Lexington Books Revisiting Jonestown: An Interdisciplinary Study of Cults

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. Review Domenico Nesci does indeed adopt an interdisciplinary approach to the study of Peoples Temple and Jonestown, as the subtitle to Revisiting Jonestown suggests. Utilizing insights from anthropology, mythology, biology, art, and literature--but primarily psychiatry--the Italian psychoanalyst argues that the mass deaths in Jonestown, Guyana indicate a regression to a primordial stage of human consciousness. More broadly, he claims that all new religions--or cults, in his terminology--have this regressive potential.--Reading Religion Revisiting Jonestown is an outstanding book on the life and death of Peoples Temple, a religious cult that Dr. Nesci has been studying throughout his life. The book is a captivating narrative, blending the facts of the story of Jim Jones and his followers with theoretical reflections on the meaning of cults, explaining how and why they are exposed to the risk of violent, destructive (and self-destructive) behaviors. To solve the riddle of Jonestown, Dr. Nesci developed new theories on the dawn of human awareness, the origins of religions, and the relationships between different death rituals of Homo Sapiens: collective suicide, genocide, and war. I am sure that the next decades will see a vibrant scientific debate on these new interdisciplinary ideas, as well as on the changes in perspective that they will inevitably bring to different fields: psychology, anthropology, sociology, political science, women studies, history, religion, and so on... As a psychiatrist, I think that this book will open new horizons in our way of conceiving psychopathology and the practice of psychotherapy with destructive (and self-destructive) patients. I strongly recommend this book to all graduate students in the humanities and in medicine (especially in psychiatry, criminology, and forensic psychology) as well as all lay (but cultivated) readers who are concerned with understanding cult mentality.--Robert O. Pasnau, MD, University of California, Los Angeles, emeritus 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, paran