Terror, Love and Brainwashing

This book explains how people can be radically manipulated by extreme groups and leaders to engage in incomprehensible and often dangerous acts through psychologically isolating situations of extreme social influence. These methods are used in totalitarian states, terrorist groups and cults, as well as in controlling personal relationships. Illustrated with compelling stories from a range of cults and totalitarian systems, Stein's book defines and analyses the common identifiable traits that underlie these groups, emphasizing the importance of maintaining open yet supportive personal networks. Using original attachment theory-based research this book highlights the dangers of closed, isolating relationships and the closed belief systems that justify them, and demonstrates the psychological impact of these environments, ending with evidence-based recommendations to support an educational approach to awareness and prevention. Featuring a foreword by John Horgan, the new edition has been fully updated to include recent work on political extremism and radicalization and totalitarian systems, as well as the recent highly publicized NXIVM case. Terror, Love and Brainwashing, second edition is essential reading for professionals, policy makers, legal professionals, educators and cult survivors and their families themselves.

Alexandra Stein is a social psychologist and visiting research fellow at London South Bank University (UK). She lectures and writes on cults and totalitarianism. As a young woman she was a member of a political cult, an experience she documented in her first book, Inside Out.

Introduction 1. The overthrow of the rulers of the mind 2. Fear: It's screamingly obvious 3. Recruitment: The accidental extremist 4. Totalist indoctrination: Isolation in a crowded place 5. Family and Friends: Not as Close as Chairman Mao 6. The Will of the Fuehrer is the Party's Law: Totalist leaders and the structures they create 7. Secrets and Lies: The Total Ideology 8. From the Inside Out 9. Deployable, but not Manchurian: It's a Human Thing 10. The Flute Player: What Should an Open Society Do?