Toward a Radical Therapy

Alternate Services for Personal and Social Change

Ted Clark, Dennis T. Jaffe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138624771
• eBook ISBN: 9780429864148
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

In September 1969, Ted Clark, Dennis Jaffe, and Yvonne Durchfort (now Yvonne Jaffe) started "Number Nine", a crisis telephone line. Initially this was an attempt to discover from young people themselves exactly what the needs of young people were, in order that a program relevant to those needs might be developed. The crisis line program, in itself, proved useful and meaningful to young people as they began calling in increasing numbers. Since many community agencies – through their insistence that young people cooperate with a value system that does not engender trust – alienated themselves from these young people, it became increasingly imperative that the crisis line expand its resources to include counseling, a crash pad, a residential program, and a drop-in center. As an alternative to those agencies who insist on viewing drug use as a problem per se and who do not focus their attentions on family, school, and personal relationships in general, "Number Nine" offered realistic and reachable solutions.

Originally published in 1973, Toward a Radical Therapy is a collection of essays concerning numerous issues which the authors encountered during the development of an alternative service – an organization which reflects the values and experiences of young people (the counter-culture), rather than the values of the established social order, as a necessary step toward helping people cope with their problems. The ideas expounded in these working papers are the outcome of experiences and experiments in attempting to effect personal and organizational changes basic to creating an alternative culture.

Concurrent with the writing of this book, the authors discovered numerous conflicts occurring at all levels of program and institutional development, as well as within themselves. Personal changes become necessarily interrelated with social change and organizational structuring. Counseling had to be redefined as existing theories and methodologies were limited in their ability to comprehend the constant changes that youth were undergoing at the time.

Chapter 1

THE DESTRUCTION OF YOUTH

We have often been asked to speak to adult groups about the problems of young people because of our experiences in a crisis intervention center. Yet we are never asked to define these problems, a relatively basic starting point. Adults assume that they know what the problem with kids is, and they use such terms as “drugs,” “communication breakdown,” “having it too soft,” and “overpermissive parents”. Making the judgment that someone’s behavior is a problem he has is essentially a moral stance — what the person making the judgment believes to be right and wrong. Since most adults feel certain about what is right and wrong with young people’s behavior, they do not need to ask what the problems are, just what to do about them. The point here is that the judgments, in the form of labels placed on certain kinds of behavior, are imposed on the young people, disregarding their own point of view. Furthermore, the judgments are prescriptive in the sense that, once they are made, they imply that the individual must change his behavior to correspond to the judge’s view of right or correct behavior. Treatment and rehabilitative programs are often methods of imposing (or at least attempting to impose) moral judgments on the individual, so as to make his behavior more appropriate and acceptable.

This discussion is based on the presentation by various young people of what they consider as their problems in their attempts to get help from Number Nine. Another difference between our approaches and many others is the fact that we do not find the usual distinctions between adolescents and various other groups within the society useful or meaningful. None of the dilemmas faced by young people (or any strategies devised by young people to resolve these dilemmas) are unique to youth. In fact, one of the difficulties in presenting even a superficial overview of young people’s problems is that the youth class is just one locus among many where the problems endemic to the society and the culture can be examined. The question for discussion is not so much the particular problems of adolescents as young people’s reflection of the basic unresolved dilemmas facing every individual in Western culture.

A classic example of the way young people become the focus of society’s hostility in the family, the school, and the community is furnished by the issue of drugs. Drug use pervades the entire society, yet officials and the general public act as if it is unique (or at least especially dangerous) among young people and blacks living in ghettoes. Almost all the attention is given to youths and to ghetto inhabitants, while middle-class housewives and their addiction to barbiturates and abuse of amphetamines merely receive lip service. Society attempts to displace its failures onto various minority groups — adolescents, blacks, women, the poor, the foreign, the institutionalized, and so forth. In this sense the moral culpability and corruption of the entire social system (the root of most of the “problems” that occupy people) goes unnoticed and unexamined, except by a few easily disregarded critics. The lack of integrity or corruption of the social system can be examined in the attitude toward drugs.

