How psychotherapy led to control and ultimate disaster in a West Coast community, narrated by journalist Mithers (author of the much ballyhooed 1982 Village Voice article ``My Life as a Man''). In 1967, Arthur Janov claimed to have found a cure for neurosis through regression to the infant state, culminating in what he called the ``primal scream.'' A few years later, Joe Hart and Riggs Corriere led a group of defectors from Janov's Primal Institute to set up The Center for Feeling Therapy, where people would not only confront their past pain but move beyond it to change their present lives through the breakdown of their defenses and the discovery of their ``true'' feelings. Soon, the therapists formed a kind of hierarchy and assumed more and more power over the patients. Public confessions were demanded and individuals were humiliated (``busted''), and even physically brutalized. Mithers tells how the therapy became a whole way of life and participants lost contact with the outside world as they formed a tightly connected community of ``the sane.'' As the 70's progressed, therapists would determine what was reality, keeping women, for example, submissive and virtually starving in order to be thin and ``feminine.'' Women were also forced to engage in assigned sexual encounters and undergo abortions as the therapists required. Mithers discerns a pattern of young, impressionable people caught up in a relentless dynamic of transference and the dream of an ideal community. To leave it, they believed, would literally be suicide. Mithers writes with massive detail, gained from first-hand contact with 48 members. The group began to fall apart when Joe Hart quietly left, but not without noting disturbing similarities in the Center's methods to Dr. Louis West's analysis of brainwashing: a process of debilitation, dependency, and dread. The end came when the therapists were absent for two months and patients began to ask questions, such as ``Where is all the money?'' Nearly a decade of lawsuits were to follow. A terrifying story, brilliantly told, as well as a commentary on American culture during the 1970's.
Pub Date: April 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-201-57071-8
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Addison-Wesley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
Meet Norma Hazelton, connoisseur and collector of swizzle sticks. If you're not impressed by a plastic Jackie Gleason long since separated from its maraschino cherry, take a look at Robert Cade, inventor of Gatorade and a collector of Studebakers (re the carmaker's Dictator line of the 1930s, he says: ``Dictator was a good name until Hitler and Mussolini and Stalin. They dropped the Dictator line in 1937 because of them''). Among the 20 collections that Tuchman and photographer Brenner cast their eyes on are caches of Civil War memorabilia (a banjo, a musket, a toothbrush); aquarium furniture (a lot of mermaids); and representations of the Last Supper (a clock, a saltshaker, a funeral-home fan). Tuchman's text, mostly a pastiche of comments from the collectors themselves, is informative—and just glib enough to keep the whole book from feeling like a spooky visit to your mad Aunt Mabel's attic.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-8118-0360-0
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
A European woman who assumed the persona of a young male Tunisian student describes her remarkable journey into the Sahara in colorful and textured, albeit romanticized, vignettes. In 1897, Isabelle Eberhardt (The Oblivion Seekers, not reviewed), born and raised in Geneva, traveled with her mother to Tunis, where both converted to Islam. Eberhardt spent much of the rest of her life in Algeria; this work comes from notes she made during 1904 as they were later edited and published in France by Victor Barrucand. Despite this cleanup of the notes, some intriguing internal tensions remain: Eberhardt says her male persona (which Arabs respected, even when they saw through it) allows her to travel without attracting notice, but in a low moment she notes that she attracts disapproval. Near the Algeria-Morocco border, she muses with some pleasure that nobody knows precisely where the boundary is, yet soon (in one of the few hints at the region's volatility) she trades her Moroccan attire for Algerian to avoid annoying residents. When individuals and settings attract her eye she describes them vividly and concisely, whether she is passing a madman reciting verses from the Koran or taking tea with male students at a mosque. (Her garb ironically restricts her access to—and ability to learn about—women; interestingly, she seems not to mind.) Her observations on the play of light and color over the desert are made with an artist's eye, and her musings on travel and isolation reveal a pensive side. Yet far as she journeys, literally and metaphorically, she is still dogged by her prejudices: Jewish women cast ``provocative leers,'' and Jewish men possess ``insinuating and commercial abilities''; blacks can be ``repulsive'' and, when dancing, both ``childlike'' and ``barbarous.'' Though lacking a needed glossary for the many Arabic terms used, this slim volume makes a welcome addition to the information available on an extraordinary woman.
Pub Date: Oct. 5, 1994
ISBN: 0-7206-0889-9
Page Count: 120
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
