Cedu meant 2 induce mental illness

[Awake]

This is an interesting history that I believe will show, in part, what was influential to Mel’s creation of Cedu, particularly the tools. As well it serves as proof that the ideas derived were applied in the Cedu program in such a way that was intended to cause mental illness.

Carl Gustav Jung :  26 July 1875 – 6 June 1961) was a Swiss psychiatrist, an influential thinker and the founder of Analytical psychology. Jung's approach to psychology has been influential in the field of depth psychology and in countercultural movements across the globe.

Jung and Alcoholics Anonymous
information provided by Roger Heydt

Jung is credited with having set the course for what today is known as Alcoholics Anonymous.
It was Bill Wilson who told a story of one of Jung's patients, "Roland," who was helped by Jung.
When Roland reportedly asked Jung if there was any sure way for an alcoholic to recover -- truly recover, Jung is quoted as saying, "Yes, there is. Exceptions to cases such as yours have been occurring since early times. Here and there, once in a while, alcoholics have had what are called vital spiritual experiences. To me these are phenomena. They appear to be in the nature of huge emotional displacements and rearrangements. Ideas, emotions, and attitudes which were once the guiding forces of the lives of these men are suddenly cast to one side, and a completely new set of conceptions and motives begin to dominate them.   Wilson later had one of these "conversions"
http://www.cgjungpage.org/index.php?opt ... &Itemid=40

, it was a conversation with Carl Jung that led to the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous, and likewise all related 12 Step Programs. Jung advised a chronic alcoholic known only as "Roland H.": "I can only recommend that place yourself in the religious atmosphere of your own choice, that you recognize your own hopelessness, and that you cast yourself upon whatever God you think there is. The lightning of the transforming experience may then strike you." This advice worked where no psychological, religious, or medical therapy had previously succeeded and the prescription was shared with Bill W., the now famous founder of A.A.  -http://www.nndb.com/people/910/000031817/

The four Ego Functions
Jung's Psychological theory of Types
The Four Ego Faculties
According to Jung, the Ego - the "I" or self-conscious faculty - has four inseperable functions, four different fundamental ways of perceiving and interpreting reality, and two ways of responding to it. Jung divided people into Thinking, Feeling, Sensation, and Intuition types, arranging these four in a compass.
The four ways of interpreting reality are the four ego-functions - Thinking, Feeling, Sensation and Intuition.  These consist of two  diametrically-opposed pairs.  Thinking is the opposite of Feeling, and Sensation the opposite of Intuition.  So, suggests Jung, if a person has the Thinking function (an analytical, "head"-type  way of looking at the world) highly developed, the  Feeling function (the empathetic, value-based  "heart"-type way of looking at things) will be correspondingly underveloped, and in fact suppressed.  The same goes for Sensation and Intuition.  Sensation is orientation "outward" to physical reality, and Intuition "inward" to psychic reality.http://www.kheper.net/topics/Jung/typology.html
The Principle of Opposites

To Jung, life consists of "a complex of inexorable opposites": introversion (inner-directedness) and extraversion
(outer-directedness), consciousness and unconsciousness, thinking and feeling, love and hate,
and so forth. The principle of opposites imply that no personality is ever truly one sided.

The Principle of Opposites: Psychic energy is created by the tension between such opposites as
introversion-extraversion, thinking-feeling, sensation-intuition, good-evil, consciousnessunconsciousness,
love-hate, and many others. When one extreme is primarily conscious, the
unconscious compensates by emphasizing the opposite tendency. Successful adjustment
requires uniting the various opposing forces through some middle ground.

The Shadow. The shadow is the primitive and unwelcome side of personality that
derives from our animal forebears. (See Jung, 1951.) It consists of material that is repressed
into the personal unconscious because it is shameful and unpleasant, and it plays a compensatory
role to the more positive persona and ego.
.
 Jung on schizophrenia and neurosis
intrapsychic ataxia (a disconnection between emotional and intellectual spheres), and Otto
Gross’s (1877–1920) dementia sejunctiva, relied heavily on a ‘splitting’ metaphor (Berrios,
Luque and Villagr´an, 2003), and Carl Jung, working closely with Bleuler, explicitly linked
dissociation (and hysteria) with dementia praecox in his 1907 book, The Psychology of Dementia
Praecox (Jung, 1907/1960). This in turn, infused with Janetian concepts (despite
Jung’s insistence on Freud’s influence), was a major influence for Bleuler, whose concept
of schizophrenia, with its core deficit the ‘splitting’ of psychological functions, provides the
most clear fusion of dissociation and psychotic concepts to date (see Moskowitz, Chapter
3, this volume).
It will thus be seen that secondary personalities are formed by the disintegration
of the original normal personality. Degeneration implies
destruction of normal psychical processes, and may be equivalent to insanity;
whereas the disintegration resulting in multiple personality is only a functional
dissociation of that complex organization which constitutes a normal self. The
elementary psychical processes, in themselves normal, are capable of being reassociated
into a normal whole.
http://media.wiley.com/product_data/exc ... 511737.pdf

Jung developed the concept of a feeling-toned or emotionally-charged complex.  This important concept, adapted from Ziehen, is discussed in detail below, as it was to become central to Bleuler’s developing concept of schizophrenia

The term ‘schizophrenia’ and its relation to the term ‘dissociation’  
Bleuler introduces the term ‘schizophrenia’ – literally, ‘split mind’ – in his 1911 book in an early section entitled, ‘The name of the disease’, in the following passage:  ‘I call dementia praecox “schizophrenia” because (as I hope to demonstrate) the “splitting” of the different psychic functions is one of its most important characteristics’ (Bleuler, 1950/1911, p. .  In the next section, entitled, ‘The definition of the disease’, Bleuler continues,  
In every case, we are confronted with a more or less clear-cut splitting of the psychic functions.  If the disease is marked, the personality loses its unity; at different times different psychic complexes seem to represent the personality… one set of complexes dominates the personality for a time, while other groups of ideas or drives are ‘split off’ and seem either partly or completely impotent.

What then, scientifically speaking, is a ‘feeling-toned complex’?  It is the image of a certain psychic situation which is strongly accentuated emotionally… This image has a powerful inner coherence, it has its own wholeness, and in addition, a relatively high degree of autonomy… and therefore behaves like an animated foreign body in the sphere of consciousness (Jung, 1960/1934, p. 96).

Importantly, Jung then argues that his research on complexes ‘corroborates’ Janet’s teachings on the ‘extreme dissociability of consciousness’ (italics in original), and of the possibility of a personality disintegrating into fragments (pp. 96-97):
…for fundamentally, there is no difference in principle between a fragmentary personality and a complex.... Today, we can take it as moderately certain that complexes are in fact ‘splinter psyches’.  The aetiology of their origin is frequently a so-called trauma, an emotional shock or some such thing, that splits off a bit of the psyche (Jung, 1960/1934, pp. 97-98).

Causes of Neurosis. The collective unconscious includes an innate tendency to be
more introverted or extraverted, and to emphasize one of the four functions. For personality
development to be successful, the favored attitude and function must become dominant, and
they must be brought into harmony with the inferior opposites.
If this goal is frustrated by the external world, or if one misguidedly tries to make some
other function or attitude dominant, the unconscious will come into conflict with consciousness.
This inner cleavage may eventually become so severe as to constitute a neurosis, with the
attempt to deny one's true nature causing the normal intrapsychic polarities to erupt into open
warfare. Neurotic conflicts may occur between various components of personality, such as the
ego versus the shadow [(truth and lie?)], the dominant versus the inferior function or attitude, the persona versus
the anima or animus, or the persona versus the shadow. (See lung, 1932/1933d, p. 236;
1935a, p. 20; 1917/1972d, p. 19.)

Suppose that an inherently introverted child is pressured into becoming a pronounced
extravert by the parents (or by society). This unwelcome external influence disrupts the individuation
process, and causes the child's psyche to become a house divided against itself. The
conscious mind now seeks conformity with the parental dictates by emphasizing extraverted
behavior, and by banishing introverted wishes from awareness. But the introverted tendencies,
which must remain within the closed system of the psyche, flourish within the unconscious and
strongly oppose the conscious processes.

Jung had arrived at the conclusion that the phenomena supporting the apparition of the well-known "automatisms" (Despine, Bernheim, Janet) coincided with the involuntary eruption , in the conscious course of representations, of particular "affects" which usually originated in the vital history of the patient due to traumatic or conflictive events of a different nature. These events had the property of clustering round them, a ce rtain number of thoughts, mental images, and sensations. These ideational contents and affect-constellations were called "Feeling-toned Complexes" (using the term proposed by Ziehen). The "Complexes," which finally would be converted into the foundation of the entire Junguian system.

Such dissociation of the complexes showed that they possessed the capacity of functioning as something like a "secondary psyche," with a strong tendency to reveal themselves as "personified" and with a considerable autonomy.”
- http://www.meta-religion.com/Psychiatry ... hrenia.htm
http://www.scribd.com/doc/7792481/003-P ... -Carl-Jung

In my opinion what this tells me is that the intent of the Cedu program was to mentally handicap you in such a way as to leave you in a state of “automatism”, or highly suggestible state. The tools were to direct us to dissociate from and banish certain aspects of self, and they were put into action (theoretically) by attatching those tools to our already existing “feeling toned complexes” (early trauma, disclosures, etc). The result of the tools is not to heal the complex (i.e. relieve the psychic tension) but utilize that psychic energy to pit all your opposing parts against yourself. Essentially what this means is your consciousness will only be acting within dissociated parts of a whole. This narrowing of consciousness to act within these limited cognitive functions is similar to the description of a hypnotic trance. Moreso the tools promote a cyclic process of catharting with respect to these complexes and polarities. Here’s what the Human Potential Movement has to say about catharsis:

“we achieve catharis by &dquo;triggering the complex.&dquo; Jones defines a
complex as &dquo;a group of emotionally invested ideas partially or entirely
repressed. In human potential work, we say that the postcathartic individual has
been deconditioned or unprogrammed and may be reconditioned or
reprogrammed according to new beliefs and values. At this impressionable
time, a person may readily fall in love, accept another person’s value
system, or reaffirm an essential faith in personal values and beliefs. It is as
if the participant were returned to the neonatal state, open and susceptible
to the imprinting process described by ethologists.
Because the postcathartic radiant person may be so impressionable, even
unconscious values of the group leader or cultural event which produced
the catharsis may be adopted. The responsibility of any programming
agent is very great. Practitioners of bioenergetics
(Lowen, 1971), the Synanon game (Yablonsky, 1965), primal therapy
(Janov, 1971) and gestalt therapy (Perls, 1969) utilize catharsis.”
- Catharsis in Human Potential Encounter
Journal of Humanistic Psychology 1974

[try another castle]

Yes, it does go back to Jung, but It actually stems more directly from Gestalt. Fritz Perls was heavily influenced by Jung.

