Here are parts of a review of the Landmark Forum from a tough-minded reporter who came to the course to find out the truth for herself. Her name is Amelia Hill, of the London Observer.

I thought I’d be brainwashed. But how wrong could I be

It claims to be about self improvement but it’s been accused of exploiting the gullible, even of being a cult. Others say it transforms their lives. So what is the Landmark Forum? And what does it do? Amelia Hill decided to find out. What she discovered about the Forum – and about herself – will surprise you.

I don’t do epiphanies. I don’t make leaps of faith or have life-transforming realisations and I have never experienced anything even remotely resembling a breakthrough.

I have never read a self-help book and consider myself immune to out-of-body experiences. Meditation bores me and the few times I tried yoga, I ended up inexplicably angry.

Above all, what I most certainly do not do is stand up in front of 200 people who openly talk about sharing, loving and personal journeys, and apologise for getting it all wrong. Except, as of last Tuesday, I apparently do.

This is how it happened. When I signed up to a course held by Landmark Education, I wanted to investigate tales I had heard about a course that turned intelligent, predominantly middle-class professionals into strange automatons.

Students were said to lose all sense of themselves and take to phoning loved ones late at night to bring up long-forgotten arguments while excoriating themselves for real and imagined character flaws.

A quick look on the internet revealed even more dramatic claims. Since its creation in 1991, Landmark Education has been described variously as a cult, an exercise in brainwashing and a marketing trick cooked up by a conman to sap the vulnerable of their savings.

Landmark rebuts such claims. Not satisfied with simply transforming the lives of its students, it promises to deliver the secret of what it means to be human and guarantees them futures greater than they could imagine.

For £275 and 39 hours of my time, it seemed like an offer worth considering. In my head, however, I had already begun to draft an article about a society so needy that even its educated elite were mugs enough to pay through the nose for such vague, preposterous promises.

Mugs or not, over the past two years, Landmark has experienced an astonishing surge of interest. While most companies congratulate themselves on achieving a 6 per cent growth, Landmark boasts a steady 10 per cent rise in customers across 100 cities and 21 countries.

More than 125,000 people in the world participated in Landmark’s courses last year. In 2001, its revenues reached $56 million, although the organisation is struggling to recover from the destruction of its main New York office in the Twin Towers.

But it is on Britain’s cynical shores that the organisation has struck gold, attracting more than 1,050 students each month, 80 per cent of whom go on to take a second course.

Questioning former students on what the course taught them got me nowhere: happy to talk, they spoke winningly of transformations and breakthroughs, insights and possibilities while remaining vague as to how such magic was achieved. Clearly, the only way to get to the bottom of the course was to attend myself. So it was that three weeks ago, I reinvented myself as a human resources manager for an unspecified City firm, and signed myself up.

Read the whole story at the London Observer to find out how it turned out.