Based Camp： Has Psychology Become a Cult？
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Summary
Scientology is a cult that started out as a religious cult, but is rapidly evolving into a cult of mental health professionals. In this episode, we talk to Dr. Simone Eichenauer, a psychologist who has spent much of her life studying psychology, about how cults and cults use psychological techniques such as brainwashing and hypnosis to maintain their control over their patients.
Transcript
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I was walking behind these three women and one of the women turns to one of the other
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women and goes, I would never date a guy who's not seeing a psychologist.
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And then all of the other women were like, yes, I agree.
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And what I realized is that their psychologists had incepted into all three of these women
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independently and enough, and this is a common enough thing that apparently like women can
00:00:25.180
just say this was in certain social circles and assume that everyone will have the same
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brainwashing, that you cannot be mentally healthy without seeing a psychologist.
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That was what was implied was what was being said.
00:00:37.760
That is the highest horror of psychologically mispractice that a like sane thinking psychologist
00:00:48.480
could imagine, that a psychologist had convinced them of largely two things.
00:00:53.540
One is you can't be psychologically healthy without seeing a psychologist.
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And then two is you can't be psychologically healthy without continuing to see a psychologist.
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They were creating dependency in their patients to get a recurring stream of revenue.
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Now, what this cult of psychology does is people go to a psychologist with a problem and they
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then say, oh, that problem is likely tied to a trauma early in your life.
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And then we can constantly meet about this trauma because if you don't have me acting as a constant
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bulwark against this trauma, then it will fall upon you and you won't be able to live a mentally
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This is actually the mechanisms that Scientologists would use.
00:01:44.260
They would do a theon reading and they would ask you questions about things like your parents or other
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things that happened early in your life and then they would say, ah, you have some trauma
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And that's essentially what this cult of psychology is doing, which is interesting to me that you
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have this one field that is so vilified for milking people from their money and creating
00:02:06.880
And then you have this other field, which Scientology labels as like the highest evil, which is
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But in a way, it's because they're competing for the same customers using the same mechanisms.
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I started my early career in neuroscience and psychology.
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So yes, I did some early work in brain-computer interface.
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But before that, I was a psychologist who focused on schizophrenia and stuff like that,
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And recently, I have become horrified and very disappointed in the field because it seems
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And I mean that very literally and as terrifyingly as it could possibly be interpreted.
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So to people who don't know this about psychology, one of the things that all young psychologists
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are taught about when you're just starting out in psychology is the horror of the fad that
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Because it turns out that when somebody comes to you and you're in a position of authority
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over them, it is very easy to implant memories in their mind using specific procedures.
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Many of those look like hypnosis, but they also look like other things.
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This is one of these big things that they always teach you early in psychology.
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It's that memories are not actually that great a predictor of whether or not something actually
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happened the way it's being remembered happened.
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And this is all important for court psychologists and stuff like that.
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But the real tragedy comes when people go to a psychologist to try to work out some problem
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And then that psychologist, through mechanisms that we now know can implant memories in a
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person's mind, which is hypnosis, implant a bunch of memories of trauma in someone's
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mind, and then use those memories of trauma to justify why that person is seeing a psychologist.
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And then, historically, there were many cases of using those memories of trauma to cut the
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person off from people who would have broken them out of the cult, gotten them away from
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There's the famous case of a young girl who accused her father of rape, which it seems
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And yet he went to trial over this and everything, really had damage to his life.
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And when I'm doing editing, I'll find the name of the case and put it on screen here because
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it's this really heartbreaking case of how easy it is to accidentally brainwash someone
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And so there was this moment not too long ago where I was in a room of really high profile
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I'm talking about like top level people in our society, controlling things and stuff like
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And I was walking behind these three women and one of the women turns to one of the other
00:05:06.680
women and goes, I would never date a guy who's not seeing a psychologist.
00:05:11.080
And then all of the other women were like, mm-hmm, yes, I agree.
00:05:16.680
And what I realized is that their psychologists had incepted into all three of these women
00:05:23.020
independently and enough, and this is a common enough thing that apparently like women can
00:05:27.780
just say this was in certain social circles and assume that everyone will have the same
00:05:31.240
brainwashing, that you cannot be mentally healthy without seeing a psychologist.
