MASS MARATHON TRAININGS
An excerpt from "The Politics of Transformation: Recruitment -
Indoctrination Processes In a Mass Marathon Psychology Organization"
By PHILIP CUSHMAN
Mass marathon trainings are usually based on the belief that it is a universal
truth that all human beings will have problems in life until they develop deep cathartic
psychological insight, experience completely their every feeling, and live only in the
present moment (see Brewer, 1975; Bry, 1976; Rhinehart, 1976). According to this ideology
all defenses are bad and must be destroyed. They shape their group exercises in order to
uncover and intensify the participants' underlying conflicts and deficits. Everyone must
be exposed to these exercises; there are no exceptions. When all defenses are destroyed,
they claim there is literally no limit to what each individual can accomplish.
Yet there is research that contradicts this universal claim. Applebaum (1976) reported
on the results of the Psychotherapy Research Project of the Henninger Foundation, which
attempted to better understand the effects of psychological insight in the treatment of
patients who had ego-function difficulties and severe characterological problems. After
insight-oriented treatment. a substantial number of patients were found to have changed
forthe worse. The data confirmed that the "screened-off aspects of one's self"
are hidden for a reason; for some types of people the conflicts that necessitated the
screening off should remain hidden. Psychology, Applebaum argued, has
to recognize the factors which impinge upon whether, when, how much, and what kind of
insight a particular person in particular circumstances should be helped to achieve. We
need to know . . . the patient's capacities in order to design the best amount, kind, and
timing of insight.(1976, pp. 205-206)
The data demonstrated Applebaum's contention that differential diagnosis and a
differential treatment plan is crucial in effective psychotherapy. This conclusion
challenges the universal and absolutist claims of insightoriented mass marathon groups.
Applebaum warned that
Until we give up the pipe dream of insight as a universal good or a universal bad, we
and our patients will, at times, be injured by its dangerous edge. (1976. p. 206)
Just as Applebaum criticized those who considered the indiscriminate use of insight a
universal therapeutic panaceas so too did Hampden-Turner (1976) attack those who treat
human growth like a consumer product, indiscriminately applying certain techniques to
every customer who appears with a blank check. He vigorously disagreed with the ethics of
the pop supermarket, the idea that you can purchase a "peak" here and a
"high" there, and go psycho-shopping for prepackaged experiences . . . . In fact
human growth is not like a product at all, and we vitiate it utterly by pandering to the
consumer ethos. (1976, p. 3)
His critique focused particularly upon the highly structured, authoritarian,
insight-oriented marathon workshops. Some aspects of humanistic psychology, he argued,
seem
to have almost forgotten that our most precious human values are achieved by
indirection as opposed to the means ends rationality of industrial production. . . I
seriously question any high that has been programmed in advance.(1976, pp. 1-2)
He voiced his disagreement with psychological ideologies that discount or deny the
significance of the sociohistorical and economic realities of the situation in which the
client lives. These ideologies instead argue for the grandiose delusion of the ultimate
limitlessness of the individual. To the organizations that teach this ideology he posed a
provoking question:
If we are not aware of what the economy does to us, are we self aware at all? Any
genuine search for truth must remind us of the things we cannot change. (1576, P. 3)
In this way Hampden-Turner raised an issue that Sampson (1981) expanded upon. Sampson
criticized cognitive psychology (the single most prominent aspect of the ideology of many
mass marathon organizations) for its "subjectivist reduction." By this he meant
the regressive tendency to discount the nonsubjective world by considering it to be either
a hallucination or subject to the total control of the individual. According to some mass
marathon organizations, human fetuses choose their parents, female victims choose to be
raped, and Vietnamese children chose to be bombed. The regressive aspects of this ideology
seem to be readily apparent.
Sampson demonstrated how a regressive psychological doctrine can impact on political
activity. He argued that an ideology both accurately expresses the "zeitgeist"
of the era and may also inaccurately distort the facts in order to serve the ruling elite.
He explained how cognitivism as an ideology serves the status quo of power and privilege
in American society by teaching individuals to reinterpret their internal response to a
painful experience rather than to work at rearranging the external situation so that it
could better facilitate personal and communal well being.
