Relatively little attention has been paid in the professional literature to the cult phenomenon: what it is, how it attracts converts, what differentiates the vulnerable youth from the mn-vulnerable; the effects of cult membership on the convert's family, and, particularly, in what ways the family can be aided during and after involvement with the cult. The authors have drawn on clinical observations, interviews, and extant literature from a variety of disciplines in constructing a portrait of the vulnerable youth; the techniques used by cults to attract, recruit, and convert members; the dynamics of the recruit's family; and the most effective modes of therapy for intervening. The intent of the article is to stimulate: 1) professional awareness of and knowledge about the cults, and 2) further research into related family dynamics and therapeutic techniques.In the late 1960's "hippies" and "flower children" ostensibly "dropped out" of a society filled with an unpopular war, poverty, racism, and materialism. In the 1970's, young adults have turned instead to a variety of religious cults that similarly present individuals with the opportunity to separate from their families, renounce the larger society and find a sense of belonging and of purpose in a visible and demarcated subculture. "he counter culture of the 1960's featured drugs, sex and radical philosophy (Roszak, 1968); today's cults are drugless, ascetic, asexual, and politically more conservative. Although parents were disturbed and upset when their children became part of the "Haight-Ashbury" scene or drug oriented communes elsewhere, they knew that the choice was deliberate and hopefully only represented a transitional phase. That is often not the situation in the case of membership in today's pseudo-religious, expansionminded cults.An additional source of contemporary parental distress is the fact that becoming a cult1 member involves a religious conversion; and acceptance of the new religion then frequently demands a complete rejection of the family as well as of its values, traditions and sanctions, while perhaps affording the opportunity the young adult seeks to rebel and escape to what seems like a viable alternative to the family. It may therefore represent initially a declaration of (personal) independence. The cults offer members a milieu in which to negate the technology, education, science and rationality which are so highly respected, even venerated, by their parents, and to replace these with learning acquired through spiritual devotion and mysticism. (Daner, 1976, p.
VZ)Parents whose children embrace the cults have asked, "How could any religion that as its first consideration tries to break the biological and psychological bond between