Jan. 23, 1979 (The New York Times) – How do cult leaders recruit new participants and change the way they think about themselves and others?

John G. Clark, MD, assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Mass General was interviewed by the New York Times as part of a three-part series on cults in America.

Clark examined 60 former and present cult members and talked with hundreds of their relatives over a five-year period. According to Clark, “Coercive persuasion and thought reform techniques are effectively practiced on naïve, uninformed subjects with disastrous health consequences.”

Dr. Clark attributes cult’s recruitment success to their ability to induce trances without the individual’s knowledge or consent. Such traces can be brought about with constant chanting, singing, dancing, preaching, scripture reading and peer pressure in a controlled, isolated setting in which only short periods of sleep—about four hours—are allowed.

“It’s the same process as hypnosis, except that with cults you don’t have to have willing subjects.”

Read the statement of Dr. Clark on the Cult Phenomenon in the United States to the US Congress (From February 1979).