Margaret Singer
American clinical psychologistWikipedia
17
MENTIONS
10
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7
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Search complete. 17 mentions across 10 episodes found for "Margaret Singer".
Sep 29, 2026
speaker_5NARRATOR
Operation MKUltra was initiated with the help of psychiatrists Drs.
speaker_5NARRATOR
Margaret Singer and Lewis West.
speaker_5NARRATOR
CIA operative Dr. Margaret Singer was the founder of the American Family Foundation.
Mark WhiteSOUNDBITE_SPEAKER
Jones had strong ties to the New Left of the '70s, to persons like Huey Newton of the Black Panthers and to Dennis Banks of the American Indian Movement.
Mark WhiteSOUNDBITE_SPEAKER
And, uh, his church, the People's Temple, was a, by his own description, a Marxist organization.
speaker_5NARRATOR
At the same time, Operation MKUltra began directing its attention on religious cults.
Mark WhiteSOUNDBITE_SPEAKER
There have been many allegations over the years that in some way the, uh, CIA's MKUltra program may have been involved in what happened at Jonestown, and that perhaps in this way, uh, Jones was manipulated through drugs or hypnosis.
speaker_5NARRATOR
After the tragedy at Jonestown in 1978, Dr. Margaret Singer's American Family Foundation changed its name to the Cult Awareness Network.
Jon AtackHOST
We're not talking about these little groups that do these things.
Jon AtackHOST
When Margaret Singer, and I think she says it in the introduction to Cults in Our Midst, but she said to me, I met her while she was writing it in 1993, spent some time with her, and Was blown away.
Jon AtackHOST
What a wonderful, wonderful person she was.
Jon AtackHOST
I even got to have dinner with her husband, Jay Singer, who was a Nobel laureate.
9 MINS LATER
Jon AtackHOST
They're used in the military to control people.
Jon AtackHOST
He wasn't quite right.
Jon AtackHOST
Margaret Singer had actually pointed out that domestic abuse seemed to have the same consequences as the North Korean brainwashing program.
Jon AtackHOST
And that was one of the things that had fascinated her when she was working with Schein.
Joe KellyGUEST
The people had expressed that they were licensed psychologists and that they were responsible, yet that community could be really susceptible to these new states of mind engendered by the trip.
Joe KellyGUEST
And, you know, what could arise in that setting, you know, was really concerning to me that, you know, and that was one of the reasons why when I talked to Margaret Singer, when, you know, EMDR was just starting to really come alive and she said, it's hypnosis.
Joe KellyGUEST
It's, you know, I mean, that was her feeling.
Joe KellyGUEST
And, you know, and and so for for these new therapies modalities that are coming out uh for ex-membership for the ex-members uh it it really leaves me you know kind of a pause with with so many people wanting to help in this you know ex-member community and so many uh coming through you know i mean people like like yanya like steve hassan You know, they went through like almost like an internship that went on for many years.
Joe KellyGUEST
A mentorship working with some of the, you know, the brightest lights in the field.
Joe KellyGUEST
You know, Steve's association with Robert Lifton and Margaret Singer and Jan's association with Margaret Singer and Jolly West.
Joe KellyGUEST
And, you know, our own good friends.
Jon AtackHOST
Phil Zimbardo.
Pat RyanGUEST
Yeah.
Joe KellyGUEST
And the kinds of way that we were brought up through our training, if you will, with Margaret Singer and Dr. Jolly West, it was very concrete.
Joe KellyGUEST
It was about bringing the dissociative tendency um into some pragmatic methodology that would help you work through the difficulties that you may have been avoiding through various systems of hypnotic induction that the groups encouraged be they christian hindu buddhist new age whatever and and so the the formulas and this is kind of relating to what pat brought up about psychedelics and psychedelic therapies That even within the ex-member community, there's this rush to healing, which it concerns me, you know, and I start thinking, am I just an old codger? You know, just like can't see the new ways and, you know, aren't willing to be open to new techniques for, you know, development.
Joe KellyGUEST
And as I look at it further, the thing you raised, John, it resonated, you know, that this idea of a sentient force which would be the result of hypnotic induction to believe that kind of anchors you to the unreal, to the unproven.
Joe KellyGUEST
You're involved in the process cognitively and intellectually processing, not just sitting back and allowing the process to clear one out.
Joe KellyGUEST
And that seems to be coming back in as a popular modality among certain practitioners in the field, along with systems like IFS, which again, when you're looking at these therapies, you see at the fundamental levels, there are practical tools that people find helpful and don't seem to be crazy making.
Joe KellyGUEST
And on the other side of that, you see that disengagement with practical practices engagement in the world um for example when margaret singer was telling us about exercise she said you guys having been meditators for the last 15 years stay away from the repetitive type of exercise engage the body mind by lifting weights um don't just run or swim, but if you do run or swim, make sure that you do it in a way that engages your mind somewhat so that it's not just more and more of a disconnected state of awareness, that you're waiting for the endorphins to fill you like you might have with meditation.