Humanistic psychology owes much to Lewin's "laboratory movement,
" which originally developed the encounter-group format at the Bethel
Institute. Mass marathon psychotherapy organizations claim that they are
within the legitimate tradition of this movement. They claim that their
training techniques, which include severe milieu control and a rigid
ideology, are taken directly from the encounter movement of years past.
And yet Gottschalk and Pattison's (1969) study of the history of T-groups
and the laboratory movement appears to refute that claim. They found that
the laboratory movement was originally an attempt to encourage democracy
within community action groups. It was composed of three types of groups:
T-groups, task-oriented groups dedicated to teaching about group process,
and intervention labs whose goals were action-oriented community
improvement programs. The authors found that the original unified effort
diverged into an increasing number of activities, each with different
philosophical foundations and agendas. The shift in the 1950s to
"individual growth. . . . self knowledge, to actualization and
maturation" (1969, p. 4) was a clear deviation from the founding
philosophy.
They reported that T-group participants sometimes complained of the hidden. agendas,
group norms, and covert values of charismatic group leaders and their loyal followers.
They found that the trainer and various group members are calling upon them to stop
certain ways of behaving, talking, thinking, and feeling, and that different ways of
behaving are being prescribed. (p. 12)
Also the T-group was found to consciously evoke dramatic reactions in the participants,
which often involved an exaggeration of impulsive traits and personality styles.
Gottschalk and Pattison isolated 13 liabilities of encounter groups, some of which are
similar to characteristics of most current mass marathon psychotherapy training sessions:
1. They lack adequate participant-selection criteria.
2. They lack reliable norms, supervision, and adequate training for leaders.
3. They lack clearly defined responsibility.
4. They sometimes foster pseudoauthenticity and pseudoreality.
5. They sometimes foster inappropriate patterns of relationships.
6. They sometimes ignore the necessity and utility of ego defenses.
7. They sometimes teach the covert value of total exposure instead of valuing personal
differences.
8. They sometimes foster impulsive personality styles and behavioral strategies.
9. They sometimes devalue critical thinking in favor of "experiencing"
without self analysis or reflection.
10. They sometimes ignore stated goals, misrepresent their actual techniques, and
obfuscate their real agenda.
11. They sometimes focus too much on structural self-awareness techniques and misplace
the goal of democratic education; as a result participants may learn more about themselves
and less about group process.
12. They pay inadequate attention to decisions regarding time limitations. This may
lead to increased pressure on some participants to unconsciously "fabricate" a
cure.
13. They fail to adequately consider the "psychonoxious" or deleterious
effects of group participation (or] adverse countertransference reactions. (1969, p. 13)
As a result, participants and leaders may unconsciously distort their feelings and
responses when reporting to researchers about the group or recruiting for future groups.
This might result in a deceptive "oversell" that could undermine informed
consent and lead to unrealistic regressive expectations in new recruits, the specific type
of problems that have been found to lead to psychological casualties (see Yalom &
Lieberman, 1972, below). Since these liabilities are so similar to the techniques used in
some mass marathon trainings, they may also cause psychological damage in that setting as
well.
In a significant study with far-reaching consequences for the study of mass marathon
trainings, Yalom and Lieberman (1972) observed in 209 undergraduate subjects the negative
effects of participation in an encounter group. Over the course of 10 weeks, 18 groups met
for 30 hours; there were also 150 fifty control subjects who did not attend any group.
Each group was run by a leader who was chosen because he was an excellent
representative of one of 10 ideological schools of encounter (T-groups, Gestalt,
Rogerian-marathon, psychodrama, psychoanalytic, Transactional Analysis, sensory awareness,
Synanon, personal growth, black-white encounter, and leaderless). Each was given complete
freedom.
