Not All Peace and Love, Man
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/child-myths/200911/legacy-the-sixties-not-all-peace-and-love-man
Some nasty practices began in the Sixties and are still here.
November 21, 2009
If you're old enough and have been interested for a long time in
psychological issues, you may remember Synanon, the California
organization that specialized in treatment of addictions and was
gradually revealed to have been both emotionally and physically
brutal in its methods. A surprising allusion to Synanon cropped up
the other day in a New York Times article about union organization.
In his article "Some Organizers Protest Their Union's Tactics"
(Times, Nov. 19, 2009, pp. B1, B5), Steven Greenhouse described
organizing methods that involved finding vulnerabilities in the
personal histories of potential union members and using this
information to manipulate people. Some members of the relevant union
denied this, and I have no way of knowing who is correct on this
point. However , the article contained an important statement from
some of the organizers. According to Greenhouse, these organizers
compared the union's methods to "a practice that Cesar Chavez, former
president of the United Farm Workers, used when he embraced a
mind-control practice developed by Synanon, a drug rehabilitation
center... Union staff members were systematically subjected to
intense, prolonged verbal abuse in an effort to break them down and
assure loyalty."
It's surprising, isn't it, to hear that the decade of "peace and
love" was also characterized by vicious manipulation of attitudes and
beliefs? And it's equally surprising to find that those manipulative
methods were passed down and around, to the point where they emerge
as almost conventional practices.
But union organizers (for example) have not been the only ones to
inherit and use resources from the less appetizing side of the
Sixties. We continue to see some of the same things in fringe
practices aimed at child guidance and child psychotherapy. For
example, in the last few years we have seen caging of children in the
Gravelle case in Ohio and the Vasquez case in California. A therapist
who recently had his license revoked in Colorado was known for
intimidating children by shouting and verbal abuse, by physical
restraint, and by licking their faces.
Are these simply bizarre behaviors that occur spontaneously among a
few emotionally-disturbed practitioners, or is there a historical
connection that goes back to the Sixties, like the possible
connection between the union organizers and Synanon? It's hard to
prove that a historical influence caused some present-day event, but
we can see a paper trail that leads from the Sixties through various
intermediate steps to the present day. Beginning in the 1960s, Robert
M. Zaslow, a psychologist who was a professor at San Jose State
University, began to write and speak about certain beliefs he held on
the subject of personality development. In 1975, he and a colleague,
Marilyn Menta, published a book entitled "The psychology of the
Z-process: Attachment and activity." The "Z-process" was Zaslow's
term for a postulated set of events in personality development, in
which fear, discomfort, and intimidation caused a child to form an
emotional attachment to his or her parents. This attachment,
according to Zaslow, was responsible for making children cheerful,
affectionate, and obedient; lack of attachment caused a wide variety
of behavior problems and even mental illnesses like autism or schizophrenia.
Zaslow theorized about-- and put into practice-the idea that if a
child had somehow missed the formation of attachment at the usual
time, later exposure to intimidation and pain could correct problems
by causing attachment to occur. The correction would be based on the
"draining off" of rage resulting from pain and fear; once the rage
was gone, attachment could easily take place. Zaslow and his admirers
carried out his methods with clients ranging from toddlers to adults.
In sessions that lasted many hours, the individuals were held down by
four or more people while Zaslow applied "tactile stimulation" in the
form of painful prodding of the ribs and underarms. Zaslow stressed
that it was necessary for this to hurt, and suggested informed
consent documentation that stated that some bruises were likely to
result from treatment. He continued to claim his treatment as
effective for many problems, and in a paper in a German journal in
1982 described having cured the blindness of a child at the Colorado
School for the Blind.
Zaslow eventually lost his license as a result of an actual injury to
a patient. But he continued to travel and to write, and in the course
of his travels encountered a Colorado physician named Foster Cline,
now a major figure in the commercial parent education organization
called "Love & Logic". Cline adopted much of Zaslow's thinking, and
in material published in the 1990s stated baldly that in his opinion
"all bonds are trauma bonds"-- an opinion which, to the best of my
knowledge, he has never retracted.
A detailed account of the ways Zaslow's ideas were passed along would
be very lengthy. Suffice it to say here that various organizations
and individuals have continued to support the Zaslow approach, with
disastrous effects for the children in their power. Perhaps the most
important question is, why were the ideas and methods advocated by
Synanon and by Zaslow not called down when they began, or soon
afterward? Part of the answer is undoubtedly that most of the public,
and indeed most professionals, had no idea what was happening. But
another, less easily acceptable, part is that the Sixties admired
unconventional thought, and tolerance of unconventional thought can
be overdone. When we encounter really unusual ways of thinking or
acting, we need to consider carefully the consequences of those ways,
rather than being afraid that disapproval might make us "uncool". The
Sixties were a time when "cool" was desperately desired. Let's hope
that the Aughties have learned a lesson from this and become ready to
think critically about the unconventional and the conventional alike.
.
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