Robert Jay Lifton, M.D., a professor of psychiatry and psychology at the City University of New York, has staked out an unusual turf—interviewing people who’ve helped make history to see what makes them tick.

For instance, he interviewed survivors of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, during World War II. He interviewed Vietnam War veterans. And now he has talked with former members of the Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo, which released gas into the Japanese subway in 1995, killing 12 persons, injuring 5,000, and shocking people throughout the world.

He reported some of his findings about the members and their leader at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis in Chicago in May.

As a child, the leader of the cult—Shoko Asahara—had demonstrated a talent for manipulating people, yet at the same time had trouble getting close to them. He was also keen on writing plays and acting in them. "Although you can never tell from a person’s childhood what he will do in adulthood," Lifton said, these qualities undoubtedly helped prepare Asahara for his later role as guru.

Asahara had a brush with the law at age 19, and again at age 27, indicating that he might be headed in an antisocial direction. He also started experiencing mystical visions; in one he fancied himself a god of light against darkness. And once he became a cult leader he demonstrated charisma, but was also paranoid and megalomaniacal.

He managed to recruit some 10,000 members to his cult. Female cult members tended to be attracted to him sexually. As a former member told Lifton, "My body would jump at the sight of him."

He created a religion from a global stew of New Age thinking, ancient religious practices, and apocalyptic thinking. His goal was to destroy the world to bring about a spiritual renewal. To achieve this aim, he and his disciples set about not just stockpiling biological and chemical weapons, but purchasing a ranch in Australia with uranium deposits so that they might ultimately create nuclear weapons. When they gassed the Japanese subway, they hoped that one country would think that another had done it, and that this contention would spark World War III, Armageddon, and a spiritual renewal.

In recent years many Japanese have read avidly about the apocalyptic prophecies of the 16th-century French physician and astrologer Nostradamus. Such apocalypse fever undoubtedly helped create fertile ground for the growth of Asahara’s cult, Lifton hypothesized. Yet such world-destroying cults are in no way limited to Japan, Lifton cautioned. For instance, one of the most notorious American criminals of this century, Charles Manson, was also an apocalyptic type, and like Asahara, enamored of nuclear weapons. Similarly, the diary of Timothy McVeigh, who engineered the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, reads like an American Mein Kampf, where white supremacists want to overthrow the American government and kill every black and Jew.

One way for Americans to be forearmed against such would-be world-destroying cults is to try to understand what goes into their making, Lifton advised. For example, the leader probably had difficulty during his childhood becoming close to people. As an adult, he is charismatic and has the potential to become paranoid and megalomaniacal. His disciples believe more in him than they do in his ideas, and he exploits them sexually and monetarily. Both he and his followers hate the world, view it as defiled, and not only regard the killing of people as a noble idea, but carry it out.

Certainly, apocalyptic thinking goes back at least 2,000 years, and large-scale killing carried out in the name of spiritual renewal is not new. But only in this age of nuclear weapons, Lifton pointed out, has it become feasible for a world-destroying guru to truly realize his goal.

More about Lifton’s observations of Aum Shinrikyo can be found in his book Destroying the World to Save It—Aum Shinrikyo, Apocalyptic Violence, and the New Global Terrorism, published last year by Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company, New York.