The cataclysmic end of the Utopian Jonestown settlement established in Guyana by the California-based Peoples Temple occurred in November 1978. Even after 40 years, it continues to attract scholarly and popular attention and contrasting interpretations, among them a mass suicide, a collective revolutionary protest ritual, a covert operation mounted by unknown rogue insurgents or government representatives, and a tragic-but-predictable result of lives given over to an unstable and authoritarian cult leader. Nesci (community psychology, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Italy) supports the last of these interpretations. In the introduction, he defines a cult as a movement "centered on the absolute power of its leader and the abuse of ‘brainwashed’ followers.” He views the Peoples Temple as the prototype of a religious cult and uses psychodynamic categories to explain how a cult produces forms of psychopathology in which identities become fused, group members regress to a “placental” level, paranoia is typical, and collective death rituals (murder or suicide) are likely to result. Nesci’s post-Freudian interpretive categories have affinities with psychiatrist Stanislav Grof’s perinatal matrices. Those interested in Jonestown or religious cults in general may wish to visit Alternative Considerations of Jonestown & Peoples Temple <https://jonestown.sdsu.edu>.



Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty.

Choice Reviews

Revisiting Jonestown is an outstanding book on the life and death of Peoples Temple, a religious cult that Dr. Nesci has been studying throughout his life. The book is a captivating narrative, blending the facts of the story of Jim Jones and his followers with theoretical reflections on the meaning of cults, explaining how and why they are exposed to the risk of violent, destructive (and self-destructive) behaviors. To solve the riddle of Jonestown, Dr. Nesci developed new theories on the dawn of human awareness, the origins of religions, and the relationships between different death rituals of Homo Sapiens: collective suicide, genocide, and war. I am sure that the next decades will see a vibrant scientific debate on these new interdisciplinary ideas, as well as on the changes in perspective that they will inevitably bring to different fields: psychology, anthropology, sociology, political science, women studies, history, religion, and so on... As a psychiatrist, I think that this book will open new horizons in our way of conceiving psychopathology and the practice of psychotherapy with destructive (and self-destructive) patients. I strongly recommend this book to all graduate students in the humanities and in medicine (especially in psychiatry, criminology, and forensic psychology) as well as all lay (but cultivated) readers who are concerned with understanding cult mentality.

Robert O. Pasnau, MD, University of California, Los Angeles, emeritus

Domenico Nesci does indeed adopt an interdisciplinary approach to the study of Peoples Temple and Jonestown, as the subtitle to Revisiting Jonestown suggests. Utilizing insights from anthropology, mythology, biology, art, and literature—but primarily psychiatry—the Italian psychoanalyst argues that the mass deaths in Jonestown, Guyana indicate a regression to a primordial stage of human consciousness. More broadly, he claims that all new religions—or cults, in his terminology—have this regressive potential.

Reading Religion

As a psycho-historian and prenatal psychologist, I can confirm the high quality of the theoretical background of this book on Jonestown by Domenico A. Nesci, who devoted many years of research to collect documents from Peoples Temple and find some meaning to their poison ordeal. His analysis of the death ritual of Jonestown opens up new levels of understanding of the unconscious dynamics in large groups, linking collective suicide to genocide and war. This book is going to become a great tool for its Readers, and allow them to grasp new insights even on some uncanny political processes of our time.

Ludwig Janus, MD, Psychoanalytic Training Institute

This book makes visible how psychoanalysis, with its interdisciplinary approach, is able to uncover something precious and alive out of an event that, at first sight, appears as totally negative, uncanny, and to be discarded. Dr. Nesci revisits Jonestown and discovers new theoretical perspectives that are in continuity with the work of Franco Fornari, a Kleinian psychoanalyst who applied her theories to the phenomenon of war. With this new book, we come full circle, analyzing collective suicide and “syncytial mourning,” the Paleolithic emotions of primal group of mothers faced with the tragic experience of frequent death at delivery when Homo Sapiens appeared on the planet, during the course of evolution. Revisiting Jonestown is rooted in the past (of American history and of human pre-history) but is a book for the future. I recommend it to every person who wants to know more about the hidden motives of human nature and culture.

Maria Teresa Hooke, Former President, Australian Psychoanalytic Society