00:05:36.180
That was what was implied was what was being said.
00:05:39.240
That is the highest horror of psychologically mispractice that a like sane thinking psychologist
00:05:52.320
That a psychologist had convinced them of largely two things.
00:05:56.160
One is you can't be psychologically healthy without seeing a psychologist.
00:06:00.200
And then two is you can't be psychologically healthy without continuing to see a psychologist.
00:06:05.120
They were creating dependency in their patients to get a recurring stream of revenue.
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Because when we talk about governance and we talk about what makes people do what they're
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doing, when you have a career in which you maintain clients and have repeat clients because
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they continue to need your services, any psycho psychologist, psychotherapist, therapist, whatever
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counselor who is really good at their job, that is to say, helping people not need counseling
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or therapy or psychoanalysis or whatever anymore.
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If you're really good at your job, you lose your customers.
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If you are really good at creating dependency and reinforcing someone's mental struggles, then
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you have a thriving career and customer base, especially if they think that they need you
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and that you are somehow helping even while you're secretly or subconsciously making things
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So there's this huge adverse incentive, one that we also really complain about in the
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nonprofit world, where the nonprofits that tend to stick around and survive are those which
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raise money effectively, not which solve their problem effectively.
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So I guess we're seeing the same problem in psychology as we are in the world of nonprofits, which
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is the successful psychologists are those that are very good at getting clients dependent
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Yeah, so I think that this is a really critical point that you've made, Simone, which is I
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don't think that anyone has really gone into this or that many people have gone into this
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with nefarious intentions, nor do I think it's a problem in how psychologists are taught
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because I was warned against this going into psychology.
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The problem is that if you're a good psychologist, you earn less money.
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If you have less money, you have less room for advertising, less money for advertising,
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less money for client acquisition, and you have lower margins, which mean you can get less
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So really what you're seeing, and I think the reason you see this in the quote unquote
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elite levels of psychology more than I think the general psychological audience, although
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I don't know how widespread this practice is, is because the people who either subconsciously
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or accidentally fall into this practice of accidentally brainwashing their patients into thinking
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they need a psychologist constantly economically outcompete the psychologists who aren't doing this
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And I think that this is one of those things where no one is acting nefariously.
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Nobody went into this saying, I want to incept people with the idea that they can't be mentally
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healthy without one, continuing to see me, or two, that they should cut themselves off from
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everyone who's not seeing a psychologist in terms of their sort of personal emotional life.
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If psychologists tell people, also the people who you are engaged with in your life need
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to see a psychologist, that's additional customers, right?
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If it's, oh, well, you should stop interacting with your parents unless they're also seeing
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By the way, you shouldn't date people unless they're also seeing a psychologist, by the way,
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And so there's many elements of how this sort of cult accidentally can evolve.
00:09:06.520
And I think that some psychologists have some of these practices and not others.
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And some psychologists, I'm not saying all psychologists are part of this cult movement.
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What I'm saying is that it does exist within the psychology movement.
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And even when I talk to people with a psychology background who aren't like caught up in this,
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they're like, oh God, yeah, I've definitely seen that.
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So let's talk about the way that psychology is generally supposed to work when you go to
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And then we can contrast that with the way you know you're dealing with probably a bad psychologist
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Typically, you go to a psychologist and you have some issue.
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And what they are supposed to do is help you rewrite your internal self-narrative so that
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thing that is an issue is either not an issue or not debilitating to your daily life.
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You might go to a psychologist believing that you have some sort of a crippling problem that
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And they work with you to not have a crippling problem that you can't get out of and not
00:10:07.560
Now, what a quote unquote evil psychologist does, this cult of psychology does, is people
00:10:14.620
And they then say, oh, that problem is likely tied to a trauma early in your life.
00:10:26.080
And then we can constantly meet about this trauma because if you don't have me acting as
00:10:31.540
a constant bulwark against this trauma, then it will fall upon you and you won't be able
00:10:39.380
And that's dependency because they're saying without me acting as this sort of bulwark.
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And what is really fascinating is when I was younger, I was interested in joining cults.
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I was interested in how people could be convinced to believe things.
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And one of the things I did is I went to a number of like psychology recruitment sessions,
00:11:07.120
And this is actually the mechanisms that Scientologists would use.
