I enjoyed reading this book also. But what I found remarkable was how different the culture and environment is of Jehovah's Witnesses than the one that Hassan describes as he describes the Moonies and a few other cults he lists in the body of the text.
It is interesting to note that Hassan never lists JWs as a cult, even though he does list some other groups, in the body of the text and the only reference at all to JWs is in the appendix and it is a reference to some counter-JWs sources.
In considering Hassan's BITE methodology it is readily apparent that only to a mild extent can the Information Control prong be made applicable to Jehovah's Witneses. All of the other prongs are at best a real stretch.
Your reference to Lifton's Criteria of Thought Reform and Totalist Psychology is interesting but you may want to do more research before you try to apply it to the culture of Jehovah's Witnesses (or even subscribe to it at all).
I have seem many people, after a superficial reading about Lifton's Criteria, find some analogy to Jehovah's Witnesses or even try to apply the criteria to the culture of Jehovah's Witnesses.
Unfortunately such persons haven't done their homework and fail to understand Lifton's research and findings completely.
First, to some extent each criteria could be said to be applicable to virtually all systems of belief.
Second, Lifton's own findings and conclusions are usually misunderstood and overlooked in the following ways:
1) Lifton based his system on study of Korean War prisoners of war and the specific circumstances of that situation. (And incidently, the population of the study was a tiny amount of POWs, which is very detrimental to any conclusions meant to be applicable to larger populations.)
2) Second, Lifton and his fellow research found that only 2 of the subjects showed some sort of "attitude change" (i.e. that the totalistic control "worked") and both of these two subjects changed their minds and reiterated their democratic values once they were safe and no longer POWs. (Also Lifton concluded that these two persons had predispositions before they were forced into the controlling situation, in that they were open to the ideas of communism before becoming POWs)
3) Finally, and most importantly and what is often overlooked by people is that Lifton concluded that his Criteria/Totalistic control can possibly work ONLY where the situation is one of extreme conditions, especially involving physical confinement and torture
It thus goes without saying that trying to apply Lifton's Criteria or find a Totalistic environment based upon his criteria within Jehovah's Witnesses is a farce.
Below is just a snippet from the Wikipedia entry with some important parts highlighted for you; but you are free to Google and research Lifton's study and his original paper is online.
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Later, two studies of the Korean War defections by Robert Lifton and Edgar Schein concluded that brainwashing had a transient effect when used on prisoners of war. Lifton and Schein found that the Chinese did not engage in any systematic re-education of prisoners, but generally used their techniques of coercive persuasion to disrupt the ability of the prisoners to organize to maintain their morale and to try to escape. The Chinese did, however, succeed in getting some of the prisoners to make anti-American statements by placing the prisoners under harsh conditions of physical and social deprivation and disruption, and then by offering them more comfortable situations such as better sleeping quarters, better food, warmer clothes or blankets. Nevertheless, the psychiatrists noted that even these measures of coercion proved quite ineffective at changing basic attitudes for most people. In essence, the prisoners did not actually adopt Communist beliefs. Rather, many of them behaved as though they did in order to avoid the plausible threat of extreme physical abuse. Moreover, the few prisoners influenced by Communist indoctrination apparently succumbed as a result of the confluence of the coercive persuasion, and of the motives and personality characteristics of the prisoners that already existed before imprisonment. In particular, individuals with very rigid systems of belief tended to snap and realign, whereas individuals with more flexible systems of belief tended to bend under pressure and then restore themselves when the external pressures were removed.
Two researchers working individually, Lifton and Schein, discussed coercive persuasion in their analysis of the treatment of Korean War POWs. They defined coercive persuasion as a mixture of social, psychological and physical pressures applied to produce changes in an individual's beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors. Lifton and Schein both concluded that such coercive persuasion can succeed in the presence of a physical element of confinement, "forcing the individual into a situation in which he must, in order to survive physically and psychologically, expose himself to persuasive attempts." They also concluded that such coercive persuasion succeeded only on a minority of POWs and that the end result of such coercion remained very unstable, as most of the individuals reverted to their previous condition soon after they left the coercive environment.
