Treatment Abuse, Behavior Modification, Thought Reform > Daytop Village

DAYTOP Did Me Great Harm in the Long Run

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SEKTO:
Here' a detail from the past that i remembered, and it's one that will prove the veracity of that what I have posted in the last couple days.  

We Dallas Daytopians used to call Leroy "Sexual Chocolate" because he reminded us of the goofy singer Randy Watson in that Eddie Murphy movie Coming To America.  He didn't like it and would tell us not to call him that, but it was funny at the time and I remember it to this day.  

Leroy'd walk by and we'd yell out "Sexual Chocolate!  Sexual Chocolate!" or we'd start singing The Greatest Love of All.  He hated that.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZoS8j9eN ... re=related

psy:
This is highly relevant to your interests:
viewtopic.php?f=11&t=26020&p=324276#p324276

It's a speech given by Abraham Maslow at Daytop in NY

SEKTO:
Thank you psy, relevant on many levels it is indeed.  

Can you please, for my edification, highlight and elucidate upon what you believe to be the most pertinent points contained in this text?

Thanks for your time.

psy:

--- Quote ---Synanon and Eupsychia. Journal of Humanistic Psychology 1967; 7; 28
These are excerpts from a speech given by Abraham Maslow, leading figure in the Human Potential Movement alongside Carl Rogers, at the Synanon branch in NY, Daytop Village, Staten Island, N. Y., on August 14, 1965. Synanon is a community run by former drug addicts to which addicts come to be cured. (Cedu was started in ’67. Also in 67' Synanon adopted the idea of lifetime therapy and became a self-proclaimed utopian community.)