[Anonymous]

Very interesting read thank you for sharing

[Anonymous]

Just saw this. Really amazingly done i think. This part was interesting.

http://www.paulmorantz.com/characterist ... cults.html
CHARACTERISTICS OF CULTS (TOTALISTIC MOVEMENTS), COERCIVE PERSUASION TOTALISTIC MOVEMENTS AND CRUSADING TERRORISM

(End justifies the means)

 Dedicated to Dr. Robert J. Lifton

By:   Paul Morantz


CENTER FOR FEELING THERAPY
 
         I represented over 40 plaintiffs after this movement self destructed. My work covered 5 years and I reviewed more documents than I did fighting Synanon.
       
         Art Janov’s Primal Scream became a hit in the sixties encounter groups trend after John Lennon called it the greatest in Rolling Stone magazine.  So many young, lonely and insecure college graduates wanted to come that Richard “Riggs” Corriere and Joseph Hart broke away from Primal Institute to start the Center for Feeling Therapy in Hollywood.  At the time they were teachers at UC Irvine and recruited considerable class students to the center.[67]  The therapists purchased several houses and took out common fences to create the “compound.” They sent out advertisements that their programs could cause a complete transformation and cure in six to eight months.  But in the end, no one was ever told they were well enough to leave and most had remained 9 years[68] until the Center ended in a patient revolt following a revelation that certain myths taught to all were admitted not true.
 
       Prospective patients had to first convince their masters they should be taken on by writing long letters showing how bad their lives were and how much they needed the center.  When they arrived, they were placed in two-week “intensives,” and ordered to wear no makeup and remove items of identity.  Without contact but for long hours each day in isolation they were convinced by the interrogator how bad their prior lives were.
 
      The Center taught that all people were harmed by not being able to live by their true feelings, starting with being told “no” as children by their parents.    The Center patients lived together in apartments surrounding the compound.  Patients could date only other patients, and even then they were often selected by the therapists.  Permission was needed to break up relationships.  Like Synanon, it used horrible punishments and humiliations to control behavior.  A woman was made to moo like a cow in group, a man to sleep in a crib and a diaper, and a woman resisting an ordered abortion to carry a doll with weights around its legs.  Some patients who tried to leave were tackled and brought back.  Therapists routinely struck patients, and patients were taught to strike other patients who were suspected of having negative thoughts. Verbally berating a person in front of others-- called a “haircut” in Synanon --was called a “bust” at the Center and in one  community “challenging.” All therapists intermarried, but no patient married or had a child.  Therapists routinely had sex with patients.
 
     Riggs and Hart call themselves the Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid of psychotherapy and appeared on Geraldo Rivera and Johnny Carson.  They preached that their system could make their patients believe anything, including that Atlantis was rising from the sea.  Further, their system they admitted in the wrong hands would be like a buzz saw figuratively cutting off hands and feet, only the damage would be mental.  “Like Synanon,” they admitted, their followers to keep their sanity-- now that they had learned to live from feelings-- had to live in a community of similar feeling persons as the world outside would disorder them.     Also like Synanon, the Center created businesses that employed patients at cheaper wages.  Other patient-run businesses paid consulting fees to a Center-aided business consulting firm.  Patients were required to refer new patients and to hand out cards in the street promoting books written by the leaders.
 
    Not only were lawyers members at the Center, two lawyers gave up law practices to act as therapists with assigned patients at the center.  The Center regularly had open houses to interest others and recruit those appearing most suitable.  The Center plan was to gross $1 billion a year by making therapists out of patients and opening clinics across the country.  The patient – therapists were paid low wages, forced to donate long hours and could be punished or fined for losing a patient or not reaching recruitment quotas.  Patients in therapy were convinced to enhance their lives they are to bring their friends to therapy when in reality the ploy was to convince the friends to join.  Those clinic patients most suitable would be “funneled” inside to the Center community.
 
     The way the Center ended proved Lifton’s theory of “hundred flowers bloom.”  Patient-therapists tiring of long hours and poor pay finally spoke amongst themselves concerning their negative thoughts during a time period that Riggs was off in Arizona playing Cowboy on a ranch purchased with patient funds that had been raised to purchase a gymnasium for the center.  This led to a busting of Riggs and temporary allowing of free thought that in 48 hours became so volatile the Center closed and Riggs departed California.[69]
 
      Licenses were taken away in the longest license removal administrative hearings in history and has been called the greatest psychotherapy tragedy in history.

[Anonymous]

Interesting posts, that I appreciated reading.

But perhaps my answer is just as enlightening.  

IT WAS ALL A SCAM.  Possibly well-meaning at one time, but a scam, none-the-less.

Parents were pulling their hair out trying to find a solution to deal with their bratty teens.  CEDU promised the moon, and of course, never delivered.

Moms and dads were only too happy to turn over their beloved child and monthly tuition of $3,500 (circa 1980) to the helpful staff of Cedu.  Not qualified, but helpful.

Wasserman was a snake oil salesman, that lifted techniques from various places.  Nothing he could truly call his own.  And who appointed him troubled teen guru, anyways?  Talk about a God-complex.
 ::evil::

[Loli]

Would you really characterize the staff as unqualified but helpful?  

I don't know about 1980 - by late 80s staff were inculcated, power hungry, boundary breaking nut jobs with no therapeutic ethics or training, combined with an inability to discern or mete out individuated treatment, compunded by an unhealthy delivery of histrionics and humilation.

In other words: not helpful.

[Awake]

I don’t know how you interpret “scam” in this case. The parents wanted a perfectly obedient child and I believe the intention of the program was to do just that by making the kids mentally ill in such a way as to be self obsessed and therefore expending less mental energy in being outwardly defiant. In that sense it is not a scam, but downright evil. The evidence is easily traceable, the cedu tools point right to their sources. But one very important thing about the elements they used to create the program is that if you look into their origins you will find that many are in conflict with each other as to the nature of mental health. This is evidence of Wasserman’s true intentions. He did not believe in his own teachings, he knew that the point was to modify peoples behavior by making them believe in these concepts.

Traditional psychology regards a mentally healthy person to be one who’s defenses are adapted in a way that the person is best able to function in society. It also says a mentally healthy person is one with an integrated psyche where all the parts are working as a unified whole, not as individual semi-autonomous processes. A person who’s defenses act in a way that prevents that person from being effective is considered to have a neurosis. People who have a disrupted or split psyche are placed  somewhere within the spectrum of Bi-polar disorder, Dissociative identity disorder, Schizophrenia, and multiple personality disorder depending on the nature of the split.

Primal therapy says that ANY defenses of any kind ARE NEUROTIC.

“Freud bequeathed us with the notion that the person with the strongest defense system is necessarily the one who can best function in society. Primal theory indicates that the healthiest people are those who are defense free. Anything that builds a stronger defense system deepens the neurosis.” – The Primal Scream,  Arthur Janov 1970 p.20

 It basically says that everyone is neurotic starting with the first moment you realized you were putting youself at risk by openly expressing yourself teaching you to learn to keep yourself protected. At cedu we identified this “neurotic protection” as “just playing games, wearing masks, covering up, taking emotions sideways, hiding, isolating, in your thinking, not listening to yourself or little kid, not really being you”  and a few I can’t think of  I’m sure.

But here is where things get pretty interesting, and if you read on you will discover why it was so convenient for Mel W. to include Primal Theory in the program. This was wassermans inspiration behind your truth and lie and the I and Me,  to teach you to regard your defenses as “not you” and therefore an invasive “false self.”

R.D Laing
The Divided Self
An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness
First published by Tavistock Publications (1959) Ltd 1960
The present book is a study of schizoid and schizophrenic persons; its basic purpose is to make madness, and the process of going mad, comprehensible.

Psychiatry could be, and some psychiatrists are, on the side of transcendence, of genuine freedom, and of true human growth. But psychiatry can so easily be a technique of brainwashing, of inducing behaviour that is adjusted, by (preferably) non-injurious torture.

When two sane persons are together one expects that A will recognize B to be more or less the person B takes himself to be, and vice versa. That is, for my part, I expect that my own definition of myself should, by and large, be endorsed by the other person, assuming that I am not deliberately impersonating someone else, being hypocritical, lying, and so on.

That is to say, when two sane persons meet, there appears to be a reciprocal recognition of each other's identity. In this mutual recognition there are the following basic elements:
(a) I recognize the other to be the person he takes himself to be.
(b) He recognizes me to be the person I take myself to be.

Each has his own autonomous sense of identity and his own definition of who and what he is. You are expected to be able to recognize me. However, if there are discrepancies of a sufficiently radical kind remaining after attempts to align them have failed, there is no alternative but that one of us must be insane.

I suggest, therefore, that sanity or psychosis is tested by the degree of conjunction or disjunction between two persons where the one is sane by common consent.

If, for instance, a man tells us he is 'an unreal man', and if he is not lying, or joking, or equivocating in some subtle way, there is no doubt that he will be regarded as deluded. But, existentially, what does this delusion mean? Indeed, he is not joking or pretending. On the contrary, he goes on to say that he has been pretending for years to have been a real person but can maintain the deception no longer. His whole life has been torn between his desire to reveal himself and his desire to conceal himself.

