THE COST OF POSITIVE THINKING
This post has three parts. Click here for the first part, “No Other Way”. Click here for the third part, “The Right Way”.
1. David Cooper, The Language of Madness (London: Allen Lane, 1978), p. 119.
2. Robert Castel, Françoise Castel and Anne Lovell, The Psychiatric Society, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 320.
3. Robert A. Hargrove, est: Making Life Work (New York: Delacorte Press, 1976), p. 112.
4. Adelaide Bry, est: 60 Hours That Transform Your Life (London: Turnstone Books, 1977), pp. 50, 52.
5. Hargrove, est, p. 79.
6. William Warren Bartley III, Werner Erhard—The Transformation of a Man: The Founding of Est (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1978), p. 44.
7. Hargrove, est, p. 97.
8. R. D. Laing, The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1966), p. 11.
9. R. D. Laing, The Politics of the Family and Other Essays (New York: Pantheon Books, 1971), p. 58.
10. Cooper, The Language of Madness, p. 167.
11. Sheridan Fenwick, Getting It: The Psychology of est (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1977), p. 120.
12. Hargrove, est, p. 96.
13. Bry, est, pp. 85, 89–90.
14. Norman Vincent Peale, The Power of Positive Thinking (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1952), p. 213.
II
PROS AND CONS
PROS AND CONS
Between 1974 and 1984 tens of thousands attended the two-week est course across the United States. Founded by Werner Erhard, the course drew from an eclectic range of sources, including scientology, consciousness-raising group work (Encounter Groups, T-groups, sensitivity training, Mind Dynamics), the Human Potential movement (Arica, Esalen), the self-help of Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking (1952) and Maxwell Maltz’s Psycho-Cybernetics (1960), the Gestalt psychology of Fritz Perls, transactional analysis, the person-centred school of Carl Rogers, and scraps of eastern spirituality (Arica, Subud, Sufism, Zen). The Seventies flourishing of esoteric psychologies of which est was a part alarmed some observers, including the anti-psychiatrist David Cooper. In The Language of Madness (1978) he listed all the therapy books he saw in a shop in Cannery Row, California, scoffing at their methods. “I’ve no doubt,” he wrote, “that after some of these experiences some people feel better, or begin to ‘feel,’ or feel more ‘real’—or whatever the ideals of capitalism prescribe for them.”1
The authors of a major study, published with the title The Psychiatric Society (1982), claimed that in the era of mental-hospital deinstitutionalisation, finding-yourself fashions were wacky in appearance but conformist in essence. These lifestyle fads, which the writers called “therapy for the normal,” might as well have been directly outsourced from asylums for the purposes of behavioural programming, except that in a society priding itself on being liberal it couldn’t be seen to work like that. “No longer a society in which psychiatry takes care of a few patients,” America was transforming into “an organization of everyday life in which manipulative techniques, more often than not developed and popularized by mental medicine, became coextensive with all aspects of social life.”2 The Psychiatric Society’s argument was like the assertion in Limits to Medicine (1976) by Ivan Illich that the modern medical rigmarole of tests and checkups robbed people of their autonomy in the name of health.
The est course was intensive and gruelling. Participants were forbidden for hours on end from taking toilet or cigarette breaks. The course leaders were belligerent and afterwards everybody said the guided meditations, known as “processes,” were emotionally exhausting. (Former mental patients and anybody who admitted to being in therapy but not making progress weren’t allowed to enrol.) Attendees were expected to talk openly about their unhappiest experiences but any hint of being a victim was loudly belittled. As the days went on, the trainers inculcated a philosophy. The mind was described as an information stack, “a linearly arranged, multi-sensory, total record of successive moments of now.”3 Troubling events in a person’s past were termed “items,” which needed to be exposed and then forgotten so that the “item-holder” could start living in the here and now. The disposal of items was called “fully experiencing the experience,” which brought home a heightened sense of responsibility.
