When Therapists Drive Their Patients Crazy - page 3

IN 1977 THE FOUNDERS MOVED CENTER HEADQUARTERS to 7165 Sunset Boulevard. The new building was sleek, with gray carpet and expensive chairs; the new image -- prosperous, almost corporate -- aptly mirrored changes taking place in the Center itself. Joe and Rigg's new book, The Dream Makers, contained no messianic talk about saving the world from insanity as Going Sane did, just lots of pop-psych anecdotes, tips and exercises. And with the appearance of the book, the Center's publicity machine geared up to go mainstream in a big way. As in the past, it played to media fast to respond and slow to ask questions. Many of the reader comments on The Dream Makers that Joe sent to his editor at the now-defunct Thomas Y. Crowell publishing company were in fact testimonials from Center patients who identified themselves only with their hometown addresses. "The Dream Makers," a press release from Crowell dutifully relayed, "contains ideas so powerful that readers across the country are reporting that merely reading the book has changed their lives." Newspaper stories were no less knee-jerk: Joe and Riggs, gushed a Honolulu paper, "may be onto the biggest thing to hit psychotherapy since Freud kicked cocaine." In 1977 and 1978 alone, founders -- usually Joe and Riggs -- were guests on 134 radio and 104 television shows, including back-to-back appearances on Merv Griffin and The Tonight Show and four appearances on Good Morning, America. Geraldo Rivera reported from the Gardner Street compound that "all of them coexist in what apparently is one big, happy family."

In fact, what the Center family was doing more than anything else was growing. In the Center building, staff-room walls were covered with a ten-year plan for Center growth around the globe. Workshops and satellite clinics opened in Montreal, Boston, Munich, San Francisco and Hawaii. New programs for the public blossomed. And even therapy changed to suit the needs of promoting this expansion: patients were now pushed to renew contact with family and friends -- and to make sure their relatives attended Center events. A number of long-standing patients were turned into "junior therapists" who carried much of the staff load although many had no professional licenses whatsoever. In 1978 the outpatient Clinic for Functional Counseling and Psychotherapy, staffed by eighteen (also mostly unlicensed) Center patients, opened.

Increasingly the Center community was urged toward permanence: patients were encouraged to contribute money to build a community gym and to become involved in the Hollywood West Neighborhood Association, a political Center group. New patients were actively recruited. Ironically, one of them was attorney Morantz, the man who would later be attacked by a rattlesnake put in his mailbox by Synanon members. Morantz went to an open house in 1978 with two Center woen who had sold him office plants. "First I was taken to some homes. Everyone I was introduced to wanted to instantly love me," he said. "Later I was taken to a restaurant in Hollywood. Of course, the tab was picked up. It didn't take too much for me to see that something unusual was going on, that this was actual recruitment. Right away, I thought something was wrong. This is not what happens in therapy. Then we went to the open house. All through this, it became more and more obvious that it was important to the women who'd brought me that I like this, that I join. Which also told me that there was pressure, and brownie points to be won by my joining. Again, a very terrible sign. In the open house they showed a slide show. I expected to hear about the therapy, but the entire show was nothing but how completely wonderful the founders were. Then they broke off into so-called therapy demonstrations, and in one they described how patients would do therapy on other people by mail. At that point I raised my hand and said, 'You're describing therapy being given by unlicensed individuals through the mail, and that's against the law.' A hush came over the room. The presenters replied, in essence, 'You're talking legalities and we're trying to save the world.'

"I had no knowledge, of course, of what was going on at the Center, just my suspicions. So when two years later my telephone rang and my first two Center clients contacted me and started telling me what had been going on, I kind of felt that that day I had been there for a reason."

Most of all, more attention than ever was focused on money. The price of the first two months of therapy, originally $2,500, had gone up to $4,500. Many of the founders were driving Mercedes and wearing Bijan suits. The men and women who staffed the clinic -- whose negligible salaries were accompanied by the promise of future riches -- understood that though people who signed up for the clinic were entering what was billed as a ten-week program, "if you were a good therapist, "as one clinic worker put it, "the client would stay forever."

"We expect to be world renowned," Riggs told a cheering Center audience around that time. "We expect to be rich. We expect to be famous. I don't believe Carl Rogers should be more well known than Joe Hart."

It was all a far cry from the organization that had once assured a Los Angeles Times reporter that "we want to have a small family business," and as the quest for empire grew, life in the community began to change. In truth there had always been cliques and "in" groups at the Center, and the whole place had operated in a kind of hierarchy of "sanity" based on seniority. "The longer you were there," David said, "the saner you were." Still, one of the Center's central myths was that someday all patients would become sane, and with the achievement of sanity, all would become equal. Then one night in the fall of 1978 even that pretense was dropped, as men and women were taken from their old therapy groups and assigned to one of thirteen numbered groups that clearly spelled out their standing in the feeling hierarchy. Groups six through thirteen were for patients new to the Center. Groups one through five were for the old-timers. Group One was the elite; Group Five, called Tombstone, was for "losers."

With the change, physical brutality eased, but class divisions deepened; within the new system, being demoted a group level was the most intense humiliation one could face. And assignments pushed for more and more surrender of independence and control. "My boyfriend and I were assigned to a special $1,000 couples week," recalls a long-term patient. "The third night, we were sent home. Jeff was told he had to wear an apron all night and wait on me hand and foot because he was too passive. Later, because he wanted more sex than I did, they sent us home to have sex every hour on the hour for exactly seven minutes. Then they started work on 'rebuilding' our new relationship: I had to call him 'my hero,' I had to swoon, Jeff had to pick out all my clothes for me. Every single thing I did, I had to ask permission. That was to be my new way of being.

"I got pregnant [that week], and Jeff wanted the child. I said, "Don't tell a soul you want it; you'll get crucified. There's no way they'll let me.' But he didn't know the rules. He said he wanted it."

"Where have you been, Daddy?" Jeff later testified the therapist asked when he returned to his group after the abortion. "Did you bring it home in a bottle?"

Perhaps such exertion of control over patients' lives was only an extreme variation of what had always gone on at the Center. Increasingly, however, control was also becoming an issue at the top.

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