Basic Assumption States: How Cults Self Seal

Joseph Szimhart, 2024

Basic assumptions about self-sealing groups or cults can lead to stereotypes about group behaviors, brainwashing, and the hypnotic powers of a leader.  We tend to toss easy to recall labels, terms and phrases around about what we view as strange, foreign, threatening, or other. “Them” stands in for most labeling of things not “us.” Labeling or stereotyping is normal as it helps us to quickly signal others about how we view something or feel about it. But taken too far, the label shrinks and seals or constricts reality and allows us to easily dismiss the other as false, threatening, insane, or evil. Labels can become thought-terminating cliches.

This brief paper will provide a summary of how I have come to define a constrictive, exclusive cult and how brainwashing or group manipulation works.

Basic assumptions in groups and Bion

Wilfred R. Bion (1897-1979) published his landmark study Experiences in Groups (and other papers) in 1961.[i] He was known for Containment Theory and Object Relations Theory. He was an influential English psychoanalyst, who became president of the British Psychoanalytical Society from 1962 to 1965.[ii] He developed his analysis of group behavior during the 1940s when he was assigned to treat and observe “neurotic” soldiers suffering from acute anxieties. Over time, Bion noted that neurotic soldiers tasked to form groups to solve problems without his guidance tended to exhibit patterns of behavior informed by what he called Basic Assumption States. He also noted the most pathological (antisocial) or narcissistic individual in an unguided group tended to emerge as the leader. The basic assumption states appeared generally in three types: Pairing, dependency, and fight/flight. Further studies have expanded on Bion’s legacy about group behavior and the number of basic assumption states.[iii]

Bion’s goal was to help his patients emerge from stilted basic assumption states (BAS) heal as a Working Group that was no longer locked into pairing, dependency, or fight/flight states. These BAS could shift over time reflecting several themes. For example, a fight/flight group might become a dependency group after the convincing narcissistic or psychopathic type among them manipulated his way into power.

Pairing group

The basic assumption that would solve the problem for this group was the production of a messiah or a super leader. This might occur through sex or breeding, but it could also be realized by the coupling of two leaders who will work out solutions for the group or give birth to a saving idea. The limitation here is that the group submits to the new solution or messiah without further work, which is harder. The basic assumption state or group mindset rules until a new pairing produces a new messiah.

Dependency group

After the most pathological or narcissistic person emerges as leader, the group falls into a basic assumption state as dependent on the leader who has acquired God-like status, transcending the wisdom and power of the rest of the group. Resentment might eventually take down the leader, only for a new omniscient leader to emerge, thus sustaining the basic assumption state of dependency: The king is dead; long live the king!

Fight/flight group

The group comes to believe it must preserve itself at all costs. If it has to run or hide or form a remote commune, it will. If it cannot escape outside threat, it will fight and perhaps die as martyrs. Group members under this tension may try to avoid hostile meetings, but the leader can readily mobilize anxious members to flee or fight. The mission to flee or fight creates what Emil Durkheim called “collective effervescence” driven by group emotion or the madness of a crowd.[iv]  

Groups collapse into basic assumption states by creating a Self-sealing Social System that, in my model, has four aspects:

1.       Transcendent attraction

The idea of a better world, becoming a better person to help create that world, and survival through that change comprises a transcendent attraction for anyone anxious about achieving those goals. At this entry stage to cult behavior, intentions are positive, and hope runs high. The contrast between the ideal world presented by a group and the fallen state of the world and the self creates more anxiety that the new attraction promises to relieve through techniques, teachings, rituals, and commitments.

2.       Authoritarian leader

The guru, teacher, pastor, or spiritual director not only defines the transcendent attraction, but also interprets it. The basic assumption that the leader has access to omniscient insight, extrasensory powers, or mystical attainment through personal experience and training becomes a matter of faith that resists criticism.

3.       Circular tensions as devotional orbiting

The transcendent attraction defined by the leader becomes the overriding center of psycho-social gravity. A group member or devotee must commit deep mental attention to the source of teaching to stay on course, as if tethered to a central pole at the cosmic center of the universe. The basic assumption is that this version of transcendence is the truth unlike any other. Daily rituals and dogmatic instructions remind the group member of his place. Tension arises between obedience to the leader and distractions and doubts outside of the orbiting mission. The follower can never be the leader and can never leave the path.

4.       Exit perils

Commitment comes with costs that include intellectual, devotion, financial, social, spiritual and psychological themes radically divided by the special interests and demands of the group in tension with outside noise. That outside noise may appear as demons, fascists or liberals, infidels, traitors, the unclean or impure, ignorance, or the enemy. To consider defection means to lose salvation, investment, social ties, certainty, purity, and face a difficult readjustment path. Robert Lifton called this “the dispensing of existence” or who had the right to salvation and life and who did not.[v] To dare to exit becomes a choice between being and nothingness.

Personal experience counts for something when relaying information about anything or choosing something, but as I tell my clients, your experience is only the beginning of inquiry on the path to truth, wisdom, or accuracy. Too many people use this self-serving aphorism: I know it’s true because that was my experience that it was true. That level of prejudice, seeing truth primarily through personal experience, is the major reason why so many people are vulnerable to deceptive and manipulative cons and cults. How many times have we heard a confidence man, or a health tonic hustler say, “Try it. Experience it for yourself! Money back guarantee! The first one is on me!” The basic assumption here is that something inside of you—your intuition, your conscience, your deepest inner being, your streetwise BS detector, your sensual experience, the Holy Spirit, your psychic ability, or your higher self—will engage to help you decide what is not only right “for me” but also right beyond further inquiry and outside criticism.

Appealing to our vanity and craving for certainty is precisely what a deceptive product salesman or follower-hungry guru or prophet does to grab our attention: The choice is yours! You are smart. You will know whether it is true for you. Perhaps most people will walk away sensing a hustle, not convinced to buy it or try it, but those that dare to try and who feel good with the initial results for whatever reason have entered the path toward total compliance whether they know it or not. You try a new and improved herbal supplement brand, it makes you seem to feel better, and you end up with a room full of products you cannot sell after two years because you succumbed to a multilevel marketing hype. And you still will not quit because the group appeals to your vanity again to try harder—you will succeed!

Your basic assumption becomes this: I am not a stupid person, and I do not do stupid things. Or: I will know when to stop or leave. Those two mantras have guided any number of otherwise accomplished and intelligent people into some of the most bizarre, deceptive, or harmful cults that keep them sealed in a delusional experience that might last a lifetime.

[i] Experiences in Groups and other papers by W. R. Bion (1961)

[ii] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilfred_Bion

[iii] Bion’s Legacy to Groups edited by Parthenope Bion Talamo, Franco Borgogno, and Silvio A. Merciai (1998, 2018)

[iv] “The Road of Excess” by Sebastien Tutenges (Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Winter/Spring 2013) https://bulletin.hds.harvard.edu/the-road-of-excess/

[v] Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism by Robert J. Lifton (1989 edition, pp 433-435),