Revisiting Jonestown covers three main topics: the psycho-biography of Jim Jones (the leader of the suicidal community) from the new perspective of Prenatal Psychology and transgenerational trauma, the story of his Peoples Temple, with emphasis on what kind of leadership and membership were responsible for their tragic end, and the interpretation of death rituals by religious cults as regression to primordial stages of human evolution, when a series of genetic mutations changed the destiny of Homo Sapiens, at the dawn of religion and human awareness. A pattern of collective suicide is finally identified, making it possible to foresee and try to prevent its tragic repetition. At the same time, through an artistic editorial work on original images from the Peoples Temple files, a sort of Multimedia Psychotherapy is subliminally delivered in order to help the mourning of the victims of Jonestown, to whose memory the book is dedicated.
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Revisiting Jonestown: An Interdisciplinary Study of Cults examines the Jonestown massacre to reveal a new understanding of vital issues concerning cults, such as the origins of human awareness, religion, and death rituals, including collective suicide, genocide, and war.
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Chapter 1: Jim Jones: Psychobiography of a Cult Leader Chapter 2: Peoples Temple and Placental Leadership Chapter 3: Peoples Temple and Syncytial Membership Chapter 4: From Miracles and Exoduses to the White Night Chapter 5: Interdisciplinary Reflections Chapter 6: The Death Ritual of Jonestown Chapter 7: Fractals
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The cataclysmic end of the Utopian Jonestown settlement established in Guyana by the California-based Peoples Temple occurred in November 1978. Even after 40 years, it continues to attract scholarly and popular attention and contrasting interpretations, among them a mass suicide, a collective revolutionary protest ritual, a covert operation mounted by unknown rogue insurgents or government representatives, and a tragic-but-predictable result of lives given over to an unstable and authoritarian cult leader. Nesci (community psychology, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Italy) supports the last of these interpretations. In the introduction, he defines a cult as a movement "centered on the absolute power of its leader and the abuse of ‘brainwashed’ followers.” He views the Peoples Temple as the prototype of a religious cult and uses psychodynamic categories to explain how a cult produces forms of psychopathology in which identities become fused, group members regress to a “placental” level, paranoia is typical, and collective death rituals (murder or suicide) are likely to result. Nesci’s post-Freudian interpretive categories have affinities with psychiatrist Stanislav Grof’s perinatal matrices. Those interested in Jonestown or religious cults in general may wish to visit Alternative Considerations of Jonestown & Peoples Temple . Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty.
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Produktdetaljer

ISBN
9781498552691
Publisert
2017-12-13
Utgiver
Vendor
Lexington Books
Vekt
440 gr
Høyde
238 mm
Bredde
158 mm
Dybde
19 mm
Aldersnivå
P, 06
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Innbundet
Antall sider
178

Foreword by

Biographical note

Domenico A. Nesci, MD, is professor of community psychology at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, president of the International Institute for Psychoanalytic Research and Training of Health Professionals (IIPRTHP), vice president of DREAMS onlus, and co-director of the Scuola Internazionale di Psicoterapia nel Setting Istituzionale (SIPSI).