What I have read about Synanon, as well as what I saw last night and this afternoon, suggests that the whole idea of the fragile teacup which might crack or break, the idea that you mustn't say a loud word to anybody because it might traumatize him or hurt him, the idea that people cry easily or crack easily or commit suicide or go crazy if you shout at them - that maybe these ideas are outdated.
I've suggested that a name for this might be "no-crap therapy." It serves to clean out the defenses, the rationalizations, the veils, the evasions and politenesses of the world. The world is half-blind, you might say, and what I've seen here is the restoring of sight. In these groups people refuse to accept the normal veils. They rip them aside and refuse to take any crap or excuses or evasions of any sort.
Well, I have been asking questions, and I have been told that this assumption works fine. Did anybody ever commit suicide or crack in any way? No. Has anyone gone crazy from this rough treatment? No. I watched it last night. There was extremely direct talking, and it worked fine. Now this contradicts a whole lifetime of training, and that makes it terribly important to me as a theoretical psychologist who has been trying to figure out what human nature is like in general. It raises a real question about the nature of the whole human species. How strong are people? How much can they take? The big question is how much honesty can people take. There are all sorts of games cooked up to cover the truth, but the truth is that the average American citizen does not have a real friend in the world. Very few people have what a psychologist would call real friendships. The marriages are mostly no good in that ideal sense as well. You could say that the kinds of problems we have, the open troubles - not being able to resist alcohol, not being able to resist drugs, not being able to resist crime, not being able to resist anything - that these are due to the lack of these basic psychological gratifications. The question is, does Daytop supply these psychological vitamins? My impression as I wandered around this place this morning is that it does.
It seems possible that this brutal honesty, rather than being an insult, implies a kind of respect. You can take it as you find it, as it really is. And this can be a basis for respect and friendship. I remember hearing an analyst talking a long time ago, long before group therapy. He was talking about this honesty too. What he was saying sounded foolish at the time, as if he was being cruel or some-thing. What he said was that "I place upon my patients the fullest load of anxiety that they can bear." Do you realize what that implies? As much as they can take, that is what he is going to dish out, because the more he can dish out, the faster the whole thing will move. It doesn't seem so foolish in the light of experience here.
On the new social therapy. This is a thought which may turn out to be of professional interest to you. There is a new kind of job opening up that is an activist's job, and it is one that demands experience rather than book training. It is a sort of a combination of an old-fashioned minister and a teacher. You have to be concerned with people. You have to like working with them directly, rather than at a distance; and you have to have as much knowledge of human nature as possible. I have suggested calling it "social therapy." Well, this seems to be developing very gradually over the last year or two. The people who are doing best are not the people with Ph.D.s and so on; they are the people who have been on the streets and who know what it is all about themselves. They know what they're talking about. They know, for example, when to push hard and when to take it easy. With the sudden effort to try to teach the illiterate how to read; and of psychiatry to help people to maturity and responsibility; and so on, there is already a great shortage of people to do these jobs.
Well, one of the interesting things about Daytop is that it is being run by people who have been through the mill of experience. You people know how to talk to others in the same boat. And this is a job; it may be a new type of profession.
On the current social revolution. I could give you a half hour of examples of the way it takes place in different spots. There is a revolution going on. There are some spots which are more growing points than others; but they are all growing in the same Eupsychian direction, that is in the direction of more fully human people. This is going on in education as well. I think that it would be possible, if we got together and pooled all the experiences, bad and good, that we could all pool together, to take the skin off the whole damn educational system. But we could also rebuild it. Well, this is explosive because it demands a human reality, human needs, and human development, rather than a sort of traditional heritage from a thousand years ago which is outdated. It is difficult to speak about Eupsychian education. I think that you can contribute some with the thought that I suggested to you that you consider this as a sort of pilot experiment.
On encounters. May I tell you something. I've been in only one encounter group - last night - and I don't know how I would react if I'd been in that thing for a long time. Nobody has ever been that blunt with me in my whole life.
A major research question. That raises a question that I am asking around here. It is a very important question, and you don't really have the answer, I guess. The question is why do some people stay and others not? That also means, if you take this as a kind of educational institution, how good will it be for how much of the population? How many customers do you expect? How many people won't it work for? You know, the people who never show up do not get counted as failures. You people here overcame a hurdle, you overcame a fear. What is your theory about the people who don't jump over the fear? What is the difference between them and you? This is a practical question, since you people will be the graduates who will be running places like this somewhere else in the future. Then you must face the problem of how to make a larger percentage stay. I report to you that by comparison with that picture that procedure - what happens here is that the truth is being dished out and shoved right in your face. Nobody sits and waits for eight months until you discover it for yourself. At least the people who stay can accept it, and it appears to be good for them. That is in contradiction to a whole psychiatric theory.
From the kind of talking that we did last night, I very definitely have the feeling that the group would feed back things that you could not get in a hundred years of psychoanalysis from one person. Talking about what somebody looks like and what you look like to somebody else, and then having six other people agreeing about the impression you give, is revealing. Maybe it is not possible to form your own identity or a real picture of yourself unless you also get the picture of what you look like to the world. Well, that is a new assumption. In psychoanalysis that assumption isn't made. What you look like to other people isn't taken into account.
After you get over the pain, eventually self-knowledge is a very nice thing. It feels good to know about something rather than to wonder about it, to speculate about it. "Maybe he didn't speak to me because I'm bad, maybe they behaved that way because I'm bad." For the average man, life is just a succession of maybes. He doesn't know why people smile at him or why they don't. It is a very comfortable feeling not to have to guess. It is good to be able to know.
--- End quote ---

Maslow was a big proponent of the human potential movement.

SEKTO:
To give a synopsis: basically, he is saying "We'll have to hurt you in order to help you.  You may not understand what we are doing right now, think that it's rough and perhaps even abusive, but eventually you'll come to understand and be grateful for what you have done to you and for you, and we'll teach you how to do it for other people so that you can one day treat others in the way you've been treated and thus perpetuate the cycle of mercy."  

That's pretty much what I take away from it.  What say you psy?

Oh, and I recently read O'Brien's book.  

It's easy to pontificate condescendingly in such a manner as he about what the country needs to do in order to "save our kids," when he's a priest who is under a vow of celibacy and has no kids of his own, right?

Constantly in the latter half of the book calling addicts and other people with problems stupid lazy babies and the like.  

More on that later though.

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