Welcome to this Jungian life. Three good friends and Jungian analysts, Lisa Marchiano,

Deborah Stewart and Joseph Lee, invite you to join them for an intimate and honest conversation

that brings a psychological perspective to important issues of the day.

I'm Lisa Marchiano, and I'm a Jungian analyst in Philadelphia. I'm Joseph Lee, and I'm a Jungian analyst in Philadelphia.

I'm Joseph Lee and I'm a Jungian analyst in Virginia Beach, Virginia.

I'm Deborah Stewart, a Jungian analyst on Cape Cod.

Today we wanted to tackle the topic of cults, which has been a topic that has been suggested to us by several listeners.

And we're going to do what we always do, which is try to examine it from a Jungian perspective and see how we can understand this fairly ubiquitous

phenomenon of being subjected to undue influence through a Jungian lens.

I'm thinking about, I'm responding to your, or resonating to your comment about undue influence.

And where I've gone is maybe in the opposite direction, which is to our human longing to

belong, our human need for a family.

Even if that family can be very strict or demanding or challenging,

we belong. And it seems to me that this current environment, cultural environment that we're in

is one that's very fragmented, that demands that we find our own places of security and career direction and maturation

and puts us very much in ourselves with this unbelievably daunting task that we be all things to

ourselves and that the cult phenomenon, although it's probably as old as time,

has taken on new energy as a

compensatory way of providing people with structure and a sense of meaning and belonging.

Absolutely. It really speaks to our deep need for meaning and belonging both. My hunch would be,

and I know that there are some social scientists studying this, that participation in what we would

think of as cults probably increases where traditional religions are losing their influence because they kind of replace that.

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