We all share this problem with him and we have all arrived at a more or less satisfactory solution. We have our secrets and our needs to confess. We may remember how, in childhood, adults at first were able to look right through us, and into us, and what an accomplishment it was when we, in fear and trembling, could tell our first lie, and make, for ourselves, the discovery that we are irredeemably alone in certain respects, and know that within the territory of ourselves there can be only our footprints. There are some people, however, who never fully real-ize themselves in this position. This genuine privacy is the basis of genuine relationship; but the person whom we call 'schizoid' feels both more exposed, more vulnerable to others than we do, and more isolated.

We can now state more precisely the nature of our clinical inquiry. A man may have a sense of his presence in the world as a real, alive, whole, and, in a temporal sense, a continuous person. As such, he can live out into the world and meet others: a world and others experienced as equally real, alive, whole, and continuous.

Such a basically ontologically* secure person will encounter all the hazards of life, social, ethical, spiritual, biological, from a centrally firm sense of his own and other people's reality and identity. It is often difficult for a person with such a sense of his integral selfhood and personal identity, of the permanency of things, of the reliability of natural processes, of the substantiality of natural processes, of the substantiality of others, to transpose himself into the world of an individual whose experiences may be utterly lacking in any unquestionable self-validating certainties.

If a position of primary ontological security has been reached, the ordinary circumstances of life do not afford a perpetual threat to one's own existence. If such a basis for living has not been reached, the ordinary circumstances of everyday life constitute a continual and deadly threat. Only if this is realized is it possible to understand how certain psychoses can develop.

If the individual cannot take the realness, aliveness, autonomy, and identity of himself and others for granted, then he has to become absorbed in contriving ways of trying to be real, of keeping himself or others alive, of preserving his identity, in efforts, as he will often put it, to prevent himself losing his self. What are to most people everyday happenings, which are hardly noticed because they have no special significance, may become deeply significant in so far as they either contribute to the sustenance of the individual's being or threaten him with non-being.

It is not true to say, however, without careful qualification, that he is losing 'contact with' reality, and withdrawing into himself. External events no longer affect him in the same way as they do others: it is not that they affect him less; on the contrary, frequently they affect him more. It is frequently not the case that he is becoming 'indifferent' and 'withdrawn'. It may, however, be that the world of his experience comes to be one he can no longer share with other people.

three forms of anxiety encountered by the ontologically insecure person: engulfment, implosion, petrification.

ENGULFMENT
It is, however, important to know that if you were to subject this patient to a type of psychiatric interrogation recommended in many psychiatric textbooks, within ten minutes his behaviour and speech would be revealing 'signs' of psychosis. It is quite easy to evoke such 'signs' from such a person whose threshold of basic security is so low that practically any relationship with another person, however tenuous or however apparently 'harmless', threatens to overwhelm him.

A firm sense of one's own autonomous identity is required in order that one may be related as one human being to another. Otherwise, any and every relationship threatens the individual with loss of identity. One form this takes can be called engulfment. In this the individual dreads relatedness as such, with anyone or anything or, indeed, even with himself, because his uncertainty about the stability of his autonomy lays him open to the dread lest in any relationship he will lose his autonomy and identity.


Engulfment is felt as a risk in being understood (thus grasped, comprehended), in being loved, or even simply in being seen. To be hated may be feared for other reasons, but to be hated as such is often less disturbing than to be destroyed, as it is felt, through being engulfed by love.

The main manoeuvre used to preserve identity under pressure from the dread of engulfment is isolation. Thus, instead of the polarities of separateness and relatedness based on individual autonomy, there is the antithesis between complete loss of being by absorption into the other person (engulfment), and complete aloneness (isolation). There is no safe third possibility of a dialectical relationship between two persons, both sure of their own ground and, on this very basis, able to 'lose themselves' in each other.

Thus, the man who is frightened of his own subjectivity being swamped, impinged upon, or congealed by the other is frequently to be found attempting to swamp, to impinge upon, or to kill the other person's subjectivity. The process involves a vicious circle. The more one attempts to preserve one's autonomy and identity by nullifying the specific human individuality of the other, the more it is felt to be necessary to continue to do so, because with each denial of the other person's ontological status, one's own ontological security is decreased, the threat to the self from the other is potentiated and hence has to be even more desperately negated. –((raps?))

In this lesion in the sense of personal autonomy there is both a failure to sustain the sense of oneself as a person with the other, and a failure to sustain it alone. There is a failure to sustain a sense of one's own being without the presence of other people. It is a failure to be by oneself, a failure to exist alone.

If the individual does not feel himself to be autonomous this means that he can experience neither his separateness from, nor his relatedness to, the other in the usual way. A lack of sense of  autonomy implies that one feels one's being to be bound up in the other, or that the other is bound up in oneself, in a sense that transgresses the actual possibilities within the structure of human relatedness. It means that a feeling that one is in a position of ontological dependency on the other (i.e. dependent on the other for one's very being), is substituted for a sense of relatedness and attachment to him based on genuine mutuality. Utter detachment and isolation are regarded as the only alternative to a clam- or vampire-like attachment in which the other person's life-blood is necessary for one's own survival, and yet is a threat to one's survival.
…
The central split is between what David called his 'own' self and what he called his 'personality'. This dichotomy is encountered again and again. What the individual variously terms his 'own', 'inner', 'true', 'real', self is experienced as divorced from all activity that is observable by another, what David called his 'personality'. One may conveniently call this 'personality' the individual's 'false self or a 'false-self system'. The reason I suggest that one speaks of a false-self system is that the 'personality', false self, mask, 'front', or persona that such individuals wear may consist in an amalgam of various part-selves, none of which is so fully developed as to have a comprehensive 'personality' of its own.

The individual's actions are not felt as expressions of his self. His actions, all that David called his 'personality' and which I have proposed to call his false-self system, become dissociated and partly autonomous. The self is not felt to participate in the doings of the false self or selves, and all its or their actions are felt to be increasingly false and futile. The self, on the other hand, shut up with itself, regards itself as the 'true' self and the persona as false.

The self is extremely aware of itself, and observes the false self, usually highly critically. It is characteristic of the organization of a false self or persona, on the other hand, that one way in which it is usually incomplete is in its very imperfect reflective awareness. But the self may feel itself in danger from the overall spread of the false-self system or from one particular part of it.

The individual in this position is invariably terrifyingly 'selfconscious ' (see Chapter 7) in the sense in which this word is used to mean the exact opposite, namely, the feeling of being under observation by the other.

The individual is developing a microcosmos within himself; but, of course, this autistic, private, intra-individual 'world' is not a feasible substitute for the only world there really is, the shared world.

We have suggested that this withdrawal is in part an effort to preserve its being, since relationship of any kind with others is experienced as a threat to the self's identity. The self feels safe only in hiding, and isolated. Such a self can, of course, be isolated at any time whether other people are present or not. But this does not work.

No one feels more 'vulnerable', more liable to be exposed by the look of another person than the schizoid individual. If he is not acutely aware of being seen by others ('self-conscious'), he has temporarily avoided his anxiety becoming manifest by one or other of two methods. Either he turns the other person into a thing, and depersonalizes or objectifies his own feelings towards this thing, or he affects indifference.

It is well known that temporary states of dissociation of the self from the body occur in normal people. In general, one can say that it is a response that appears to be available to most people who find themselves enclosed within a threatening experience from which there is no physical escape. Prisoners in concentration camps tried to feel that way, for the camp offered no possible way out either spatially or at the end of a period of time. The only way out was by a psychical withdrawal 'into' one's self and 'out of the body.

Yet the self may at the same time long more than anything for participation in the world. Thus, its greatest longing is felt as its greatest weakness and giving in to this weakness is its greatest dread, since in participation the individual fears that his vacuum will be obliterated, that he will be engulfed or otherwise lose his identity, which has come to be equated with the maintenance of the transcendence of the self even though this is a transcendence in avoid.


This detachment of the self means that the self is never revealed directly in the individual's expressions and actions, nor does it experience anything spontaneously or immediately. The self's relationship to the other is always at one remove.

If the individual delegates all transactions between himself and the other to a system within his being which is not 'him', then the world is experienced as unreal, and all that belongs to this system is felt to be false, futile, and meaningless.

'A man without a mask' is indeed very rare. One even doubts the possibility of such a man. Everyone in some measure wears a mask, and there are many things we do not put ourselves into fully. In 'ordinary' life it seems hardly possible for it to be otherwise.

The false self of the schizoid person is compulsively compliant to the will of others, it is partially autonomous and out of control, it is felt as alien; the unrealness, meaninglessness, purposelessness which permeate its perceptions, thoughts, feelings, and actions. There is a tendency for the false self to assume more and more of the characteristics of the person or persons upon whom its compliance is based. This assumption of the other person's characteristics may come to amount to an almost total impersonation of the other.

The 'inner' secret self hates the characteristics of the false self. It also fears it, because the assumption of an alien identity is always experienced as a threat to one's own. The self fears being engulfed by the spread of the identification.
Self-consciousness, as the term is ordinarily used, implies two things: an awareness of oneself by oneself, and an awareness of oneself as an object of someone else's observation.

These two forms of awareness of the self, as an object in one's own eyes and as an object in the other's eyes, are closely related to each other. In the schizoid individual both are enhanced and both assume a somewhat compulsive nature. The schizoid individual is frequently tormented by the compulsive nature of his awareness of his own processes, and also by the equally compulsive nature of his sense of his body as an object in the world of others. The heightened sense of being always seen, or at any rate of being always potentially seeable, may be principally referable to the body, but the preoccupation with being seeable may be condensed with the idea of the mental self being penetrable, and vulnerable, as when the individual feels that one can look right through him into his 'mind' or 'soul'.

Self-consciousness, then, may be the apprehensive awareness of oneself as potentially exposed to danger by the simple fact of being visible to others. The obvious defence against such a danger is to make oneself invisible in one way or another.

One would not be surprised to find that such a person would have in some measure a distrust of other people's awareness of him. What, for instance, if they had, after all, the same 'fugitive awareness' of him as he hadof them ?

In Chapter 5 we stated that the self dreads as well as longs for real aliveness. The self dreads to become alive and real because it fears that in so doing the risk of annihilation is immediately potentiated. 'Self-consciousness' is implicated in this paradox.

