【Abstract】This paper analyzes the evil cult`s essence and its operations from the point view of clinical psychology, and briefly analyzes the physical and mental states, sick personalities and origination of cult-obsessed followers, then brings forward the application modes of Clinical Psychology in the field against evil cults.
【Key words】Evil Cult, Psychological Characteristics, Application of Psychological Technique
Nowadays, evil cult, terrorism and mobdom are called the three "malignant tumors" of the society. According to incomplete statistic data, there are more than 10,000 evil cults in the world with about 100 million believers. There are about one thousand evil cults organizations in the United States, which is thus called "the kingdom of evil cult". The number of fanatical cults in western and southern Europe is 1,300; the number is more than 600 in U.K. and 170 in France, while in Spain there are more than 200 "destructive" evil cult organizations. In recent years, the activities of evil cult are more and more rampant in the developed capitalist countries such as European countries and Japan, what deserves mentioning is that some evil religious organizations begins to expand their activities into medium and small countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America. By making use of advanced scientific technology and spreading heretical ideas through Internet, they develop believers and take multinational rampant evil cult activities.
Evil cult organizations usually violate human rights, deracinate humanity, and constantly create terrorist incidents and bloody tragedies, which bring great sabatage to the normal living and working order of people and to national security. Thus, governments and people of all the nations are against evil cults. On July 22, 1999, Chinese government banned the evil cult "Falun Gong" according to the law. In parallel with the banning, we should also deeply analyze the originations of the cult from political, economic, cultural and psychological aspects, and understand the psychological background of their germination, development and spread, so as to find out remedy and cut off the source of germination of evil cults.
1. The physical and psychological situation of the cult-obsessed followers and the reason "why"
Nowadays, the main issue of anti evil cult in China is to transform Falun Gong-obsessed people, that is, how to make them change their status of being controlled by Falun Gong and return to their normal lives. Thus, workers engaging in psychological health tutorship and psychological assistance should provide specialized services for them.
1.1 The form and essence of evil cults
1.1.1 The form of evil cults
Formally, evil cults use some measures to deprive people's rights of free choice, recruit members with deceiving methods, cheat them, make use of their body suicidally and control their spirits. By recruiting members with extreme and immoral methods, controlling members' thoughts, sentiments and actions, evil religious organizations try to achieve the goal of allowing their members to be manipulated by the ringleaders of evil cults. Although most of evil cults' concerns and interests are about religion, evil cults can also be political, economic and artificial curing organizations. An evil cult, in the form of a society,an organization or a movement, pay great and extraordinary attention to someone or some idea or issues, take immoral handling, alluring and controlling methods such as isolating their members from their friends and family so as to weaken their members unceasingly. Other methods includes taking implying method to make their members more obedient, putting powerful organizational pressure on members , controlling outside information, denying individual and reasonable analysis, enforcing complete reliance to the organization and making members be afraid of leaving. By doing so, the evil cult tries to achieve the goal of the hierarch, which may be harmful to their members, families and communities.
The obsessed followers are usually tranquilized, beautiful, active, energetic, vigorous, successful, caritative, friendly, moving, honest and affirmatory, devoting, dedicating, visionary, exciting, full of actions, sympathetic, passionate, healthy, charming, radical, humorous, tolerant, holy, royal, insightful.
The evil cult usually makes its members to feel happy, frightened and guilt, while the ringleaders are specially attractive and persuasive, make its members feel them mysterious and be hard to refuse. People in organizations are very friendly and affectionate, they visit and call frequently and promise to give help for almost everything. Organizations claim they have special, meaningful and sole mission, while the ringleaders claim they have unparalleled power, vision, knowledge or other capabilities. Organizations hold meetings several times a week, while members talk about their ringleader all day long; it seems that he is the leader of the holy organization. Organizations also forbid members to read books of other religions, attend seminars and meetings initiated by other religions or organizations. They are often in the state of hypnosis and collective stress. They use unusual terms to interdict communications. Members should believe its teachings unconditionally and should not be suspicious. Because of being deprived of sleeping and resting time, members are always under the condition of exhaustion and stress and cannot think normally and feel frightened and guilty...
