ABSTRACT
Within the swirling turmoil and often bitter conflicts of these public events, there is another, more private, less observable level of the interplay of inner, subjective events and powerful forces of influence generating and sustaining the phenomenon of the cults. A preliminary description of the Cult Phenomenon (CP) can serve as a starting point for our further investigation. The CP expresses a general tendency to factionalization in human religious experience and in the organization of religious groups. The paranoid process was defined originally in clinical terms, but finds its natural extension in the dynamics of the CP. The clinical understanding of paranoid process is rooted in the introjects, the drive-dependent and defensively motivated internalizations drawn from significant object relationships during the course of development and life experience. Even within more consolidated church structures, like that of the universal church or the ecclesia, the CP plays a role in a variety of contexts and with a variety of effects and connotations.
