Insane Therapy Pb

By Marybeth F. Ayella

Book Overview

Sensational media coverage of groups like Heaven's Gate, the People's Temple, and Synanon is tinged with the suggestion that only crazy, lonely, or gullible people join cults. Cults attract people on... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1566396018
• ISBN13: 9781566396011
• Release Date: April 1998
• Publisher: Temple University Press
• Length: 213 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

With much gratitude

I read this book as I was trying to decide to leave a therapy cult. Like the Feeling Center, the clients were educated, middle class, interesting people. The leader was very controlling and had a messiah complex among other things. I owe a debt of gratitude to Dr. Ayella for her work because I was not a completely lost soul when I began but it is easy to become socialized into the group and then you're stuck! I was able to recognize the cult-like characteristics and left. It has been many years and the trauma is healing, but I am thankful this book was available.

Good analysis of the Center for Feeling Therapy

This book is about the Center for Feeling Therapy, which was a bizarre abusive psychotherapy cult in Los Angeles in the 1970s. The book has two major goals: 1) to describe the behavior of CFT founders and members; and 2) to analyze the weird abuse from that group in terms of sociological theories regarding social influence and control. The book attempts to explain why CFT members acted as they did: why they participated in the CFT, why they stayed despite horrific abuse, why some of them participated in the abuse, and so on. In that regard, the book differs markedly from the other book about the CFT (Therapy Gone Mad by Mithers), insofar as this book is far more theoretical and less descriptive. One of the major claims of this book was that social influence was more important than individual personality, and that many people would have behaved similarly to the CFT members if they'd been subjected to the same coercive techniques. For the most part, the book's analysis of the cult is convincing. The book also includes an excellent final chapter about coercive persuasion more generally and the techniques cults in general use to control their members.