Participants learned that they were actually the cause of their entire existence. “However it is for you,” the course leader explained, “that’s the way you’ve set it up and no amount of resistance will change that. Now you have a choice. You can keep resisting. Or you can choose it. You can bitch about it. Or you can take responsibility for it. If you are willing to acknowledge that you are the cause in the matter, then you can be responsible for it, instead of having it run you.” Responsibility meant acceptance, while “resistance only makes things continue.”4 Protest against the Vietnam War was an example of this principle of persistence; it caused the downfall of Lyndon Johnson only for Richard Nixon to replace him and escalate the war.5 At worst, “you become what you resist.”6
The relationship between person and environment was understood by est in terms of agreements rather than laws. For example, the trainer said, “institutions have an agreement going with gravity, and when you try to knock them over, they come tumbling down on top of you.”7 Agreements were unavoidable but anybody could take the step of eliminating the feeling of subjection to them by actively choosing the forcible agreements. Above all, est was a doctrine that renounced disobedience. In so doing it inverted the ideals that radical writers like Cooper and R. D. Laing held dear—and est welcomed, even in the very same terms, what these malcontents dreaded.
Laing’s great fear was that the asylum could somehow worm its way into people as a mentality. “In the best places,” he wrote in the 1966 preface to The Divided Self (1960), “where straitjackets are abolished, doors are unlocked, leucotomies largely foregone, these can be replaced by more subtle lobotomies and tranquillizers that place the bars of Bedlam and the locked doors inside the patient.”8 He returned to the theme in The Politics of the Family (1971): “Man does not always need bars for cages. Ideas can be cages too. Doors are being opened in mental hospitals as chemical constraints become more effective. The doors in our minds are the most difficult to open.”9 Cooper likewise warned of “a miniaturization of the hospital if the logic of the hospital is not broken.”10 In est, however, the intake of restrictions was the goal rather than the feared danger. Trainers worked to make “trainees identify with and internalize the training rather than merely comply.”11 In the est view imprisonment was unavoidable and therefore to be embraced. According to the training script, “There are two kinds of prisons—maximum security prisons, with bars; and minimum security prisons, like here and on the outside, with doors.”12
Werner Erhard actually developed an outreach program for American penitentiaries, which he led himself. The writer and est graduate Adelaide Bry went to a correctional facility in Lompoc, California to witness the results. She met men who had come to accept they were the sole engineers of their situation. Instead of dreaming of freedom, they lived for the present. “By being in the here and now, and by accepting that ‘here’ meant three sets of barbed wire, guard towers, and restricted movement, then they had choices.” A man convicted of armed robbery said he used to long for release but after the training he was able to go with the flow because he finally understood that wishes didn’t change anything. Bry was moved to find “people leading caged lives with integrity,” and she reported a strange feeling as she left Lompoc. “When I left the prison and heard the electronic lock shut behind me, I had the fleeting sense that I was being locked out,”13 she wrote, as though a prison run on est lines was the perfect place to be.
The premise of one of Erhard’s major influences, The Power of Positive Thinking, was simple and stern: “In the last analysis the basic reason a person fails to live a creative and successful life is because of error within himself. He thinks wrong. He needs to correct the error in his thoughts. He needs to practice right thinking.”14 As in many self-help teachings, the links between person and world were ignored. In one way this doctrine boosted the individual’s autonomy by focusing on what he or she thought and did in any situation, irrespective of external factors. But in another way it overloaded and violated personal responsibility because it claimed the factors which stopped somebody from being effective—not only physical obstacles like barbed wire and guard towers, which were bad enough, but also inward factors like the bitter anger caused by powerlessness—were really under the person’s control. Self-help in the extreme form of est attributed total responsibility for experience to the individual, who therefore had to banish disappointment, resentment, and any other useless negative feeling or never have a life that wasn’t weighed down—which anyway est then defined as a choice rather than an affliction.
GO TO PART 3