Those who tend to the human psyche are experts in our internal dramas, which are generally invisible to the naked eye. They give us tools to subdue our anxieties, lift plummeting moods and mop up our quotidian emotional messes.

A rare few populate therapeutic realms inhabited exclusively by men and women who are thrust against the very limits of human adaptability. These professionals deal with people whose dramas are enough to make front-page news.

Call them extreme psychologists. Psychology Today tracked down five whose work takes them into often-uncharted depths of human nature. Most are rewriting the textbook of human behavior as they go.

One examines American soldiers who acted unspeakably in Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison. Another helps cult members break free. Yet another probes the memories of people whose experience has been almost literally out of this world. Still another has found the secret that allows victims of terrorism and catastrophes to emerge stronger than ever. And one plucks couples from the abyss of marital dissolution. By working at the margins of human experience, they illuminate the most basic psychological needs of us all.

Susan Clancy's close encounters with the third kind began a decade ago, by proxy. A psychology fellow at Harvard, she was searching to find a verifiable way to study the conditions under which people do—or do not—create fake memories. What she found was how far people go to make sense of experience.

In 1996, she had begun work with women who had repressed and "recovered" vivid memories of sexual abuse, applying well-known tests designed to show if some were more prone to re-create memories. She tested subjects and control groups who said they were either never sexually abused or had never forgotten their abuse. All were asked to study, memorize and then recite back a list of semantically related words, such as those having to do with the word sweet. On the list were candy, sugar, cookie and brownie, for example, but never actually the word sweet.

Everybody had a tendency to think that the "nonpresent critical word"—sweet—was on the list. "But the women who claimed to have recovered memories of sex abuse were significantly more likely than the control groups to be very, very confident that the critical word sweet was on that list," Clancy found. "The bottom line is that they created a false memory and not only believed it, but were very confident in their belief." The research set off a firestorm. "All I said was that if women were more prone to create false memories in the lab, it was also a possibility they had outside the lab, too. I was accused of protecting pedophiles."

Ultimately, there was no workable way to corroborate the abuse stories. She needed "a better, safer 'mouse'" to study in the lab. Clancy turned to alien abductees. "Here were intelligent, high-functioning, nonreligious people, free of brain damage or major trauma, yet with vivid memories of something that to a high degree of certainty did not happen."

The same tests yielded the same results. The only big difference between abductees who created false memories in hypnosis, those who said they were abducted but had no memory of it, and a control group who had never thought they were abducted was that the false-memory group scored higher in fantasy proneness. The "recovered-memory" abductees overall were far more likely to remember sweet with complete certainty and to believe false memories that were suggested or imagined in detail with the help of testers.

Few abductees remembered the abduction itself. Most just believed it on the basis of symptoms, Clancy says. "They would say 'I woke up and couldn't move for 30 seconds,' or they discovered a strange pattern of moles on their skin. Then they would conclude that they 'feel different now.'" But instead of telling themselves they had a bad dream, a physical ailment, sleep problems or just a coincidental set of symptoms, they attributed the phenomena to an abduction.

Initially, the abductees sought therapy for the psychological and physical trauma they "experienced." But once past the pain and terror, Clancy found, "they felt special, that something chose them and they were important, and they felt that scientists 'don't know everything.'"

False as the abductions may be, they play a real role in the psychological lives of those who believe in them. Further, they expose a universal need. "It's human for people to seek psychological explanations for why they feel alone, sad, lost or put down," Clancy observes. "We don't all choose alien abductions that focus on trauma, anal probes and all the creepy stuff, but we all seek some kind of explanation for what we experience. Being abducted is culturally available; aliens are all over the media. My child at age two could identify an alien on TV."

Clancy recognized in abductees the same need you and I have to believe in something bigger than ourselves. "They want meaning. And don't we all? Their experience makes them human, not weird." Therapists called upon to treat anyone for postabduction trauma would do well to respect that, she notes. Then abductees can be helped to understand themselves and their lives, even if the memory of what happened to them isn't valid.

In charge of the night shift in a part of Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison known as the "hard site," Ivan "Chip" Frederick could have stopped the abuse that famous night in 2003, he later admitted. But the 38-year-old former staff sergeant, whose 12-year sentence is on appeal, took part instead, forcing prisoners to masturbate and punching one man so hard he needed medical help. He also hooked wires to the hands of a detainee, who was told he would be electrocuted if he fell off a box.

Philip Zimbardo was called to consult on Frederick's defense. "Most of us have a self-serving illusion," says the Stanford University psychologist, whose 1971 landmark study of prison society famously demonstrated the power of circumstance to hijack morality. "We say we'd be good guards or heroic prisoners, that we can't imagine how guards at Abu Ghraib did this." But he can.

