Terror, Love and Brainwashing: Attachment in Cults and Totalitarian Systems

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, Ph.D. is a social psychologist who lectures and writes on cults and totalitarianism. She is a visiting research fellow at London South Bank University and has taught at Birkbeck, University of London, UK, and the University of Minnesota. She is a member of the EU’s Radicalization Awareness Network’s expert pool, of the European Federation of Centres of Research and Information on Cults and Sects, and is a trustee of the Family Survival Trust. She appears frequently in the international media as a commentator and writer, including for the BBC, NBC, CNN, Rolling Stone, and Vice, among others. As a young woman she was a member of a political cult, an experience she described in her first book, Inside Out.