SOME OF My ThouGHTS
PRELUDE to MY WRITING the FIRST DRAFT of “SMACK in the MIDDLE”
Multiple sparks, separated by years (1969 -1978) triggered the writing of “SMACK in the MIDDLE.” The first occurred ten years later on November 19th, 1978 in reaction to my reading a large, bold headline on the front page of the New York Times. The headline read: NINE HUNDRED SUICIDES NOW ESTIMATED IN A REVISED BODY COUNT FROM GUYANA. This article detailed the gruesome account of what came to be known as “The People’s Temple Massacre” in Jonestown wherein martyred cult members suicide by poisoning themselves shocked the sensibilities of the entire world. Mine as well.
Avidly I read press accounts of the tragedy, particularly the in-depth reports, that attempted to answer the complex questions posed by this horrendous event. What were the essential variables that motivated this mass suicide? What was the nature of the leader’s personality that was able to attract and to keep such a large group of people under his control, even to the point of their certain death? What kinds of personalities are attracted to these kinds of cults? What makes people stay even when they doubt the sanity of the leader?
Besides Jones town, other cult-like groups - including Synanon, the Moonies, and Scientology-were making notorious headlines of their own, as many ex-members alluded to their abusive use of brain washing techniques, supposedly in the service of mental, emotional, and spiritual well-being.
Editorial writers drew parallels between these groups. Chief among them was that each group had a charismatic leader promising salvation to potential followers who, disillusioned with conventional society, were searching for some deeper meaning.
Once over my initial shock at the contents of these reports, my subsequent reaction was unexpectedly matter-of-fact, devoid of emotion. Completing my reading on the subject, I uncharacteristically concluded there was nothing new here for me. Thus, I was surprised when, the next day, I felt an irrepressible urge to write a poem I called “The Death of an Illusion” about the Jonestown phenomenon. Words flowed naturally, as if I had been an intimate member of that particular cult, which of course, I had not been.
Upon finishing the last sentence, I said to myself: Here we go again. Hearing what I had said, I suddenly realized why it had been so easy to write about the “Death of an Illusion” with such authority and intensity as the news stories about these cults had revived my own parallel life defining experience I had lived through nine years ago at Odyssey House.
I knew the experience at Odyssey had been profound, but for many years after I left I felt too close to it to be able to appreciate all that it really meant. Deciding to let it be, I had a fantasy that when I had given myself sufficient time and space to adequately digest all that had happened, so as to be able to objectify this life defining turning point, then one day I would write the story of what I experienced, so to be able to objectify this life defining turning point, then one day I would write the story of my personal odyssey working at Odyssey House.
With undertones and overtones of Jones town resonating and reverberating in the depths of my soul,I instantly knew that the time to begin my inner odyssey was that very day. Resurrecting my journal entries I wrote the first draft of my memoir in a few hours. That was thirty years ago
THE DEATH of an ILLUSION
(WRITTEN ONE DAY BEFORE I WROTE THE FIRST DRAFT OF “SMACK”
“Ma Ma, Ma Ma,”were the last recorded words of Jim Jones: the self-
appointed GoD-Father of the Peoples’ Temple.
I never personally met the Boy/Man. but,
I have seen his face on some of those I knew and wanted to love.
He is, so far, the last Leader in a long line of stalking,crazed ghosts, whirling
incarnations of dis-eased humans:Tormented and tormenting themselves -
and all those other unfortunate souls whose primitive needs have propelled
them into the their ensnaring stick web of overwhelming megalomania ….
For those who are well defined and ego strong, the signs of craziness are obvious
and foreboding - but For those who feel empty and set adrift- all those who are
lost,and isolated - impoverished sick souls (both worldly rich as well as
worldly poor) the blaring warnings go unheeded -Their alarms have been
disconnected long ago due to careless neglect;
Unsupported arms breed desperate searches which may likely consume their
contaminated life energy for their entire life.
