Psychotic cult leaders blur the boundaries between reality and fantasy. They exhibit grandiose ideas about themselves, persecutory beliefs, and a conviction that the end of the world is nigh. The man originally named Vernon Howell combined the names of two Biblical kings and, like David Koresh, declared himself to be the “sinful” incarnation of Jesus Christ. Vernon Howell had been an abused child, an itinerant carpenter, and a would-be rock star. David Koresh was different. He was convinced that he could open the seventh seal of the book held in God’s right hand, as described in the Book of Revelation, which prophesied all the calamities that would take place before the Apocalypse. Charles Manson, when arrested, insisted that he be booked as “Charles Manson, aka, Jesus Christ, God.”
The problem created for the person identifying with Jesus Christ is that he or she has to die before resurrection can take place. When authorities are in confrontation with a psychotic leader who claims that sort of divinity, they would do well to remember this potential problem and to defuse paranoid and grandiose delusions by backing away. De-escalating intimidation and removing the crisis from the limelight are often useful when dealing with a person who has identified so openly with a deity.
Psychopathic cult leaders who are not psychotic never reach such delusional heights (or depths). Throughout their tenure, they maintain a basic sense of reality. Their leadership is based on self-aggrandizement, the exploitation of cult members, and the accumulation of money, power, and sexual indulgence. If cornered by the authorities and unable to see any way out, psychopathic leaders may impulsively choose suicide, taking others with them, if the leaders can no longer stay alive.
Cult leaders may display some of the following characteristics of a borderline personality, particularly during a crisis:
• The tendency to split the world, people, and themselves into good and bad
• Unstable yet intense personal relationships that alternate between extremes of idealization and devaluation
• Impulsiveness in sex, spending, and substance use
• Rapid mood swings
• Intense but poorly controlled anger
• Recurrent suicidal threats or behavior
• Frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment
• Uncertainty about personal self-image or sexual identity
• Under stress, temporary breaks with reality or manifests transient paranoid thinking
All of these personality traits become exacerbated as cataclysmic
psychological stress takes hold and the cult’s end draws nearer. These
reactions are also intensified by the psychology of the cult as a whole.
The good-bad splitting occurs on a wider basis. The world is divided
into us and them. The outside is seen as threatening and evil, whereas
the cult inside is seen as threatened and good. Mutual reinforcement
of this view by the cult leader and followers can fire up hostility and
aggression against the outside world. Hitler saw the Jews as evil and
required their elimination. His followers did not disagree with the task
he set out for them. Jim Jones saw the enemies as the CIA, the FBI,
and the Ku Klux Klan.
Charles Manson looked upon blacks as the source of evil and
destruction. He hoped that his murders would provoke blacks into
starting a race war and bringing about Armageddon or, as he called it,
Helter Skelter. Manson and his white followers would be transformed
into deities and rule the Earth when the blacks discovered that they
were incapable of managing it themselves. For Charles Dederich, the
leader of Synanon, the government and the news media constituted
the evil empire. For other militant religious cults, the enemies are their
members’ natural parents.
Three prominent psychological defense mechanisms are frequently used by deviant cult leaders: 1) good-bad splitting, 2) projection, and 3) projective identification. These mechanisms are particularly evident in persons with borderline personality disorder. In good-bad splitting, the cult leader devalues and rejects the “bad”
parts of the world (and oneself ), and idealizes and embraces the
“good” parts. Jim Jones saw his cult as a socialist utopia. He hated the
outside evil forces that would, in his belief, destroy that utopia. For
those who so split the world, awareness of the hated part of the self is
submerged and projected onto the world outside. In a cult, this mechanism impels the cult leader to further distance his or her group from
society. Such projection of the bad and hated self onto the outside
world also contributes to the group’s suspiciousness and to its siege
mentality. Once it became apparent to Jim Jones that his cult’s boundary could no longer be secured, he made the deranged but clear choice
to preserve the cult’s identity in spirit, even if he could no longer preserve it in reality—and chose mass suicide.
An understanding of projective identification also is crucial to deciphering the sorts of massacres that occurred at Jonestown and Waco. Projective identification is a primitive mental mechanism that goes through three steps:
1. The person projects (attributes to others) intolerable inner feelings while still maintaining a certain awareness of what is projected.
2. The person who projects tries to control the individual on whom the unacceptable feelings have been projected.
3. Unconsciously, when interacting with that individual, the projector leads that individual to experience what has been projected onto him or her.
This process is made clearer by the following example:
John, a person who fears loss of control over his aggressive impulses, is persuaded to accompany friends on a hunting trip. While walking with the hunters, John is seized by the fear that they could turn their guns on him. Even though he recognizes his own past fears that he might shoot someone, if he had a gun and momentarily lost control, John nevertheless continues to be anxious that he could be killed. He attempts to control the hunters by dissuading them from doing any more hunting, suggesting that they go home earlier than planned. The hunters, noting John’s anxiety, sense his fear of guns and also become briefly concerned about their own safety.