On the dubious, and totally unsupported, assumption that marijuana is dangerous — an assumption reached out of fear rather than from evidence or reasoned argument — young people are lied to, terrorized by false threats (marijuana leads to heroin), made into criminals, harrassed by authorities, diagnosed as emotionally disturbed (“drug problem”) and often institutionalized and subjected to infiltration of their social groups by undercover agents (a euphemism for secret police). Parents, more susceptible to threats and fears generated through the authority of government officials, scientists, and psychiatrists, have subjected their children’s rooms to searches, informed on them to the police, or attempted to have them hospitalized for treatment. School officials have allowed specially trained police dogs into their schools to smell out marijuana in lockers (these are the same school officials who have often used amphetimines in the lower grades to keep troublesome — “hyperkinetic” — kids quiet and well-behaved) and have encouraged young people to report drug use among their friends. And the community as a whole is reacting punitively through unrealistic legislation. This is a clear paradigm of the hysterical, punitive, controlling, and corrupted process of socialization young people are continually subjected to.

If we begin where the problems for young people begin, we must focus on the family. The family is a social institution; its form and purpose is defined by the society. Put simply, its purpose is to make the individual fit into the society — that is, to teach him how to behave according to socially acceptable standards. The family functions almost independently of the individuals who comprise it, since the role of parent is inculcated in the father and mother from the time of their birth. The family becomes the “family,” an internalization of various norms, and this “family” creates strong feelings of shame and guilt if the father and mother fail to be “good parents” — in other words, when their children misbehave. The social standing (face) of the parents, is lowered when the child fails to adjust to the demands of the family.

This pressure from the family is quite intense and is applied on all levels of behavior. In order to discuss the fundamental difficulties presented by the family, we have to isolate the specific areas of social interest in the individual’s behavior: authority, aggression, sexuality, and individual relation to the social system. When the directives of the society are incomplete, contradictory, or irrelevant to the young person’s experience, they will be resisted. Yet the directives are internalized as well, reinforced by external authorities (such as the political-economic system and its representatives). The enemy is the self and the society; the family is the first and most significant battleground.

Parents have a difficult task as the central authority figures within the family. They have the responsibility for making sure the behavior and attitudes of their children correspond to socially acceptable standards, even though these standards are never explicitly stated, are interpreted differently by different families, and are often self-contradictory. Without clear guidelines, and with their own interests leading them in directions other than enforcing social standards on their children — a generally stressful activity — parents are experiencing feelings of failure, helplessness, and powerlessness. These reactions are within the context of their socially defined roles as parents, although the feelings are clearly reinforced by the social system itself. At any rate, parents know their role is unfulfilled when their child’s behavior departs from appropriate standards, or they think it does, and they try to find solutions. This brings them into contact with surrogate parents — school administrators, psychiatrists, juvenile courts, and the like.

Despite the general breakdown in the effectiveness of the socializing function of the family, there is still ample reason to be concerned about the harmful effect of the institution on young people. Of particular concern is the most effective weapon used by parents to manipulate the behavior of their children: dependency. Dependency begins as a natural reliance on the parents for protection and nourishment in infancy. As the child matures, he ordinarily becomes more self-reliant and independent. The family is the first social institution with a vested interest in frustrating the maturation process. Adolescence itself is the period in a young person’s life when his “growing up” is rigorously defined by the family (as well as the school). It is essentially a time of artificial childishness. The family attempts to reinforce the assumption of dependency — that is, that the needs of the individual will be fulfilled by others — by attempting to meet the young person’s every imaginable need. The surfeit of material wealth imposed on young people — a college education and braces, even a car of their own — all imply that at least the family would like to do everything possible to make the individual healthy, happy, and as much like others in his peer group as possible, so that he will not be unloved or lonely.

There is only one catch. Meeting the needs of the individual becomes conditional on his behavior’s conforming to acceptable standards. Inappropriate behavior is therefore associated with the withdrawal of love, the absence of protection, the undermining of support, and the creation of loneliness. Underlying dependency is a feeling of helplessness, powerlessness, and vulnerability. The individual is caught in a bind, where any direction except obedience to his parents’ expectations opens up terrifying and destructive possibilities. The manipulation of behavior through the threatened or actual frustration of the youth’s felt needs, coupled with the constant reinforcement of his sense of helplessness, inadequacy, and lack of confidence, occurs in almost every family as a result of the task the family feels compelled to fulfill: the socialization of the child. Of course the cycle of dependency, threat, frustration, and partial fulfillment works; the young person learns to conform to at least the basic norms of his society. But there are destructive consequences.

Young people relate to other authority figures in much the same way they do to their parents. They seek fulfillment, or they turn toward authority all the resentment and sense of disillusionment engendered by the failure of their parents to meet their needs. The choice is often one of dependency or counterdependency. Counterdependency is a counterfeit form of rebellion, but the generalizations inherent in the basic underlying dependency, albeit a frustrated one, demonstrate that the posture is spurious. The anger, even rage, underlying the hostility is disproportionate to the situation, and the condemnation of authority per se demonstrates a basic distrust of the internal desire for fulfillment of the dependency needs.