The schizoid individual exists under the black sun, the evil eye, of his own scrutiny. The glare of his awareness kills his spontaneity, his freshness; it destroys all joy. Everything withers under it. And yet he remains, although profoundly not narcissistic, compulsively preoccupied with the sustained observation of his own mental and/or bodily processes. That is to say, he turns the living spontaneity of his being into something dead and lifeless by inspecting it. This he does to others as well, and fears their doing it to him (petrification).

The 'self-conscious' person is caught in a dilemma. He may need to be seen and recognized, in order to maintain his sense of realness and identity. Yet, at the same time, the other represents a threat to his identity and reality.

He is, therefore, driven compulsively to seek company, but never allows himself to 'be himself in the presence of anyone else. He avoids social anxiety by never really being with others. He can be himself in safety only in isolation, albeit with a sense of emptiness and unreality. With others, he plays an elaborate game of pretence and equivocation. His social self is felt to be false and futile.

The splitting of the self forms the basis of one type of hallucination. One of the fragments of the self generally seems to retain the sense of 'I'. The other 'self' might then be called 'her'. But this 'her' is still 'ME'. ' (The self in chronic schizophrenic states seems to fragment into several foci each with a certain I-sense, and each experiencing the other fragments as partially not-me.) A 'thought' belonging to the 'other' self tends to have some of the quality of a perception since it is received by the experiencing self neither as a product of its imagination nor as belonging to it. That is, the other self is the basis of an hallucination. An hallucination is an as-if perception of a fragment of the disintegrated 'other' self by a remnant (selffocus) retaining residual I-sense; this becomes more apparent in manifestly psychotic patients. Moreover, the self-self relationship provides the internal setting for violent attacks between warring phantoms inside, experienced as having a sort of phantom concreteness (see following chapter). It is in fact such attacks from such inner phantoms that compel the individual to say he has been murdered, or that 'he' has murdered his 'self'. In the last resort, however, even speaking in 'schizophrenese', it is in fact impossible to murder the inner phantom 'self although it is possible to cut one's throat. A ghost cannot be killed. What may happen is that the place and function of the inner phantom ' self become almost completely 'taken over' by archetypal agencies which appear to be in complete control and dominate all aspects of the individual's being.

In the last resort, it is perhaps never true to say that the 'self has been utterly lost, or destroyed, even in the most 'dilapidated hebephrenic', to use H. S. Sullivan's appropriately horrible term. There is still an 'I' that cannot find a 'me'. An ' I ' has not ceased to exist, but it is without substance, it is disembodied, it lacks the quality of realness, and it has no identity, it has no 'me' to go with it. It may seem a contradiction in terms to say that the ' I ' lacks identity but this seems to be so. The schizophrenic either does not know who or what he is or he has become something or someone other than himself.

Such a scission cleaves the individual's own being in two, in such a way that the I-sense is disembodied, and the body becomes the centre of a false-self system. The totality of experience has been differentiated by a line of cleavage within the individual's being into self/body.

When this is the primary split or when it exists along with the further vertical split of self/body/world, the body occupies a particularly ambiguous position. The two basic segments of experience can be taken as here there which are further differentiated in the normal way into inside outside (me) (not-me) The schizoid cleavage disrupts the normal sense of self by disembodying the sense of 'I'.

[Ursus]

For some more on R.D. Laing, his time at Tavistock, and the Rosenhan experiment, see also: viewtopic.php?f=11&t=25873

[Awake]

This is about as telling as it gets. This is a study of Lifespring, the rights to which mel wasserman purchased to create cedu. If you just want to cut to the chase id suggest start reading at the section, Diminished ego functions and regression.

