397. La Barre, Weston. "The Dream, Charisma and the Culture Hero." In The Dream and Human Societies edited by G.E. von Grunebaum and Roger Caillois. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1966: 229-35.
"Outlines a holistic biological-psychiatric view of culture as an adaptive ecological phenomenon. Influenced by Roheim (1943); close to Sierksma and, in some respects, Muhlmann, and borrows from Durkheim and his school."
The above is La Barre's own estimate of this work, which in today's PC climate seems to err heavily on the side of elitism and imperialism. It consists of a conjectural reductionist procedure by analogy with Freudianism that would have benefited from awareness of levels of analysis.
Culture is analogous to individual "dreamwork," hence it amounts to no more than a social defense mechanism (aside from the "adaptive" aspects of culture, of course: the technological and economic areas.) So much said, it needs to be admitted that some of La Barre's points are nonetheless well taken. Sacred culture is group specific, where the "adaptive" aspects are generalizable. It is relatively impervious to feedback [i.e., it is subject to change in general under dire distress only], but it still amounts to a "phylogenetic neurosis" (p. 231) of society.
Charismatic leaders are "paranoid prophets" whose authority is "[their] own infantile omniscience" (p. 232); followers, of course, are "infantile authoritarian personalities" and religion is "group autism" (p. 231). Charisma is like a dream. [I suppose this is especially true of charismatic ritual; another well-taken point, though the conclusion is both wrong and contradictory.] All of this is entirely unsupported. It is speculation only.
398. ———. "Materials for a History of Studies of Crisis Cults: A Bibliographic Essay." Current Anthropology 12 (1), 1971: 3-44.
"A crisis cult means any group reaction to crisis, chronic or acute, that is cultic. `Crisis' is a deeply felt frustration or basic problem with which routine methods, sacred or secular, cannot cope.Ê.Ê.Ê.ÊThe `cultic' is the indisposition to accept either disruptive feedback or the ego-critique of experience, but instead, supported by the wish-needs of fellow-communicants, to indulge the appetite to believeÊ.Ê.Ê.ÊThe term assumes thatÊ.Ê.Ê.Êmuch as the body sometimes responds inappositely to stress, so does the mind" (p. 3).
La Barre provides a summary of religious and political episodes that can be seen as crisis cults or their reflections.
Charisma amounts to an appeal to a hearer's unconscious wishes, and prophets are "autistic." The acculturation theory of causality is likewise inadequate, since it personalizes cultures. [But La Barre tends to reductionism in placing the locus of movements in individuals]. Cognitive dissonance is at best a secondary cause, since belief is causally prior to the dissonance. [My reading of cognitive dissonance theory suggests that it is supposed to intervene "when prophecy fails" instead of being a cause of movements, but the contextualist studies reviewed here suggest that it may well be a cause, and La Barre's argument seems to me to be valueless. These studies suggest that we do believe in a vague sort of way in the end of the world but don't give it much thought until cognitive dissonance forces us to. Belief is always tested in action.] He comments on the impermeability of religious systems to disconfirmation of their "illusions."
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