Firstly, they break away from their families and friends, their thoughts ignore and deviate from foregoing practices and experiences, and the new world view of them is usually contradictory, which can "answer every question" and provide solution for the problems and requirements of organizations.
During this process, they are required to be loyal to their ringleader. They are afraid to talk about honesty in and out of organizations, they should report to their superior everyday. If they are trying to leave their organizations, they will face psychological, physiological and mental threat and pressure. Many aspects of their lives are controlled and their personal decisions are restricted, e.g. they are so busy that they have no time to think. The ways of forcing members to break away from the society includes tireless lectures, singing holy songs, meditation, taking part in confronting activities held by organizations and in some cases the sex relationships are forbidden. Sometimes they use encouraging or punishing ways to intimidate and control the spirits of members, suppress original social actions and bring forward new social actions. They regard the doctrines of evil religious organizations as truth, while other ideas and methods are defective, deficient, wrong and even evil. They discourage questioning and independent thought, which will be punished. And they always idealize their organizations.
1.1.2 The essence of evil cult
First, evil cults distort people's psychological needs towards ultimate concerns in the first place. Ultimate concerns focus on the highest search of human wisdom, such as spirit and body, life and death, goodness and badness, beauty and ugly, this life and afterlife and so on. Issues of ultimate concern are always the extremely rational questions concerned by the most people. These questions are so difficult to explain perfectly due to the present scientific level that it is very probable that faith may be distorted. If the faith turn to complete practicality and short-term actions, it will cause reliance to irrationalism and mysticism through the forms of enthusiasm, fantasy, meditation, self-abusing, it will even let loose of primitive religions, superstitions and evil cults and so on.
Second, evil cults lead astray the people's transcending spiritual needs and psychological sustenance. The socialist market economy has undergone great changes, but some people`s ideology is still in the tranquil pastoral life, they require more transcending spiritual needs and put their psychological sustenance on traditions by avoiding realities and arriving at future. They are unsatisfied with and unadaptable to the fast developing society and tend to escape to a perfect world beyond the reality, that's why they choose blind faith and superstitious fatalism.
Third, evil cults retain some leeway for lopsided development for psychologically unbalanced people. In our country, reform and opening-up policy has great impact on the traditional forces of habit which had exsisted in the natural economy for several thousand years, furthermore, the people`s thought and philosophy have met with unprecedented challenges. It's not easy for them to adapt to the these changes. They may get lost or feel puzzled when facing reorganization of enterprises, unemployment, reemployment, change of free medical treatment and uprising housing price in the market, psychological unbalance is inevitable. Some people cannot rightly face the above issues and try to find spiritual sustenance,that is why they enter into the temple of evil cults. In general, these people have some physical illness or psychological problems before practicing; some have psychological stresses like marriage failure, unemployment or passing away of family member. Some have lost hope for their daily life and tended to put their self-values above the motals (the life of common people in the society). They believe and pursue the so-called supernatural mysterious experience and superstitious magic thought of Falun Gong, and pursue the "fantastic fairyland". They believe it and never regret, and try their best to pursue the outcome (meeting with Buddha). The self-value of such people is deficient or confused, due to the uproar of social reform and their incomplete ego-identity resulted in the development of personality. Once they are led by the evil cult Falun Gong into an orientation and find their meanings of lives, they will be dead-end and their void spiritual state will go even far, and finally get to the psychological and mental extermination in the space provided by evil cults. Therefore, during the transforming process, they are against education and salvation, and even hurt themselves, begin starvation, commit suicide so as to counter transformation, the working staff who haven`t had special psychological training, feel confused and have difficulties to haddle.
Fourth, evil cults crazily stimulate the inner irrational belief of people. Practitioners of evil cult "Falun Gong" usually regard human sense and belief independently. They deny the direction of knowledge and the verification of reality, thus get into a kind of sightless, instinctive, succumbed irrational belief. Irrational believers always have no doubts and deny doubting, and put "belief" on the basis of thoughts without independent analysis. What they "believe" is not truth based on reality, but on sightless loyalty.