Pathology as "Personal Growth":
A Participant-Observation Study of Lifespring Training
by Janice Haaken and Richard Adams
PSYCHIATRY, Vol 46, August 1983
Janice Haaken PhD, is Assistant Professor of Psychology, Portland State University, Portland OR, 97207.
Richard Adams PhD, is Associate Professor of Sociology Lewis and Clark College, Portland.
________________________________________
This paper presents an overview of a Lifespring Basic Training workshop from a psychoanalytic perspective. Basing our conclusions on a participant-observation study, we argue that the impact of the training was essentially pathological. First, in the early period of the training, ego functions were systematically undermined and regression was promoted. Second, the ideational or interpretive framework of the training was based upon regressive modes of reasoning Third, the structure and content of the training tended to stimulate early narcissistic conflicts, and defenses, which accounted for the elation and sense of heightened well-being achieved by many participants.
A major contemporary force in developing popular conceptions of the self has been the human potential movement, grounded in the premises and practice of "Third Force" psychology--humanistic psychology--which emerged in the 1950s and found increasingly widespread expression in the next two decades. The growth of the human potential movement has been both exponential and chaotic. In the realm of education and therapy it has created numerous gurus and schools and provided an array of techniques and procedures for the enhancement of personal growth. In the 1970s an effort was made by several persons, and groups to consolidate various practices into cohesive packages as training programs. These widely marketed programs, designed and organized to effect significant and positive changes in the lives of participants were first successfully initiated by Werner Erhard with est, and are now dominated by est and Lifespring. The investigation presented here focuses on the structure and processes of a Lifespring training program.
For the most part, literature which is available on "human growth" companies is limited to clinical impressions and journalistic reports of est. Clinicians have tended to focus on psychiatric risks associated with the training for some people (Kirsch and Glass 1977). Others have emphasized its efficacy as an adjunct to psychotherapy (Paul and Paul 1978). Anecdotal reports of Lifespring graduates are often enthusiastic, lending support to the organization's strong claims for the effectiveness of its training activities. Comments of graduates range from "It changed my life" to "It was extremely valuable." However, such global reports often lack specific content.
To date, there is no published material on Lifespring other than materials which are distributed by the organization. Followup studies initiated by research associates of Lifespring Foundation suggest that the training increases "self- actualization" as measured by the Personal Orientation Inventory (Shostrom 1978). Although the Inventory provides an objective measure of the effects of the training, it poses typical scaling problems. The results are based on forced-choice questions whish restrict the range and content of responses. In addition, a response bias may be built into the scale: it is heavily laden with the language and values of the human potential movement and may merely be measuring a superficial familiarity with the training ideas. As Rosenthal (1978) pointed out in his review of empiracal findings on encounter groups, participants tend to overstate, often in global terms, the extent of "personal growth" achieved.(p. 74)
The research upon which this paper is based was developed out of the need for a clearer and more detailed picture of the Lifespring phenomenon. The purpose of the paper is both descriptive and analytical. First, we describe Lifespring training: the participants and leaders, the structure of the training activities, and the techniques utilized. Second, we explain the effects during Lifespring training from a psychoanalytic perspective. We argue that although participants often experience a heightened sense of well-being as a consequence of the training, the phenomenon is essentially pathological. By pathological, we mean that the training systematically undermines ego functioning and promotes regression to the extent that reality testing is significantly impaired. This does not imply that participants suffer from lasting forms of psychopathology as a consequence of the training. The long-term effects of the training and its usefulness to participants in facing problems in living fall outside the scope of this phase of the study.
The interpretive framework adopted here is supported by several psychoanalytic premises concerning group behavior. In discussing the relationship between ego functions and group behavior, Freud noted that "intensification of the affects and the inhibition of the intellect" characterized "primitive groups" (1959 p 20). Primitive groups promote the blurring of ego boundaries and psychological merger with the group leader, who serves as an ego ideal for group members. By projecting ego and superego functions, e.g. the regulation and control of impulses, into the leader, members may express infantile aggressive and libidinal drives normally held in constraint. (Kernberg 1980 p212). This psychological state may be described as regressive in that it is reminiscent of the experience of early childhood?the oceanic experience of oneness with the all-good, protective parent who mediates between the child?s immediate needs and the external world.
Regression, however, does not inevitably imply pathology. From a psychoanalytic perspective, many healthy and adaptive forms of human activity, such as falling in love (Grunberger 1979 pp 5-6) and artistic achievement (Kris 1964 p 28), require the capacity to regress, When falling in love, one must be able to experience temporary states of psychological merger with another person and artistic achievement often involves access to impulses and irrational of primitive fantasies. In addition, the ability to work in groups or to engage in collective forms of social action requires the capacity to merge with the group ideals and group interests. The critical distinction in determining pathology in group members concerns the extent of regression ? i.e., the dominance of primitive fantasies or impulses and the level of ego control maintained. By ego control, we mean the capacity for reality testing, for mobilizing adaptive defenses, for distinguishing between internal and external events, and for bringing affective states under rational control.
Many of the encounter groups of the human potential movement have been described as regressive because of their disinhibitive effects and their tendency to stress abandonment to strong emotions while disparaging reasoning and intellect (Back 1972, p 79; Schur 1976, pp48-53). The emphasis upon "getting in touch with your feelings" and "getting out of your head" may be of therapeutic value in encouraging participants to gain access to previously warded off impulses, a process which often occurs in successful forms of psychodynamic therapy. However, without an interpretive framework which reconciles affective states with objective reality and logical thought processes, such group cathartic experiences offer little opportunity for sustained therapeutic change and may, in fact, be psychologically damaging (Lieberman, Yalom, and Miles 1973 pp 167-209)
THE STUDY
The material presented in this paper is based on a participant-observation study by a psychologist and a sociologist at a Lifespring Basic Training workshop held in Seattle, Washington in 1981. Because of the uniformity of Lifespring trainings, this workshop most likely is representative of training workshops in other settings. The training took place over five days and consisted of a total of 48 hours. Participants met from approximately 6 to 12 PM on the three days before two all-day workshop sessions. In addition, a "wrap-up" session was held four days after the initial training. While participants and leaders were unaware of the research project, prior consent for the project had been obtained from the Lifespring Corporation and the fees were waived.
Our approach was consistent with usual participant-observation methods. Because of the anticipated evocative nature of the experience, measures were taken to assure both a sufficient level of experiential involvement and sufficient analytical distance. Our reactions, as participants, were understood to constitute an important phenomenological aspect of the inquiry to be carefully noted. We decided to allow some self-disclosure (to discuss "real" problems when appropriate) but to avoid disclosure in those areas of our personal lives which were too affectively loaded to allow the emotional distance compatible with researching. Thus, we sought to achieve genuine but restrained involvement to avoid either immersion in the experience, or conversely, excessive detachment. We do recognize that our decisions about how we would react make our experiences somewhat different from those of the other participants.
Although notes and taping were not allowed during training sessions, we made extensive notes during breaks and at the close of each day?s session. Our discussions following each session were taped and subsequently transcribed. Efforts were made to provide a detailed account of what had occurred and to note any discrepancies in our reactions or recall of events.
The conclusions presented here are the result of a thematic analysis of the transcribed sessions. Although the conceptual framework which investigators bring to a participant-observation study structures both the particular content and the meaning of observations, we attempted to suspend previous assumptions to the extent that this was possible. Thus, our approach to the training experience was primarily inductive in nature. For expository purposes, we have subsumed the descriptive data under the conclusions drawn from our analysis of the training.
Participants
Participants paid $350 for the Basic Training, which is the first of the three levels in the Lifespring training series. The group consisted of 68 adults ranging in age from 17 to 66 years, with and average age of approximately 35 to 40. Women slightly outnumbered men. Most participants were Caucasian; there were only a few minority group members ? 1 Black and 3 Asians. The socioeconomic status of participants was for the most part middle-income. The majority were in sales positions, self-employed or housewives. A few were in professions such as teaching, engineering, medicine and dentistry. The explanation given for participation in the training included the range of complaints, which typify psychotherapy populations. Couples came to resolve marital conflicts. The younger participants, in particular, reported feelings of loneliness, social isolation or a lack of direction in life. Others said that difficulty with jobs or personal relationships brought them to the training.
Although Lifespring provided a preliminary questionnaire to screen out those who were under psychiatric treatment and emphasized that the training was educational rather than therapeutic, the promise of a rapid cure for these various complaints was unmistakably an attraction to the participants. Thus, an important motivational basis of the training was the expectation that dramatic change would occur. Most participants learned of Lifespring through the recruiting efforts of friends and family members who were Lifespring graduates. The promise of "personal growth" held out by the organizations and zealous graduates was both nonspecific and unlimited. As we waited for the workshop to begin, a high level of anticipatory excitement was created by the expectations of the participants, the mystery surrounding the training, and the laudatory comments of friends and family members who mingled with the group. As participants were finally ushered into the training room, Lifespring staff and supporters applauded enthusiastically, indicating that something quite important was about to take place.
The Leaders
The staff for the training consisted of one leader, or "trainer", who was a paid member of the Lifespring staff, and eight volunteer assistant leaders who had already completed the series of Lifespring training workshops. The trainer was a conventionally attractive man of about thirty. He was tall, dark, even-featured and meticulously attired in dressy sports coat and tie. His physical appearance projected a Madison Avenue image of success. His training in leadership and communications prior to his Lifespring training was as an IBM sales representative.
The assistant leaders were in charge of various logistical aspects of the training such as leading small group discussions and monitoring various experiential exercises. They also conducted much of the follow-up contact with participants after the training. Most of the assistants were employed in sales or managerial positions.
DIMINISHED EGO FUNCTIONS AND REGRESSION
As with many of the encounter groups and sensitivity training workshops of the 1960s and 1970s, the structure and content of Lifespring training had a disinhibitive effect. Reasoning and intellectual processes were minimized while affective states were intensified. However, Lifespring differed from these prototypical groups by the extent to which the leaders took control of ego functions for participants. The environment was elaborately structured, much as a compulsive parent would do for a small child. During the early training sessions, chairs were meticulously arranged on rows of masking tape facing the podium, where the leader stood with large paper tablets for didactic instruction. If a chair was moved, the participant was instructed by one of the assistants to return it to the taped line. The theme song from Star Wars was played ceremoniously at the beginning of each sessions, and participants were to be seated in their chairs by the conclusion of the music. Frantic compliance to this rule was remarkable even though its purpose and the consequences of noncompliance were unclear.
The trainer began the workshop by discussing the purpose of Lifespring, writing "personal growth" and "personal awareness" in bold letters on the board. Awareness was defined as "understanding things as they are." The trainer emphasized that the answers were already within us- it was just a matter of discovering them. "Everything has always been available to you. It?s a matter of noticing it, of awareness." This nativistic approach to knowledge was dramatized by a banner across the front of the room which "grew" in size each day. The enigmatic phrase, which spanned twenty feet by the fifth day, was "What am I pretending not to know?"
Following the introduction by the trainer, the group discussed the various motives for coming to Lifespring and how to achieve "full value" from the training. The key phrases, which described the vehicle to personal growth, were "submission," "100 percent commitment," and "spontaneity".
This emphasis upon submission and total involvement required some attention to resistances--the doubts, and reservations which participants inevitably would experience. The trainer moved to a discussion of "how we avoid," drawing from the audience examples of avoidance behaviors such as forgetting, sickness, and daydreaming. The question was posed, "What stands in the way of creating maximum value for yourself?" By the end of the first evening, the trainer had explained emphatically the major contingency for achieving the expected transformation: complete submission to the Lifespring experience. By the device of identifying resistances as "ways of avoiding," participants' questions, doubts and concerns were labeled as obstacles to personal growth.
A variety of rules for "playing the Lifespring game" were then reviewed and participants were asked to stand to indicate agreement with them. While all groups, are guided by implicit or explicit rules, the Lifespring rules were notable for their emphasis upon obedience to the instructions of the trainer and their arbitrariness or lack of an apparent rationale. The effect of a prolonged discussion of the rules, which included some challenging questions by participants, was to fortify the position of the trainer as a legitimate authority who was in control and to diminish the participants' control.
Audience responses were managed in a way which reduced the ability of participants to think critically and simultaneously inflated their self-esteem. In order to speak, participants had to stand, he acknowledged by the leader and speak into a microphone. The audience was to applaud after the person finished speaking, presumably indicating support for the "risk of sharing." The experience of having to speak before a large group, hearing one's voice amplified and being rewarded with applause was undoubtedly useful for those who were fearful of public speaking. However, since the applause was mandatory, it was not an indication of the quality or coherence of participants' comments. The trainer acknowledged as valid only those audience responses which confirmed or illustrated a point being made. Over the five days, responses came increasingly to mirror the idiom of the trainer, and the applause became increasingly enthusiastic. This essentially distorted And magnified the import of what was -being said, undermining reality testing. For example, midway through the training, one participant stood and announced elatedly, "I've got it!" Considerable applause followed even though there was no explanation about what he had 'gotten."
What was rewarded by the trainer was compliance or pseudocompliance. Participants who offered critical comments or who suggested a different way of conceptualizing a problem had their statements dismissed were subjected to ridicule or were confused with paradoxical logic. The "dissenter" was generally maneuvered into some form of compliance before being permitted to sit down and receive the applause.
An example of this type of interaction occurred on the first evening after the "Trust" exercise.-' Instructions for this exercise were as follows: Participants were to mingle, and when eye contact was made with other participants, one of four comments was allowed: "I trust you ", "I don't trust you," "I don't know if I trust you,"" or "I don't care to say if I trust you." The participants were then to move on to the next person without further comment. After regrouping following the exercise, one participant challenged the implicit reasoning behind the exercise; as the exchange below indicates, his reaction was dismissed without legitimizing the rationality of the question that he raised.
JAMES: I'm not sure what this had to do with real trust. I mean, it's not an all or nothing thing-like "I trust you" or "I don't trust you." I would trust someone with my car before I would trust them with my child, depending on how well I knew the person.
TRAINER: Are you willing to consider the possibility that you don't know what trust really means?
JAMES: (Appearing confused and hesitating) Yes.
TRAINER: Thank you. You may sit down. (Audience applause)
The trainer used a variety of techniques to neutralize comments which challenged or qualified the point being made and maintained sufficient control over audience responses to assure that defiance and critical thinking were not publicly rewarded. The use of confusing "double talk" was particularly effective in disarming those who threatened to delegitimize the trainer's position. Statements such as "What you think isn't is, and what you think is isn't," or "Well, what is the answer?" were perplexing enough to cause the participant to fatter in uncertainty. The suggestion that the participant was disturbed, confused, "avoiding," or "game-playing" were other tactics used to discredit objecting participants.
As the training progressed, participants, become increasingly reliant upon the trainer to interpret reality. Defenses and the capacity for critical reasoning were undermined by both the structure of the training and the responses of the leader. Typically, a didactic session followed each experiential exercise, providing an interpretive framework for the feelings evoked. The trainer provided attributions for the heightened arousal which was generated by the exercise.
A form of exercise used repeatedly throughout the training involved highly structured interactions in pairs. Each member of the pair faced the other in the open position" (legs uncrossed, one hand placed on each leg), and eye contact was to be sustained for the entire exercise. If participants deviated from this position--for example, by breaking eye contact or crossing their legs-the assistants instructed them to resume the open position. We found that the experience of having our movements monitored throughout the five days (while being told to be spontaneous) was particularly unsettling, evoking feelings of powerlessness and dependency. The prolonged eye contact required in all pair exercises had a certain hypnotic effect in that it became increasingly difficult to withdraw from the influence of the exercise.