Yalom and Lieberman's primary interest was in assessing the types and causes of
psychiatric "casualties." The operational definition of a casualty was "an
enduring, significant, negative outcome which . . . was caused by . . . participation in
the group" (1972, p. 223). There is little doubt that the careful, conservative
manner in which the study was conducted tended to minimize negative results and reduce the
risk to subjects (1972, p. 228). The authors developed a system for identifying subjects
who were harmed. Their definition of this subsample and their means of locating it were
characteristically conservative. Subjects were included in the casualty subsample only
when they had experienced "enduring" negative change and
as a direct result of . . . [their] experience in the encounter group became more
psychologically distressed and/or employed more maladaptive mechanisms of defense.(1972.
p. 228)
Also, the experience must have been proven to be the responsible element in the
psychological decompensation. For example, one subject committed suicide during the study
and was not counted as a casualty because the suicide could have been caused from past
encounter group experiences.
In a startling finding, Yalom and Lieberman reported that 9.4% of the subjects met
their stringent criteria and were therefore identified as casualties. The authors viewed
this as a serious challenge to the entire movement.
The authors also determined that it was neither the psychological traits of the
subjects (i.e., predispositional factors) nor the ideology of the leaders (i.e., doctrinal
factors) that determined the casualty rate. Instead, surprisingly, it was the style of
leadership that was primary. Leaders who were aggressive, stimulating, intrusive,
confrontive, challenging, personally revealing, and authoritarian were the leaders who
caused the casualties.
Specifically these leaders often unilaterally structured the group's events. Their
focus was on the individual rather than group process. They provided a comprehensive
intellectual framework with which to understand one's self and one's world. They exercised
firm control and were "ready, willing and able" to take over for participants
and guide them to "enlightenment" (1972, p. 236). They were People who were
charismatic leaders: they had a universal message to deliver# a fool-proof technique to
use, and a cause to recruit for. They were uninhibited in their attempts to convert all
the participants in their group. These characteristics are clearly duplicated by many mass
marathon trainers. The findings corroborated Gottschalk and Pattison's 1969 conclusions
and again call into question many tactics used by mass marathon organizations.
Of the categories that caused casualties, "rejection" was the most damaging.
"Failure to achieve unrealistic goals" was the second most dangerous category.
Each of these subjects reported being pressed for a breakthrough without being able to
deliver. "Leader attack"-"group attack" tied for third. The fact that
participants were restrained from leaving, that they had "no place to hide," was
thought to be a crucial element. "Group pressure to experience and express
feelings" also caused casualties. When subjects couldn't comply, they felt a
"sense of hollowness" which led to a "deficient or empty self-image"
(1972, p. 243).
Interestingly, many subjects who demographically resembled the casualty subsample
didn't have negative experiences. Yalom and Lieberman found that they had more realistic
expectations for the experience, they were not lonely or depressed, they remained
uninvolved (i,e. . they did not enter into a public confessional and therefore maintained
their objectivity and their "observing ego"), they dropped out of the group,
they depended on a positive self-concept when they were negatively criticized by the
group, or they used an outside reference group to bolster their own beliefs when in
conflict with a group norm.
The authors suggested that a questionnaire that detects unrealistic expectations would
be a helpful counterindicator when attempting to predict which potential participants
would be at risk. In summary, Yalom and Lieberman stressed that casualties were caused by
the style and techniques of the leader, and by recruitment and selection practices.
The groups were determined to be dangerous when:
1. Leaders had rigid, unbending beliefs about what participants should experience and
believe, how they should behave in the group. and when they should change.
2. Leaders had no sense of differential diagnosis and assessment skills, valued
cathartic emotional breakthroughs as the ultimate therapeutic experience, and sadistically
pressed to create or force a breakthrough in every participant.
3. Leaders had an evangelical system of belief that was the one single pathway to
salvation.
4. Leaders were true believers and sealed their doctrine off from discomforting data or
disquieting results and tended to discount a poor result by, "blaming the
victim."
Yalom and Lieberman concluded by again emphasizing the crucial importance of informed
consent. "Our best means of prevention," they maintained,
remains the type of group the subject enters, and our best means for prevention is
self-selection. If responsible public education can teach prospective encounter group
members about what they can expect in terms of process, risks, and profits from a certain
type of group, then and only then can they make an informed decision ;bout membership. (p.
253)
It is instructive to note that many mass marathon organizations are conducting their
trainings in the exact manner found by Yalom and Lieberman to cause the greatest number of
psychiatric casualties.
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