Someone on Reddit's Cults forum brought up the Charles Manson cult a few hours ago. I spent a lot of time in Hollywood during my misspent youth and actually knew more than half dozen people who'd (at least claimed to have) lived at the Spahn Ranch... in part via my involvement in The Center for Feeling Therapy cult only five years after the Tate / Labianca murder spree. I'd also met and talked with Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme outside the Hall of Justice during the trial in 1970 and been in a position to observe both Patricia "Katie" Krenwinkel and Susan "The Shiv" Atkins in the 1990s. But I was not yet sufficiently educated about cult dynamics to be able to connect any significant dots, nor had I read any of the later (and much better than Vincent Bugliosi's) books on the topic including Nikki Meredith's (flawed but insightful and informative) The Manson Women and Me and Jeff Guinn's Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson.
About two years ago, however, I saw Tarantino's movie, and the coffee began to percolate. Understanding the Cultic Pyramid, the Karpman Drama Triangle, insecure attachment and cultic power structures as I do now, I'll try to construct a case on the published and otherwise well-known psychological evidence that young...
Charlie M. was indeed the well-documented victim of almost the worst combination of childhood circumstances anyone could imagine, having been repeatedly neglected, ignored, abandoned, discounted, disclaimed, and rejected, as well as invalidated, confused, betrayed, insulted, criticized, judged, blamed, shamed, ridiculed, embarrassed, humiliated, denigrated, derogated, scorned, set up to screw up, victimized, demonized, persecuted, picked on, vilified, dumped on, bullied, gaslit..., scapegoated..., emotionally blackmailed, defiled and/or otherwise abused by others upon whom he depended for survival in the first few years of life;
Charles "Tex" Watson had been raised religious (possibly too religious, morally perfectionistic and false-self "goody goody") out there in Copeville, Texas, about 20 miles from downtown Dallas and firmly in the "Bible Belt";
Susan Atkins was the daughter of a pair of alcoholic parents who were so dysfunctional, she had to move out of the house when she was 13 (and likewise going "churchy," a way of being she definitely reassumed at Corona and Chowchilla); and
Patricia Krenwinkel was a big, mannish girl who was both bullied and bullying from the time she was six or seven, and who became fiercely Jesuit in a highly idealistic, moralistic and assertive school of Roman Catholicism she shared with Robert F. Kennedy.
If one has read Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism, Eric Hoffer's The True Believer, and David Lykken's "A Case for Parental Licensure" in Theo Millon's Psychopathy, not to mention Alexandra Stein's Terror, Love and Brainwashing and some of the other books in A Basic Cult Library, it becomes evident that a) early life experiences were hugely influential, and b) all of the aforementioned played specific, well-identified and documented authoritarian roles in the Manson Family cult structure that are perhaps more easily seen in better known examples:
Charlie 1 was clearly the Adolph Hitler (the horribly abused son of the awful Alois Schicklgruber) in his little gang. He dimly understood how to present a seeming solution for the problems of others who'd been similarly abused (or thought they had, at least). Manson was Hoffer's "raging idealist," the one who "explained" things and had sufficient charisma to attract and maintain a following, even as his ideas became increasingly paranoid. But, like Hoffer's rabble-rousing idealists -- including Jean Jacques Rousseau and Karl Marx before the French and Russian revolutions -- he was not one to risk his own neck in the front lines. Despite his exposure to the Church of Scientology shortly before the murders, as an organizer Manson was no L. Ron Hubbard, Swami Prabhupada or Werner Erhard, but he was very much like them with respect to manipulating others to manifest his objectives.
"Katie" Krenwinkel was The Intimidating Enforcer and more or less the Heinrich Himmler of the Manson family. She was no intellectual for sure, but she knew a source of empowerment for her dire need to dominate others, her excuse being that it was in the Holy Name of the Great Seer, Charles Manson. In many ways, Krenwinkel was more than just the power behind the throne; she was the power, period.
"Tex" Watson was The Schutzstaffel "SS". A confidant-appearing but nevertheless approval-seeking toady, he did whatever Katie told him to do to protect the integrity of the cult to support her Compensatory Narcissistic imperatives so long as they coincided with Manson's... or at least appeared to. Watson was one of the family's Lee Harvey Oswald robotic patsies; the "good soldier" willing to march into the machine gun fire to earn Manson's and Krenwinkel's approval.
Susan the Shiv was another "good soldier" (along with Leslie Van Houten, but beyond anyone else in The Family I know of, truly "The Manchurian Candidate." Atkins might have found Katie's and Charlie 1's approval appealing, but that was NOT the sole source of her motivation. Compared to Watson's and Krenwinkel's cold-blooded, (il)logically purposeful True Believers, Atkins had a side that fits the description "wildeyed, Prisoner of Hate, bloodlust murderer." She simply couldn't kill her hated mother / self in the visage of Sharon Tate enough and drove her knife into Ms. Tate's body sixteen times.
Over the years at Corcoran, Donovan (near San Diego), Corona and Chowchilla...
Manson became increasingly psychotic and delusional. He'd always had to "live in his head," and that did not serve him well in incarceration, much as was the case when L. Ron Hubbard moved into the trailer outside a remote little village east of Paso Robles, California, where he ultimately expired;
Watson found Jesus (again) and worked the foolishly codependent convict groupies like so many murderers have done before and since to try to crowbar his parole;
Krenwinkel did her best to put a lot of distance between herself and the others, earning a psych degree and becoming a 12th Tradition-bending personality in AA and NA, but never really took full responsibility for her actions in '69 because she continued to be (as many, but far from all, do in AA and NA) a compensatory narcissist; and...
Susan the Shiv did her own version of the born again maneuver and worked it to try to get parole, but she continued to be so easily triggerable that she gave herself (actually her still rage-steeped, "not okay inner child") away again and again in pre-parole hearing psych evaluations (something the photo on her Wikipedia page reminds those who've actually seen her).
The point of all this was to try to illustrate that it's very difficult for the leopard to change his or her psychopathological spots once the die has been cast -- or conditioned, in-doctrine-ated, instructed, imprinted, socialized, habituated, and normalized into a default mode network -- in the human brain.
I've seen way to many examples of former, higher-level cult members (and others with lingering Religious Trauma Syndrome and Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder who simply never got past that die-casting, especially if the principal reason they climbed to the eighth or ninth level on some Cultic Pyramid was to try to compensate for an awful childhood with some means of self-empowerment.
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