In 1976, he was involved in the "exit counseling" of Arthur Roselle from the Church of Scientology, which resulted in Roselle accusing Hassan in an affidavit of kidnapping and imprisoning him for the purposes of deprogramming.
Hassan insists the counselling was conducted with the cooperation of Roselle's parents and close friends, and, although Roselle later rejoined the church, Hassan says no charges were ever filed against him.
But Hassan's survival of the vicissitudes of anti-cult work propelled him to produce his first book in 1988, entitled Combatting Cult Mind Control. It sold 250,000 copies and was translated into five languages.
And in the past decade or so, mind control experts of various flavours have emerged from the wings, albeit that they managed to attract little mainstream attention.
Organized psychology on mind control
Rewind to 1986, when a group of psychologists had apparently formed a task force, entitled Deceptive and Indirect Methods of Persuasion and Control (DIMPAC)-and had submitted a report to the American Psychological Association (APA) that condemned cults for using brainwashing.
But the APA's Board of Social and Ethical Responsibility for Psychology found the report "unacceptable, lacking in scientific evidence, relying too much on sensational anecdotes and providing insufficient information for APA to take a position on the issue," the association's mouthpiece the Monitor reported recently.
But they got a more formal cue from the body last year at its 2002 Annual Convention in Chicago.
Joining the usual crew of psychological movers and shakers at this cyclopean gathering were a few more liminal figures than usual, ones who had failed to crack the nod at earlier gatherings. They were the mind control authorities.
So, have the mind control experts cleaned up their scientific act, or is something else-perhaps more to do with political jostling-to account for the more respectable face of mind control theorists.
Hassan featured on the podium, and perhaps inadvertently gave a clue to a now rather hackneyed factor which may have given impetus to the sea-change in the level of respectability he and his colleagues now enjoy:
"Al Qaeda fulfills the criteria for a destructive cult," Hassan noted. "We need to apply what we know about destructive mind-control cults, and this should be a priority with the war on terrorism. We need to understand the psychological aspects of how people are recruited and indoctrinated so we can slow down recruitment. We need to help counsel former cult members and possibly use some of them in the war against terrorism."
That kind of band-wagoneering probably did the mind controllers little good in the minds of the skeptical, but even the most cynical can't deny that the past 50 years is smattered with examples of the terrible disasters that have spilled from the most visible of the cults.
The Jonestown massacre of 1978, in which 913 followers of Jim Jones were killed en masse, was probably the most visible and convincing. But at the softer end of the spectrum, potential impingements on civil liberties vie for credibility with mind control "deprogrammers" and claimed experts who would assert that to remove somebody from a particularly fanatical church is preferable to allowing them to find their own way out using their constitutionally enshrined freedom of religious association.
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