“Ma. Ma,” where are you? I am lost !-
The danger goes unheeded because reality is poisoned by the faux leader
projecting the illusion of his perfection Into the Nearly Every inch of the -
polluted atmosphere - populated with throngs of starving empty hypnotized
followers swallowing all of his hot air as if his words were the quintessence
of absolute wisdom -How can this be? you ask. The answer shouts out":
A starving man does not question the rancid taste of putrid meat…
But once the awful stench of the awful truth penetrates the denial of the
seduced sensitive souls (as eventually it will) Who will be able to deny the
presence of the same clear revelation that the hero Kurtz experienced in the last
line of Conrad’s prescient NovEL:“The Heart of DarKness”:
“The Horror! The Horror!”
*****
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PSYCHODYNAMIC INTERPRETATION of “SMACK in the MIDDLE” [20th draft]
Chapter I:
A DREAM COMES TRUE
Pre - Odyssey, despite my presenting a normal enough appearance, reinforced by an impressive resume, I feel ‘sick’ at my core, a familiar feeling I have had since adolescence. I suffer from symptoms of isolation, depersonalization, unreality, emptiness, severe mood swings, a sense of purposelessness, fragmentation, and a continuing attitude of cynicism and despair. I feel caught up in forces beyond my control. The structure of my pre-Odyssey personality made me ripe for an instantaneous idealizing transference to Dr. Judi happening in the first staff meeting.
Odyssey provides me with an opportunity to identify and explore these same symptoms in the population of drug addicts I hope to understand and help to cure. At first I am unaware of the parallels between the residents and myself, as I am supposed to be a normal paid professional who is an observing participant, whereas they are the sick addicts who are participant-observers. However, as I begin to work with these people up close, I gradually realize that our symptoms are identical.
As a professional, I am willing and eager to learn all I can, aware that the task of understanding heroin addicts is not an easy one to master. As new theoretical and treatment approaches are needed, I eagerly rise to this challenge.
Without understanding it at the time, I experience and pass through the first stage of an idealizing transference. An idealizing transference appreciably affects the quality of relating to the external world in that one’s realistic power is projected onto an externalized authority figure, {place, or thing}. The PROJECTED external authority is endowed with undeserved attributes as the projector’s authority is correspondingly diminished. The externalized authority is then responded to as if he or she is the perfect idealized parent of the projector’s childhood fantasies and wishes, while the remaining self is experienced as weak, insecure, and grossly imperfect. Subjectively, a full blown idealizing transference is experienced as, what Freud calls ‘oceanic bliss’ {perfesion}.
Chapter II
Seeds of Doubt
Intimately working together breeds predictable conflicts, frustrations, and disappointments. The need to experience the leader of the community as perfect leads to inevitable clashes with the actuality of the leader’s all-too-human contradictions, weaknesses, and problems. In this case, the leader, Dr. Judi, is unable to sustain professional objectivity when subjected to selective personal criticism, despite her insistence that staff and residents must not lie, particularly if they feel that the authorities have been irrational. Her deficiency makes it increasingly impossible for me to maintain my unwarranted idealization of her. This rift between intentions and actions takes the form of a problem in sustaining BASIC TRUST.
THe problem of basic trust, is identified as the core concern in treatment for both my patient’s and myself as well. A pre condition for resolving the problem of basic trust is that the authorities must be trustworthy. Theoretically, the Odyssey concept provides a just right structure for implementing and maintaining treatment geared to resolving the problem of basic distrust. However, on a practical level, given the contradictions of the leader, severe doubts are raised as to whether she can be trusted. Thus the leader both creates and interferes with optimum conditions for treating the assumed core problem of basic distrust. These growing doubts and the attempts to deny them, lead to feelings of traumatic disillusionment with her and the treatment program.
