of flow, 

“ecstasy,” within the context of various schools of thought 

that contribute to the individualistic aspects of understanding 

creativity. In section five I link the potentially addictive state 

of flow to what I call the compulsive passion in cults, which I 

contrast with the joy or spontaneous passion of flow and 

creativity. 

2. Science of Creativity: Contextualist/Individualist 

Perspectives on Creativity 

The contextualist view refers to the sociocultural schema 

that emerged out of the new science of creativity with the 

works of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Howard Gardner, Keith 

Sawyer, and others. According to Sawyer, “…[C]reativity … is 

a culturally and historically specific idea that changes from 

one country to another, and from one century to another” 

(2006, p. 36). He states earlier in his text, “I explain 

creativity by bringing together psychological studies of 

individuals, sociological studies of creating in groups, and 

anthropological studies of how people from different cultural 

and social backgrounds perceive and value creative products 

differently” (p. 4). 

Using the individual/domain/field schema, Csikszentmihalyi 

(1996) provides an excellent analysis of creativity within a 

particular time in history by discussing Renaissance 

Florence. He writes, 


Of course, the great works of Florentine art 

would never have been made just because the 

domain of classical art had been rediscovered, 

or because the rulers of the city had decided 

to make it beautiful. Without the individual 

artist the Renaissance could not have taken 

place. … At the same time, it must be 

recognized that without previous models and 

the support of the city, Brunelleschi [architect 

of the dome for the Duomo of Florence] and 

Ghiberti [sculptor of bronze doors for the 

Baptistery] could not have done what they did. 

And with the favorable conjunction of field and 

domain, if these two artists had not been 

born, some others would have stepped in their 

place and built the dome and the doors. It is 

because of this inseparable connection that 

creativity must, in the last analysis, be seen 

not as something happening within a person 

but in the relationships within a system. (p. 

36) 

My focus on the individualist view from a psychodynamic 

perspective as both a clinical social worker and 

psychoanalyst is embedded in a person-in-environment 

perspective that considers home and society essential 

components of the individual’s psychological development. I 

therefore align with the sociocultural approach and here 

present a detailed exploration of the various disciplines that 

contribute to my focus on the individualist view within the 

broader schema. These disciplines include humanistic 

psychology and the work of thinkers such as Rollo May, Carl 

Rogers, Morris Stein; research psychology and the work of 

researchers such as Graham Wallas, J. P. Guilford, Ellis Paul 

Torrance; psychoanalysis (thinking) and theorists such as 

Melanie Klein, Donald Winnicott, Wilfred Bion, Susan Deri, 

Hannah Segal, Eric Rayner, Jacques Lacan; and neuroscience 

and the work of Antonio Damasio and Joseph LeDoux, which 

I explore below. 

The eight authors in this issue vary in their emphasis on an 

individualist versus contextualist view of creativity. They 

approach the theme from different combinations of 

psychological, sociological, communications, art historical, 

and philosophical perspectives. 


Miguel Perlado is a psychoanalyst who used a multifamily 

approach for an exit intervention with the families of both 

members and leader of a music cult. In his paper, he 

creatively links cult dynamics with the clinical concept of folie 

a deux. He presents an extensive literature review of the 

concept of folie and demonstrates its usefulness in 

understanding the reciprocity of influence between leader 

and followers. Perlado writes, “…a group that formed to 

create music with an emphasis on spontaneity paradoxically 

developed into a cult-like group that undermined and 

controlled the members’ creativity.” The individual musicians 

began studying with this teacher because he spoke of 

musical innovations such as novel rhythms. In time, the 

teacher who became the cult leader controlled the lives of 

the members by inflicting ongoing physical, sexual, and 

emotional punishment. Perlado’s discussion of the 

importance of two chance encounters as part of the creative 

unfolding of the exit intervention reflects the recurring 

theme of tolerating uncertainty as a key criterion of 

creativity. 

Dana Wehle draws on neo-Kleinian and postmodern 

psychoanalytic theory to discuss her primary concern—i.e., 

the individual’s capacity for symbol creation and use as 

characteristically human and intrinsic to creativity. From the 

neo-Kleinian school, she draws on Segal, Bion, Winnicott, 

Milner, Grotstein, and others for whom emphases on the 

emergence of subjective meaning through symbol creation 

and use, processes of intermediation between internal and 

external realities, and development of a creative relation to 

the world are central. She discusses two potential forms of 

unconscious communication involving empathy—total and 

trial projective identification—the first of which leads to loss 

of boundaries that allows for domination and submission, 

and the second of which can be used to inform one about 

another’s experience while maintaining autonomy. From the 

postmodern school, Wehle draws on Jacques Lacan, Michel 

Foucault, and others, emphasizing postmodern 

psychoanalysis’ focus on broader culture and how the power 

of language controls the individual, social relations, and 

society. Building on values such as the relativity of meaning, 

an appreciation of uncertainty, and “the presence of the 

absence” discussed in particular by Lacan, she discusses the 

music cult exited by Perlado by applying four hypotheses she 


developed regarding the degree to which the following 

criteria of creativity are met or impinged upon in open 

versus cultic environments: 1) mourning of loss, 2) tolerance 

of lack/unfilling of gap, 3) tolerance of opposition, and 4) 

tolerance of uncertainty. 

Gillie Jenkinson, a psychotherapist and former cult member, 

draws on the psychological theories of Winnicott, Perls, and 

Rogers, and on Lifton’s eight criteria of mind control to 

examine the way her own creativity was suppressed while in 

The Love of God Community. She poetically writes that the 

member’s “creativity was hijacked for the purposes of the 

group.” She refers to the singing, dancing, and beautiful 

needlework done by cult members as products of cultinduced 

pseudo-creativity, in service to the needs of the 

group, while they often suffered physical and emotional 

punishment used to exercise control over individual 

members. Jenkinson notes that recovery from the cult 

experience means reconnecting with the pre-cult personality 

and developing a post-cult identity, and presents examples 

of her clinical work, including use of dreams and sand tray 

painting, to help her clients access true creativity and begin 

to heal and move forward in their lives. She goes on to say 

that the “bounded choice” the cult member makes, reflected 

in part by the development of cult-induced pseudocreativity, 

may only be determined by each individual from 

the perspective of post-cult recovery. 

Colleen Russell is a psychotherapist and former cult member 

whose creatively written case study makes palpable the 

nuances of how an environment can be either suppressive or 

conducive to the unfolding of creativity. She draws on her 

personal experience of creativity being suppressed while she 

was involved with Eckancar to present her belief that 

"corrective emotional experiences"—a concept first posited 

by Franz Alexander and Thomas Morton French that became 

a central element in Control-Mastery theory—are critical for 

recovery. In addition to personal therapy, her own selfdiscovery 

was enhanced while she was participating in an 

intensive acting studio, particularly in her applying ideas 

from a Jungian perspective to her performance in Ingmar 

Bergman’s short story “The Touch.” She writes that the safe 

community of the acting studio, in contrast to the repressive 

environment of Eckankar, allowed a creative process of 

character study that enabled her to disconfirm the 


internalized pathogenic beliefs and, she writes, “helped me 

reconnect with myself and heal from trauma.” 

