Luigi Corvaglia, PsyD

Italy   Luigi Corvaglia, psychologist and psychotherapist, is director of a public outpatient unit for the treatment of addictions and assistant professor of Forensic Medicine and Criminology at the University of Salento in Lecce (Italy). He is a scholar of the relationship between power and submission, with particular regard to the relationship between persuasion and personal freedom. He is the author of various books and dozens of texts on the subject of freedom in all its implications—philosophical, political, clinical, and criminological—and has given speeches on these issues in many countries. He is past-president of the Center for Psychological Abuse Studies (CeSAP) and a member of both the scientific committee and the board of FECRIS, the European Federation of Centres of Research and Information on Sectarianism. He is the FECRIS delegate to the annual Human Dimension Implementation Meeting at the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) in Warsaw. He has dedicated himself to unmasking the psychological tricks used by those who defend high-control groups, underlining the contradictions posed by academics who claim to defend civil rights and individual freedoms, while in reality defending totalitarian groups that deny those very rights and freedoms to their members. He has produced an analysis of the argumentative fallacies used by so-called “cult apologists” to defend the work of abusive and coercive groups, and an investigative work on the international network linking some of these cult advocates to the sodalities they defend. He is Honorary Magistrate at the Court of Appeal of the Court of Bari.

Italy