00:11:10.500
They would do a Thean reading and they would ask you questions about things like your parents
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or something like that or other things that happened early in your life.
00:11:17.980
And then the Thean reading is basically a galvanic spin response.
00:11:22.660
And then they would say, ah, you have some trauma with your mom or your trauma with your dad,
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depending on how you reacted galvanic spin response wise to their questions around this
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And that's essentially what this cult of psychology is doing, which is interesting to me that you
00:11:38.440
have this one field that is so vilified for milking people from their money and creating
00:11:44.460
And then you have this other field, which Scientology labels as like the highest evil, which is psychologists.
00:11:50.280
But in a way, it's because they're competing for the same customers using the same mechanisms.
00:12:00.100
And interesting, when Scientology evolves, that was during one of the periods where this
00:12:04.980
So if you go back to Christian science, a lot of people are like, oh, isn't that ridiculous
00:12:10.740
However, actually, if you look at the time period when Christian science evolved, modern
00:12:14.740
medicine might have actually lowered life expectancy because that was back when they were doing
00:12:21.840
And so it actually made sense during that time.
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If you look at during the early evolution of Scientology, this was happening during the
00:12:29.940
So they might have actually had a point that there are mechanisms that was actually interesting
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is their mechanisms might have been prescient of the direction psychology was going to
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go 30, 40 years in the future, which is just fascinating to me that we now see them as evil.
00:12:48.380
And yet they were just creating dependency in the same way psychologists do.
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And so what psychologists have that the Scientologists didn't have was certain regulatory
00:12:57.120
organizations, which can disbar them and stuff like that so that they couldn't go quite as
00:13:01.740
far with molesting people or something or creating essential slaves or any of the other things
00:13:08.560
that, of course, for legal reasons, I'm not saying Scientology has ever done any of these
00:13:13.840
things. But what I'm saying is that the tech, if they might, because it's such a centralized
00:13:19.280
organization, they wouldn't have the same system for preventing these kinds of extreme levels of
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abuse. But that doesn't mean that the core techniques that they're using aren't the same
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techniques that the field of psychology had allowed itself or has allowed itself to drift into.
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Let me add another layer of complexity, though, because as much as this is terrifying and as
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much as we frame this as like people unknowingly entering into these relationships or dependency
00:13:46.000
is created and then turned into victims, part of me wonders if this is an open secret because
00:13:54.160
We've had this conversation with people, quite frankly, because we find it interesting.
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And we've met many people who have undergone really hard mental periods of their lives.
00:14:03.760
Most people have, I think, who have ended up in dependent relationships with therapists and just
00:14:09.080
flat out told us, yeah, I see a therapist a couple of times a week. It's gotten to the point where my
00:14:14.600
insurance doesn't accept them anymore. I'm paying out of pocket for this. So this is obviously a big
00:14:18.820
investment. I know that this is a dependent relationship, but also it's been a big help for me.
00:14:26.440
And even though I know that this is not right, I need this.
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This is one of the problems with psychological biases is you can know you have a psychological
00:14:34.060
bias and it doesn't help you get out of it. You can know that you're in a cult or in a dependent
00:14:38.840
relationship, but the psychologist has effectively created this dependency. You can't easily leave
00:14:44.260
it. That's one of the problems. You essentially need cult deprogramming to get out of this.
00:14:48.100
Does such a thing exist? What can we say? What can we say to our friends who are in those positions
00:14:52.580
or if someone's watching this video and they're like, oh, wait, yeah, I am in a codependent
00:14:58.100
relationship. I'm paying out of pocket for someone. This is really, it's not sustainable.
00:15:02.820
And obviously my problem's not going away, right? Like I still have crippling anxiety or this terrible
00:15:07.560
traumatic thing that's interrupting my life. What would you say to them then? There is no cult
00:15:13.140
I think that that's the key is solving it yourself. If you don't, if whenever you give
00:15:18.000
your mind, your mental state to another person, you create enormous personal vulnerability.
