See, I don't know how experimental it was. It had its funding from the government, yes, but can you tell me what the hypothesis was? What were the controls on the experiment that differentiated it from the previous experiment/programs like Synanon. See, I'm missing something. How does a charlatan like Art Baker become privy to the experimental data and funding that is accessible to the military-scientific community? Art Baker had no prior scientific experience and had no prior military experience. The only way I can feasibly imagine that he got access to the funding was that he sold to the stringholders of the purse that his program worked, lifting directly the techniques used in Paradise House and mishmashing them a bit to come up with something that would appear experimental, but truly was nothing more than charlatanry - nothing different than what we see with attachment therapy. And if you sell it well enough to the stringholder, you can get a lot of fuzzy deals that ensure that the operation can work in secrecy.
Dr. Davidson's Elan is a bit different. Ricci was a charlatan, but we don't know much about Dr. Davidson.
Ummm... Maybe this is a minor point, but Art Barker *did* serve in World War II. How efficaciously is another story. I seem to remember that he might have gone AWOL at one point, but I may well be remembering the story incorrectly.
If he *did* go AWOL at some point, however, there's the
possibility that he may have been "thrown in the brig" for that, and if so, may have been exposed to the form of rehabilitative "group therapy" that the DOD was attempting to install and promulgate via its military prisons in the mid 1940s, namely
Guided Group Interaction. (This paragraph here is
strictly speculation on my part with regard to Barker's personal history; I cannot stress that enough.)
Nevertheless, whether or not Barker went through the above noted experience, the fact remains that
GGI was mentioned as one of the methodologies that Barker used to formulate the magical voodoo that was put into practice at the Seed.
As to how someone like Barker could be given such reins? For that you'll need to look into local political history in Florida in the late 1960s and early 1970s. I'm not from Florida, so there's obviously a lot I don't know, but I rather suspect that a hell of a lot of this had to do with attempts to close down places like Marianna and the man Florida recruited to do that job. That would be Oliver Keller.
Keller's vision was to do away with the large scale prison-like institutions rife with nightmarish physical brutality like Marianna, and install lots of smaller, community-based programs. I imagine there was ample room, perhaps also ample support, for local small scale business opportunities in this arena.
The idea was to do away with the
physical coercion, and instead, to resort to the "kinder, gentler" forms of
psychological persuasion exemplified by former experiments like GGI originator Lloyd McCorkle's Highfields RTC in New Jersey (1950) and Cottage 6 in metro NYC (shortly after Highfields; PIs escape me at the moment). [Fwiw, note that these two experiments predate Synanon by quite a bit.]