Fifth, evil cult will bring followers into an obsessed state without sense and control followers psychologically. In present world, hierarchs of evil cults all pursue centralized control. Thus the first thing of controlling followers is to control their mental world and infuse them from every aspect. It's the ever used method of hierarchs to enthal followers from psychological world.
2. The psychological characteristics of people obsessed with evil cults
In order to cure emotional hurts or physical illness, or to meet increasing mental and religious needs and to establish friendship and communication with outside world, people attend evil religious organizations.
As to the characteristics of mental health of evil religious members, they are always people who are easy to be bothered and who are hard to deal with changes in life, or people who have encountered changes, transformations or crisis in life before, or people who have undergone great pressure before attending evil religious organizations. These people usually have physical or mental illness. Additionally, some have psychological stresses like marriage failure, unemployment or passing away of family member. Some have lost hope for their daily lives and tended to put their self-values above the mortals (the life of common people in the society). They believe and pursue the so-called supernatural mysterious experience and superstitious magic thought of Falun Gong, and pursue the "fantatic fairyland". They believe the cult and never regret, and try their best to pursue the outcome (meeting with Buddha). They really want to serve for some great ideal or cause, hope to be part of the social reform (at the same time to change their own identities) and hope to find answer for their own question. They pay special attention to loyalty to organizations and are easy to be seized, while those people who feel lonely and have mental problems are easy to be attracted by friendship, care and the warmth of organizations.
Furthermore, many of domestic Falun Gong practitioners have chronic illness because of long-term depress, discontentment, grievance and other negative emotions. Falun Gong provides powerful and directive psychological hints to patients who want to get cured and people who are sensitive.Falun Gong induce followers psychologically by making use of people's hope to be alive and healthy, which may not only cause spiritual obstacle for normal people, but get worse for the psychologically sick people.
This paper will make some analyses with MMPI, IPC based on psychological testing data of domestic psychologists (refer to "Research on personalities of people obsessed with evil cults" of Chen Qingping), and compare people obsessed with evil cults with drug addicted people and psychotics so as to analyze the personalities, psychological characteristics, psychological mode of obsessed people and provide some scientific evidence for the work of anti evil cults.
I. The value of MMPI of obsessed people is above normal value, abnormal items are morbid spirit, paranoia, paranoid, psychasthenia, hypomania, hysteria. And the reflecting personality trends are
1) Paranoia and compelling personalities are about 25%. People with these kinds of personalities focus solely on practicing, their cognitions become parochial, and they never think about opposite reasons, only believe in "masters" and their "teachings", only collect evidences which can prove their biases, and turn biases into beliefs and understand the reality with paranoid cognition.
2) Split personality is about 34.09%. This kind of people is sensitive to miracle psychological experience during practicing, and their association is arbitrate, and their delusions are exaggerated based on communications with "gods" and "hierarch", their actions are weird and cannot adapt to the society.
3) Hysteria personality is about 39.55%. This kind of people has high level suggestibility. They like illusion and are not used to rational thinking, their senses are controlled by emotions and they use illusion to replace reality so as to obtain psychological support.
4) Impulsion personality is about 10.23%. This kind of people has capricious emotion, they can be outrageous if things are against their wishes, their actions are unpredictable and they never consider what the outcome is.
5) Neurotic personality is about 22.73%. This kind of people has unstable emotion, high anxiety, high agitation, and high sensitivity. They don't believe they are able to rein their own lives; they lack confidence and energy, have the psychology of begging for help blindly and willing to follower others' control, and tend to feel helpless when some sort of controlling relationship ends.
In the ten clinical values of male obsessed people, nine items except opposite sex are all higher than domestic norm and are statistically significant, which show that male obsessed people have obvious personality distorting and psychology morbidity.