Chapter III
THE CENTER CANNOT HOLD
Doubts about Dr. Judi’s professional competence evokes intense love/hate feelings, rekindling an unresolved childhood ambivalence conflict. The intense feelings of mixed love and hate are the kinds of feelings very young children of plus or minus two years old experience who have not yet learned how to integrate the fact that the same parent (authority) is both the author of frustration and of gratification. For them, the parent who gratifies is a good, all knowing and all powerful king or good queen, while the parent who frustrates is the bad, evil witch. Inability to fuse a mix of good/bad feelings for the same parent (object constancy) renders the child unable to experience himself as a complex mixture of good/bad feelings {self-constancy}. The inability to integrate a mixture of positive/ negative feelings and thoughts renders the child a prisoner of vacillating mood swings.
When either the idealized parent or idealized child is experienced as all good, all perfect, all loving there is a sense of fusion and harmony. But when the same child or parent is perceived as frustrating hence bad, imperfect, hateful they are typically cut off and dismissed along with of respect – resulting in a precipitous drop in self-esteem.
My work and self-analysis leads me to realize that the gap between me and the residents is much smaller than I had initially imagined. However, at the same time, while I feel as if I am one of them, in another sense I know that I am significantly different. For example, I can run the Harlem house efficiently and effectively and do whatever I wish to at the end of the day — while they are not free to do any of this.
I am deeply impacted by experiencing basic trust as both a central core concept underlying addiction as well as in understanding my own psychodynamics (inner cause and effect relationships). I come to realize that a sub-problem connected to the issue of basic trust is one of dissent and how it is handled or mishandled.
While on the one hand there is repeated encouragement to be absolutely honest with everyone including the top authorities; on the other, is the reality that if the confrontation is perceived as ‘offensive’ there will be severe negative consequences. Among these negative consequences are accusations of disloyalty, demotion, expulsion, and the worst of all, questioning the sanity of the ‘accuser’. Thus encouraged dissent, if not expressed in an acceptable manner, can be turned back on the dissenter whose perceptions are interpreted as symptoms of his mental illness.
When I realize the full implications of this pattern of behavior I suffer a severe crisis of trust, both with the authorities and myself. One the one hand I decry the fact that it is almost incomprehensible that right here in America — New York City — is the same kind of perverted logic being used to control the minds and spirits of patients that was as prevalent in the psychiatric wards in Soviet Russia; whereas, on the other, I feel a nagging chilling heavy sense of guilt that I the pretender, the upstart, dare to call the integrity of Judi into question. Although torn about my criticism of DR. Judi, I feel under increasing pressure to make my concerns public but uncertain as to what to say and to whom I should say it.
Chapter IV.
THE DREAM is a NIGHTMARE
As I witness one horror after another in the name of therapy, my personal ambivalence conflict deepens. Realistic perceptions of the leader’s ‘madness’ are confused with experiences of the madness of authority figures from my past. I oscillate between viewing them (present and past) and myself as either all good or all bad. I am unable to integrate the actuality of psychic complexity (good/bad); instead, I experience mutually opposed ideas as canceling each other out.
As my projected authority shifts before my eyes as sometimes all good and sometimes all bad, I find myself on increasingly shaky ground. I turn to other possible sources of validation and guidance. Among them is the esoteric occult.
I feel as if I in contact with transcendent, benevolent authority figures guiding me. Additionally, I search for worldly authority figures who might be able to help me sort though my confused, emotional ‘muck and mire.’ My need for external recognition and approval converts my realistic perceptions into rationalizations when Dr.Judi calls to ‘confide’ in me. This flip-flop in my feelings shakes my confidence. I come to realize that I have an emotional illness the core of which is an inability to trust myself taking the form of wimpy equivocation.
Chapter V
PASSIVE to ACTIVE
As a result of running the ‘Pressure Cooker’ in Harlem, as well as in doing research for my dissertation, I start to take my own experience seriously. I increasingly challenge Dr, Judi’s irrational authority internally and externally.