00:15:24.660
And so yes, it's harder to do it on your own, but the truth is that the things that the psychologists
00:15:30.120
are taught about how to engage with someone are just not that complex. They're going to say they
00:15:35.340
are, they really aren't. It's just personal narrative building stuff, which you can read about
00:15:39.780
in the pragmatist guide to life. But if you aren't interested in that, then try to find another
00:15:45.220
psychologist, interview them early on, like you should a psychologist. And I would say the big
00:15:49.320
red flag is the more psychologists is focused on the concept of trauma, especially trauma as an
00:15:54.000
immutable thing is not a goal to get over. Then they are likely on the evil side or the dependency
00:15:59.440
creating side. If they are focused on either not focused on trauma or their focus on trauma is
00:16:04.540
helping you overcome the trauma entirely, then they are likely more likely to be on the positive
00:16:10.500
side. But what's interesting is I've noticed that these ideas that have been incepted into people
00:16:16.220
have worked their way in a way into mainstream progressive politics, where people now define
00:16:21.780
themselves by their traumas, and they see them as like a major part of their self identity. And I think
00:16:28.240
what's really interesting is other religious movements used to have defenses against this. And this is
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one of the things we talk about in the pragmatist guide to crafting religion, is that a lot of
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religious movements essentially had roles that were like psychologists. I mean, of course they did,
00:16:42.440
right? This isn't a new need for people to some extent within the Jewish community, like that's what
00:16:46.500
your rabbi would do. And in the Mormon community, you know, you have solutions to this. And within these
00:16:50.620
communities, because they didn't use psychologists to recruit people in the way that Scientologists did,
00:16:54.860
they were genuinely interested in mental health. And one of the best mental health focused
00:17:00.320
communities or systems that evolved to do this that I just have endless admiration for is the
00:17:06.360
Catholic system. So what the Catholic system is the confession system. What it allows you to do
00:17:13.480
is go to someone, say, this is something bad I've done, or this is something I've done that is causing
00:17:21.060
mental trouble for me or something like that. And what they don't say very importantly is no,
00:17:26.380
that thing wasn't actually bad. They don't say, oh no, you're just automatically forgiven for it,
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which is what the Bible says, you know, as you repent, but it's actually a better system than even
00:17:36.080
what the, I think from a psychological standpoint, is to say, yes, what you did is bad. Here is a concrete
00:17:42.160
list of things you can do to atone for the bad thing you did. So it's an acknowledgement of the
00:17:50.180
badness and then creating a self-narrative within the person that they can overcome that through
00:17:54.820
following this list of things. Now, of course, they're also creating dependency to the church
00:17:58.880
to some extent, right? Oh, you need to keep going every time you do a bad thing. But what's really
00:18:04.140
admirable about the system they created is it's a very difficult system to abuse either accidentally
00:18:11.320
or on purpose. The pseudo anonymity of the system makes it harder for a person to form a dependency on a
00:18:18.720
single individual. The high level of ethics around not talking about, and this is like a really
00:18:24.500
important thing for Catholic priests, you cannot say what was told to you in confession, even if it
00:18:28.320
can save someone's life or prevent a murder, which is actually higher than the level of trust you have
00:18:33.720
with your psychologist. If you go to a psychologist and you say something that suggests that you could
00:18:38.220
kill someone else or self-harm, they actually have a duty to report you like serious, like you're at
00:18:42.900
risk of your own life, where the Catholic priest has a higher level of trust in that. And even if you
00:18:48.840
have a dumb person who could accidentally give a person bad advice, they're actually working within a fairly
00:18:53.700
narrow range of answers they can give you. And it's really hard for them to give an answer that
00:18:58.940
creates that much psychological damage. So there are mechanisms for better systems in this. The
00:19:06.260
problem is that these mechanisms aren't available to the masses or to the secular or like religiously
00:19:14.260
derived masses that are no longer in these traditions that offer services like this.
00:19:19.700
So I know you don't really like Alcoholics Anonymous, for example, because what it has
00:19:25.900
become is actually quite corrupted and it has various adverse incentives at play.
00:19:30.380
It's another example of an organization that was started with good intent, but essentially has
00:19:33.820
become a cult, but that's for a different video.
