by
Ted Daniels, Ph.D.
Electronic version copyright © Ted Daniels 1997. All rights reserved
Originally published in Millennialism: An International Bibliography
by Garland Publishing New York, 1992. Reproduced here by permission.
URL for this article is http://www.
6. Adler, Herbert M. and Van Buren O.Hammet. "Crisis, Conversion and Cult Formation: An Examination of a Common Psychosocial Sequence." American Journal of Psychiatry 130, 1973: 861-64.
"An attempt to discover the generic factors operating in all interpersonal therapies" (p. 861). The authors begin by making the unexceptionable point that "primitive" medicine has most of its effect by virtue of fitting illness into system, i.e., making it knowable, and by providing access to a parental figure (which the authors equate with group formation). [I fail to observe much distinction between this model and modern medicine.] This is the model not only of primitive medicine, psychoanalysis and the therapeutic community but also of the cult.
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