Projective identification produces a self-fulfilling prophecy. In denying one’s feelings and attributing them to someone else, the individual behaves in a way that causes others to respond in kind. Thus, when the borderline person’s hostility is returned, he or she finds confirmation of his or her original paranoid thinking.
Negotiating with the Devil
The negotiator handling a cult crisis must have an understanding of the defense mechanism of projective identification. Lack of awareness of this defense may well play into the self-fulfilling apocalyptic prophecies of a mentally disturbed cult leader. Given their knowledge of projection, mental health professionals may help negotiators in crisis situations. What is needed is a critical window into the cult leader’s mental state. Usually there is one negotiator who is in regular contact with the cult leader. If the feelings engendered in that negotiator by the cult leader can be psychologically held, examined, and properly interpreted—without immediate action being taken—it is possible to obtain important data about the cult leader’s state of mind, and to gather it on a continuing basis.
For example, a cult leader stressed by a confrontation crisis may experience an increase in feelings of helplessness, fear, and rage. The leader, although conscious of these threatening feelings, may misperceive their origins and project them onto an adversary. The leader’s efforts to control the adversary may create similar feelings of helplessness, fear, and rage in the negotiator. What needs to happen is for these feelings to be deciphered and taken into account before any action is taken. What sometimes occurs, though, is that these feelings a
re reflexively acted upon by the authorities, themselves triggering an attack that fulfills the leader’s projections as well as the apocalyptic fantasies.
No one can know with any certainty the extent to which such mechanisms as good-bad splitting, projection, and projective identification played parts in the mass murders and suicides of the 82 Branch Davidians. But it is likely that they played a prominent role. For example, it had been alleged that Koresh had been abused as a child. It was the reports of his increasing physical and sexual abuse of the children at Ranch Apocalypse that produced a realistic sense of helplessness in the authorities. They perceived a need to act, ostensibly to protect the remaining children. Could it be that the escalating child abuse at the hands of Koresh was also a sign of increased good-bad splitting within himself and of his projecting the bad aspect onto certain cult children?
Adding to the authorities’ mounting sense of frustration were Koresh’s repeated promises to surrender peacefully, promises that he never kept. Koresh, rather than the authorities, seemed to be in control of the situation. Inside the compound, as a cult member later testified at the trial of surviving Branch Davidians, Koresh “told the ladies to do 50 pushups, 50 situps, 50 deep knee bends, every two hours…to make us strong, to stop the American Army, the Assyrians, from raping us, the ladies.” Koresh likely saw the Branch Davidians as all good and the world outside as all bad. From Koresh’s psychological perspective, evil did not lurk in his heart but resided in the minds and intentions of the government agents who were besieging him. Cult members shot the ATF agents because they “knew” the agents would kill them. The members did not fully comprehend that they were stockpiling arms intended to kill other people because Koresh had projected his (and their) fear, hate, and rage at the outside world. Koresh projected his terrible feelings onto the FB I and then attempted to control the FBI and the likelihood of FBI retaliation against him and his followers.
Finally, according to a spokesman for the FB I, “there was simply an accumulation of frustrations: the negotiations had gone nowhere, they were convinced that Koresh was stalling and feared he was spoiling for a confrontation.” To what extent was this statement a true assessment of David Koresh’s thinking? Is it possible that the decision to assault the compound was driven by feelings Koresh had communicated in his deranged mental state and that these feelings had not been properly psychologically assessed?
In both instances, with Jim Jones and with David Koresh, government officials grossly misunderstood the psychological forces operating inside the cults and in the minds of their leaders. The authorities did not comprehend the siege mentality or the suicidal intent of the cults. They did not seem to know how to evaluate or decipher such mechanisms as good-bad splitting, projection, and projective identification. As a result, 15 years after Representative Leo Ryan set foot on a Guyana airstrip and provided an unwitting trigger to Jim Jones’s apocalyptic end for over 900 of his cult members, the government authorities replicated their mistake in that first assault in which four ATF agents were killed. Once government agents had been killed, the fiery apocalyptic fate of the Branch Davidians was all but signed and sealed. It was later delivered on national television.
During the 51-day siege, the FB I’s Behavioral Science Unit composed a psychological profile of David Koresh. In a detailed memo, these behavioral experts concluded that a high probability existed that the cult leader would commit suicide if directly confronted by the FBI. Nonetheless, the FB I agents on the scene handling the negotiations reportedly grew impatient and disregarded the advice of their own behavioral science experts. When the government forces attacked, the apocalypse took place as Koresh might have wished—live for a national television audience. The futility and folly of using intimidation and then of mounting a frontal assault upon a would-be martyr with an apocalyptic vision ought to have been apparent to the authorities, but it was not.
After the fires cooled, a psychiatric expert on the panel who reviewed the government’s handling of the siege disagreed with what had been done to “resolve” the crisis. He criticized the FB I for using pressure tactics and tear gas that may well have pushed Koresh into triggering his plan for mass suicide. In the future, it is hoped that negotiators in similar situations—and there will be others—will use the psychological knowledge that is available about cult leaders and their followers to avoid unwittingly becoming the executioners of a cult leader’s self-fulfilling death wish.