00:19:38.240
I do want to ask you about their buddy system. You know, that you, when you go into AA, there's a lot of
00:19:43.840
stuff that is whatever, but one of the things that you do have rather than a therapist, rather than a
00:19:49.160
priest that you confess to, rather than a centralized authority, you just have another one of the people
00:19:54.080
of this group who shares your struggle being your, your accountability buddy. And it seems like
00:20:00.820
sometimes these people have, they've been through it more than you have, but at least, so they're more
00:20:04.260
advanced. Like what are they really doing? They're preventing you from leaving AA. You could say
00:20:08.860
they're preventing you from getting back on alcohol, but just as much of preventing you from getting
00:20:12.740
back on alcohol, they consider a failure scenario, two things, you getting back on alcohol or you
00:20:20.900
What are your thoughts on, we'll say, take a step aside here. This is where the concept of a dry drunk
00:20:26.060
within AA comes from. If anybody doesn't believe me, look up this concept. Many people in the cult
00:20:31.220
version of AA believe that quitting alcohol through a mechanism other than AA is as bad as
00:20:37.440
continuing to be an alcoholic, which to me shows the point is staying in AA. It's not getting off
00:20:43.780
alcohol, which is what I mean when I say this is a cult and it's not all of AA and the same way,
00:20:48.760
it's not all psychologists, but the buddy system.
00:20:51.660
Let's yeah, let's return to mechanisms that people can turn to if they don't turn to a therapist,
00:20:56.820
if they're not Catholic and they don't want to go to confession. Do you think a buddy system,
00:21:01.480
so someone maybe who's been through the same thing that you have or someone that you really
00:21:05.300
trust as a friend is a good alternative to just figuring it out by yourself? Because I don't
00:21:11.520
Just a side note, as somebody who really studied cults and loves cults,
00:21:15.440
buddy systems are really common in cults. It's one of the most common systems. We love Mormons,
00:21:20.040
we'll have a video on them in the future, but Mormons do to an extent use a buddy system during a
00:21:23.920
person's mission trip to prevent them from deconverting so that they have somebody they
00:21:28.640
can turn to constantly, but that also is supervising them to an extent. And when you look
00:21:34.420
at cults, actually, one of the reasons why cults historically use buddy systems is for converting
00:21:38.780
people. What some cults found, and there's some great research on that was actually done by the
00:21:42.880
cults themselves because they kept records. I think the Moonies were the ones who did this,
00:21:46.840
is it was never approached somebody as an individual because they'll think that it's like a sexual thing or
00:21:51.440
like you're hitting on them or something or like it's weird. But if you approach them with a buddy,
00:21:56.840
which is the smallest group you can do this with, they have a much higher chance of not being afraid
00:22:02.160
of you and not seeing you as threatening. So yes, buddy system is actually often a sign that you're
00:22:07.600
joining a cult. And I need to stress, I don't think Mormonism is a cult. Just the buddy system is there to
00:22:12.620
prevent deconversion. But to the point that you were making, can a buddy system be good? It may be good,
00:22:19.320
but I really think the ultimate buddy system is a spouse. And what you really should have is the
00:22:25.120
type of spouse that can help you work through these things for yourself, which Simone does for me all
00:22:30.160
the time. I've been brainwashed by my spouse. That's really what I'm saying here. I've been
00:22:36.580
brainwashed into just having absolute mental dependency on my spouse.
00:22:40.240
What I, but no, what I hear you saying is buddy systems are a viable therapy.
00:22:47.520
Isn't that what someone who had brainwashed me would say?
00:22:51.380
No, I know, but it's buddy systems may work, but they're not a terribly good system.
00:22:56.360
Well, there, I think a buddy system is a really good system if you're trying to opt into someone's
00:23:05.140
If the buddy system is managed by an organization that you can have total trust has your best interest
00:23:12.480
I'm referring to a friend. I'm referring to a spouse. I'm referring to a mentor. I'm not
00:23:16.380
referring to anything that's organizationally related. I'm referring to the dynamic of someone
00:23:20.280
that you trust helping you work through something.
00:23:23.180
Well, then you better have total trust in them because you know what, that buddy, there's a reason
00:23:27.360
why there's all these rules against sleeping with your psychologist and stuff like that.
