Attack therapy was one of several pseudo-therapeutic methods described in the book ''
Crazy Therapies
''"Crazy" Therapies: What Are They? Do They Work?'' is a book by the psychologist Margaret Singer and the sociologist Janja Lalich. It was published by Jossey-Bass in 1996.
Content
Singer and Lalich's intended audience is psychiatric and psycho ...
''. It involves highly confrontational interaction between the patient and a therapist, or between the patient and fellow patients during
group therapy, in which the patient may be verbally abused, denounced, or humiliated by the therapist or other members of the group.
The method has been used by groups such as
Synanon
Synanon is a US-founded social organization created by Charles E. "Chuck" Dederich Sr. in 1958 in Santa Monica, California, United States. It is currently active in Germany.
Originally established as a drug rehabilitation program, by the early ...
,
Odyssey House,
Straight, Inc.
The Drug Free America Foundation (DFAF) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization founded in 1976 by former US Ambassador Mel Sembler, his wife Betty Sembler (), and Joseph Zappala as Straight, Inc., renamed The Straight Foundation, Inc. in 1985 and ...
, the
John Dewey Academy,
Élan School
Élan School was a private, coeducational, and controversial residential behavior modification program and therapeutic boarding school in Poland, Androscoggin County, Maine. It was a full member of the National Association of Therapeutic Schools ...
,
The Phoenix Center,
DeSisto School
The DeSisto School was a pair of therapeutic boarding schools founded by Michael DeSisto, DeSisto at Stockbridge School in Massachusetts (from 1978 to 2004) and the DeSisto at Howey School in Florida (1980 to 1988). It closed in 2004 amid allegati ...
,
Gateway Academy, Amity Circle Tree Ranch,
CEDU School, Cascade School, Monarch School, and similar methods have been employed in
Large Group Awareness Training
The term large-group awareness training (LGAT) refers to activities - usually offered by groups with links to the human potential movement - which claim to increase self-awareness and to bring about desirable transformations in individuals' Persona ...
.
A 1990 report by the
Institute of Medicine
The National Academy of Medicine (NAM), formerly called the Institute of Medicine (IoM) until 2015, is an American nonprofit, non-governmental organization. The National Academy of Medicine is a part of the National Academies of Sciences, E ...
on methods for treating alcohol problems suggested that the
self-image
Self-image is the mental picture, generally of a kind that is quite resistant to change, that depicts not only details that are potentially available to an objective investigation by others (height, weight, hair color, etc.), but also items that h ...
of individuals should be assessed before they were assigned to undergo attack therapy; there was evidence that persons with a positive self-image may profit from the therapy, while people with a negative self-image would not profit, or might indeed be harmed.
Methodology
Attack therapy can be particularly problematic when the group members are captive, and not allowed to leave during the sessions. In ''Group Psychotherapy with Addicted Populations'', Flores notes that attack therapy can take place when individuals are psychologically intimidated in a confrontational atmosphere. In her book ''
Help at Any Cost: How the Troubled-teen Industry Cons Parents And Hurts Kids'', Maia Szalavitz writes that attack therapy can include the tactics of isolation, and rigid imposition of rules, which later leads to a restoration of limited permissive freedom, and an acknowledgement of those that did comply with the strict rules.
Psychologist
A psychologist is a professional who practices psychology and studies mental states, perceptual, cognitive, emotional, and social processes and behavior. Their work often involves the experimentation, observation, and interpretation of how indi ...
Donald Eisner writes in ''The Death of Psychotherapy'' that attack therapy "attempts to tear down the patient's defenses by extreme verbal or
physical measures". Tudor describes attack therapy in ''Group Counselling'', writing that the individual is ridiculed in front of others, and cross-examined and questioned about their personal behavior patterns. According to Maran's book ''Dirty'', attack therapy can take place in "all-night encounter groups and daily interactions". Monti, Colby, and O'Leary write in ''Adolescents, Alcohol, and Substance Abuse'' that in attack therapy, there was a movement to: "tear them down in order to build them up", referring to a methodology of tearing down the individual ego in order to then educate the individual in the inherent thought-patterns of the group and the group leader.
In ''Concise Encyclopedia of Psychology'',
Corsini and Auerbach note that attack therapy puts an emphasis on the expression of anger by each individual.
''One Nation Under Therapy'' by Satel and Sommers characterized attack therapy as among the "more bizarre expressive therapies", and put it in the same category as
The Primal Scream
''The Primal Scream. Primal Therapy: The Cure for Neurosis'' (1970; second edition 1999) is a book by the psychologist Arthur Janov, in which the author describes his experiences with patients during the months he developed primal therapy. Althou ...
,
Nude Encounter, and
Rolfing
Rolfing () is a form of alternative medicine originally developed by Ida Rolf (1896–1979) as Structural Integration.
Rolfing is marketed with unproven claims of various health benefits. It is based on Rolf's ideas about how the human body's " ...
. In ''Social Problems'', Coleman and Cressey write that in attack therapy, one individual is criticized and "torn down" by the rest of the larger group.
Groups that use attack therapy
In their textbook ''Helping People Change'', Kanfer and Goldstein note that controversial group
Synanon
Synanon is a US-founded social organization created by Charles E. "Chuck" Dederich Sr. in 1958 in Santa Monica, California, United States. It is currently active in Germany.
