Margaret Thaler Singer, PhD
Read “The Late Margaret Singer: Birthday Reflections From Her Son, Sam Singer” (ICSA News Letter: August 13, 2021)
Margaret Singer died in 2003.
“Margaret Thaler Singer, PhD, was a pioneer in the cultic studies field, and for many years she was a director of American Family Foundation (ICSA’s pre-2004 name). … On July 29, 2021, her son Sam Singer sent a 100th birthday message to friends of his late mother. … it sheds light on Margaret Singer the person and the history of the field to which she devoted her life.
“Sam Singer wrote that his mother ‘argued fascinatingly and endlessly about the insidious religious, political, and individual cults that manipulated individuals into what Robert J. Lifton described as ‘the most dangerous direction of the twentieth-century mind – the quest for absolute or ‘totalistic’ belief systems.'”