Melinda Haas, a Jungian analyst, addresses how 

contemporary Western culture limits creativity and increases 

vulnerability to the appeal of cults. She identifies a onesidedness 

in Western culture in which the rational and logical 

are privileged. People today yearn for both spiritual 

expansiveness and its contrast of containment, and they 

often turn to groups they later discover to be cults. Haas 

suggests that it may be the creative person who is more 

deprived of finding what she needs in the culture and is thus 

more inclined to seek answers that might lead to cults. She 

notes that these and other individual “cult seekers” are 

themselves caught in this one-sidedness and asks how to 

move the culture and society to more wholeness. Haas 

presents two examples of composers (Ludwig van Beethoven 

and Olivier Messiaen) for whom confinement did not restrict 

their previously established connection to the Jungian 

concept of “psyche,” and who were therefore still able to 

compose. Distinguishing between Jung’s concepts of “ego” 

vs. “psyche,” Haas writes, 

Gustav Mahler once wrote, “The symphony is 

the world. It must contain everything within it” 

(Greenberg, 2001). He is telling us about 

psyche. Our definition reminds us that psyche 

contains everything, including ego. Surely one 

cannot produce a “creation” without using ego 

functions. Where would the artist be without 

technique; without tools, instruments, rules, 

rights and wrongs; without relying on what he 

or she knows? But if the creator stops there, 

the result will be a commodity, an ego product 

that has not been allowed to make the 

intuitive leap into the unknown. 

Thus, for both Beethoven and Messiaen, intimate 

relationship with their own self-identities provided a degree 

of protection from the destructive impact of their confining 

or controlling conditions and even propelled greater 

creativity. 

Miriam Boeri, a sociologist, and Karen Pressley, a graduate 

student in professional writing, and both former cult 

members, use concepts from the fields of sociology and 


communication to examine the ways that cults suppress the 

natural human inclination to make meaning—i.e., to create. 

They give examples from their own experience of harsh 

punishment from leadership directly related to creative 

endeavors. Pressley was demoted by the leader, Miscavige, 

from prominent art-related positions within Scientology, 

while Boeri’s writing of a children’s book while a member of 

Children of God became the theme of one of David Berg’s 

very critical “Mo letters.” Their theoretical view begins with 

the symbolic interactionist perspective that a sense of self 

develops in a social context. This context is shaped by power 

dynamics that offer more or less freedom of thought, with 

cults considered total institutions and located at the more 

controlling end of the continuum. The power hierarchies of 

cults deprive members of sovereignty over their creative 

selves, as described in the authors’ Hegemonic 

Communication Model and illustrated by two figures in their 

article. Both Boeri in The Children of God and Pressley in 

Scientology were initially controlled by these hierarchies, but 

over time managed the creative solution of developing what 

the authors call a “secret creative self” that eventually 

enabled their departures. For each, the process of recovery 

was based on reclaiming self-sovereignty and, further, led to 

increased resilience in the face of power demands and 

increased confidence in her creativity. 

Joseph Szimhart, an exit counselor, painter, and former cult 

member, presents his view of the aesthetic impulse as an 

effort to make meaning and to make special, and thus as 

intrinsically related to the spiritual. He shares the view of 

Ellen Dissanayake that the aesthetic impulse is an 

evolutionary given, part of an impulse to survive. Developing 

his own art work, Szimhart followed a number of artists, 

particularly Nicholas Roerich, in pursuing the teachings of 

Theosophy, including Blavatsky, a connection that led him to 

Elizabeth Prophet and Church Universal and Triumphant. He 

examines his own intense personality change through the 

process of embracing a path, recognizing its restrictions, and 

finding a way out, illustrated by colorful examples. While in 

these groups, he was told what paint colors he could and 

could not use; and he had great fear, guilt, and shame if he 

disobeyed. He writes, “We make a transcendental idea or 

experience special by surrounding it with myth, ritual, and 

devotion. The form and activity it takes is the cult or 


eligion. To me, this is similar to a creative impulse that 

must risk manifestation in form to succeed or fail—to be 

realized, to mean something, to live or die." He notes the 

irony that “Aha!” moments were part of both his conversion 

process into the cult and also of his recovery when, triggered 

by a color, he was able to make new connections outside the 

cult perspective. 

Steven Gelberg, photographer, student of theology, and 

former cult member, begins with the belief that for any 

action to be creative requires that the creator be relatively 

free, externally and particularly internally. Using as an 

example his seventeen years with ISKCON, the Hare Krishna 

movement, he contrasts the ways a cult member’s freedom 

is ostensibly supported but in reality is controlled. He 

believes most basically that artistic creation is an expression 

of the personal, of the individual’s own experience, while a 

cult demands creation in service to the higher purpose of the 

group. The truly creative act comes from the authentic self, 

from focusing on what is unique within. An independent 

person is free to enjoy the beauty and majesty of the 

temporal world, for example, while the cult member must 

avoid sensory gratification in favor of what is deemed 

valuable by the leader. Growing disillusionment led to 

Gelberg’s departure from ISKCON, at which point he 

celebrated his discovery of the value and pleasure of 

uncertainty. He studied theology, and then, wanting a more 

bodily involvement with the physical world, moved on to 

photography, which became a means of personal healing. 

His article includes a personal credo of photography that 

reclaims for him both the perception and expression of his 

authentic self. 

At this juncture I present four examples of Individualist 

perspectives. They are Psychodynamic/Psychoanalytic, 

Psychological Creativity Stage Models, Neuroscientific, and 

Cognitive. iii 

Lifton (1961) writes, 

Psychodynamic/Psychoanalytic 

The ethos of psychoanalysis and of its derived 

psychotherapies is in direct opposition to that 

of totalism. Indeed, its painstaking and 

sympathetic investigations of single human 


minds place it within the direct tradition of 

those Western intellectual currents which 

historically have done most to counter 

totalism: humanism, individualism, and free 

scientific inquiry. (p. 446) 

As opposed to classical psychoanalysis, contemporary 

psychoanalysis fully situates itself in a person-inenvironment 

framework, and the unconscious is viewed not 

only as a site of repression, but as the source of generative 

and ongoing creativity experienced in the form of dreams, 

fantasies, slips of the tongue, metaphor, metonymy, and so 

on. Reflecting this view, Joseph Newirth (2003) discusses 

changes in "the psychoanalytic concept of the unconscious, 

from a view of the unconscious as [only] a center of 

pathological relatedness to a view of the unconscious as a 

developing structure that is a source of creativity, strength, 

and energy” (p. xviii). In contemporary approaches, 

interpretation of symbols is no longer attached to set 

meaning related to repression of sexual and aggressive 

drives. Creativity researchers from other disciplines within 

psychology today incorporate the concept of the unconscious 

within the stage of creativity they call “incubation,” to be 

further discussed here within the context of psychological 

models of creativity. This is important to our discussion of 

cults and creativity because it is this unrepressed 

unconscious—the source of creativity—that becomes 

suppressed in cults. In fact, cult leaders often proclaim that 

they are the source of all creativity. 

As noted earlier, a pioneer in the study of symbol formation 

and a great influence on the neo-Kleinian school of 

psychoanalysis, philosopher Suzanne Langer (1942), built 

upon early 20 th century philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, 

sharing his belief that “philosophy is based not on reason 

alone, but one that includes ... ‘feeling.’ ...not simply 

affect...” but “...the total capacity of the human organism to 

experience his or her world” (Whitehead, in May, 1975/1994, 

p. 134). This emphasis on emotion is a recent addition to the 

history of Western philosophy. Langer (1942) also drew on 

Freud, stating, 

The great contribution of Freud to the 

philosophy of mind has been the realization 

that human behavior is not only a food-getting 


strategy, but is also a language; that every 

move is at the same time a gesture. 

Symbolization is both an end and an 

instrument. (p. 26) 

Langer develops Freud’s belief in “the fundamentally 

symbolic function of the mind” (p. 51) and writes, “the 

power of using symbol makes [man] lord of the earth” (p. 

