going-clear-scientology-hollywood-and-the-prison-of-belief-by-lawrence-wright-2

the saved and the damned. Such persons, the theory goes, are reared in either chaotic or
extremely authoritarian homes. They have conicted images of themselves as being at
once extremely good and extremely bad. This is particularly true in adolescence, when
identities are still volatile. Prince didn’t need to be brainwashed, the theory goes; he was
actively looking for a totalistic organization that accommodated his polarized
personality.
Some incidents in Prince’s background support this hypothesis. Although his
upbringing was “tumultuous”—his mother died when he was ten—Prince maintained
close and loving relationships with his father and his three younger siblings. After his
mother died, however, he began experiencing bouts of total body paralysis accompanied
by a sense of falling—“like jumping o the Grand Canyon.” The feeling was of helpless,
abject terror. Then, suddenly, he would be outside his body, as if a parachute had
opened, and he could observe himself sleeping in his bed. The intensity of these
experiences made them absolutely real to him, but he decided not to talk about them
because “if you bring that up, you go to the crazy house.” Prince now sees those
episodes of body paralysis as severe anxiety attacks, but they prepared him to accept
the truthfulness of the paranormal powers that Scientology claimed to provide.
Brainwashing theory, on the other hand, proposes that strenuous inuence techniques
can overwhelm and actually convert an individual to a wholly dierent perspective,
regardless of his background or pre-existing character traits, almost like an addiction to
a powerful drug can create an overpowering dependency that can transform an
otherwise stable personality. Stripping away a person’s prior convictions leaves him
hungry for new ones. Through endless rounds of confession and the constant,
disarmingly unpredictable uctuations between leniency and assault, love and
castigation, the individual is broken loose from his previous identity and made into a
valued and trusted member of the group. To keep alienated members in the fold, “exit
costs”—such as nancial penalties, physical threats, and the loss of community—make
the prospect of leaving more painful than staying.
Whether Prince was brainwashed, as he believes, or spiritually enlightened, as the
church would have it, his thinking did change over the year and a half he spent in the
RPF. In order to move out of the RPF, a member has to have a “cognition” that he is a
Suppressive Person; only then can he begin to deal with the “crimes” that he committed
that caused him to be conned in the RPF in the rst place. During his many hours of
auditing, Prince later related, “You just kinda get sprinkles of little things that seem
interesting, sprinkles of something that’s insightful. And then you’re constantly audited
and in a highly suggestible state … like being pulled along very slightly to the point
where now I might as well just be here and see what this is about now. Maybe it’s not so
bad, you know?”
ONE OF JESSE PRINCE’S COMPANIONS in RPF was Spanky Taylor, an old friend of Paul Haggis’s
from his early days in Scientology. She had become close to Paul and Diane soon after
they arrived in Los Angeles. She called him “Paulie,” and had helped him market some