Why We Worship The Unconscious Logic Behind Cult Submission

There is a sentence I keep returning to, one that surfaced in a public lecture on cult dynamics and has since lodged itself in my thinking like a splinter under the skin: everybody worships, and the only genuine question is what. Not whether. What. And the companion question follows immediately—everybody "cults," and the only question is how. These are not sociological observations dressed up as aphorisms. Stripped of their casual delivery, they name something that Freud spent the last decade of his life circling, and that Lacan restructured entirely through the grammar of language. The human subject does not arrive in the world already whole, already sovereign, already capable of standing upright in its own desire. It arrives split, constituted through the gaze of another, and it spends the rest of its existence trying to suture that split with something—someone—that appears to hold the missing piece. Worship is not an aberration of an otherwise autonomous mind. It is the default architecture of that mind.

What I want to do here is take this architecture seriously, not as a curiosity of fringe movements or a cautionary tale about gurus in compound walls, but as the fundamental psychoanalytic problem of subjecthood. The recent resurgence of public attention to cultic formations—from NXIVM's legal collapse to the sprawling conspiracy ecosystems of QAnon—has largely been covered as journalism. What has been missing, in my reading, is the structural analysis: what is it about the unconscious economy of desire that makes submission not merely possible but, under certain conditions, almost irresistible? And what would it mean to build a form of collective worship that does not require that submission at all?
 

The Desire for the Other: Worship as Unconscious Structure

Freud's Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, published in 1921, remains the single most important psychoanalytic text on collective submission, and it remains deeply misunderstood. The standard reading reduces Freud's argument to something like: people in groups become stupid and obedient, the way children are obedient to parents. That is not what Freud says. What he actually proposes is far more unsettling. The bond that holds a group together is not ideology, not shared interest, not even fear. It is libido—love, in the broadest psychoanalytic sense, the binding energy that attaches the subject to an image outside itself. Each member of the group installs the leader in the position of the ego-ideal, the internal agency against which the subject measures itself and finds itself wanting. The leader is not obeyed. The leader is loved, in the specific sense that the subject hands over the function of self-evaluation and says, in effect: you will be the mirror in which I finally see myself as whole.

This is where Lacan's reformulation becomes indispensable, and where I think Freud's own framework reaches its limit. In the mirror stage—Lacan's 1949 essay that remains the most compressed and radical account of subject formation in the psychoanalytic canon—the infant between six and eighteen months encounters its own image in a reflective surface and experiences a shattering recognition: that is me, and that is more unified, more coordinated, more complete than anything I actually feel myself to be from the inside. The ego is founded on a misrecognition. It is an image borrowed from outside, a fiction of coherence that the subject will spend a lifetime defending. Worship, in this register, is not a deviation from healthy selfhood. It is a return to the founding scene. The cult leader, the guru, the influencer with two million followers who promises to "make sense of all this nonsense"—each one offers the subject a new mirror, a more flattering, more totalizing image than the one the subject currently inhabits. The subject does not submit to the leader's power. The subject submits to the leader's image, because that image promises to resolve the constitutive lack that has haunted the subject since the mirror.
 

The Silverback and the Signifier

Jamie Wheal, whose thinking on cult dynamics I draw on throughout this analysis, describes humans as "tribal primates wired to seek the silverback," perpetually scanning for where status, love, attention, and access are concentrated. This is a useful evolutionary shorthand, but psychoanalysis pushes it one level deeper. We do not seek the silverback because we are primates. We seek the silverback because language has made us into beings for whom desire is always the desire of the Other. Lacan's formula—le désir de l'homme est le désir de l'Autre—means that I do not know what I want until I see someone else wanting it, or until I can locate myself within someone else's wanting. The "silverback" is not a biological alpha. The silverback is a signifier, a point in the symbolic network around which my own desire organizes itself. Strip away the signifier, and desire does not become free. It becomes formless, agonizing, unbearable. This is the real vulnerability that cults exploit, and it is not a vulnerability of the weak. It is a vulnerability of the speaking being as such.
 

When the Symbolic Order Fractures: From Lineage to Living Guru

Here I need to draw a distinction that Wheal articulates with unusual clarity, and that maps precisely onto Lacan's structural categories. In what he calls the "traditional cult"—and he uses the word cultus in its original Latin sense, simply meaning worship, the way Kali had her cult in India or Dionysus in Greece—the individual submits to a lineage. A priest or administrator of the sacred occupies a role within a chain of transmission stretching back generations. The authority is not personal. It is structural.