Joe KellyGUEST
and and these warnings and cautions don't seem to be as much a part of the the treatment of people coming out of cults as as it once had and that concerns me a little about you know and and i'm not painting this with a broad brush because there are many varieties of practitioners but there are many people in a desperate effort to help the the suffering former members especially second gen who you know whose trauma is real and profound um born and raised in a system uh don't know any other reality apart from the cultic environment uh you know that they can rely on uh whereas most of the you know uh people who were joined of of their own accord if if that's really
Rick Alan RossGUEST
Influence by Robert Cialdini, Coercive Persuasion by Edgar Schein, and, uh, also two books that I think are often neglected, Snapping and Holy Terror by Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman.
Rick Alan RossGUEST
Uh, and then there's the book Cults in Our Midst by Margaret Singer.
Rick Alan RossGUEST
So if you put these together, you have the foundation of what we understand cult brainwashing to be.
Rick Alan RossGUEST
And Lifton breaks it down into eight criteria to determine whether or not a thought reform program is ongoing, and one of them is social isolation, uh, that is, becoming, uh, removed from society at large, becoming so preoccupied in a particular group or a social structure that you really are neglecting previous relationships, your family, et cetera.
45 MINS LATER
Mayim BialikHOST
How much of...
Mayim BialikHOST
Like, how do we know if it's true? Can you tell if it's true? [laughs]
Rick Alan RossGUEST
Margaret Singer was a clinical psychologist.
Rick Alan RossGUEST
She wrote the book Cults in Our Midst.
Lisa BilyeuHOST
So explain to me what you mean by that.
Rick Alan RossGUEST
Well, now we're-- Now, the six stages actually were written by Margaret Singer originally, who is a clinic- was a clinical psychologist, and Margaret, who I knew quite well, you know, in her book, Cults in Our Midst, broke down these six conditions, and one is to make people unaware of what's going on, and that is what we would call control of information, control of the environment, and to interfere with someone's communication with anyone that can give them alternative explanations, a different perspective.
Rick Alan RossGUEST
Because what you want is for them not to understand what you are doing.
Rick Alan RossGUEST
Nobody willfully says, "Oh God, you know, I just really wanna be a pawn."
Mike KingGUEST
They're going to boil the frog slowly.
Mike KingGUEST
And I remember Dr. Margaret Singer made a comment once that she said, if people knew from the get-go what they were in for, they would never join.
Mike KingGUEST
And that's the secret.
Mike KingGUEST
These leaders don't let them know what they're in for in the long run.
Rachel BernsteinHOST
Cured enough to be able to see it for what it is so that There are people who I will sometimes talk to who have been in Scientology and other groups, too, where this was done to them, where if they noticed something that was... that was in conflict, if they noticed something, an equation that didn't quite come together, they knew they couldn't ask about it, they couldn't bring it up, they knew they couldn't even think it.
Rachel BernsteinHOST
And it makes it so difficult for people coming out of this to be able to do what, you know, Margaret Singer used to talk about was about no longer needing to deny the evidence of your senses.
Rachel BernsteinHOST
Like, you can actually notice now what is true, what's not true.
Rachel BernsteinHOST
But I see this hesitation They're afraid to bring it up.
JacobHOST
Sources state when survivors of satanic ritual abuse or SRA and monarch programming began recovering memories and speaking out in the 1980s and 1990s, the intelligence community deployed a massive psychological warfare operation to silence them.
JacobHOST
The False Memory Syndrome Foundation, the FMSF, was established and staffed by top-tier CIA mind control contractors, including Dr. Martin T. Ornn, Dr. Louis Jolin West, and Dr. Margaret Singer, not Sanger, not to mention Robert J. Lifton.
JacobHOST
The explicit purpose of the FMSF was to aggressively attack therapists and discredit SRA survivors by claiming that satanic ritual abuse was a myth, a mass hysteria, or false memories were implanted by quack psychologists.
JacobHOST
Sources state, by controlling the media narrative and providing expert defense testimony for accused pedophiles and cult members, these CIA-linked psychiatrists successfully protected the intelligence community's ongoing use of satanic cults for human experimentation.
Rachel BernsteinHOST
So yes, people do want to be able to have that sense that someone is able to take care of everything.
Rachel BernsteinHOST
And once they feel that they've found it, then they can do what Dr. Margaret Singer talked about, which is that within a system where you want to believe and where you're being manipulated, you learn to deny the evidence of your senses.
Rachel BernsteinHOST
So as much as, and this is also what I try to do when people come in for counseling, as much as you have these red flags, you ignore them, you push them away or you're taught.
Rachel BernsteinHOST
That's just like in a religious group, that's the devil trying to keep you from your mission or whatever, from belief.