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Eric Hamell
, April 12, 2013
(view all comments by Eric Hamell)
I had a personal interest in reading this because the group Kollisch was involved with in her youth was closely akin to the one my parents joined a few years later. Having been involved with it during my own adolescence -- yet not realizing till years later that it was already turning into a cult at that point -- I wondered what it was like at the time of my parents' involvement. Earlier, when I hadn't yet recognized the cultic aspect of my own experience, I read a review of this book and was intrigued by the all-too-terse mention, near the end, that the author had eventually left the group because she no longer had the psychological needs it had fulfilled.
On reading the book myself, I saw that this was a distorted view, perhaps reflecting similar issues the reviewer wasn't quite ready to confront. Kollisch's account makes clear that there were problematic features to the group, some of which are typical of cults or groups that may be evolving in a cultic direction. One in particular was the high tension associated with factional struggles, arising from the sense that these might lead to splits. These situations were emotionally fraught because of the exaggerated self-importance the group had about its role in history. While Kollisch's group had open disputes and so was far from totalistic, their fraught character was predictive of splits on the one hand, and a circle-the-wagons mentality on the other, both of which can point a group down the road toward totalism.
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