In Lacanian terms, the Name-of-the-Father functions: it is the symbolic law that precedes any individual, that no single person embodies, that operates through precedent, checks and balances, elders, norms. You take your seat in the orchestra. There is a conductor, there is sheet music, there is a metronome. You play your part. The music is not yours. It was not invented last Tuesday by the person holding the baton. It was composed by someone dead for three hundred years, and you submit to the composition, not to the conductor.

The fracture Wheal identifies begins in the late nineteenth century and accelerates through the twentieth: traditional religious structures lose their binding force, and simultaneously, Eastern teachers from Tibet, India, and Vietnam arrive in the United States and Western Europe. Many of these figures had broken with their own lineages. And here the language shifts in a way that is psychoanalytically decisive. They no longer say, "Submit yourself to the teaching, to the tradition, to the generations that carried this knowledge before me." They say, "Submit yourself to me. I am the God-self. I am fully enlightened. I am the guru." The symbolic authority of the lineage—the Name-of-the-Father, the structural function that distributes and limits power—is foreclosed. In its place stands a single living body that claims to be the signifier. Not to represent it. Not to administer it. To be it.

This is not a minor distinction. In Lacan's clinical nosology, foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father is the structural condition of psychosis. I am not calling gurus psychotic. I am saying that the structure of the culty cult—the submission of the subject to a living person who has abolished the mediating function of the symbolic—mirrors the foreclosure mechanism. The subject is no longer related to the law through language, through tradition, through the chain of signifiers. The subject is related to the law through a body. And a body can be seduced, manipulated, starved, sexually exploited, and financially drained in ways that a symbolic structure cannot.

A narrowly focused case illustrates this mechanism better than the usual textbook examples. Consider Erhard Seminars Training, the large-group encounter program founded by Werner Erhard in 1971, which operated well into the 1980s before rebranding. Participants in "est" trainings sat in marathon sessions of up to sixteen hours without bathroom breaks, subjected to aggressive verbal confrontation from trainers, stripped of the ordinary social scripts that protect the ego. The stated goal was "getting it"—a moment of breakthrough clarity. What the structure actually produced was a systematic dissolution of the subject's symbolic supports: no lineage, no tradition, no graduated initiation. There was only the trainer, the room, and the promise that if you surrendered completely, you would be remade. The analogy Wheal draws is apt: the traditional cult is an orchestra; the culty cult is a marching band where everyone follows the person with the big hat and the whistle. The music is whatever that person decides, in the moment, with no score and no tradition to appeal to.
 

Weaponized Jouissance: The Exploitation of Dissolved Boundaries

The most disturbing dimension of the culty cult is not the submission itself. Submission, as I have argued, is the default condition of the speaking subject. The most disturbing dimension is what Wheal calls the weaponization of access to peak states. And this is where Lacan's concept of jouissance becomes essential, and where I must note a genuine scholarly disagreement.

Jouissance is not pleasure. Freud's pleasure principle is homeostatic: it seeks to reduce tension, to return the organism to equilibrium. Jouissance is what exceeds the pleasure principle. It is the painful, excessive, overwhelming intensity that the subject both craves and cannot survive. Lacan locates jouissance at the boundary of the symbolic order—it is what language cannot capture, what the subject is separated from by the very act of entering speech. In ordinary life, jouissance is glimpsed in fragments: in the body's extremity, in the moment of orgasm, in the terror of near-death, in the shattering of a grief that breaks through every defense.

The culty cult does not merely offer meaning. It offers access. Psychedelics, enforced sexual encounters, boundary-eroding group encounter sessions, sleep deprivation, ecstatic ritual—these are technologies of jouissance. They produce in the subject a state of radical undoing, a temporary collapse of the ego's defensive architecture. And in that collapsed state, the subject is maximally suggestible, maximally open, maximally in need of someone to say: this is what it means, and I am the one who can guide you through it. The guru does not create the jouissance. The guru positions itself as the necessary mediator of jouissance, and then extracts allegiance, apology, finances, and obedience while the subject is still trembling, still undone, still unable to reconstitute its own symbolic boundaries.

There is a legitimate debate in psychoanalytic scholarship about whether this exploitation is best understood as a perversion in the clinical sense—the Lacanian structure of perversion, in which the subject makes itself the instrument of the Other's jouissance—or as a more general narcissistic capture. My own work leans toward the perversion reading, but I acknowledge that colleagues working in relational psychoanalysis would frame the dynamic in terms of projective identification and enactment rather than structural perversion. The disagreement matters, because it changes the intervention: if the mechanism is perverse structure, the guru cannot be "reformed" within the system; if it is narcissistic enactment, the system itself might be redesigned. I remain skeptical of the second position, but I do not dismiss it.