Originally established as a drug rehabilitation program, by the early ...
used a form of attack therapy. A publication by the
National Association for Mental Health
Mind is a mental health charity in England and Wales. Founded in 1946 as the National Association for Mental Health (NAMH), it celebrated its 70th anniversary in 2016.
Mind offers information and advice to people with mental health problems an ...
wrote that the Synanon form of attack therapy was also called the "Synanon confrontation game." The ''Concise Encyclopedia of Psychology'' also described the Synanon method of attack therapy, noting that it even differed from other models that could be seen as using a similar approach.
Balgooyen compared "Synanon game verbal attack therapy" to standard group therapy, in a study published in the ''Journal of Community Psychology.'' In '' Dictionary of American Penology'', Williams writes that attack therapy was actually first developed in the Synanon group. In ''Therapeutic Communities for the Treatment of Drug Users'', it is noted that in Synanon, attack therapy was referred to within the group by members simply as "The Game". Similarly, the attack therapy techniques used in Synanon have been described in ''Therapeutic Community'' by a former participant as "brutal and bordering upon sadism". In addition to comparisons to Synanon, Miller and Rolnick also compare the methods of attack therapy to ''
Scared Straight!
''Scared Straight!'' is a 1978 American documentary directed by Arnold Shapiro. Narrated by Peter Falk, the subject of the documentary is a group of juvenile delinquents and their three-hour session with actual convicts. Filmed at Rahway St ...
'', and "therapeutic" boot camps, in their book '' Motivational Interviewing: Preparing People for Change''. They note that the supporters of attack therapy believe that: "...people don't change because they haven't suffered enough". In her book ''
Help at Any Cost: How the Troubled-teen Industry Cons Parents And Hurts Kids'',
[Szalavitz (2006), pp.22-23.] Maia Szalavitz describes the abusive attack therapy techniques by
Straight, Inc.
The Drug Free America Foundation (DFAF) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization founded in 1976 by former US Ambassador Mel Sembler, his wife Betty Sembler (), and Joseph Zappala as Straight, Inc., renamed The Straight Foundation, Inc. in 1985 and ...
This method of therapy was also used at the now defunct
Élan School
Élan School was a private, coeducational, and controversial residential behavior modification program and therapeutic boarding school in Poland, Androscoggin County, Maine. It was a full member of the National Association of Therapeutic Schools ...
. Part of the reason for Elan being closed was due to pressure from activists who saw the usage of this form of therapy as wrong and humiliating. Rumors of the use of attack therapy also surround the
John Dewey Academy, as many ex-residents have written online about the brutal three-hour, thrice a week "confrontation groups" that make up the treatment program at the school. Tom Bratter, the school's founder, has addressed claims of attack therapy being used at the establishment, as well as claims that John Dewey is a cult-like environment forcing
behavior modification
Behavior modification is an early approach that used respondent and operant conditioning to change behavior. Based on methodological behaviorism, overt behavior was modified with consequences, including positive and negative reinforcement continge ...
on adolescents through fear, attack, and abuse, but since his death in 2012, these issues seem all but forgotten by the therapeutic community.
The WWASP schools used a modified version of attack therapy, along with various other types of therapy, in the different seminars their students were required to attend in order to graduate. Some schools under the WWASP umbrella used it more often than others; for instance, attack therapy was pretty much part of the daily routine at Tranquility Bay, while other WWASP schools such as Majestic Ranch Academy and Cross Creek relied more on other forms of therapy outside of the seminars.
Consequences
A study of group therapy in over 200 normal college students conducted by Yalom and Lieberman found that 9.1% of the students who completed over half of a series of "encounter groups" using attack therapy had psychological damage lasting at least six months. The most dangerous groups were the Synanon-style groups with a harsh, authoritarian leader.
William Miller and colleagues found that the more confrontational a counselor was, the more his or her clients with alcohol problems drank.
A 1979 study cited in ''Broadening the base of treatment for alcohol problems: report of a study by a committee of the Institute of Medicine, Division of Mental Health and Behavioral Medicine'' (1990) found that attack therapy applied to a "heterogeneous correctional population" did not result in a net benefit to the treatment group. The study noted that approximately half the individuals had benefited, while the other half had not been helped, or seemed in fact to have been harmed. The people who had been helped by the therapy were those who—according to the
psychometric
Psychometrics is a field of study within psychology concerned with the theory and technique of measurement. Psychometrics generally refers to specialized fields within psychology and education devoted to testing, measurement, assessment, and ...
assessment carried out at the beginning of the study—had a positive self-image. The participants who had a negative self-image did not benefit from attack therapy. The report suggested that there should be a pre-treatment assessment of potential participants' self-image, and that treatment assignment should be guided by the results of such assessment.
See also
*
Struggle session
Denunciation rallies, also called struggle sessions, were violent public spectacles in Maoist China where people accused of being "Five Black Categories, class enemies" were public humiliation, publicly humiliated, accused, beaten and tortured by ...
; a similar method of using group-based personal attacks for the purposes of reinforcing political (as opposed to psychological) orthodoxy.
References
Further reading
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Attack Therapy
Group psychotherapy
Human Potential Movement
Medical controversies
Therapy