A number of dyadic exercises which reenacted parent-child relationships were included in the training as a means of resolving conflicts through brief, intense encounters with parent surrogates. These exercises also contributed to the regressive pull of the early phase of the training. The first involved one partner standing and assuming the position of a parent while the other gazed into his/her eyes from the perspective of childhood memory. As feelings, of infantile helplessness in relation to a powerful parent were evoked, participants displayed more childlike behavior, such as giggling and eager compliance to the trainer. Another exercise required that one partner attempt to gratify all the childhood fantasies of' the other--fantasies of what the perfect parent would have provided.
IDEATIONAL THEMES AND REGRESSION
On the second evening during the didactic session, the ideational content of the Lifespring message was reviewed elaborately with the use of diagrams. The trainer began with a discussion of "how we respond to events." He argued that by "resisting events" or "attempting to change them," people merely rely on prior belief systems or "automatic" ways of interpreting the world. This way of responding is a reactive one which ties people to the experience of the past and to unrealistic expectations for the future. The trainer emphasized that "coming from a position of change never works," On the other hand, "submission" to events and acceptance of things as they are results In "creative choice," "awareness," "joy" and "growth." The paradox of this implicitly conservative message was that personal control was promoted through submission or surrender to the existing reality of the trainer.
The following interchange took place as one of the researchers attempted to challenge the logic of the presentation, using the language and categories provided by the trainer.
JANICE: Part of what you're saving matches my experience and part of it doesn't. I can see how in some situations conflict is made worse by reacting on the basis of rigid, unrealistic expectations. Yet. in other situations--like the women's movement or other social movements--those who resist are the ones who create change. For those who submit and back away from conflict, no change takes place. Also, beliefs can limit us but they can also sustain us at times. The belief in justice or equality, for example, can provide hope for another way of cooperating in the world. There needs to be some distinction between rational and irrational or infantile beliefs here.
TRAINER: Your problem is that you're stuck on the level of analyzing and beliefs. You're hung up on having to analyze everything.
JANICE: I thought that this was the time for that- the didactic period. Isn't that what you're doing on the board? Am I wrong? (Some audience laughter)
After the audience laughter the trainer removed his chart, displaying some irritation, and began a new chart entitled "Levels of Awareness." He started with "belief," stating that this was a low level of human awareness: he then discussed "analyzing" and "experimenting." He distinguished these three low levels of awareness, which presumably maintain the "illusion of certainty," from "experiencing and observing." which are unfettered by belief and lead to "natural knowing." By stressing that "all beliefs are arbitrary," the trainer promoted a radical devaluation of the external world. This solipsistic view of the world, which presupposes a presocial self, contributed to the general tendency of Lifespring to cultivate regressive modes of reasoning.
Although there was often an element of truth in the trainer's arguments, the extensive use of all-or-nothing categories, absolutist logic and magical thinking distorted what would other-wise have been reasonable points. Ideas were not presented as problematic beliefs which were open to scrutiny but as transcendent truth--"natural knowing." The critical eye of the participant wits turned away from tile content of the training and toward him/herself. its the source of all knowledge
INFANTILE OMNIPOTENCE AND IDENTIFICATION WITH THE LEADER
After participating in a variety of regressive exercises, Participants came increasingly to identify with the trainer and to share his power during the third and fourth days of training. Shifting from the emphasis upon submission and trust, the trainer suggested that we were totally responsible for all events, in our lives--"100 percent accountable"--including the selection of our parents. An exercise designed to illustrate the theme of "taking full responsibility" involved the use of pairs. Partners were to tell each other of an occasion when each had been victimized. Several people told stories about having been beaten by a parent as a child. We were then instructed to retell the story from a position of 100 percent accountability--in other words, how we "set things up to be that way."
This exercise transformed the infantile helplessness which participants had experienced earlier into infantile omnipotence. Many participants reported feelings of elation and expansiveness following this exercise. The level of insight gained was akin to the reasoning of a small child who has not yet cognitively overcome an egocentric view of the world--the conviction that all events emanate from the self. The subjective experience of liberation which accompanied this exercise seemed to stem from the sense of omnipotent control generated among the participants. The group was particularly vulnerable to this type of primitive reasoning because of the effects of the earlier training. The lowering of inhibitions, the extensive structuring of the environment and the undermining of critical thought combined to elicit archaic defenses such as omnipotence.
Identification with the powerful position of the trainer as a defense against infantile helplessness and dependency was made evident by the increasing reliance upon his language over the five days of training. The language of the human potential movement, which provided the "official" lexicon of Lifespring, seemed to exhaust and encompass all of human experience, e.g., "getting off automatic," "going for it," "taking risks," "taking responsibility," and "creating your own reality." These phrases took on an almost magical communicative power within the group.
As the training progressed and the trainer's words were repeated by group members, the trainer became softer in his style and more accessible to the group. His occasionally stepping down from the podium and mingling with the group allowed a greater sense of psychological merger with him. Our collective seduction was dramatically enacted on the fourth day as participants took the position of the leader on the podium and "shared" the growth which they had achieved thus far. Laura, an attractive and articulate woman of about thirty, who had been the first participant to object to a rule on the first evening, approached the microphone. Her voice trembling, she began to explain how socially isolated she had become and spoke of the barriers which she had erected to keep people at a distance. The trainer then asked if she would be willing to try an exercise in "trust." The lights were dimmed and the woman stood on a chair ready to fall backward into the arms of six men selected from the audience. As sensual music played, the trainer stood close to her, murmuring in intimate tones. Finally she allowed herself' to fall, and the men began to rock her back and forth to the music. The trainer remained close to the woman, who was now sobbing, massaging her stomach and speaking softly to her. The exercise was quite poignant, moving many participants to tears. Although the surface meaning of the exercise concerned trust, it was compelling in its libidinal and religious undertones. There had been a series of testimonials followed by the "baptismal" of a formerly recalcitrant participant. She had fully immersed herself in the experience and had finally yielded to the trainer.
The desire for merger, which is reminiscent of the security and total dependency of early childhood, has been identified in various psychological phenomena, e.g., falling in love, religious experiences, and intoxicated states. However, what we found particularly troublesome in the various trust exercises presented in Lifespring was the implied indiscriminate nature of trust. The desire for intimacy was gratified instantaneously. It appeared to matter little whether or not the object of desire was trustworthy. The emphasis was upon abandonment to an undifferentiated, unknowable other who existed as an extension of one's own needs.
An essentially solipsistic view of the world was supported by the experiential and ideational content of tile training throughout the five days. While reactions to others always contain projective themes, at Lifespring the boundary between inner and outer reality, between self and other, was constantly being obliterated by the structure of the training. This contributed to the sense of expansiveness and boundless power experienced by participants. The idea of "mirroring" was used in several exercises as a metaphor for projected reality. "What you see in others," we were told, "is a mirror of yourself."
Exercises which mobilized narcissistic defenses, i.e., feelings of inflated well-being and exaggerated personal power, were alternated with attacking exercises, which were narcissistically injurious. The latter evoked feelings of shame and worthlessness and made the group vulnerable to the judgments of the leader. One example involved a game called "Red and Black," which required the group to divide into two teams and develop strategies, based upon a set of rules, for achieving the greatest number of points. Neither team was able to recognize that the main contingency for getting the maximum number of points was that both teams succeed. Essentially, if one team lost, both lost. And both teams did lose. This exercise could have been an occasion for discussing the cultural context of competition and aspects of our society which make it difficult to identify cooperative contingencies. Instead, the trainer castigated participants, finally stating with disgust, "You all make me sick." Since the exercise was at the close of the evening, we were to go home and reflect upon what we had learned. Many participants were silent and tearful as we closed the evening session
By assuming the position of a harsh and rejecting parent, the trainer was able to mobilize infantile feelings of badness. This experience made it more likely that participants would attempt to defend against feelings of being a bad and powerless child in subsequent exercises by identifying more strongly with the leader. The tendency to identify with him in order to share in his power was particularly evident. on the morning following the Red and Black exercise as 8 or 10 participants lined up enthusiastically on the stage to give testimonials. This was the first time in the training that participants were invited to join the leader in his elevated position on the stage.
During the final two days of the training, there was a great deal of hugging and other indications of affection among participants. However, these expressions of "love for everyone" seemed to be narcissistically motivated. They were an extension of the expansive mood and feelings of power experienced by many of the participants rather than an expression of mutuality or attachment. Another group exercise, based on an assembly line model of human relations, illustrates the indiscriminate nature of intimate overtures. Participants assembled in two concentric circles, facing each other. Each facing pair was to simultaneously indicate one of four possible gestures of intimacy: no contact; a handshake; holding hands; or an embrace. After completing this brief, silent interaction, the lines shifted and new pairs were formed, repeating the procedure. Most pairs embraced so that by the conclusion of the exercise, close contact had been made among the majority of participants.
While this exercise may have been helpful for those who fear physical contact, providing a form of desensitization, it stripped such interactions of the relational context which generally gives them meaning. Instead, it became a rather compulsive, counterphobic reaching out which provided little information concerning problems of intimacy. These fleeting physical contacts were experienced as if they had profound human implications.
PSEUDO SELF-AWARENESS AND REALITY TESTING
The events of the fifth and final day of the training provided an opportunity for participants to use what they had learned in responding to an unanticipated crisis. Following the morning break, one of the more actively involved participants, Patrick, leaped up and took the position of the trainer on the podium. Initially it appeared that Patrick was acting out against the trainer by mocking him and by ignoring rules. However, it soon became apparent that he had decompensated--his speech was incoherent, he was out of contact with reality, and he appeared to be hallucinating. The trainer approached him and told him to stop "game playing." His "other choice" was to "go to a place where they allow people to play crazy games." Patrick merely gazed vacantly at the trainer and continued to mutter Lifespring phrases. Various participants, responded by encouraging Patrick to "go for it" and "let it all out." They did not understand that he had already "let too much out." His apparently fragile defenses had been repeatedly challenged by the trainer, who hid often accused him of "bullshitting,"
When it became clear that Patrick was unable to pull himself together, the other participants were asked to leave the room. We gathered outside, initially stunned by what had transpired. Then the group coalesced into a "circle of love," initiated by several members, out of the desire to "send Patrick our energy." The group was clearly attempting to provide comfort to its members in an upsetting situation. What was remarkable was the level of denial and misinterpretation of what had occurred. The group transformed Patrick's psychotic episode into a positive experience by using the categories of reasoning provided by the training. Drawing upon the infantile omnipotence encouraged by earlier sessions, some of the participants declared that "we are going to heal Patrick-he'll feel our energy." Others commented cheerfully that "he is getting in touch with his feelings" and "whatever he chooses is right for him, it's the very best for him." After Patrick had been spirited away, the group reconvened to continue the training. What could have been an occasion for discussing what had happened, including the impact of the training on Patrick, instead stimulated an outpouring of testimonials.
Since the group's idealization of the trainer was potentially undermined by this incident, decisive defensive operations were necessary to prevent the eruption of hostility in the group. The group felt impelled to reaffirm the goodness of Lifespring and to externalize and redirect the bad feelings evoked, which were potentially directed toward the trainer. Hostility was deflected from the trainer, who received the uncontaminated affection of the group, onto one of the participants who had remained outside the "circle of love." This participant, one of the researchers, had been a symbol of resistance throughout the training by asking questions and at times disagreeing with the trainer. During one group exercise, he had been selected by half of the participants as the "least attractive" person in the group. He was offensive to many participants for being "too analytical," "rigid," and "not feeling enough."
In the wake of the morning's events, affective states were intensified and a mood of hysteria was palpable. While loving feelings were directed toward Lifespring, the hostile component of what had been evoked was now directed more intensively toward the participant- researcher. One participant stood and stated, "I've got something to say to Dick. You know, I really hate Dick!" Another participant charged, "You don't give your love, Dick. All I want, Dick, is for you to love. And you hold back your love!" When Dick explained his reactions to the events of the morning, various participants shouted out angrily, "You're coming from your head, stop analyzing, come from your heart."
Within the narcissistic framework constructed by the training, the use of infantile splitting-dividing the relational world into "all good" and "all bad" objects emerged as a dominant defense against anxiety in the group. In order for the Lifespring experience to he taken in, it needed to be idealized as an all-good object. The trainer could not. be questioned nor the content of the training challenged. Participants whose opinions deviated from the trainer's were seen as a threat to the feelings of elation and well-being enjoyed by participants. Such threats had to be actively defended against in order to preserve the fantasy of omnipotence cultivated within the training.
CONCLUSION
We have argued that while many participants experienced a sense of enhanced well-being as a consequence of the training, these experiences were essentially pathological. First, ego functions were systematically undermined and regression was promoted by environmental structuring, infantilizing of participants and repeated emphasis on submission and surrender. Second, the ideational or interpretive framework provided in the training was also based upon regressive modes of reasoning--the use of all-or-nothing categories, absolutist logic and magical thinking, all of which are consistent with the egocentric thinking of young children. Third, the content of the training stimulated early narcissistic conflicts and defenses, which accounts for the elation and sense of heightened well-being achieved by many participants. The devaluation of objective constraints upon a person's action promoted grandiose fantasies of unlimited power. A corollary to this devaluation of the external world wits that interactions with others lacked substance. People appeared to be interchangeable so that ephemeral, indiscriminate emotional contacts were experienced as profound and meaningful. Identification with Lifespring necessitated considerable idealization so that any threat to this experience was aggressively defended against.
Our methods had an effect on our experience of the training and on our conclusions. The Lifespring Basic training, which demands full participation and rejects the legitimacy of observation, provided a particular challenge to the participant-observation method. In the Lifespring milieu any evidence of observation became evidence for the need for further "growth," for getting away from analysis or "intellectual trips." Lack of full emotional involvement in the training thus set the authors apart from the-group and led us to experience the training differently from the rest of the participants. As a result, we are not qualified to speak from the point of view of the "average participant." We did not, to use Lifespring's words, "got the training."
However, as parficipant-observers, we did share some of the group's subjective experiences, particularly the extraordinary pressure to conform. In this instance, the context of participant-observation, which as Rabinow (1977) says is dictated by "observation and externality," provided us with the opportunity to note the lengths to which the trainer was willing to go in attempting to achieve the required submission and commitment which we have described In this paper. Thus participant-observation, although a research strategy not. suited to fully integrating the researcher into the Lifespring Basic Training, did prove to be invaluable for developing insight into the processes of that training.
We have not addressed the normative implications of the training nor the extent to which participants are prepared by our culture to respond positively to Lifespring. The ideational content of the training would he less persuasive, perhaps, if beliefs concerning the autonomy and power of the individual were not deeply embedded in the prevailing ideology of American society. Growth organizations seem to be capitalizing upon the erosion of traditional means of supporting these beliefs and of anchoring individual identity. A deeper understanding of this phenomenon would require an analysis of the sociohistorical context out of which it emerged and from which it has gained its legitimacy.

