Read this excerpt by Stephen Batchelor
[
americanguru.net]
Though written years later, Batchelor's description matches very closely with Luna Tarlo's description of this very same time period in Cohen's career.
Many of them had just spent time around
Andrew in Rishikesh. They were convinced that something extraordinary
was happening. Then Alka, Andrew’s girlfriend, arrived
in Devon and joined the staff at Gaia House, a nearby retreat
centre, where I was starting to teach. I listened to her recount the
same story again and againNote this..'recount the same story again and again.'
Sounds like the Eckie Tolle park bench story
The Byron Katie cockroach story
Telling and retelling such stories would probably be identified as pre frame technique.
Batchelor continues
What was going on here clearly had little if anything to do
with what Andrew was saying.
The “teaching” and “dialogue”
were merely devices for building and sustaining an emotional
bond between Andrew and the students. While the students experienced
some sort of ecstasy by collectively projecting their spiritual
longings and ideals onto Andrew, Andrew seemed to need
the adulation of others to endorse the sense of being the enlightened
guru he and his students wanted him to be.
The more this interchange of mutually reinforcing desires went on, the greater
became the certainty that Andrew really was the savior of our age
and the students his first blessed circle of disciples. As long as this
bubble of shared conviction remained intact, everyone got what
they wanted.For additional possible frameworks by which to understand this process as observed by Batchelor,
there is a discussion of projective identification at group level
(quote)"One way of distinguishing benign from virulent projective identification is whether or not it allows experience to be thought about - for its complexity to be borne, for it to feed depressive functioning (perhaps by making it possible for a person to hold and contain sadness and acknowledge and mourn a loss with depth and relatedness?-Corboy) Young
In the kinds of abusive groups and relationships that concern us here, persons are not allowed to think or feel or acknowledge complexity and develop what some famous songs have termed, 'Tombstone Eyes'.
quotes from a paper to be referred to below.
Projective identification may occur at group level. This citation is for a long and very technical paper that is one clincians attempt to find ways to apply psychoanalytic data concerning projective identification to larger group processes(unquote)
For more read here
[
forum.culteducation.com]