The latent hope that one will after all be taken care of by someone persists independently of contradictory experiences. It is a seductive wish. The basically frustrated person turns his energy into dependent or counter-dependent (resistive) strategies, creating more frustration and greater feelings of helplessness, loneliness, and vulnerability. Eventually, the the energy drain creates a feeling of imminent collapse, of weakness. The sense of hopelessness and helplessness, as well as deep frustration, creates depression and leads to feelings of isolation, often to suicide attempts. Even in the depression the individual seeks to create a childlike image, so that people will love and nourish him without expecting a responsible (ability to respond) individual. Despite its inherent frustration of the individual’s sense of being, the dependency assumption prevails.

The internalization of the family — that is, the child’s inner recreation of the parents’ values — and the consequent structuring of individual consciousness around the dependency assumption, with its attendant fears and resentments, create a sense of imprisonment without indicating the source. The incredible rage and violence of many young people, turned against their bodies or those of others, occasionally against such structures as schools and empty buildings, reflect this dynamic. Anyone in authority and any structure representing limits on the individual may be hurt in the attempt to destructure the conscious, to free the individual from the internal constraints his dependency forces upon him.

This construction — that the individual rages against himself and authority in an attempt to break down his own internalizations of the family — may seem rather vague. An example may help clarify the process. John had liberal and well-educated parents, relatively permissive, who allowed him to establish his own limits while being quite judgmental. He always knew what they disapproved of, despite their refusal to stop him from behaving in ways they censured. He learned their values, and they occur within his mind as voices telling him what he should and should not do. If he were to act out these voices, he would be imitating his parents. His own voice, determined to represent what he wants, argues with his internalized parents. Despite the failure of the real parents to establish limits, the internalized parents still succeed in making their judgments known. John cannot rebel against his internalization (which he confuses with his “self”) without externalizing it. Since his father in particular fails to establish any limits — since the father is, in fact, unknowingly expressing contempt for his son— John accumulates anger, rage, and frustration at his own failure to live up to his internalized father’s expectations or at his guilt for doing something he should not have done, without being able to share this anger with his father.

Yet the voices continue. And to the extent that John fails to live up to the inner demands (representing his parent’s values) he finds it difficult to live with himself. He therefore seeks an escape from the demanding and punitive “father”, from his real father, and from any persons or structures representing more or similar demands. In this case John’s father, being very reasonable, resists setting any limits, taking any stand, presumably unaware of the son’s confusion between his internalization and his real father. Without his father’s telling him to stop— using drugs, for example — John has only the voice telling him to stop. The voice continues to berate John for using heroin while at the same time expressing contempt for John. John’s father of course professes to love John, making John feel that the contempt he feels is his own, he cannot live with himself. Eventually he looses sight of who he is, having already lost sight of who his father is behind his reasonableness, and becomes “psychotic.” The confinement of the hospital at least provides a clear limit, although it is not imposed by John’s father. He is able to release some of his rage and become more balanced. Medication (prescribed drugs) helps in the same way heroin (self-medication) did. Until John can come to grips with his punitive and contemptuous “father,” a person his real father would never allow himself to be (which explains his camouflage behind reasonability and permissiveness), John will always experience contempt for himself.

Finally we can understand how dependent John is on his father’s acceptance and respect and how much this was withheld. The father’s unwillingness to fight, to set limits, to declare a value prevents John from ever experiencing his father as a whole person. Acceptance and respect are not words but attitudes, and John’s father’s attitude is one of contempt for his son. But he does not acknowledge this fact directly. John is told one thing, experiences another, internalizes both (he “knows” his father likes him, he “hates” himself for what he does “wrong”) and suffers from a “divided self.” He feels helpless, unsafe, and alone and searches pathetically for someone to take care of him. His father, through his concern, has the son institutionalized as a “last resort,” knowing he cannot provide what his son wants: a father who is real. There is probably no more significant issue in therapy than coming to terms with the internalization of one’s family and the resulting dependency.

The young person is an object within his own family, since he must be controlled if the parents are to feel that they have done a good job. A mother recently said to me, in discussing the problems she was having with her daughter, “Won’t people think I have failed if she gets into trouble?” The mother, acting out of fear that the girl will become involved in dangerous activities, wanted to control her daughter; she even had fantasies of locking the girl up to keep her out of trouble. The daughter, struggling against her own desires to let her mother take care of her, fought her mother’s every effort to control her. A typical counter-dependent, she reacted to her mother’s rule that she may not stay out after ten, for example, by lying, running away, or whatever was necessary just to stay out after ten. This behavior established, in some ways, that if she is not actually independent (her behavior is precisely, if inversely, related to her mother’s directives), she is at least not being controlled.