26). 

Describing Langer’s work, Eric Rayner (1995) states that she 

has had a far-reaching influence on psychoanalytic thinking 

with her views that symbol formation differentiates humans 

from animals, and that art is a symbol of feeling. She 

categorizes language into two forms: discursive and 

presentational, whereby “she makes it plain that 

psychoanalytic symbols are essentially presentational. … 

[and] presentational symbolism, and metaphor in particular, 

is the central verbal means of communicating affects” (p. 

17). 

Rycroft (1968), drawing on Langer states, “the various 

‘impractical’ apparently unbiological activities of man, such 

as religion, magic, art, dreaming, and symptom-formation … 

arise from a basic human need to symbolize and 

communicate, and are really languages” (p. 61). Thinking 

about the rituals in cults within this context underscores the 

harm done when “the human need to symbolize and 

communicate” is so methodically compromised. 

Describing presentational symbolism, Langer (1942) states 

that “outside of the rational domain is the inexpressible 

realm of feeling, of formless desires and satisfactions, 

immediate experience, forever incognito and 

incommunicado,” and this is what therapy seeks to help the 

patient formulate and/or experience (p. 86). 

Winnicott, who has written vastly about “transitional objects” 

and other aspects of symbol formation and use, offers a 

clear understanding of the task of symbolic processing when 

he states (1971), “the individual is engaged in the perpetual 

human task of keeping inner and outer reality separate yet 

interrelated” (p. 2). Similarly, psychoanalyst Susan Deri 

(1984) notes that “since the specifically human mode of 

communication is symbolic, symbolization is the central issue 

in human psychology” (p. 61). I believe that since feelings 


are both dictated and minimized in cults, understanding the 

importance of symbol formation and its mechanisms based 

on Langer and other theorists cited offers much to post-cult 

recovery. 

Deri, in the Kleinian psychodynamic tradition, sees the 

capacity for symbol formation and use as integral to wellbeing; 

she states, 

symbols both link the person to the 

environment and provide the basis for 

communication with the self. It is through 

symbols that we become in touch with 

ourselves. (p. 29) 

Further, neo-Kleinian Wilfred Bion states, “the mind is an 

instrument for thinking about emotional experiences" (in 

Meltzer and Harris, 1988, p. 7), and further suggests, “when 

the [symbol-forming] linking function between subject and 

environment is severed, when the environment fails to 

contain the subject’s unmanageable and powerful emotions, 

one effect is that the impulse of curiosity on which all 

learning depends” is disturbed (Bion, 1950). Former 

members/SGAs often say that it was easier to stop thinking 

for themselves than to face their cult-induced pervasive 

fears as built upon pre-cult personality. In terms of how this 

plays out in cults, Conway and Siegelman quote Patrick, who 

states, “Thinking to a cult member is like being stabbed in 

the heart with a dagger. It's very painful because they've 

been told that the mind is Satan and thinking is the 

machinery of the Devil" (p. 60). 

Newirth (2003) reflects both neo-Kleinian and postmodern 

thinking with which I fully align my views. He states, 

“Th[is] model of the person as subject reflects 

a postmodern focus on language, the 

ambiguity of meaning, the existence of 

multiple realities, issues of political and 

personal power, and the pervasive impact of 

culture in defining psychic and material reality. 

… A critical element in the views of the person 

as a subject, and one that defines the 

postmodern perspective, is an emphasis on 

language as a means of creating meaning and 

reality and as a powerful tool influencing and 


controlling the other’s experience of self and 

reality. … The Kleinian approach does not 

focus on the discovery and clarification of past 

or present experience, but rather on the 

development of symbolic experience that leads 

to the development of a new psychological 

entity, the person as a subject. Ogden (1992) 

captures this important element in the Kleinian 

view of the psychoanalytic process when he 

says that ‘analysis is not simply a method of 

uncovering the hidden; it is more importantly 

a process of creating an analytic subject who 

had not previously existed.’ (pp. 37-38, 41) 

There is an overlap with respect to emphasis on emotions 

and self-realization between psychoanalysis and humanism. 

May states, “There are now Rorschach responses, for 

example, that indicate that people can more accurately 

observe precisely when they are emotionally involved—that 

is, reason works better when emotions are present…” (p. 

49). And he sees the “[c]reative process [as] represent[ing] 

the highest degree of emotional health, as an act of selfactualization” 

(p. 40). Similarly, Rycroft states, 

“Psychoanalysis interprets human behavior in terms of the 

self that experiences it … and regards th[at] self as a 

psychobiological entity which is always striving for selfrealization 

and self-fulfillment” (1966, p. 20). This idea links 

to the discussion below about the prominent place emotion 

now holds within neuroscientific research on creativity. 

Lalich (2004b) describes Lifton’s concept of “personal 

closure” by stating, 

the person turns inward, refusing to look at or 

consider other ideas, beliefs, or options. The 

personal closure that is the culmination of 

cultic life is profoundly confining because the 

individual is closed to both the outside world 

and her or his own inner life. (p. 243) 

Within the individual component of the sociocultural schema, 

“inner life” is part of the emotional realm that is addressed 

by psychodynamic, neuroscientific, and, more recently, 

cognitive approaches to creativity. 


Psychological Creativity Stage Models 

According to Csikszentmihalyi (2006), 

Most problems are already formulated; 

everybody knows what is to be done and only 

the solution is missing. … But there are also 

situations in which nobody has asked the 

question yet, nobody even knows that there is 

a problem. In this case the creative person 

identifies both the problem and the solution. 

(p. 95) 

Building on this view, Sawyer notes that problem solving is 

equated with convergent thinking and problem finding with 

divergent thinking, and that most creativity researchers view 

both aspects as intrinsic to creativity (p. 73). For problem 

finding, formulating good questions is a primary way that 

creativity is manifest. Because questioning is forbidden in 

cults, I suggest that divergent problem finding is greatly 

challenged. A recent Newsweek article discusses the work of 

creativity researcher Mark Runco, stating, “the inability to 

conceive of alternative approaches [via divergent thinking] … 

leads to despair”; he considers the “alternation between 

divergent and convergent thinking” as intrinsic to “original 

and useful ideas, the very definition of creativity” (Bronson 

and Merryman, 2010). 

In this section, I examine psychological creativity stage 

models to consider which might support creative functioning 

in a cult, and which stages might present potential obstacles. 

Particularly relevant to our theme are those stages of 

creativity that describe combinatory processes since cultic 

thinking, language, and practice are characterized by rigidity 

and lack of flow. A section is fully devoted to combinatory 

processes below. 

A key cognitive capability is combining disparate elements to 

create meaning, such as through metaphor or analogy. 

Wallas’ (1926) four-step model of the creative process, is 

considered a standard and includes preparation (“detecting a 

problem and gathering data”), incubation (“stepping away 

from the problem for a period of time”), illumination (“a new 

idea or solution emerges, often unexpectedly”), and 

verification (“the new idea or solution is examined or 

tested”) (Treffinger, et al., 2002, p. 34). I will discuss the 


stages relevant to potential stifling of feeling and thought in 

cults. When applying these concepts about creativity to 

cults, it is important to remember that ongoing research 

from the 1950s to the present continues to conclude that 1) 

the definition of creativity is multifaceted and cannot be 

comprehensively measured; 2) some areas of creativity such 

as marketing or business are easier to quantitatively study 

than others such as poetry or dance; 3) cults vary in general 

according to severity of harm inflicted and specifically 

regarding creativity; and 4) individual differences regarding 

creativity, including pre-cult experience and self-identity, 

exist within the cultic environment. 

