Cults: Faith, Healing, and Coercion

From the mass weddings of Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church to the r itual suicides at Heaven's Gate, charismatic cults and their devotees have become facts of American life. Using material gleaned from twenty -five years of direct encounters with cults and their detractors, as w ell as extensive research, Marc Galanter offers the most extensive psy chological analysis of these organizations available. Cults explores n ot only how members feel and think at all stages of their involvement, but also how larger social and psychological forces reinforce individ ual commitment within the cults. For this revised and newly-illustrate d second edition, Galanter has added three new chapters on cult develo pment in the 1990s, spiritual recovery movements, and alternative medi cine.