II. The comparative outcomes of lie and hysteria between obsessed people and drug addicted are similar, which show that these two kinds of people have similar personality characteristics—concealing and falsehood character and disclose that mental opium and drug opium will bring similar harm to the mental and physical health of human being. Drug addicted people conceal their ugly behavior in order to escape from social denouncement, while obsessed people break their communications with the outside world in order to escape from social education. They both have the hysteria characters of which the emotion controls the sense and the illusion replaces the reality.
III. The comparison between obsessed people and psychiatric patients. Both kinds of people have similarity in the items like domination, prejudice, mania, psychosis, controlling, which shows that the obsessed people have the same pathology personality characteristics like psychiatric patients, and they have similar aberrant personality and aberrant ideology, which may cause intellective, mental, and behavior obstacles of the obsessed people. If they are suggested or directed by "spiritual domination", they will behave crazily and even commit crimes.
IV. Some abnormal personalities disclosed by the relevant analyses of MMPI and IPC of male obsessed people are positively correlated with C value table, which shows that the obsessed people "believe that opportunity will affect their life experiences and the outcome of things". The value of I, P, C of the obsessed people is lower than domestic norm and even lower than drug addicted people, which shows that they are hard to self-control their behaviors, and they always think "what happen to them are caused by outside power they cannot control", which belongs to a kind of outside controlling psychological mode, while people with outside controlling psychological mode are easy to be depressed and anxious, and are hard to deal with living environment with pressure. Therefore, abnormal personality will cause abnormal psychological and behavior modes.
Personality is a kind of physical and mental driving system formed on the base of inheritance, which will decide the particularity of people's thought and behavior. This analysis shows that people obsessed with evil cult have abnormal personalities, and this is the susceptibility and inner institution caused by psychology of people obsessed with evil cult and the personality bases of obsessed behavior. In another words, evil cults create and build up the abnormal personalities for practitioners with enforcing methods, while once the abnormal psychological mode come into being, it will be stable. And that is why the obsessed people are difficult to break away from evil cults.
3. Discussion on the psychological techniques about the transformation of people obsessed with evil cults
The transformation of people obsessed with evil cult is a huge therapeutical system of clinical psychology, which requires a large amount of manpower and resources and high-level psychological expert teams and supporting teams. The transformation process includes following parts:
3.1 Psychological dialysis
3.1.1 Interesting psychological tests with various forms
The above psychological analysis shows that people obsessed with evil cult have special personality characteristics, and the change of personality is a long-term process and the speedy approach is always effectless. The first step in the process is psychological test for cult-obsessed people so as to identify the characteristics of their sick personality. The questions for psychological tests should be "trivial in life", which can make testers relax. And the test may take the form of game to people with strong repellency, such as apperception mode, Rorschach Ink and House-Tree-Person.
3.1.2 Humane treatment of compound therapy
Clinical psychological counselors and doctors who are good at different treatment may chose free association, dream analysis, anatomy of defense mechanism, empathy impedance projection and other psychoanalysis methods based on the outcomes of above psychological tests. They can use Rogers's humanism theory like positive audience, affection reaction, staying with obsessed people and optimistic experience. They can use Gestalt therapy like enhancing experience, conforming confrontationand empty chair technique. By doing so, psychological counselors can help obsessed people experience and understand their inner contradictions and accept the reality of personality deficiency, and then gradually make them realize the necessity of returning to reality and relying on their own strengths to liberate themselves in stead of the theurgy of evil cult.
The treatment of first phase should make obsessed people extremely suffered in heart; this feeling might be fragmentized and thorough pain (or other similar descriptions). The obsessed people feel helpless, depressed and confused because they have seen the fragile ego and hurts in their various life periods, especially hurts in their childhood (witness the ego in the hell). At this time the doctor should take emotional dissipation therapy and allow them to give vent to their agonies, accompany and support them patiently with great compassion and love.
3.2 Constructing whole new self-cognitive system
3.2.1 Breaking the old and building the new self-cognitive system for cult-obsessed people
After prophase treatment, obsessed people gradually begin to recover psychological rationality, and have a certain degree of objective requirements of change for themselves. This is the most appropriate time to introduce cognitive behavior therapy such as ABC rational emotional behavior therapy. This kind of therapy makes use of initiative, instructive, time-limited, concentration on current and structural modes or techniques, which include Socratic dialogue, debating with irrational belief, doing homework, automatic recording and analyzing ideas, roll play, questioning errors and so on, and allow obsessed people to break their old cognitive system and form a new and healthy cognitive system about personal life and development.