Wallas’ stages are elaborated upon as follows: 

1. Preparation—becoming immersed in problematic 

issues that are interesting and arouse curiosity 

(Csikszentmihalyi, 1996, p. 79). 

Regarding preparation, Sawyer notes that “without 

first learning what’s already been done, a person 

doesn’t have the raw material to create with” (2006, 

p. 59). In cults, access to information and knowledge 

is controlled. A member who was a student of a 

particular artistic domain before the cult may come 

with such background, but the cult leader might at 

any time require this member to work in a domain 

she knows nothing about. 

2. Incubation—ideas churn around below the threshold 

of consciousness (Csikszentmihalyi, 1996, p. 79). 

States Sawyer (2006) “…[M]ost creativity researchers 

(cognitive and social psychologists) think that the 

incubation stage is guided in some way by conceptual 

structures, by association networks, or by 

unconscious processes of evaluation” (p. 94). It is 

this stage that represents the mental capability of 

combining and recombining to form symbols as 

communicators of feeling, per Langer and the others. 

One must only think of the best poets, and our own 

flashes of humor and poetic thought, to value this 

aspect of our brain functioning. 

Sawyer (2006, pp. 60-61) quotes William James in 

describing the unconscious experience of the 

Incubation stage: 


Instead of thoughts or concrete things 

patiently following one another ... we 

have the most abrupt cross-cuts and 

transitions from one idea to another ... 

the most unheard-of combinations of 

elements, the subtlest associations of 

analogy. In a word, we seem suddenly 

introduced into a seething cauldron of 

ideas, where everything is fizzling and 

bobbing about in a state of bewildering 

activity. 

This drama tends to flatten in cults, although perhaps 

at times there is a vacillation between the exuberance 

of the creative moment and opposing forces that 

attempt to stop it. Rayner, from a psychodynamic 

point of view states, “[thinking] is a complex dynamic 

system” that involves “dynamic combinatorial 

activity” (1995, p. 13). Deri (1984) states, “This 

rearrangement of old elements into new gestalts is 

the essence of all productive, creative thinking” (p. 

36). 

Sawyer (2006) continues, “creativity results when the 

individual somehow combines these existing elements 

and generates some new combination” (p. 59). In the 

incubation stage in Wallas’ model, the generating 

ideas stage in the NRCG/T model, and perhaps the 

operations stage in the Characteristics, Operations, 

Context, and Outcomes (COCO) model, there is 

consistent emphasis on the need for fluidity, for the 

presence of uncertainty and chance that is within a 

coordinated flow. These factors, as I have said, are 

necessary for spontaneous passion, play, creativity, 

flow. 

In the cult, generating a new combination might be 

possible only within the inconsistent and 

unpredictable limitations set by the leader. Amy 

Siskind describes the panicked reaction of the 

Sullivanians to Three Mile Island, with predictions of 

nuclear devastation and germ warfare triggering a 

deepening of their paranoia (Shaw, 2006). It is easy 

to imagine that, within this context, the degree of 

attention necessary for flow is lacking as survival 


needs preclude a rich incubation period that allows 

for creative transformation and unconscious 

combinatory processes leading to innovation. 

The remaining stages of Wallas’ (1926) model of creativity 

are 

3. Illumination/Insight—“[T]he ‘Aha!’ moment when the 

puzzle starts to fall together” (Csikszentmihalyi, 

1996, p. 80). Sawyer (2006) adds, “A creative insight 

is never 100% original. What makes an insight novel 

is the way that these existing ideas are put together” 

(p. 67). 

4. Verification/Evaluation—“deciding whether the insight 

is valuable and worth pursuing” (1996, p. 80). 

Sawyer adds, “the creator usually experiences a 

continued cycle of mini-insights and revisions while 

elaborating the insight into a finished product” (p. 

70). 

Another model that draws on Wallas is created by NRCG/T 

(Treffinger, et al., 2002). It is significant that the fourth 

stage of this model includes emotions as part of its stage 

theory. 

1. Generating ideas—combining 

2. Digging deeper 

3. Openness and courage to explore ideas 

4. Listening to one’s inner voice 

The “generating ideas” stage of the NRCG/T model and 

Wallas’ incubating are very significant because this is where 

we can find impairment in creativity in cults. This stage 

includes cognitive characteristics commonly referred to as 

divergent thinking “...involv[ing] the development of a large 

number of possibilities, many arrived at as the result of 

shifts in one’s perception and thinking, and adding details 

and expanding ideas as the process continues” (Treffinger et 

al., 2002, p. 45). 

Sawyer (2006) states, that “of all of the mental processes 

studied by cognitive psychologists, the ones thought to be 

most relevant to creativity are conceptual combination, 

metaphor, and analogy” (p. 65); in other words, what 

Guilford identified as the “divergent processes” (p. 44). It’s 


creative to combine two concepts to make a single new one. 

… Sawyer notes that “the generative processes produce 

ideas, filtering processes select among these ideas, and 

exploratory processes expand on the potential of each idea,” 

as well as “information retrieval, association, and 

combination…” (p. 65). 

The “listening to one’s inner voice” category—particularly 

relevant to our discussion—includes “traits that involve a 

personal understanding of who you are, a vision of where 

you want to go, and a commitment to do whatever it takes 

to get there”. This category includes “awareness of 

creativeness, … self-direction, internal locus of control, 

introspective, freedom from stereotyping, concentration, 

energy, and work ethic” (Treffinger, et al., 2002, p. 8). The 

COCO model (Characteristics, Operations, Context, and 

Outcomes) is similar to the sociocultural approach of 

Csikszentmihalyi that looks at individual, domain, and field. 

Proposed by Treffinger (1988, 1991), the COCO model 

suggests that “creative productivity arises from the dynamic 

interactions among the four essential components”: 

1. Characteristics include the personal 

characteristics of the creative individual. 

2. Operations involve the strategies and 

techniques people employ to generate and 

analyze ideas, solve problems, make 

decisions, and manage their thinking. 

3. Context includes the culture, the climate, the 

situational dynamics such as communication 

and collaboration, and the physical 

environment in which one is operating. 

4. Outcomes are the products and ideas that 

result from people's efforts. 

Creative productivity is best described as a 

dynamic, complex system, in which all four 

components are interdependent. These 

components can either facilitate or inhibit 

one's expression of creativity in observable 

ways within any domain of human effort.” 

(Treffinger, et al., 2002, p. x) 


Significant to this model and the NRCG/T model is the 

incorporation of a person’s history, as suggested by 

researcher Amabile (1983). Because the cult denies the 

member any attachment to pre-cult life, the notion of 

personal history disappears. I suggest therefore that cult 

recovery treatment consider pre-cult as well as cult and 

post-cult experience in assessing the impact of cults on the 

creativity of a particular individual. 

Neuroscientific 

Neuroscience has recently joined psychoanalysis in viewing 

emotion as central to an understanding of creativity. 

Cognitive neuroscientist and neurologist Antonio Damasio, in 

his seminal book Descartes’ Error (1994), writes, “…the 

reasoning system evolved as an extension of the automatic 

emotional system” (p. xi). He came up with a concept called 

“the somatic-marker mechanism” that a reviewer of his book 

The Feeling of What Happens: Body, Emotion, and the 

Making of Consciousness (1999), Bruce G. Charlton, M.D., 

describes “is the way in which cognitive representations of 

the external world interact with cognitive representations of 

the internal worlds—where perceptions interact with 

emotions” (2000, pp. 99-101). Charlton continues, 

Damasio has suggested that while the senses 

of vision, hearing, touch, taste smell function 

by nerve activation patterns that correspond 

to the state of the external world; emotions 

are nerve activations patterns that correspond 

to the state of the internal world. 