[Ursus]

One internet source for the above paper found HERE.

[Awake]

More evidence of Cedu's intention. Evidence suggests that the 'I and Me' propheet is a concept modified from the originator, Humanistic Psychologist Carl Rogers, but applied with negative intent.

I made some statements before about the history behind Cedu and have found that I did not make some important distinctions.
One part of Cedu’s history is connected with Lifespring and that organization is a child of the Human Potential Movement. I also was describing that in connection with Humanistic Psychiatry, which is utilized by the HPM, but in looking into the history I found information that I think is very important to understanding points of contention between these viewpoints. I also think it is very important in understanding the Cedu experience as well.

To summarize Humanistic Psychiatry is a school of thought that was “developed in the 1950s in reaction to both behaviorism and psychoanalysis.” “The humanistic approach was distinguished by its emphasis on subjective meaning, rejection of determinism, and concern for positive growth rather than pathology.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychology

The Human Potential Movement “formed around the concept of cultivating extraordinary potential that its advocates believed to lie largely untapped in most people.” “those who begin to unleash this assumed potential often find themselves directing their actions within society towards assisting others to release their potential. Adherents believe that the net effect of individuals cultivating their potential will bring about positive social change at large.” Critics of the HPM say it “has not succeeded in its goals, but has instead created an environment that actually inhibits personal development. Such critics may claim that the HPM encourages childish narcissism by reinforcing the behavior of focusing on one's problems and expressing how one feels, rather than encouraging behaviors to overcome these problems. One can view this criticism in the terms of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. This analysis characterizes the failure as an exclusive focus on helping individuals fulfill their "Deficit Needs", without moving individuals up the hierarchy to "Being Needs" (self-actualization). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Potential_Movement

My main point here is that Humanistic psychology is the study of healthy individual personality development, and the tactics of the HPM are to utilize Humanistic Psychology to promote successful behavior on the societal level. This goal of heightened success and productivity at the societal level, though, can be at the expense of individual development. I believe this also represents the beliefs of the Cedu program and here is the real evidence for that:
Before, I referred to one founder of Humanistic Psychiatry, Abraham Maslow, and his ‘hierarchy of human needs’. But please look at this information on the other founder Carl Rogers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Rogers
“Carl Rogers (January 8, 1902 – February 4, 1987) was an influential American psychologist and among the founders of the humanistic approach to psychology. Rogers is widely considered to be one of the founding fathers of psychotherapy research and was honored for his pioneering research with the Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions by the American Psychological Association in 1956. The person-centered approach, his own unique approach to understanding personality and human relationships, found wide application in various domains such as psychotherapy and counseling.”

“Development of the Personality

With regard to development, he described principles rather than stages. The main issue is the development of a self concept and the progress from an undifferentiated self to being fully differentiated.

“ Self Concept ... the organized consistent conceptual gestalt composed of perceptions of the characteristics of 'I' or 'me' and the perceptions of the relationships of the 'I' or 'me' to others and to various aspects of life, together with the values attached to these perceptions.”

“In the development of the self concept he saw conditional and unconditional positive regard as key. Those raised in an environment of unconditional positive regard have the opportunity to fully actualize themselves. Those raised in an environment of conditional positive regard only feel worthy if they match conditions (what Rogers describes as conditions of worth) that have been laid down by others.”

“Incongruity

Rogers identifies the "real self" as the aspect of one's being that is founded in the actualizing tendency, follows organismic valuing, needs and receives positive regard and self-regard. It is the "you" that, if all goes well, you will become. On the other hand, to the extent that our society is out of sync with the actualizing tendency, and we are forced to live with conditions of worth that are out of step with organismic valuing, and receive only conditional positive regard and self-regard, we develop instead an "ideal self". By ideal, Rogers is suggesting something not real, something that is always out of our reach, the standard we cannot meet. This gap between the real self and the ideal self, the "I am" and the "I should" is called incongruity.”

“Psychopathology

Rogers describes the concepts of congruence and incongruence as important ideas in his theory. In proposition #6 he refers to the actualizing tendency. At the same time he recognizes the need for positive regard. In a fully congruent person realizing their potential is not at the expense of experiencing positive regard. They are able to lead lives that are authentic and genuine. Incongruent individuals, in their pursuit of positive regard, live lives that include falseness and do not realise their potential. Conditions put on them by those around them make it necessary for them to forego their genuine, authentic lives to meet with the approval of others. They live lives that are not true to themselves, to who they are on the inside.

Rogers suggests that the incongruent individual who is always on the defensive and cannot be open to all experiences is not functioning ideally and may even be malfunctioning. They work hard at maintaining/protecting their self concept. Because their lives are not authentic this is a difficult task and they are under constant threat. They deploy defense mechanisms to achieve this. He describes two mechanisms: distortion and denial. Distortion occurs when the individual perceives a threat to their self concept. They distort the perception until it fits their self concept. Denial follows the same process except instead of distorting they deny the threat exists.

This defensive behavior reduces the consciousness of the threat but not the threat itself. And so, as the threats mount, the work of protecting the self concept becomes more difficult and the individual more defensive and rigid in their self structure. If the incongruence is immoderate this process may lead the individual to a state that would typically be described as neurotic. Their functioning becomes precarious and psychologically vulnerable. If the situation worsens it is possible that the defenses cease to function altogether and the individual becomes aware of the incongruence of their situation. Their personality becomes disorganised and bizarre, irrational behavior, associated with earlier denied aspects of self, may erupt uncontrollably.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Rogers

Now, going back to his Partner, Abraham Maslows pyramid of human needs.

“Maslow's hierarchy of needs is a theory in psychology, proposed by Abraham Maslow in his 1943 paper A Theory of Human Motivation”
His theory is that to fully “actualize” as a person, to be able to develop fully, a person must be able to satisfy the successive needs on the pyramid. They are:
Physiological>Safety>Love/Belonging>Esteem>Self Actualization
(Details on these.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s ... y_of_needs

“Maslow's hierarchy of needs is also predetermined in order of importance.[5] It is often depicted as a pyramid consisting of five levels: the lowest level is associated with physiological needs, while the uppermost level is associated with self-actualization needs, particularly those related to identity and purpose. The higher needs in this hierarchy only come into focus when the lower needs in the pyramid are met. Once an individual has moved upwards to the next level, needs in the lower level will no longer be prioritized. If a lower set of needs is no longer being met, the individual will temporarily re-prioritize those needs by focusing attention on the unfulfilled needs.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s ... y_of_needs
…and some other pertinent things on Carl Rogers.