As is usually the case, the mother was reacting out of her worst fears rather than acting from any moral objection to what she actually knew her daughter to be doing. And as usual, the daughter underneath her disobedience was actually frightened, insecure, and feeling helpless enough to avoid potentially dangerous activities. (In general, a parent’s repeated warning to the child about a particular danger, acts as a message to the child to keep involving himself in this activity and eventually to become addicted, pregnant, or whatever.) Although nothing more was occurring than the normal mother-daughter power struggle, the worst fears of both allowed them to justify their battle by predicting what would happen if they stopped fighting. The mother would never let her do anything, according to the daugher, while the mother was sure her daughter would take up hard drugs. Eventually such battles do evolve to precisely these extremes. The daughter will eventually get into drugs abusively, while the mother will try to have her daughter institutionalized. The self-fulfilling prophesy.

Power struggles characterize most families, and because the children must deal with both the real and the internalized family, they are often the victims of the struggle. In this case the girl used concealment, lying, and her friendship with another girl as her strategies, while her mother tried to use the courts, a psychiatric clinic, threats, withdrawal of privileges, and her own suffering (inducement of guilt). This kind of overkill is terribly oppressive to young people, and they tend to identify with other oppressed groups. Youth as a class is in fact oppressed, and the overwhelming weaponry on the side of parents merely compounds the destruction rather than providing relief. One is inclined to note the parallels between the United States government’s attempts to bring a small, underdeveloped country into line with our political beliefs through an overwhelming superiority of arms and parents struggling to make their children conform to the parents’ ideology. Neither attempt succeeds both wreak destruction on the enemy, and both enemies are inclined to distinguish the oppressor from the individual caught up in that role. J. Anthony Lucas’ recent book, Don’t Shoot, We Are Your Children noted this war against young people.

The failure of the family is not the failure of the individuals who make up the family. Parents have learned ways of behaving which do not meet their personal goals, do not give their role as parents meaning, and are ineffective in their own terms. Parents are as helpless, dependent, and confused as their children. Parents do tend to rely on their roles and the social structure of the society for support, while young people, struggling against the same basic issues, tend to defy authority and distrust the structures of the social system (even when they behave as if they accepted their situation). Because youth must resort to strategies which are by definition illegitimate, young people tend to attract more attention. But this fact must not continue to obscure the underlying similarity between the emotional dilemmas of the child and the parent.

The destructive consequences of the family are, in fact, often minimized through the strengths of the individual members of the family. Some parents resist their role as authority figures, or at least emphasize genuine support and trust of their children. Rather than trying to control their children, they understand the youth’s needs to experiment and take risks. They wisely do not pry into their children’s privacy nor stress the need of the child to conform to their standards instead of the youth’s own vision of self. But power struggles are still present, even if counterbalanced by more humanized and less role-oriented behavior. And the fact that many young people survive their families — with the help of their parents or without it — cannot be used to avoid acknowledging the destructive consequences of this social institution.

Dependency, frustration, helplessness, rage, a deep-seated suspicion of authority, a fear of vulnerability, a reliance on indirection, manipulation, concealment, and rigid psychological defenses are characteristic of most young people. Tied deeply into the “family,” many young people recapitulate the family environment wherever they go. But if the family treats its young people by rewarding dependency, stimulating the basic underlying feelings which reinforce the dependency assumptions, and providing for the continuance of this dynamic through the internalization of the parental authority; and if the family continues, as a social institution, to struggle against its children because of a need to control them then the real harmfulness to young people occurs in the surrogate parent, the school system. Families do not provide their children with any really effective means for gaining what they want: love, respect for themselves as persons, excitement, growth experiences, fun and enjoyment, a sense of purpose. Families do not even succeed in giving their children adequate means for surviving in a society which is becoming more and more hostile to life. No longer does a good home protect the youth against a life of crime, or even against b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1. The Destruction of Youth
• 2. Deviance and Delinquency as Frustrated Rebellion
• 3. The Counter-Culture as a Process of Social Change
• 4. The Repression and Support of Psychedelic Experience
• 5. Number Nine: Crisis and Growth Center for Youth
• 6. The Structure and Function of Alternate Services
• 7. Radical Counseling Programs
• 8. Three Experimental Therapeutic Communities
• 9. The “Foreign Policy” of Number Nine
• Bibliography