3.2.2 Introducing social integrated education system and constructing whole new reality cognitive system for obsessed people
During this phase, we should introduce integrated education system which accords with our present situation. During this phase, social association system, anti-cult association and social workers should interfere in it.
When obsessed people is going back to the society, it is necessery to provide for them the supports surrounded social organizations and social connections in their life, and the required conditions for setting-up normal personalities and pschological modes, such as respect, affection, support and understanding and so on, so as to urge them to put aside pschological worries and to replace negative idea with positive idea. We reiterate that this phase is also very easy for obsessed people to show doubt and indecision. The reason is that the new cognitive system is very fragile during the constructing period when facing with the social contradictions and challenges, and the old cognitive system is easy to stage back. Therefore, during this phase psychological doctors should closely follow the thoughts and behaviors of obsessed people in transformation, introduce reality therapy, and revise disharmonious understandings between the individuals and the social cognitive system.
3.3 Forming and strengthening healthy personality behavior
On the basis of harmonious cognition, the social behaviors of people in transformation are normal. However, a person often encounters following situation that he knows clearly what he should do, but he can not control himself and does things he should not do. This is caused by behavior inertia of the old sick personality.
The working focus of this time is to set up practices for healthy personality. Doctors of behavior treatment may use various therapeutical techniques such as systematic desensitization, relaxation method, full filling method, strengthening technique, imitation, firmness, practice of social skills, self administrative program, behavior practice and so on so as to gradually eliminate abnormal personality behavior and shape the healthy personality behavior system.
In addition, the compulsive adjustment of laws is also a positive and effective method in behavior treatment. We may take compulsive education towards obsessed bigots. It may be compulsive education in the beginning, and then obedience, later on, their attitude will change and their psychological structure will recompose with their understanding about discipline, institution and rational meaning, and the abnormal personality will get revised to some extent.
3.4 Combined treatment of psycho-medicine
During the rectification process towards obsessed people, appropriate medical and medicinal treatments are necessary. According to the research data provided by the mental health center of Shandong province, in 101 mental disorder cases in 9 mental health centers in Shandong provinces, there are 34 (33.66%) male patients and 67 (66.34%) female patients, and their average age is (41.25±12.42). The average age of male patients is lower than female patients. Their main symptoms are inner control deficiency, behavior unearthliness, sotokoshi, unstable emotion, behavior turbulence, acouasm, insomnia, antifeedant, hurting people and so on. The main medicines are perphenazine, clozapine, risperidone, chlorpromazine, and haloperidol and so on, and the dosage is medium and small. At the time of leaving hospital, 36 people get cured (33.4%), 44 ones obvious (43.56%), 12 ones progress (11.88%), 3 ones inefficacy (2.97%), 6 ones other situation (5.94%).
Conclusion
The above mentioned are the thoughts of the author when applying in the clinical psychological techniques in the field of anti-cult, which are aimed at urging clinical psychological workers to do better job, setting-up a systemic platform for combined work and making some contribution to the construction of harmonious society. I request experts from various fields to make criticism so that I can make more progress. During the writing process of this paper, I refer to data and conclusions of following research and papers, thank you very much!
Bibliography:
1. "Research on Personalities of People Obsessed with Evil Cults", Shannxi Normal University, Chen Qingping
2. "Suggestions and Cautions towards CULT of American Fountain Recovery and Consultation Center", Chinese Anti evil cult Association, Chen Ningning, Ren Shiping
3. "On Psychology of Anti Evil Cult", Social and Scientific Department of Tangshan Normal College, Deng Ke
4. "A clinical analysis on 101 patients with Falun Gong related mental disorder", Mental center of Shandong province, Wang Dengqin
(Kaiwind, August 23, 2007)