Zimbardo grew up in the South Bronx—"a skinny, sickly kid with a funny, big nose, picked on by other kids." Survival meant using his brains to learn the "psychology of street smarts," becoming an "intuitive personality theorist who sized up other kids very fast to figure out who was a friend and who was dangerous." That led to "understanding the dynamics of power, which kid had it and how to make it work for me and not against me."

With a Ph.D. in psychology from Yale, and his mean-streets training, Zimbardo found himself exploring how ordinarily decent people could do evil. "This was not a philosophical question for me," he says of the experiment in which he put college students into a prisonlike setting, some as guards, some as inmates. He watched as shifts in power and circumstances messed with personal identities, distorting and overwhelming deeply held values and moral codes.

"The lesson was that the human mind is a template for virtually anything, capable of heroic or evil acts," he says. Within "deindividuation," a temporary state of suspended personal identity, lie the ordinariness of evil and the banality of heroics. "Most people who do evil—or a heroic act—do it unpredictably, only once and in a particular time or place," he says. This suggests that many are looking for evil in the wrong places, including in "bad seed" personalities.

Frederick, for example, supervised 12-hour night shifts for 40 nights with no day off amid stress, prison filth, lack of sunlight, missed meals, absence of socialization, fear of bombings, escape attempts, zero mission-specific training and vague commands. "There is not a single trait about him that is other than normal," says Zimbardo. "No sadism. Nine medals. An all-American poster boy of patriotism who became a monster. This was not a case of a bad apple, but of bad bough makers."

Zimbardo stresses that Frederick is responsible for his acts. But, he says, "Abu Ghraib was a crucible for evil and those who try to predict evil by linking personality traits rooted in everyday normal situations to samples of evil behavior at a particular time are on a fool's errand."

In his forthcoming book, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, Zimbardo points out that Lucifer was once God's favorite angel. "Everywhere I've looked, I've found transformations of ordinary people into evil ones," he says. "The gold ring won't be found in predicting the unpredictable, but in figuring out triggers and altering them. Not in trying to change the nature of human capabilities, but in understanding what drives it."

Steven Alan Hassan was 19 and depressed, a college dropout who had just broken up with his girlfriend. He was lonely and working at a nearby Holiday Inn when a trio of attractive young women approached him on his college campus. Dressed like students and carrying books, they talked about classes, flirted and got him to talk about himself.

Over several days, they described the good life living with people from all over in a group house. They reassured him he would love it there, that there were big ideas afoot that could include him and that their only agenda was to help each other save the world. "I had no idea that what was happening to me was a systematic, well-planned manipulation and seduction and that I had been targeted," he says.

So, in 1973, Hassan became a member of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church. For more than two years, the Moonie was subjected to "overwhelming psychological, physical and emotional torture." He rose quickly in the cult's ranks and was brought into discussions about "what country I wanted to run when we took over the U.S. and, ultimately, the world."

But his "boringly normal" Jewish family never stopped worrying about him and seized a moment of opportunity. Working almost nonstop to raise money for the cult, he had fallen asleep at the wheel, crashed and was hospitalized with a broken leg and chest injuries. Dazed and unsure about what would happen to him, he called his sister Thea. "I made her promise not to tell my parents. Fortunately she broke her word."

Hassan became an expert witness in the U.S. government's investigation of the 1978 Jonestown massacre in Guyana. He turned over Moon's speeches, believing the parallels to Jim Jones' cult would help expose the Unification Church's methods.

Today, as a licensed mental health counselor, he's a role model for cult-member clients. He doesn't so much get people out of cults as give them the tools to get themselves out. He teaches them about mind control. He creates a support team of family and friends. Everyone gets homework. "If the brother of a cult member says his brother tried to recruit him and he replied that the cult member was nuts, I ask him to think about when he last called his brother just to say he missed him and to do that instead."

His own experience and careful observation have taught him that people don't join cults, they are targeted and seduced by well-trained political, religious or other opportunists who know exactly on whom to prey—smart, well-educated youth who have a hard time getting themselves out of stressful, disappointing or depressing situations. They fall victim to those who take them back to the feelings they had as children, when their needs were met by all-knowing adults.

"The recruiters spend time with you, comfort you, take the time to get to know a lot about you even before a face-to-face meeting. You feel wanted, desirable, chosen, special, useful and, most of all, safe. I believed my father was Satan and despaired at the evil place that was the world outside. Cults get you to be confabulators of your own history."

His coaching aims to "get people to start thinking again, comparing what they've been told to reality—to motivate those whose minds have been closed to a painful real world to open their minds again.

Hassan asks that families not wait if they think their young have been swept up in a cult or have begun to pay attention to people who belong to secretive organizations. "These people haven't made an informed choice, they have been recruited and enslaved. The sooner you act, the better."

Just after dark, on October 28, 1989, Aloha Island Air Flight 1712 took off from Maui with eight athletes from Molokai High School and two of their teachers among the 20 passengers. Minutes later, it crashed near Molokai Island's Halawa Valley. All 20 aboard were killed.