CHAPTER VI
I AWAKEN
I actively confront the question: Why do I stay on when I know that I distrust the leader? I proceed to act out a number of alternatives, each of which is an attempted solution to the problem of disappointments with Judi’s leadership: (1) I try to comply and follow the party line. This fails because I see too much that offends my natural sensibilities; (2) I try to compete in a silent, secretive way, feeling smug and superior, knowing that I’m not her. This fails because I am increasingly unable to hide my feelings and because the professed superiority is unsupported by my confusion; (3) I consider competing with Dr. Judi by playing with ideas of starting my own center. This fails because of my inexperience, feelings of inadequacy, fears of reprisal, and too many uncertainties; (4) I try to compete within the structure by running my own house independently and keeping myself as separate as possible from the leader’s negative influence. This almost works until she begins to worry about my growing stature, as she is unable to tolerate an imagined threat to her authority. Thus she actively interferes with my territory; (5) I consider open rebellion. This fails because the leader’s realistic power, both in the house and In the public, is immensely greater than anything I could hope to marshal; (6) I try to win her over by reason: to become her therapist. That fails because of the inherent grandiosity of this fantasy, the leader’s basic resistance toward admitting weaknesses of any kind, and the confusion of roles.
Chapter VII
I ACT
I come to see that the only realistic option open to me is the one that becomes the hardest of all for me to do. This option is to leave, grudgingly admitting that the only absolute authority in my life is myself and that I along with the rest of humanity have realistic limitations. Among these realistic limitations is the fact that we are all basically alone and ‘stuck’ with ourselves. All we really know is our experience, our experience of our experience, and what meanings we consciously and unconsciously attribute to our experience. To override this essential experience is to commit an act of self-betrayal. To be an integrated person, the self has no other alternative but to follow Keat’s advice - “To Thine Own Self Be True.”
At the point of leaving Odyssey I begin to understand that it is easier attacking the ‘bad’; authority than it is accepting the responsibility for determining the criteria for being my own ‘good’ final authority. It is far easier to be a passive victim in someone else’s jail than it is to be a free man walking on one’s own path.
Having Acknowledged and accepted the above has stirred a notable degree of clarity about traveling MY road of life to future freedom and integrity.
CONCLUSION
My experiences at Odyssey both as a person and as a professional convince me that there is a particular and predictable personality structure that makes such people ripe for organizations that hold out the promise Of SALVATION.
In the case of drug addicts, my experience supports the findings of S.Rado who describes the addict’s dynamics as follows:
· There is a basic depressive character with early wounds to narcissism and defects in
ego development.
· There is an intolerance for frustration and pain with a constant need to change a low
into a high. This may come from an early lack of satisfying object relations.
· There is an attempt to overcome the lack of affection and meaningful relations
through the pseudo closeness and fusion with the drug takers and their common
experience.
· The artificial technique of maintaining self-regard and satisfaction with drugs results
in a change from reality-oriented to a pharmacothymic-oriented regimen. This
leads to severely disturbed ego functioning and, ultimately , to conflict with
reality. Eventually, drug-taking becomes a way of life.
Recent advances in objects relations theory, ego psychology, and in the normal and pathological development of the self indicates that the key psychological problem of the substance abusers’s personality structure is his inability to adequately regulate his self esteem.
Rado, “Psychoanalysis of Pharmacothymia,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly11 (1933): 23, cited in The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, Doris Hartman (New York); International University Press (1970): 396.
Recent advances in objects relations theory, ego psychology, and in the normal and pathological development of the self indicates that the key psychological problem of the substance abusers’s personality structure is his inability to adequately regulate his self ESTEEM.
The problem of self-esteem regulation finds its expression most noticeably in the difficulties encountered in maintaining the therapeutic alliance with addict patients, particularly in therapeutic community programs. By ‘therapeutic alliance,’ is meant the real relationship between the therapist and the patient as two human beings dedicated to the mutual understanding of the patient’s (not the therapist’s) psychological problems. Characteristic of these difficulties are the typical reactions of the addict to inevitable disappointments and frustrations, either by wholesale withdrawal, feelings of intense inner depletion and depression, or fury at the therapist for not being perfect.
A key symptom of such patients is their need to project their grandiose fantasies onto the external authority. Kohut describes such people as characterized by “persistent greatness fantasies, often an inability to judge realistic limitations, little pleasure in functions and activities, and low self-esteem.”
