# Susan Forward **Susan Forward** (d. 2020) was the American therapist and author whose books gave a mass readership its vocabulary for manipulation: *Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them* (1986, forty weeks on the *Times* bestseller list), *Toxic Parents* (1989), *Obsessive Love*, and *Emotional Blackmail* (1997), which coined the term. A UCLA theater graduate who appeared in some fifty television shows before quitting acting at 28, she took a master's in psychiatric social work and a USC doctorate, ran a private practice for twenty-four years, hosted a daily ABC radio program for six, and was a fixture of *Oprah* and the *Today* show — the therapist as public explainer, a generation before the podcast. Her one professional scandal is instructive. Forward had treated Nicole Brown Simpson during her divorce; after the 1994 murder she told reporters that the sessions had documented abuse, believing the privilege died with the patient. It did not: the California licensing board suspended her for three months and put her on three years' probation. She spoke publicly about having been abused by her own father at fifteen. ## Why she is in the vault Forward's frameworks — the FOG of fear, obligation and guilt; the toxic parent who demands loyalty as the price of love — are reference material for the vault's account of coercive control, alongside [[Lundy Bancroft]] and the narcissistic-abuse literature, because the same dynamics that organize an abusive family organize an authoritarian movement: the leader who is never wrong, the follower whose doubt is treated as betrayal, the exit that costs everything. The pages on [[Narcissism]] and cult dynamics use her terms with that transposition made explicit. ## See Also - [[Lundy Bancroft]] · [[Narcissism]]