The critical point is that the weaponization of jouissance is not an accident. It is not a case of a good idea corrupted by a bad actor. The moment you combine boundary-dissolving experience with a single authority figure who has abolished the mediating function of lineage, the weaponization is structurally inevitable. The architecture produces the abuse. You do not need a monster. You need a structure without checks.
 

The Ethical Cult: Sovereignty Without the Master Signifier

Wheal proposes a third category, and I find it the most psychoanalytically interesting part of his framework, even as I think it needs to be pushed further than he pushes it. He calls it the "ethical cult"—ethical community worship, ethical cult-ure. Not submission of the self to the lineage, not submission of the self to the guru, but the valorization of the self as a sovereign individual connecting to what he calls collective emergent intelligence. His metaphor shifts: not the orchestra with its conductor and score, not the marching band with its baton and whistle, but jazz. Call and response. Listening. A deep combination of agency and surrender. "I can hit my notes and play my instrument and surrender," he says, "but there's a thing we're looking for together. We'll know it when we find it. But we have to feel the force. We can't force the feel."
In my reading, this is Lacan's ethics of desire articulated in a register Lacan himself might not have chosen but would have recognized. In Seminar VII, Lacan formulates the only ethical imperative of psychoanalysis: ne pas céder sur son désir—do not give up on your desire. This is not a command to pursue pleasure. It is a command to refuse the substitution of your desire with the desire of the Other, to refuse the Master Signifier that tells you what you should want. The ethical cult, in this frame, is a community organized around the principle that no single signifier will stand in for the desire of the group. Each member plays their instrument. The music emerges from the interaction, not from a score handed down by a conductor, and not from the whims of the person with the biggest hat.

The practical difficulty—and Wheal is honest about this—is that sovereignty is terrifying. "We're terrified of our highest, fullest potential," he observes. "If I stepped up, could I keep it up?" This terror is not incidental. It is the terror of the subject confronting its own constitutive lack without the buffer of an Other who will fill it in. The traditional cult says: you do not have to face your lack, because the lineage holds it for you. The culty cult says: you do not have to face your lack, because I hold it for you, and I am God. The ethical cult says: you must face your lack, and so must everyone in this room, and the only thing that emerges from our mutual confrontation with lack is whatever we can build together, in real time, without a guarantee.

This is why Wheal insists on a first principle: let us do no harm. Let us stop building culty cults. Before we can build ethical communities, we must stop constructing the architectures that make exploitation structurally inevitable. And then we must ask the harder question: can we build communities of worship—communities that bear witness to life, that take responsibility for their own development and empowerment—without surrendering the self to anyone?

I do not think the answer is a simple yes. The unconscious does not abolish itself because we have decided we prefer jazz to marching bands. The pull toward the Master Signifier, the longing for someone to make sense of the nonsense, the exhaustion of being a sovereign individual in a world that has fractured every traditional container—these are not pathologies to be cured. They are conditions of being a speaking animal. What the ethical cult requires is not the elimination of that pull but the construction of a symbolic architecture robust enough to hold it without collapsing into a single body. Multiple elders. Distributed authority. Transparent norms. The metronome is shared. The sheet music is written collectively, revised in public, and no one is permitted to claim they composed it alone.

The question of cult psychology, then, is not why people join cults. That question has a psychoanalytic answer so fundamental it barely needs articulating: we join because we are split, because we are constituted through the Other, because the mirror promised wholeness and then withdrew it, and we have been looking for it ever since. The question—the only question that matters, the one that separates the culty cult from the ethical cult—is whether the community we build around that shared wound will place a single living body at its center and demand that we kneel, or whether it will ask us to sit down together, pick up our instruments, and see what kind of music we can make without a conductor. We will not play perfectly. We will miss notes. The rhythm will falter. But the music will be ours, and no one will be able to weaponize our longing for it against us.


References

• Freud, S. (1921). Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. Standard Edition, Vol. 18.
• Lacan, J. (1949). "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function." Écrits, trans. B. Fink. W.W. Norton, 2006.
• Lacan, J. (1959–60). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. W.W. Norton, 1992.
• Wheal, J. "Why the World Needs Cults." Big Think. https://bigthink.com/video/jamie-wheal-why-the-world-needs-cults/
• Wheal, J. Recapture the Rapture: Rethinking God, Sex, and Death in a World That's Lost Its Mind. HarperOne, 2021.

The unconscious does not yield its secrets to a single reading; those who wish to go deeper into the architecture of desire, submission, and collective meaning will find that the texts reward every return visit with something new.

This article is for general reference only and does not constitute professional R&D guidance, production process advice or quality certification. All material performance data has specific test premises; readers should verify parameters against actual equipment and working conditions.