The highly influential philosopher Langer (1942) many 

decades earlier discusses perception as both a selective and 

a condensing process. She writes, “The material furnished by 

the senses is constantly wrought into symbols, which are our 

elementary ideas” (1942, p. 42); “[t]he human brain is 

constantly carrying on a process of symbolic transformation 

of the experiential data that come to it” (p. 47); and “as far 

as thought is concerned, and at all levels of thought, mental 

life is a symbolic process” (p. 27). Damasio (1994) writes, 

“brain systems that are jointly engaged in emotion and 

decision-making are generally involved in the management 

of social cognition and behavior” (p. xiii). In his 2005 preface 

to Descartes’ Error, he writes about a hope he had when it 

was first written that “a two-way bridge could be established 


etween neurobiology and the humanities, thus providing 

the way for a better understanding of human conflict and for 

a more comprehensive account of creativity” (p. xiv). He 

qualifies, “the intent is not to reduce ethics or esthetics to 

brain circuitry but rather to explore the threads that 

interconnect neurobiology to culture” (p. xiv). I believe the 

study of cults and creativity is enhanced by considering brain 

science’s recent focus on the interface between body, 

emotion, cognition, and creativity. I wonder about the 

neurological effect of fear and induced phobia (Hassan, 

1988, p. 65) on creativity within “the social psychological 

state of the bounded choice.” Lalich (2004b) states, 

…the believer becomes a true believer at the 

service of a charismatic leader or ideology. In 

such a context, in relation to personal power 

and individual decision making, [my emphasis] 

that person’s options are severely limited as 

the devotee lives in a narrow realm of 

constraint and control, of dedication and duty. 

(p. 238) 

Neuroscience studies the interdependence of emotion and 

thought for decision-making as a component of creativity. 

The study of cults and creativity in this regard might 

advance Damasio’s hope of bridging neurobiology and 

culture. I question how the leader’s manipulation of cult 

members’ emotion and decision-making affects their 

“management of social cognition and behavior” on a neural 

level. 

According to online book reviewer James Hitt (2000), 

neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux (1996) studies the fear system 

of the brain and identified the amygdala as “mediat[ing] 

between the stimulus and the fearful bodily reaction. …The 

amygdala prepares a person’s body; heart rate increases, 

stress hormones are released, blood pressure rises, and 

attention is focused. The body is geared for freezing, fleeing, 

or fighting.” 

Jenkinson in this issue writes of the fear in the Love of God 

Community: 

…[I]n time the creative arts were used as a 

vehicle of torture for the music group and later 

the whole community, pushing them to 


perform more and more perfectly and 

punishing and admonishing them if they did 

not. The punishments evolved from verbal 

chastisement, threats of damnation in hell and 

God’s punishment and rebuking sessions, 

through to beatings with a hairbrush, 

progressing to beatings with a bamboo cane.… 

It was clear that the group had failed, and an 

atmosphere of fear very quickly spread from 

the music group to the rest of the community, 

generating a period of dread and dependency. 

Charlton, explaining Damasio’s thinking that emotions are 

brain representations of body states, notes, “If we 

experience a state of fear, then our brains will record this 

body state in nerve cell activation patterns obtained from 

neural and hormonal feedback, and this information may 

then be used to adapt behavior appropriately” (2000, pp. 

99-101). In Descartes’ Error, Damasio (1994) discusses 

Gardner’s (1983) concept of “social intelligence” and 

suggests a link between decision-making, which relies on 

both emotion and reason, and “social intelligence,” and 

connects good decision-making with survival (p. 169). I 

question how neuroscienctific language might be applied to 

what Hassan describes as “thought stopping” and what he 

also infers is “feeling stopping” with his words, “[e]motional 

control, the third part of mind control, attempts to 

manipulate and narrow the range of a person’s feelings” 

(1988, pp. 62–63). I question how loaded language, such as 

“we are not our feelings,” often heard in the Gurdjieff group, 

for instance, might neurologically affect the member’s 

decision making processes, and therefore creativity. 

Damasio (1964), in his hope of bridging neurobiology with 

culture, concludes, “[t]o understand in a satisfactory manner 

the brain that fabricates human mind and human behavior, 

it is necessary to take into account its social and cultural 

context” (p. 260). In a later book (2001), he states that 

creativity “cannot be reduced simply to the neural circuitry 

of an adult brain and even less to the genes behind our 

brains” (cited in Sawyer, 2006, p. 83). 

As discussed above, the sociocultural view represented by 

the Science of Creativity aligns with this multidisciplinary 

understanding. Gardner (2001) writes, “you could know 


every bit of neurocircuitry in somebody’s head, and you still 

would not know whether or not that person was creative (p. 

130). Sawyer further notes, 

[a]ll of the evidence suggests that creativity is 

not coded in our genes. And decades of study 

have found no evidence that creativity is 

localized to any specific brain region; in fact, 

all of the evidence suggests that creativity is a 

whole-brain function, drawing on many 

diverse areas of the brain in a complex 

systemic fashion.… To explain creativity, we 

need to look to the higher levels of 

explanation offered by psychology, sociology, 

and history… (p. 95) 

Damasio (1994), emphasizing both progress and limitations 

within neuroscience as a vehicle for understanding the 

functioning of the mind and creativity, views scientific results 

as “provisional approximations.” He writes, “But skepticism 

about the current reach of science, especially as it concerns 

the mind, does not imply diminished enthusiasm for the 

attempt to improve provisional approximations” (p. xxii). 

The study of cults and creativity has much to gain from 

neuroscientific studies that explore links among the body, 

emotion, thought, decision-making, and creativity, all prime 

targets of psychological manipulation in cults. 

Cognitive Psychology 

We might better understand the common refrain by former 

cult members and SGAs, “I could no longer think or feel for 

myself,” when we consider Harvard education researcher 

Ron Ritchart’s (1998) statement, “[i]f we are serious about 

promoting good thinking, we have to pay attention to the 

role of emotions. … they always precede” (p. 11). Current 

cognitive research is taking another look at Aaron Beck’s 

(2008) and cognitive psychology’s belief that cognition 

controls emotion. Reflecting on this, Damasio (2005 preface 

to 1994) notes the historic “neglect of emotion as a research 

topic” and states, “[b]ehaviorism, the cognitive revolution 

and computational neuroscience did not reduce this neglect 

in any appreciable way” (p. x). In an informative Internet 

blog David Johnson (2008) provides an overview of some 

efforts made within cognitive psychology to recognize the 

interplay between emotion and thought. Promoting 


expansion of this view, he asks in his title, “Is there a place 

for emotion in cognitive theory?” and summarizes, 

“[e]motion can provide a linking concept between the body 

and the mind, between neurophysiology and cognitive 

psychology.” 

3. Why Is the Study of Creativity Significant? 

Addressing creativity within oppressive societies, May (1975) 

discusses the courage to doubt as integral to the courage to 

create. Although creativity was a focus of psychodynamic 

study since Freud, it was first researched within the field of 

psychology in the United States by J. P. Guilford in the 

1950s, and in the 1960s by Ellis Paul Torrence within the 

context of the cold war. Competition with the Soviet Union 

motivated our government to fund the research of creativity, 

having an impact on educational curriculum and testing, 

among other outcomes. In 1954, humanist psychologist Carl 

Rogers warned that “[w]ithin the context of the high-stakes 

game during the nuclear arms race “international 

annihilation will be the price we pay for a lack of creativity” 

(in Sawyer, 2006, p. 41). Sawyer (2006) notes that “… Like 

Carl Rogers and Morris Stein, [other] creativity researchers 

believed they were defending freedom and helping to save 

the world from nuclear annihilation” (p. 43). 

