Here is some info, a few sites that helped me out. Synanon. I believe the origins came from his relations with Dr. Dan Casriel and his own genius. Chuck was a extremely intelligent man. He just managed to never get the help he needed to tame
his demons.
Now, where did Dr. Casriel get his opinions and methods is explained better in the wiki site below. Inculcated and Setko are educated more so on Dr.Casriel.
http://www.directionjournal.org/article/?1272The Rise and Fall of Synanon: A California Utopia
Reviewed by Richard Kyle
Rod Janzen
(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 300 pp
(excerpt from the article)As indicated by the book’s title, Synanon was not a static movement. Rather, it experienced many changes, which the author recounts. Started as a self-help organization for alcoholics and drug abusers by Chuck Dederich, an alcoholic with a charismatic personality, the movement began under inauspicious circumstances and through the years gained and lost 25,000 members.
Central to Synanon’s program—and close to achieving a sacramental status—were encounter sessions known as “the Game.” The Game consisted of confrontational techniques designed to strip down a person’s defense mechanisms and uncover the real person. According to Janzen, Dederich based his game on Emerson’s essay, “Self-Reliance.” Participants were encouraged to be brutally honest, spouting “indictments” to attack hypocrisy and fraud as their fellow members “ran their stories.” Emerson's essay translated:
http://www.youmeworks.com/self_reliance_translated.html http://www.rickross.com/reference/synanon/synanon9.htmlThe History of Synanon and Charles Dederich
August 2, 2008
By Paul Morantz
(excerpt from article)Dederich became an AA favorite speaker and went to an AA meeting every day. He read Emerson’s
"Self Reliance" and using it as a bible he quit his job to devout full time to cleaning up other Alcoholics. He existed on a $35 unemployment check and charity from others. He volunteered for a Dr. Keith Ditman LSD experiment and felt he had a cathartic break through and now understood the world and that good and bad were the same. He studied on his own in a library and his AA speeches changed from typical religious overtones to a psychological/philosophy slant. He gathered his own following in AA and after a time of meetings at apartments, they rented a small store in seedy Venice. The original name was The Tender Loving Care Club. They played the
"game" in which anyone was allowed to say anything, true or not, to someone to cause an effect. Only the threat of violence was prohibited.
It was a game because one being gamed could turn the game on another. They survived by begging stale food from catering trucks, hookers doing tricks and donations. For a shower, a hose ran through a window (Casriel, So Fair a House, Yablonski, The Tunnel Back: Guy Endore, Synanon; Charles Dederich tapes on history of Synanon).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Harold_CasrielDr. Dan Casriel, So Fair a House, Yablonski, The Tunnel Back: Guy Endore, Synanon; Charles Dederich tapes on history of Synanon.
(excerpt from Casriel wiki)In the winter of 1953 Casriel began private practice as a psychiatrist in New York City. Shortly thereafter he was appointed as a psychiatric consultant to the Metropolitan Hospital in East Harlem and the Court of Special Sessions in Manhattan where he became active in the treatment drug addicts.
In July 1962 Casriel visited the famous Synanon therapeutic community on the US East coast. So impressed with what he saw there, he moved into the community for a “closer look” and wrote a book about the experience ( "So Fair A House: The story of Synanon"). In February 1963, Casriel gave $2000 to seven members of Synanon to start a community on the West Coast. The result was a house on Greens Farm Road, Westport, Connecticut directed by Jack Hurst, former president of Synanon in Santa Monica [4]
