Meredith is a hot mess’s Reviews > Traumatic Narcissism: Relational Systems of Subjugation > Status Update

My eyes are starting to glaze over, when it comes to anything with a psychoanalytic lens I have a limit before I give up -

The most interesting part in this book was learning about The Sullivan Institute, but even then the author's section was incredibly brief.

Nice review for the psychology behind cult leaders (grandiose, traumatizing narcissists that operate within a relational framework)

Again, this would be excellent for clinicians, the author writes about how narcissism can occur in psychoanalysis (in less transgressive ways than what happened with the Sullivan Institute)

At the group’s peak in the 1970s and 1980s, Siskind describes how hundreds of patients lived communally in large apartments and saw their therapists
several times a week. The patients saw the senior and junior therapists not just for therapy, but also at meetings, classes, legendary parties in the Hamptons with plenty of drugs and alcohol, and in bed.

This story took place on the Upper West Side of New York City, involving a population of middle class, liberal, college-educated artists, professionals, academics,
and intellectuals—many of whom were notable in their professions, and several
quite famous.

I want to emphasize, for those who may not know, that these things did not happen, for example, in a fundamentalist, apocalyptic, UFO, or other cultic group in the deep south or the remote west of the U.S., far from the reach of progressive contemporary cultural and intellectual influence, and from the culture of psychoanalysis.

He's writing about the Sullivan Institute:

The unstated and disavowed actual goal of any group led by a traumatizing narcissist is for the leader to keep herself in a state of narcissistic hyper-inflation; the actual job of the follower is to do whatever it takes to help the leader to achieve that aim.

Once I had spoken out publicly about Shakti Yoga, in the early days of the internet, I was instantly, literally within hours, persona non grata in the community,
so that the dozens of people I thought of as friends, and the hundreds of others from all over the world that were friendly acquaintances, immediately cut me off completely.