Summarizing creativity as an intrinsic part of being, and 

integrating individualist and contextualist perspectives on 

creativity, Csikszentmihalyi, states that “a joyful life is an 

individual creation that cannot be copied from a recipe” 

(1990, p. xi). The popularity of his ideas is exemplified in the 

following excerpt, included in an online summary of his 

thinking posted by University of Southern California Human 

Resources. It says, 

According to Csikszentmihalyi, people focus 

their life activities in accordance with two 

powerful motivations. One is the ability to 

enjoy being creative for the sake of 

exploration and invention which has over 

generations enhanced human society’s ability 

to survive in an unpredictable world. The other 

is to derive pleasure from comfort and 

relaxation which allows us to rejuvenate 

ourselves and to recover our energy in order 

to maintain overall health and well-being. A 


alance of these two motivations can lead to 

enhanced creativity. (Enhance Your Wellbeing 

Through Creativity) 

And with a global sense of urgency, Bronson and Merriman’s 

Newsweek article cited earlier states that if creativity is 

ignored, 

The potential consequences are sweeping. The 

necessity of human ingenuity is undisputed. A 

recent IBM poll of 1,500 CEOs identified 

creativity as the no. 1 “leadership 

competency” of the future. Yet it’s not just 

about sustaining our nation’s economic 

growth. All around us are matters of national 

and international importance that are crying 

out for creative solutions, from saving the gulf 

of Mexico to bringing peace to Afghanistan to 

delivering health care. Such solutions emerge 

from a healthy marketplace of ideas, sustained 

by a populace constantly contributing original 

ideas and receptive to the ideas of others. 

(Bronson and Merryman, 2010) 

The message of this and other recent articles (Cohen, 2010) 

is that creativity in the United States has been declining 

continually since the 1990s. With society’s urgent need to 

understand what enhances creativity, I suggest that the 

articles in this special issue contribute not only to the field of 

cultic studies, but also to the new field of the science of 

creativity. 

4. Cult Recovery Model: Humanism, Dehumanization, 

and Rehumanization 

Freedom to imagine, to think, to feel, and to be self-defined 

are fundamental humanistic values that underlie the view of 

creativity commonly noted by survey respondents and 

authors. I find that the fundamental psychological impact of 

cults on members is dehumanization through suppression of 

creativity and imagination, and more specifically through 

suppression of the freedom to subjectively symbolize and 

express experience. As noted above, this view builds on the 

concept that man is by nature the symbol-using animal. 

Further building upon Lifton’s description of thought reform 

in extreme circumstance as a dehumanizing process (p. 67), 


I see cult recovery treatment as one that focuses on 

rehumanization through the encouragement of spontaneous 

symbol creation to reclaim the joy of creating subjective 

meaning in the form of humor, play, metaphor, analogy, and 

so on, and in turn to enhance self-esteem and the potential 

to contribute to society. 

In my clinical work with former cult members and SGAs, I 

propose that rehumanization through encouragement of 

subject creation of meaning through fluidity of symbol 

formation be a central focus of treatment. It is heartwarming 

to witness over time in these individuals the emergence of 

metaphor out of near catatonic depression, the writing in 

journals after this very activity became a major trigger postcult 

as the result of cult requirements, and the slow building 

upon pre-cult relationship to creativity. 

I submit that observing and studying an individual’s 

attitudes about creativity, both at his joining and leaving a 

cult, in relation to the leader’s stated and implied beliefs 

about creativity yields an important layer in unpacking the 

complexities of psychological manipulation in cults. 

5. “Joy Stopping” As an Extension of “Thought and 

Feeling Stopping” 

A sense of ecstasy is a key characteristics of “flow,” and 

therefore creativity. Csikszentmihalyi speaks of a sense of 

ecstasy as an experience outside of everyday reality. 

Concepts about ecstasy in relation to creativity from other 

disciplines that predate his concept of flow extend the 

discussion to include the one who appreciates an aesthetic 

encounter, in addition to the one who creates. 

Art Historian Bernard Berenson (1948) describes the joy and 

ecstasy that accompanies viewing artwork. He writes, 

...the aim is that flitting instant, so brief as to 

be almost timeless, when the spectator is at 

one with the work of art he is looking at, or 

with actuality of any kind that the spectator 

himself sees in terms of art, as form and color. 

He ceases to be his ordinary self, and the 

picture or building, statue, landscape, or 

aesthetic actuality is no longer outside himself. 

The two become one entity; time and space 

are abolished and the spectator is possessed 


y one awareness. When he recovers 

workaday consciousness, it is as if he had 

been initiated into illuminating, exalting, 

formative mysteries. (p. 93) 

Psychoanalyst and pediatrician D. W. Winnicott differentiates 

between compulsive passion, which I associate with that 

often found in cults, and spontaneous passion, which is 

represented by the flow state. I link Winnicott’s 

“compulsive passion” to Lifton (1961), who states that 

“imposed peak experiences—as contrasted with those more 

freely and privately arrived at by great religious leaders and 

mystics—are essentially experiences of personal closure” (p. 

436). Winnicott’s (1971) concept that spontaneous passion 

accompanies creativity aligns with creativity researcher 

Gruber (1974). As noted above, he suggests creativity may 

occur as a methodical building up of insights in steady and 

small increments rather than as one sudden flash of genius. 

Steady and spontaneous passion and creativity contrasts 

with compulsive passion, which Winnicott (1936) associates 

with the play of traumatized children that involves repetitive, 

predictable, and often frenzied gestures that lack the joy of 

“flow.” I wonder how the pre-cult member’s or new cult 

recruit’s experience of spontaneous passion as artist or 

otherwise becomes a compulsive passion as cult 

entrenchment deepens. I see this as a central element of the 

bait-and-switch operation in cults. 

May (1994) writes, 

...[creativity] may have a religious quality with 

artists. This is why many artists feel that 

something holy is going on when they paint 

that there is something in the act of creativity 

which is like a religious revelation. (p. 69) 

Many of these statements that support the notion of a 

joyous, ecstatic, religious experience related to creativity 

speak to cult violation of members’ aesthetic and spiritual 

self-expression by the phenomenon Lifton named Mystical 

Manipulation. He states, 

ideological totalists do not pursue this 

approach solely for the purpose of maintaining 

a sense of power over others. Rather they are 

impelled by a special kind of mystique. 


Included in this mystique is a sense of ‘higher 

purpose,’ … Whatever [the group member’s] 

response—whether he is cheerful in the face of 

being manipulated, deeply resentful, or feels a 

combination of both—he has been deprived of 

the opportunity to exercise his capacities for 

self-expression and independent action. (pp. 

422, 423) 

The fundamental impact of psychological manipulation of 

members in cults is dehumanization through the suppression 

of symbol formation, creativity, and imagination. This occurs 

through coercive enforcement of what Lifton refers to as 

“thought terminating clichés” (p. 429). He states, 

For an individual person, the effect of the 

language of ideological totalism can be 

summed up in one word: constriction. He is, 

so to speak, linguistically deprived; and since 

language is so central to all human 

experience, his capacities for thinking and 

feeling are immensely narrowed. (p. 430) 

Hassan (1988) refers to the use of “thought-stopping 

techniques” in cults. He states, “Thought-stopping is the 

most direct way to short-circuit a person’s ability to test 

reality,” and “… when thought is controlled, feelings and 

behaviors are controlled as well” (p. 63). I must note here 

that I have not found the term feeling stopping in the 

literature, although it is inferred, as per Hassan’s statement. 

