When Therapists Drive Their Patients Crazy - page 4

Actually, life in the compound had never been as harmonious as patients would have liked to imagine. Jerry and Dominic were often the butt of jokes that portrayed them as comic bumblers; Riggs tended to treat Steve Gold, who sometimes stuttered, as if he was not very bright. And in the mid-seventies there was plenty of bitterness when both female founders were stripped of their right to do individual therapy. The private lives of the therapists could be as messy as their patients': although Steve Gold and Carole Suydam married, Jerry and Linda Binder divorced, and when Riggs began dating (and later married) blond, beautiful patient Konni Pederson, who had been seeing his old teacher, Dominic (who ultimately recoupled with Linda Binder), many a Freudian eyebrow might have raised.

Still, each founder had his own loyal group of fans and area of operations to control. If any one person could be called the Center's leader, it was Joe Hart -- the oldest therapist, the most credentialed, the wise man and theorist. But in a way, Joe had never fully become part of the therapy community. Although like the other therapists he had participated in violent sessions with patients, at most times his speech remained slow and soft. During groups he did more talking about psychological theory than hard-core busting. And at night he went home to the wife he had married in college (a woman who had adamantly refused to join the Center) and a young daughter they were apparently "sane" enough to keep.

The community, however, had proved the perfect environment for Riggs. He could be childish and obnoxious, but when it came to expressing feelings, he was absolutely fearless. "He wasn't scared to say his horrible thoughts to you," recalled Lisa. "Everyone else was a little scared to hurt people's feelings. He could just yell at you, scream at you, decimate you. It was considered incredible that he was that powerful and that open. I thought of him as my idol. Everyone thought that the person they wanted to be like was Riggs."

By the end of the seventies, it was clear that Riggs's influence was dominant. It was Riggs who led the elite Group One, which applauded as he entered the room. It was basketball, Riggs's favorite game, that became the Center's sports obsession. It was Riggs, who had always dreamed of being a cowboy, who persuaded the other founders to buy a cattle ranch in Arizona for a vacation retreat. It was Riggs who oversaw Management Achievement Consultants, a small firm that gave managerial advice to patient-owned businesses in return for a hefty chunk of their profits and whose services patients felt they could not refuse.

In 1979 Joe and Riggs published a new book, Psychological Fitness: 21 Days to Feeling Good, and Butch and the Kid began yet another round of publicity efforts. Joe Hart, noted the San Francisco Examiner, was "a remarkably fit-looking psychologist" who bore "an unnerving resemblance to Robert Redford." At home, however, the tension was growing. In early 1980 Joe suddenly withdrew from the Center community and took a teaching job at USC. He had come to believe, he later told David, that the Center should be a place where people came and went, not where they spent their lives. Patients should have families and children. Perhaps that was all there was to his complaints -- he did leave his own brother behind in the therapeutic community. But before he left, he wrote a letter to Dr. Louis West, head of the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute, requesting information on the subject of brainwashing.

Joe's departure was never really explained, but patients were warned to avoid him. "Joe's crazy," they were told. "He's going through some things of his own and he doesn't want to talk to anyone." As usual, no one really questioned the news. But afterward, a ground swell of resentment against all of the founders began to build. Junior therapists were growing increasingly angry at the salary discrepancy between them and the founders. "The last full year I worked there I made $13,000," said one. I hated it. I talked about it and was told I was acting out, but that was the one thing that would not die down in me." Clinicians were under unremitting pressure to recruit clients and were fined if they lost them. "It was a nightmare," said one. "We were busted so hard for losing clients, we were humiliated, torn apart. It was like living a phobia. The anxiety was just horrible."

Both clinicians and junior therapists were given vacations at the ranch, but the time there simply made all the inequalities more obvious. Only three couples were allowed in the comfortable ranch house, with Riggs and his wife, Konni -- herself a junior therapist -- permanently occupying the master bedroom. Everyone else slept in the cowboy's quarters down the hill and might be awakened at 5 A.M. if Riggs wanted a corral built. "There goes the general," people would say when Riggs went by on his motorcycle. Everything had to be done Riggs's way; if it wasn't, it was "crazy."

That had always been the line. But the junior therapists and the men and women who ran the clinic -- who perhaps were beginning to have a sense of their own economic power within the Center -- were starting to believe that the real craziness lay elsewhere. "I had always seen the founders as being very confident, having it all together," said one clinician, "But when Riggs conducted the staff meeting he totally emasculated and busted every one of the founders. And they turned into timid little boys right in front of my eyes. When I saw that, I got really scared. When Jonestown happened in 1978. I'd had some doubts and there was talk about how we were different, and I must have put them aside. But when this other thing happened, I started putting it together. I started thinking, My God, we're just like that."

Such "negative" thoughts could still get you busted, but busting didn't make them go away. "I wanted to be an adult," said Lorraine, "but I couldn't see where you'd ever make the transition. I was living with a guy who was in Group One, and what was clear to me was that even Group One people weren't equal. I told my boyfriend, 'You know, where I grew up, my parents weren't the wealthiest people in town and they weren't the most powerful. But they were part of the community and they were respected, and they were equal with the other people in the town.' I said, 'I don't see how we're ever going to get there.' And Dennis didn't bust me. He didn't have an answer. There was this unseen, undiscussed, growing discomfort. It was as if the grass was soaked with gasoline but nobody noticed."

And then someone lit a match.

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