To over-evaluate others and to under-evaluate oneself (or the reverse) suggests an attempt either to merge with the external authority or to deny the need for any external authority. Such a person oscillates between the need for rescue on the one hand to insisting that they are absolutely self sufficient on the other. As a result of such exaggerated attitudes, the addict often expresses his essential self as “aspiring so high but falling so low.”
Seemingly unbridgeable gaps are experienced between wishes and actualities. These gaps are experienced with intense frustration, disappointment, shame, guilt, anger, depression, anxiety, despair, unremitting self-consciousness, worthlessness, emptiness, utter isolation, and meaninglessness. This whole complex state is experienced as generalized insecurity with the core of the self, best described as suffering from massive ego weakness coupled with an in-cohesive (fragmented /un-integrated) self structure.
Unbearable states of tension result from the discrepancy between the desire to attain grandiose aspirations versus inevitable failure to initiate and, or to sustain a process that would accomplish lofty goals. A concept of the self as vulnerable, shaky, and utterly lacking in confidence is thus reinforced over and over again. The bottom line experience of this psychological composite is an inability to trust either oneself and, or others.
Central in my experience of Odyssey was my unconscious need to idealize Judi, followed by an accelerating disillusionment process of de-idealization. I took the concept of the program at heart and made it work for me. Others were not so fortunate as they did not have adequate support when their crises of trust were interpreted as disloyalty rather than as realistic complex events to be sorted out and objectified.
What is crucial for treatment to be effective is the realization by the therapist(s) that such initial idealization – especially of the top authorities – is an inevitable, motivating, and altogether necessary normal need. Positive treatment then consists of a process of letting the idealizations play themselves out until there is a phase of inevitable disillusionment. During this disillusioning stage one learns to accept the inevitability of frustration (and other negative affects such as anxiety, fear, depression, despair, complexity, ambiguity, not knowing, shame, guilt, and the likes.) The beneficial result of working through this stage is cultivating a positive attitude to realistic limitations that takes the form of a willingness to master problems and adversity by an attitude of struggling with struggle.
This can only come about under the condition that the therapist has a clear sense of who and what he or she is. This means that the therapist has a realistic sense of his assets and limitations. Such a therapist must be able to create and to maintain an atmosphere of ‘compassionate neutrality’ with his patients, neither becoming too close nor too distant. Such a therapist respects
the rights of his patients to dissent, criticize, and challenge whatever perceptions he wishes without fear of counter attack or put-down. He must be able to acknowledge imperfections and blind spots in himself and, if they become interferences in the treatment, must take responsibility to work them out with professional help.
If one assumes that working through the problem of basic trust/distrust (self esteem regulation) is the core problem underlying the symptom of drug addiction, then a necessary pre-condition for effective resolution of this problem is the establishment and maintenance of a therapeutic alliance with a therapist who is himself thoroughly trusTWORTHY.
FINAL NOTE
It is to be emphasized that this book is not intended to be a vilification of Dr. Judi. She – as is most innovative personages – is a highly complex and multi faceted personality. Without her Odyssey House would have never been born. On the other hand, she is a living embodiment of what worked both best and worst in treating a highly complex set of problems. Rather this book is a plea to those interested parties to look at the vision that the concept of Odyssey House invites.
One can only imagine what the state of the drug wars might be today if Judi and others were to run the program consistent with the precepts and guidance that the concept provides. To repeat: (reflecting on the discussion to open up a store front in Harlem):
I wondered what the various levels of government might be able to accomplish
if they had one-tenth the daring, imagination, courage and drive, as did the
Odyssey staff and residents during this time. Never did I feel more exhilarated –
all of us moving together as a constructive force doing great things for
ourselves and for others.
For fifty years since Odyssey House I have witnessed one failed attempt after the other to make a significant dent in the drug wars. I am convinced that the concept – if implemented on a grand scale – provided there be adequate training and supervision and funding – would go a long way to scoring a truly major break-through in an area that screams for enlightened guidance. The Odyssey House concept lives and can be implemented by any and all who truly care and dare to breathe life into it.
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