I find “feeling stopping” to be a convenient and important 

extension of the term thought stopping, and one I have 

heard in dialogue, although apparently not documented. 

Neuroscience supports psychodynamic thinking that 

psychological trauma impairs the link between 

thought/emotion and symbol formation/creativity; and I 

suggest that thought and feeling stopping might contribute 

to such impairment in cults. Building on this, I suggest that 

“joy stopping” occurs when members learn to avoid or shut 

down the joy that would, under nonoppressive 

circumstances, accompany the optimal experience and flow 

of subjectively expressed creativity. While symbols are 

vehicles to joyfully bridge disparate elements of thought and 

feeling as a way to create subjective meaning, undue 

psychological stress is often characterized by impairment to 


symbol formation, accompanied by black-and-white thinking 

and often fear, dread, and isolation. Some joy stopping in 

cults is obvious, as when communal house leaders use cult 

doctrine to induce in children spiritually based fear about 

playing and enjoying themselves. To avoid beatings or harsh 

reprimands, the children, and in fact individuals of all ages 

might utilize joy stopping to suppress individual desire to 

symbolically express themselves through play, music, art or 

in any form that asserts autonomy. 

The role of fear comes up quite often, because if inclination 

to create is accompanied by fear, cognitive dissonance arises 

and the need to resolve the dissonance ensues. Joy stopping 

might be one way to solve the intolerable conflict. 

6. Gap and Combinatory Processes in Symbolic 

Functioning 

It is quite significant that all the major creativity-stage 

models include a stage that involves the combining and 

recombining of elements. Wallas refers to this as the 

incubation stage, NCRG/T as the generating-ideas stage, and 

the COCO models as the operations stage. Postmodern 

thinking suggests that besides thinking and feeling, psychic 

space for sliding thoughts and feelings—referred to as gap— 

is intrinsic to symbol formation as a combining process that 

allows for the generation of meaning. Unfilled psychic 

space/gap is necessary for the fluid combining and 

recombining of thoughts, feelings, and so on into symbolic 

representations. Tolerance of uncertainty is necessary to 

avoid addictive solutions, such as cult involvement, to the 

common human quest for absolute truth. Einstein states, 

“combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in 

productive thought” (Hadamard, 1945, p.142, as cited in 

Sawyer, p. 62). I suggest that denial of loss and intolerance 

of the unknown in cults enables the suppression of symbol 

formation and the psychic play necessary for creativity. 

My cult-recovery treatment approach—drawing on 

psychodynamic and postmodern thinking—encourages the 

reemergence of fluid and original symbol formation and use 

in language (verbal and nonverbal) through maintenance of 

the abstract idea of gap. This gap allows for sliding within 

the symbolic systems of language, social relations, and 

society. In language, sliding allows for creation of metaphor, 

analogy, and other forms of combining processes directed 


toward communication; in social relations sliding allows for 

mutuality and the fluid reversal of roles when appropriate; 

and within society sliding patterns within social systems 

allow for a check on the type of hegemonic power dynamic 

within society that Boeri and Pressley discuss in this issue. 

With an awareness of the suppression of creativity in cults, I 

propose that an essential ingredient of cult recovery is the 

development of a new relationship to the concept and 

experience of “lack.” Because the implication in cults, and in 

fact in our culture as well, is that “lack” suggests failure, 

replacing this idea with a deep valuing of unfilled psychic gap 

can support the movement and fluidity intrinsic to creative 

processing. 

Personal closure can be seen in the closure of gap when cult 

member language is used more as a reactive “sign” than a 

symbol of thought and feeling. Communication through 

symbolic language requires room to slide, to take form, and 

to re-form. This is the basis of great poetry, humor, dreams, 

fantasies, and such. “Sign” is a response to something 

without first conceptualizing it, such as a response to a 

green light. When members have come to the point of not 

thinking or feeling for themselves and instead use “loaded 

language,” this may be seen as the use of sign rather than 

symbolic expression of experience and emotions. Cult 

recovery treatment from a neo-Kleinian and postmodern 

perspective involves encouragement of symbolic thinking as 

vehicle to express emotion and thought. A short clinical 

vignette illustrates slippage within the gaps of language that 

allows for creation of metaphor to capture emotion otherwise 

hard to articulate. Such subjective creation of meaning, 

while always specific to the individual, is a goal of post-cult 

recovery. 

A: Guess you noticed that I didn’t name the topic directly 

today. 

P: Yes I did, and I so appreciate it. [very sad pause] Guess I 

still need to be dancing around it. 

A: [pause] But at least you are on the dance floor. 

P: [surprised, she looks up, nods, and smiles] 

A: What’s it like for you there? 


P: Just you and me standing around, I guess. Guess I could 

ask you if you want to dance. 

A. [I nod and smile] We are dancing. It’s a formal dance. 

P: I know. We’re getting there. It’s just so hard. I just don’t 

feel like talking about it today. Is that okay? 

One way to understand how lack or gap in language 

manifests is by looking at Lifton’s “loaded language,” 

thought-terminating clichés. Jacques Derrida offers a useful 

way to understand the opposite of this in free-flowing 

language, such as with the spontaneous use of puns. He 

states: 

…meaning “slips” in the act of transmission. 

Words contain within themselves traces of 

other meanings than their assumed primary 

one. It would probably be better to talk of a 

field of meaning rather than a precise one-toone 

correspondence between word and 

meaning. (as cited in Sim and Van Loon, p. 

89) 

In viewing language and the creation of meaning through 

this lens, the cult leader’s attempt to halt that slippage of 

meaning by allowing only loaded language can be 

conceptualized as the leader filling the gap within the cult 

member’s psyche—the gap so essential for feeling, thinking, 

symbol formation, and, thus, creativity. 

Critical theory represents an approach to cultural criticism 

that is characterized by beliefs in multiple interpretation as 

well as in the illusory nature of totality without gap. This 

philosophical stance, with its emphasis on uncertainty and 

the unknown, has much to offer cultic studies, and in 

particular to recovery from the harmful effects of the 

totalism of cults. Drawing on this thinking as well as Lalich’s 

concept of “transcendent belief,” I see the cult as declaring a 

grand narrative, in Jean-Francois Lyotard’s words (as cited in 

Belsey, 2002, p. 99), while marginalizing the creative 

expression of “little” narratives. A wonderful introduction to 

poststructuralism by Catherine Belsey (2002) asks “how far 

we should let the existing language impose limits on what it 

is possible to think” (p. 4). She references Lewis Carroll’s 

“Humpty Dumpty” and the question of meaning. Says 

Humpty Dumpty to Alice, “When I use a word, it means just 


what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less” (Belsey, p. 

1). Loaded language by definition imposes what it is possible 

to think and who is to be in control. 