00:23:30.480
If you're a female and that buddy's a male, they're probably going to try to sleep with you
00:23:33.420
unless you have like enormous trust in them or vice versa. No, this is how people create
00:23:36.980
dependency. This is how I understand if you have total trust in the person you're going
00:23:41.940
with in this buddy system. Great. But the problem is that you can often misjudge someone. And when
00:23:48.680
you use someone to be this kind of sounding board, you outsource the keys to your mental kingdom to
00:23:55.360
someone else, which puts you in a position of enormous mental vulnerability.
00:23:59.600
But Malcolm, I think what you're missing is when people are severely depressed, when people
00:24:03.160
are severely traumatized, they may not have to be solved with pharmacological intervention
00:24:09.120
and potentially even more extreme interventions like, um, uh, electroshock therapy works really
00:24:15.720
well for extreme depression. There are solutions to the more extreme psychological problems.
00:24:21.240
This is same for things like schizophrenia and stuff like that, but those aren't psychologist
00:24:25.880
problems. Those are psychiatrist problems. It's a different fricking degree. Okay. It's a
00:24:33.760
different, it's a completely different level. One prescribes things and the other doesn't go to the
00:24:39.000
one that prescribes things. If that's what you're looking for, if you're looking for solutions that you
00:24:43.160
can't come to yourself or you can't come to with a buddy. And I do agree a buddy. All I'm doing is
00:24:48.000
highlighting the importance of understanding that if you go to a buddy, trust that buddy, but the truth
00:24:54.600
that you could probably trust a buddy better than you can, a random psychologist. That is true. Like
00:24:58.920
you, the only thing you really have faith that the psychologist isn't going to do is they're likely
00:25:04.280
not, or less likely going to do something that's just absolutely egregious to you, but they are much
00:25:10.520
more likely to just create a generic dependency. Whereas a buddy may have a slightly higher probability
00:25:15.800
of doing something absolutely egregious, but a much lower probability of creating general dependency.
00:25:20.080
So long as you prepped them with framing for this, which the Fragment has guided to life,
00:25:25.840
which is our shortest book by far and sells for 99 cents and all the profits go to charity.
00:25:30.080
So like we created it actually, when we wrote that book, it was to try to create an alternative to CBT.
00:25:35.580
CBT is actually a great system. We just wanted an alternative that people with less training could
00:25:40.300
use was more reliability. CBT standing for cognitive behavioral therapy.
00:25:44.520
But it was originally meant to be a, if then training manual for psychologists. And actually
00:25:50.540
an AI was going to be trained on it to become a psychologist. One AI team reached out to us after
00:25:54.580
reading it. If you read it and you're like, this sounds like a psychologist training manual,
00:25:58.580
that's actually the way it was written. And so it could actually help you in that scenario
00:26:02.920
to prevent the more extreme ways you might engage with something, but then also just self-reflection
00:26:09.040
with this very simple concept. And I'll present the concept to you.
00:26:12.520
You have an internal self-narrative, who you are, what your role is in the world,
00:26:17.700
what events have caused you trauma, how you relate to those trauma. This is all part of
00:26:21.880
your self-narrative. It's a narrative you tell yourself. The core goal of this person you're
00:26:26.760
going to is for you to go to them, say, this is how I would like to rewrite my self-narrative,
00:26:31.920
or this is my self-narrative today. And here's how it's causing me problems. And to work with you
00:26:36.580
in rewriting that self-narrative, which is actually self-narratives are incredibly malleable. Even though
00:26:42.280
we pretend in society today, like they are this immutable part of who we are, they are not.
00:26:47.100
It's very, like research shows are very malleable. So you're going to this person to rewrite your
00:26:52.220
self-narrative into one that is less damaging to your daily life or your goals for who you want
00:26:57.720
to be or yourself. And that's just a very doable thing. You don't need to read the book.
00:27:01.140
Just go into it with that concept while also understanding that this person who's rewriting
00:27:05.360
yourself narrative could rewrite it to say, you absolutely need to keep seeing me and giving me
00:27:11.900
money and give me all your money and then do all these things I tell you to do, or you will never
00:27:16.960
be mentally healthy. And that's the danger. So that's the red flag to look for. Speaking of red flags,
00:27:23.180
we have to go get our kids from daycare. So let's go run, run, run, get that. And I will start dinner.
00:27:29.660
I love you so much, Malcolm. I'll see you soon.