Analysis of the psyches of cult leaders has its limitations, however. Cult leaders are not available for psychiatric examination at the time of crisis. Moreover, cult leaders’ personalities vary greatly, particularly in their motivations and degree of mental aberration. Cultural and ethnic differences, if present, may also complicate psychological analysis. Moreover, psychiatrists cannot draw clear distinctions between mystical experiences of the sort that cult leaders say they have and deviant mental states. Nevertheless, when a cult leader becomes psychotic, it is reasonably certain that tragedy is likely to be a result.
Forensic Psychiatrists and Cults
There are many types of litigation involving cult members and cults in which forensic psychiatrists can and do become involved. For example, forensic psychiatrists may testify in suits alleging fraud, unlawful imprisonment, or the intentional infliction of emotional distress. We try to grapple with some of the following questions: Was the alleged emotional trauma caused by the cult experience, or can it be traced to some other cause? Did the emotional trauma exist before the person’s joining the cult? Was the trauma exacerbated by joining a cult? What is the extent of the psychological damages that have been incurred?
All psychiatric interventions involving involuntary evaluation or treatment of a cult member are fraught with thorny ethical and legal dilemmas. Some psychiatrists who have given adverse testimony about a cult member’s mental competency and against the cult itself have been hit with civil suits and even with threats of physical violence. No involuntary examinations of cult members should be attempted without prior consultation with psychiatrists and attorneys who have had experience dealing with cults.
Forensic psychiatrists can also lend a hand in incidents involving cults during a developing crisis or confrontation. Most forensic psychiatrists have acquired knowledge and experience concerning the always murky relationship between mental illness and the emergence of violence. Psychiatrists do not possess the ability to accurately predict violence but, in association with other mental health experts, forensic psychiatrists are sometimes called on to attempt to assess the risk of violence.
Mental health professionals can be of consultative assistance to negotiators, generally in hostage situations, whether domestic or terrorist. A critically important role for mental health professionals is the treatment and management of those who have been psychologically traumatized by terrorist events.
Al-Qaeda and the Mind of the Jihadist
Psychiatrists and other mental health professionals cannot perform the same consultative roles when dealing with terrorist groups like alQaeda. As noted above, psychological profiling of terrorists lacks reliability. Psychiatrists and psychologists have taken part in interrogations of captured terrorists. This is a highly controversial role. It is unnatural and unethical for a psychiatrist to participate in the torture of detainees for interrogation purposes. But psychiatrists and psychologists have acted as consultants to interrogators—and there is no bright line separating consultation from participation.
Is al-Qaeda, translated as “The Base,” a killer cult? At first glance, it appears to share similarities with the killer cults discussed above. For example, Osama bin Laden is a charismatic leader. He is considered by many in the Islamic world to be the Mahdi, the missing and longawaited Messianic deliverer, the mighty warrior of the apocalypse. Like killer cults, some of bin Laden’s group and other al-Qaeda groups live in distant isolation, hiding from their enemies. As do killer cults, al-Qaeda espouses a death ethic, but for reasons of Islamic revolution
. Suicide bombings are its trademark. The terrorist feels enraged, humiliated, and besieged by the “crusaders” who occupy Arab lands. A prominent Saudi imam has issued a fatwa, or religious ruling, granting bin Laden and other Islamic terrorists permission to use nuclear weapons to kill 10 million Americans. Bin Laden’s vision is not a self-destructive apocalypse but a nuclear Armageddon visited on the United States. It includes a worldwide Islamic revolution at the tip of a sword, if conversion to Islam is not voluntary.
The Muslim–infidel dichotomy is a classic example of good-bad splitting. This is a psychological mechanism that allows demonization of “infidels,” that is, persons of other religions. Good-bad splitting is endemic to the human condition, but is taken to extremes among killer cults and terrorist organizations. There is, however, little similarity between al-Qaeda and killer cults such as the Peoples Temple and the Branch Davidians. Al-Qaeda is governed by a leadership council, and major decisions made by the core group are approved by bin Laden. There is a known second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian surgeon. Unlike killer cults, which consist of members trapped within the delusion (and control) of a deranged leader, al-Qaeda has a distinct governance infrastructure based on cells organized for sharply defined purposes including logistics, fundraising, and sophisticated media management. To launch a single suicide bomber requires many levels of assistance, for example a quartermaster who obtains explosives and other materials (nails, ball bearings, nuts, bolts), a technician to make the bomb, a reconnaissance operative, and someone to identify the specific target. Before the operation, a handler sequesters the bomber in a safe house, away from family and friends, sees to it that a film crew helps the bomber make a martyrdom video for propaganda and recruitment purposes (and so the bomber will not back out), and then places the bomber as close as possible to the target.
Bad Men Do What Good Men Dream: A Forensic Psychiatrist Illuminates the Darker Side of Human Behavior Page 30