7. Denial of Loss, Filling of Gap, and Vulnerability to 

Impairment of Symbolic Functioning in Cults 

In psychodynamic thinking, symbols are thought to arise out 

of recognition of absence, based on the notion that the mind 

needs to imagine only that which is not present. For 

instance, the child’s earliest utterances help regulate her 

anxiety of absence by symbolically representing the mother 

whom the child cannot see as “mama.” Throughout life, 

symbolizing loss is considered an important aspect of 

mourning. Thought and feeling stopping in cults might be a 

conscious or unconscious response to indoctrination that 

coercively imposes denial of loss. Former members often 

agonize about having complied with the leader’s command to 

not be present during family medical crises or a parent’s 

funeral. They come to question how it was possible that their 

sense of loss was replaced by recommitment to the leader 

and to the “work.” Such denial of loss might emerge as 

either a defense again fear of cult leader rejection if pre-cult 

life is in any way valued, and/or as an indication that the cult 

member is a “true believer.” The net effect is that members 

to some degree dissociate their own feelings and thoughts 

about loss. 

Denial of loss and related suppression of symbol formation 

are psychodynamic concepts that assume two levels of 

reality: unconscious and conscious. People sometimes ask 

what psychodynamics or psychoanalysis mean. This 

approach to understanding the human psyche is steeped in 

and primarily about how we unconsciously create symbols to 

communicate. In the cult, the leader’s message is that there 

is nothing before the cult. There are no parents, no family, 

no people going through crises, dying, having strokes. In 

turn, there is to be no mourning of loss by the cult member. 

Within psychodynamic thinking, which centers on that part 

of human processing that creates and uses symbols, symbol 

formation arises out of acknowledgement or mourning of 

absence or loss. When one physically has something, the 

mind has no need to evoke an image of it. By not imaging 

that which is absent, by not symbolizing the parents and 

other loved ones who are outside of the cult, the member or 


SGA more successfully achieves full compliance and 

devotion. It is extremely significant that loss, both pre-cult 

and while one is in the cult, is denied in compliance with the 

indoctrination process. Because symbol formation and use 

are primary aspects of creativity, it follows that if symbol 

formation is vulnerable to impairment in cults as a result of 

“thought and feeling stopping” about loss, creativity, in turn, 

is likely to be suppressed. A key component of creativity via 

fluid symbol creation is joy. In this way, joy is also stopped 

as a subjective and authentic experience. 

8. Multidisciplinary Emphasis on Emotion— 

Emotion/Thought/Symbol/Creativity 

Equating emotion and creativity must be understood within 

the context of the history of Western philosophy and art in 

the past 200 years. Emotion as a focus of interest in other 

fields also traditionally has been marginal. Writes James Hitt, 

Ph.D., one reviewer of LeDoux’s The Emotional Brain, “The 

study of the emotions has been relatively neglected by 

neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, and philosophers, but 

recently the tide has been turning” (Hitt, 2000). 

Underscoring the interrelatedness of thought and emotion 

before this tide turned, May (1994) refers to there being 

“data in Rorschach responses … that indicate that people can 

more accurately observe precisely when they are emotionally 

involved—that is, reason works better when emotions are 

present...” (p. 49). The tamping down of emotions in cults in 

turn leads toward a diminishment of critical thinking and the 

power of reasoning. I present a brief historic overview of the 

role of emotion in Western art and philosophy. 

As noted above, beliefs about creativity have changed over 

the history of Western art. Emotion as part of subjective 

experience is relatively new to an art historical and/or 

philosophical concept of creativity. Recent commentary 

about Benedetto Croce in the early twentieth century, based 

on content in Hofstadter and Kuhns’ collection (1964), 

Philosophies of Art and Beauty: Selected Readings in 

Aesthetics from Plato to Heidegger, notes that “because of 

feeling, an image can become an intuition,” and that Croce 

identifies intuition with expression: “With this achievement 

art becomes a symbol of feeling” (p. 556). 

The commentary continues, 


…Not the idea, but the feeling, is what confers 

upon art the airy lightness of the symbol... He 

thus sets the outlook of most twentiethcentury 

philosophies of art which replace the 

concept of beauty with that of expression, or 

identify beauty, as Croce does, with 

expression. (p. 555) 

Croce describes art as a “lyrical intuition.” Suzanne Langer 

further developed this idea that “art is the creation of forms 

symbolic of human feeling” (Hofstadter and Kuhns, 1964, p. 

556). 

This special issue of CSR, The Last Draw—Cults and 

Creativity, explores both opportunities and restrictions of 

human creativity against the backdrop of cults. The 

introduction and articles witness the pain and loss suffered 

by individuals who have experienced suppression of 

creativity within cults, and also the resilience of the creative 

spirit, particularly in post-cult recovery. The recent 

recognition by neuroscience and cognitive psychology of the 

importance of emotion in creativity gives renewed validity to 

the emphasis in psychodynamic psychology on the essential 

human process of subjective creation of meaning that relies 

on and also fosters a sense of freedom. It is my hope that 

this special issue will bring cultic studies to the awareness of 

the new science of creativity, to which it offers an extreme 

context within which to explore individualist and 

contextualist perspectives of creativity. The suppression of 

creativity pervasive within cults represents a huge and 

painful cost not only to members, SGAs, families, and friends 

of those involved, but also to society, which holds freedom 

as its highest value. Writes May, “[c]reativity requires 

courage under the least extensive oppressive of situations— 

this courage is of the internal sort” (1975, p. 20). We can 

support this courage. Alexandra Stein, sociologist, author, 

and former member, writes (2001), 

Our efforts are important. They are important 

in helping people identify coercive 

psychological manipulation and in preventing 

the loss of life, and the loss of “years of life” 

that many have suffered. We can help to 

educate children and youth to become what 

Lessing describes as “people who think about 


what is going on in the world, who try to 

assimilate information about our history, about 

how we behave and function—people who 

advance humanity as a whole.” (closing 

comment) 

And in her autobiography (2002), Stein expresses the 

yearning for this courage and for the freedom to pursue it: “I 

am trying to fly—I am in flux—I need continual change, to 

flow, to fly, using my wings, as a bird, to wave or float in the 

air” (p. 367). 

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i 

To Daniel Gensler and Jill Pliskin I extend deep thanks for support of my 

creativity, personal and professional growth, and so much that cannot be 

named; to Michael Civin deep thanks for introducing me to Jacques Lacan 

and for helping me develop my psychoanalytic thinking about the 

suppression of creativity in relation to cults. I dedicate this introduction to 

Hana Wehle, whose dance with creativity intoxicates still; to Kurt Wehle, 

whose music forever plays; to Susan Wehle, with whom I share a sacred 

lifetime of joy and creativity; to Tamar Friedner, whose creative flame burns 

strongly on; and to Mary Francis Collins, who inspires hope like none else. 

ii 

My reading of Alex Stein’s Inside Out some years ago first inspired my 

inquiry into cults and creativity. Stein’s direct and poetic discussion of her 

journey with creativity during her cult-involved years is invaluable. 

iii This discussion of cults and creativity in part draws upon models of 

creativity from neuroscience and psychology. Since my own theoretical 

grounding is not in these disciplines but rather in the fields of art and 

psychoanalysis, I at times rely upon secondary sources to explain how the 

neuroscience and psychology models contribute to the study of cults and 

creativity. The same applies to the section on critical theory. 

About the Author 

Dana Wehle, L.C.S.W., M.F.A., is a certified psychoanalyst 

in private practice in NYC and administrative supervisor at 

the Cult Clinic of JBFCS. She received her psychoanalytic 

training at NIP-TI, and has presented on cults on Internet 

webcasts, at Rutgers, the William Alanson White, ICSA and 

elsewhere. Her interest in the impact of cults on creativity 

builds upon her background as a classically trained painter, 

and on intensive clinical work with former members, SGAs, 

and families. It has led to creation of a survey, publication, 

and guest editing of this issue. (DWehle1@gmail.com)

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