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This Element provides a comprehensive overview of the Transcendental Meditation (TM) Movement and its offshoots. Several early assessments of the as a cult and/or new religious movement are helpful, but are brief and somewhat dated. This Element examines the TM movement's history, beginning in India in 1955, and ends with an analysis of the splinter groups that have come along in the past twenty-five years. Close consideration is given to the movement's appeal for the youth culture of the 1960s, which accounted for its initial success. The Element also looks at the marketing of the meditation technique as a scientifically endorsed practice in the 1970s, and the movement's dramatic turn inward during the 1980s. It concludes by discussing the waning of its popular appeal in the new millennium. This Element describes the social and cultural forces that helped shape the TM movement's trajectory over the decades leading to the present and shows how the most popular meditation movement in America distilled into an obscure form of Neo-Hinduism.
This chapter describes the psychopathological consequences of harmful spiritual beliefs, practices and experiences. It explores the concepts of spiritual defences, offensive spirituality, false spiritual teachers or gurus, and attempts to define the characteristics of cultic groups and compare how they differ from healthy groups. Terms such as ‘conversion’, ‘brainwashing’, ‘thought reform’, ‘coercive persuasion’ and ‘mind control’ are discussed. The complex psychopathology experienced by people who have been harmed by cult-like organisations and the related abuse is examined, and specific diagnostic issues are considered. Current evidence-based recovery-orientated psychotherapeutic interventions are also described. Treatment may best be understood in four phases: separation from the cult, psychoeducation and story-telling, emotional healing, and – finally – a resumption of an authentic identity and new life. The themes of the chapter are explored in a series of case studies.
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