ABSTRACT
This chapter describes some psychoanalytic perspective to the understanding of cult phenomena. The first step in such an undertaking is to try to gain some degree of conceptual clarity about cults and their relationship to other forms of organized religious expression. The chapter focuses on the primary elements of the paranoid process: the core introjects around which the subject’s inner world is structured; these introjects represent critical internalizations of significant object relations in the patient’s developmental history and provide the basis for the organization and integration of the self-system; projections that derive from the core introjects and contribute to the progressive modification and differentiation of object-representations and their correlative objectrelations; and the paranoid construction by which the meaningful and sustaining patterns of environmental reference are cognitively organized to provide a congruent context for the support of specific projections.