The casualties in the close-knit community included the living as well as the dead. Lloyd Yonemura, for example, believes that athletic director John Ino took the fatal flight so that he wouldn't miss a basketball game with him the next day.

For psychologist Claude Chemtob, the guilt and helplessness that Yonemura experienced—in fact, the entire disaster—became an instruction manual in human resilience, with lessons for coping with mass catastrophes like 9/11. Called to Molokai because of his sensitive handling of an earlier crash, his task was to identify those at high risk for severe psychological trauma and to help others begin the process of recovery.

Born in Egypt to parents made refugees by the Suez Crisis in 1956, Chemtob grew up sensitized to the response of ordinary people to life-threatening situations. These days, he shuttles between Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York and Honolulu, where he directs a research laboratory at the Pacific Islands Division of the National Center for PTSD.

Disasters and trauma, whether singular events or chronic threats, open a "window on real human nature, the affiliative part of it," Chemtob finds. They bring out altruism and self-sacrifice, emotions normally hidden in everyday life. No cauldron of unformed instincts erupts—except enormously well-organized impulses. "Our primitive essence is not wild and disorganized, he argues. "We have the capacity to form ties, to help and to connect." Such impulses facilitate recovery.

Chemtob's postdisaster experience has led him to one sure conclusion: It is necessary to help victims find "the gift in the horror." For recovery to begin, people need to exercise the powerful impulse to bond, to touch, to need one another, to create something positive in a nightmare experience—but it can happen only if they are first allowed to get as close to the pain as they wish.

Early in the aftermath of a disaster, he has found, people are grateful to have outside help. But unless the helpers mobilize locals, the community will eventually want to exclude the helpers because of embarrassment and feelings of helplessness and ineffectiveness. "Only they themselves can over time create the gift in the horror, some way of getting an entire community to feel it has come out better for the experience."

The common impulse of outsiders to "protect" parents from seeing their maimed children is misguided, Chemtob says; he particularly remembers one father who sneaked into a morgue to see his daughter. "There is a powerful human need to touch and see the loved one and to know the loved one died," he contends. "Soldiers will sacrifice their own lives to not leave bodies behind; in mass trauma people can't otherwise accept that the experience is real. We need affirmation."

France and Israel each have coordinated emergency response systems: "People come out feeling stronger and more resilient." Americans don't feel more capable, stronger or better organized post-9/11 or post-Katrina, he laments. "We have utterly failed to pay attention to what humans can do at times like this, and to provide support for them to do it."

He is usually successful, blatantly ill-behaved, hyperjudgmental, focused on her demands for attention and unwilling to talk about problems. In fact, grandiose in beliefs and pronouncements, he looks down his nose at her "neediness" and brings his outside-the-world, above-the-rules stance home.

She is disdainful of her mate but silences her sense of superiority. Unwilling to risk losing her man, she shrinks from putting real demands on the table, instead erupting over side issues that leave him clueless. Given his unwillingness to work on the relationship, she either withholds sex or offers the silent treatment.

Typically they've been married for decades, were once deeply in love and have been through multiple rounds of marital counseling. For Massachusetts-based marital therapist Terence Real, that's part of the problem. Most couples counselors don't take sides. That leaves them "ignoring the obvious," which, Real insists, is why everyone gets precisely nowhere.

Like a battle-toughened Special Forces operative, Real drops behind enemy lines in a last-ditch attempt to keep couples from self-destructing. In an intense 48-hour fusillade, he is aggressive in pointing fingers at bad behavior, insisting that both he and she own up to their shortcomings. And when he takes sides, it's usually with her against him.

What he says typically sounds something like this: "Harry, you have a problem. You're a rager and even Mother Teresa wouldn't want you. How do you expect your wife to sleep with you?"

The problem, Real finds, is that today's women are invariably asking for more intimacy than men are trained to give. "The great unspoken secret of bad marriages is that men are not unhappy about their marriages but about the fact that women are so unhappy with them." Its corollary is that women have a right to be unhappy with them.

"When women say they want men more connected, more responsive and more in tune and expressive, it is not appropriate for a therapist to then turn to the men and ask 'Now, what do you want?' What's needed is to turn to the guy with empathy and say 'OK, you weren't trained in relationship skills; let's go get some. They're better and healthier for you.' And the wife needs to stop scolding him for not doing what he doesn't know how to do."

Connecting requires that men give up their grandiosity, and Real admits that's a toughie—because grandiosity feels so great. But it makes men tone-deaf to others' needs. So he delivers a crash course in remedial empathy and the healthy ego.

Real has done no formal follow-up with clients after they go back home. But his office reports that nine out of 10 leave recommitted.

His message for women: Stop being coy and nasty and put demands on the table firmly and considerately. To men, he says: Stop whining about conflict, take up the yoke and learn to do some of the heavy lifting that women have always been taught to do and do well. "Honey, we have to talk" should not be a man's five most dreaded words but an invitation to the dance.