Carl Rogers developed a theory of personality and consciousness based on 19 propositions. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Rogers
Nineteen Propositions

His theory (as of 1951) was based on nineteen propositions:[6]
1.   All individuals (organisms) exist in a continually changing world of experience (phenomenal field) of which they are the centre.
2.   The organism reacts to the field as it is experienced and perceived. This perceptual field is "reality" for the individual.
3.   The organism reacts as an organized whole to this phenomenal field.
4.   A portion of the total perceptual field gradually becomes differentiated as the self.
5.   As a result of interaction with the environment, and particularly as a result of evaluational interaction with others, the structure of the self is formed - an organised, fluid but consistent conceptual pattern of perceptions of characteristics and relationships of the "I" or the "me", together with values attached to these concepts.
6.   The organism has one basic tendency and striving - to actualize, maintain and enhance the experiencing organism.
7.   The best vantage point for understanding behaviour is from the internal frame of reference of the individual.
8.   Behavior is basically the goal directed attempt of the organism to satisfy its needs as experienced, in the field as perceived.
9.   Emotion accompanies, and in general facilitates, such goal directed behaviour, the kind of emotion being related to the perceived significance of the behaviour for the maintenance and enhancement of the organism.
10.   Values experienced directly by the organism, and in some instances are values introjected or taken over from others, but perceived in distorted fashion, as if they had been experienced directly.
11.   As experiences occur in the life of the individual, they are either, a) symbolized, perceived and organized into some relation to the self, b) ignored because there is no perceived relationship to the self structure, c) denied symbolization or given distorted symbolization because the experience is inconsistent with the structure of the self.
12.   Most of the ways of behaving that are adopted by the organism are those that are consistent with the concept of self.
13.   In some instances, behaviour may be brought about by organic experiences and needs which have not been symbolized. Such behaviour may be inconsistent with the structure of the self but in such instances the behaviour is not "owned" by the individual.
14.   Psychological adjustment exists when the concept of the self is such that all the sensory and visceral experiences of the organism are, or may be, assimilated on a symbolic level into a consistent relationship with the concept of self.
15.   Psychological maladjustment exists when the organism denies awareness of significant sensory and visceral experiences, which consequently are not symbolized and organized into the gestalt of the self structure. When this situation exists, there is a basic or potential psychological tension.
16.   Any experience which is inconsistent with the organization of the structure of the self may be perceived as a threat, and the more of these perceptions there are, the more rigidly the self structure is organized to maintain itself.
17.   Under certain conditions, involving primarily complete absence of threat to the self structure, experiences which are inconsistent with it may be perceived and examined, and the structure of self revised to assimilate and include such experiences.
18.   When the individual perceives and accepts into one consistent and integrated system all his sensory and visceral experiences, then he is necessarily more understanding of others and is more accepting of others as separate individuals.
19.   As the individual perceives and accepts into his self structure more of his organic experiences, he finds that he is replacing his present value system - based extensively on introjections which have been distortedly symbolized - with a continuing organismic valuing process.
Additionally, Rogers is known for practicing "unconditional positive regard," which is defined as accepting a person "without negative judgment of .... [a person's] basic worth."[

What I am really getting at here is that Humanistic Psychiatry itself is providing the guidelines to understanding how the human personality develops, but it also gives all the information you need to control and shape personality development.
If you are still reading ( I really hope some people find this interesting) There are some very important clues in the above information that, I think, are key to identifying the true intention of the program.

In the above information Rogers talks about the “I” and “Me”, but his perspective on this is one of unity, wholeness and integration. “I” and “Me”, to Rogers, is the same thing, they are not separate. As he said “I” and “Me” both symbolize self concept, the awareness of self, both words symbolize the same thing. Additionally he defines a healthy personality as one in which the self concept is fully differentiated from other, meaning “self-actualization” is a state of achieving independence and autonomy. He says undeveloped self-concept is a result of an environment where positive regard is conditional upon the persons behavior. He says in this environment people “only feel worthy if they match conditions (what Rogers describes as conditions of worth) that have been laid down by others.”

I really am going somewhere with this, but before it comes together there is another very important concept that Rogers talked about. This was ‘incongruency’. Here he talks about the split between ‘real self’ and ‘ideal self’ as well as “I am” and “I should”. I think this concept of splitting is important in considering the intention of the “I and me” propheet at Cedu, that being the conceptual split of the self into Thinking and Feeling. There is more to say about this, but to expand on this idea I think this information is key:

This book claims to have been the first book to cover the subject of personality splitting.
Subpersonalities: The people inside us. John Rowan. 1990

It chronicles the various instances of personality splitting in psychotherapy. It describes various ways to split the mind into separate and autonomous regions. It quotes Carl Jung:

“The tendency to split means that parts of the psyche detach themselves from consciousness to such an extent that they not only appear foreign but lead an autonomous life of their own. It need not be a question of hysterical multiple personality, or schizophrenic alterations of personality, but merely of so-called ‘complexes’ that come entirely within the scope of the normal.” Jung 1936”

Various descriptions of splitting include:

Primal split- Of Primal therapy. Primal therapy regards any defense mechanisms as neurosis. “Primal Theory indicates that the healthiest people are defense free. Anything that builds a stronger defense system deepens the neurosis. – The Primal Scream, Arthur Janov, 1970” It focuses on “the real self” and “un-real self” or “false self”. This false self is the defensive (neurotic) self that has been established to protect the real self from being vulnerable in an environment that denies the real expression of himself. (*note: This concept of real and unreal self (even the specific reference to ‘Truth’ and ‘Lie’) do not have their origins in Primal Theory. Earlier references to this are found in works by R.D. Laing and Donald Winnicott, however both use it to describe how this split can result in mental illness, specifically schizophrenia (split mind http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winnicott , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_David_Laing . Laing fully covers the progression of mental illness as a result of this self concept in his book “The Divided Self”.).)

Split between child ego and adult ego- From Transactional analysis, Eric Berne. Founded on the principle that everyone has parent, adult, and child ego states. “We all have within us a Parent, Adult, and a Child, and these can sometimes be in conflict with one another.” The book quotes Berne: “An Ego State can be described as a coherent system of feelings related to a given subject and operationally as a set of coherent behavior patterns… repression of traumatic memories is possible only through repression of the whole pertinent ego state. Early ego states remain preserved in a latent stage, waiting to be re-cathected. – We would add to this point that the whole ego state may not only be repressed, but split off. This comes out in the way in which an ego state can switch in with great power.”

Splits in Gestalt therapy- Fritz Perls, and Gestalt Therapy, “laid all the stress on internal conflicts rather than external conflicts.” “Gestalt school lays all the stress on polarities as a form of conflict.” Perls refers to what he calls “The famous self-torture game” which makes use of the conflict from these polarities with a conceptual split which he calls “topdog underdog”. The basis for this game is that “we carry around certain “shoulds” which we do not really intend to honor. We carry them around with us until they beat us over the head with the thought-‘I still haven’t written to my grandmother,’ –or whatever it may be. The reply is something like,’I will do it but I haven’t got time.’ In Perls terms this is the topdog underdog at work.” Perls states,”The topdog is righteous and authoritarian; he knows best. He manipulates with demands and threats of catastrophe. The underdog manipulates with being defensive, apologetic, wheedling… This is the basis for the famous self torture game.”

The book also has sections on Neuro Linguistic Programming and Hypnotherapy.

I’ll try to get to the point here. Cedu knew it was trying to PREVENT personal growth, the tools were meant to stifle you with inner conflict. The “I and ME” seems to have been taken from Rogers’ theories, but they twisted the concept to fit Rogers’ description of psychopathology by creating a self concept that is incongruent. I think all the tools were for that purpose, to create a split in self concept then fully polarize the parts by imparting the belief that you could banish, or exorcise one of them. Furthermore they kept us in an environment in which positive regard was highly conditional upon behavior, which Rogers says cannot support self actualization. I’m sure you can see how Maslows hierarchy of needs was a tool cedu used to control people with their system of rewards and punishments. All in all I think it was elaborately set up to be exactly what Perls calls it, ‘The Famous Self Torture Game’.

[dishdutyfugitive]

AWAKE

Outstanding.

Exemplifies Mels sinister genius.

From this he fashioned a highly lucrative teen fixing widget.

I'd pay a King's ransom to have a 30 minute intercambio with Mel.

[Awake]

AWAKE

Outstanding.

Exemplifies Mels sinister genius.

From this he fashioned a highly lucrative teen fixing widget.

I'd pay a King's ransom to have a 30 minute intercambio with Mel.

Ditto, and thank you. Sometimes I seriously feel like other people think it was well intentioned, but just fd up, when really it was designed to be entirely fd up.

[Anonymous]

Thank you.  This really clears a lot of things up for me about what exactly their reasoning is behind all the games.  Very interesting stuff.  I think everyone who went through propheets should read this page.

[dishdutyfugitive]

His methodology was quite simple and effective. He meant to induce obedience and self-loathing.

1. Isolate the students.
- complete isolation from society.
- minimal contact with family. All family contact is program based/monitored.
- enlist parents as agents of 'reform'. Provide them pre-packaged answers for every possible conversation with their children.

2. Instill 'broken/faulty' identity doctrine into students through 1 size fits all intimidation scream therapy. "You got yourself sent her because you are a fuck up. Your thinking sucks - it runs you. Everything you do is a game. You have an infinite supply of emotional pain inside that needs to be exorcised by screaming and crying".

3. Portray soon to be graduates as 'cured'. This inspires the younger & middle school students to one day becoming an 'older student'. AKA "Sell the dream"

4. Good cop / bad cop the students. Scream by day - smoosh by night. And cry your ass off 24/7.

5. Destroy all social boundaries. Wear them down. Yell at them. Make them cry, then Humiliate students in group settings. Have staff admit to bizarre 'disclosures' in group settings.

Talk about a self propelled ecosystem.

The only other requisite is supply - Rich kids being raised in dysfunctional households. There will never be a shortage of those.

Voila. Mel's printing money and laughing all the way to the bank.

And when it finally blows up? Hmmm, fuck it - just ignore it. No one is accountable. It never happened.