A Life Well Lived: Maxwell Jones - A Memoir (Community, Culture and Change)

A LIFE WELL LIVED

Therapeutic Communities Series editors: Rex Haigh and Jan Lees The Therapeutic Community movement holds a multidisciplinary view of health which is based on ideas of collective responsibility, citizenship and empowerment. The tradition has a long and distinguished history and is experiencing a revival of interest in contemporary theory and practice. It draws from many different principles – including analytic, behavioural, creative, educational and humanistic – in the framework of a group-based view of the social origins and maintenance of much overwhelming distress, mental ill-health and deviant behaviour. Therapeutic Community principles are applicable in a wide variety of settings, and this series will reflect that. Thinking About Institutions Milieux and Madness

R.D. Hinshelwood

ISBN 1 85302 954 8

Therapeutic Communities 8

An Introduction to Therapeutic Communities David Kennard ISBN 1 85302 603 4

Therapeutic Communities 1

Therapeutic Communities Past, Present and Future

Edited by Penelope Campling and Rex Haigh ISBN 1 85302 626 3

Therapeutic Communities 2

Therapeutic Communities for the Treatment of Drug Users Edited by Barbara Rawlings and Rowdy Yates ISBN 1 85302 817 7

Therapeutic Communities 4

A Therapeutic Community Approach to Care in the Community Dialogue and Dwelling

Edited by Sarah Tucker ISBN 1 85302 751 0

Therapeutic Communities 3

A Life Well Lived Maxwell Jones–A Memoir Dennie Briggs

Jessica Kingsley Publishers London and New York

First Published in the United Kingdom in 2002 by Jessica Kingsley Publishers Ltd 116 Pentonville Road London N1 9JB, England and 29 West 35th Street, 10th fl. New York, NY 10001-2299, USA www.jkp.com Copyright © 2002 by Dennie Briggs All rights reserved. Neither the whole nor any part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Briggs, Dennie. A life well lived : Maxwell Jones--a memoir/Dennie Briggs. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 1-84310-740-6 (alk. paper) 1. Jones, Maxwell. 2. Clinical psychologists--Biography. I. Title. RC438.6.J644 B75 2002 616.89’0092--dc21 [B}

2002023979

British library Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 1 84310 740 6 ISBN 1 84310 740 6 Printed and Bound in Great Britain by Athenaeum Press, Gateshead, Tyne and Wear

CONTENTS Introduction: A Record of a Friendship 11 1. “Max and his Gangsters” 13 2. The 1960s 27 3. Painful Communication 47 4. Dreams Die Hard 85 5. Recycling the Psyche 117 6. The Illusion of Reality 155 7. After Thoughts: A Life Well Lived 171 8. Social Learning and the Future: A Conversation 177 NOTES AND REFERENCES 195

Maxwell Shaw Jones 1907–1990

For the memory and legacy of Maxwell Jones

by the same author Dealing With Deviants: The Treatment of Anti-Social Behavior. (1972) London: Hogarth Press (co-author). In Place of Prison. (1975) London: Temple Smith/New Society. La Comunità Therapeutica: Conversazioni con Maxwell Jones. (1986) Rome: Centro Italiano di Soldarietà. An Open Life: Joseph Campbell in Conversation with Michael Toms. (1990) New York: Harper & Row (co-editor). A Class of Their Own: When Children Teach Children. (1998) Westport, Connecticut: Bergin & Garvey/Greenwood. Online Publications: http://www.pettarchiv.org.uk In Prison, I, II, III In the Navy, I, II In School, I, II, III, IV

I owe a great deal to the late John Maher for his assistance in the preparation of this memoir and to my brother Bob for his unique and characteristic contribution.

INTRODUCTION: A RECORD OF A FRIENDSHIP Three months before he died, Maxwell Jones wrote me in Italy that he felt I understood him much more than any of his friends. Touched as I was, and honored that he would confide in me, I wasn’t at all sure that I did or ever would understand this man of paradox. He was a mystery—as all of us are to others—and when he died the riddle became a final enigma. Looking back over his letters to me and my memories of the man, I can only agree that we were good friends, that is about as much as anyone can truthfully say of another. The rest is supposition. My attempt here is not to analyze or eulogize Max; it is rather an effort to sort out the nuances of a friendship that spanned most of my adult life.1

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FIRST HEARD about Maxwell Jones from William Caudill, a social anthropologist, who was studying patient and staff interaction at Yale. He told me about Max’s experimental communities and strongly urged me to go and visit his ”unit” or therapeutic community in England. I bought his book and read it with considerable curiosity; at that time, however, my interest in groups was limited. I was in the Navy and studying how submariners got along in small groups while in confined quarters in preparation for the launching of the first atomic powered submarines. Sometime later (in the mid 1950s), I was transferred to the US Naval Hospital in Oakland, California. Dr Harry Wilmer, a psychiatrist, was there doing his two-year obligated service. He had visited Max and was impressed with what he saw—impressed enough to convince naval authorities to let him set up a therapeutic community (July 1955-April 1956). His population was naval and marine corps personnel evacuated from the Pacific area. I spent that year working on his project. To my knowledge, this was the first therapeutic community in North America. At its conclusion, Dr Wilmer suggested that I go to the naval hospital in Japan (where psychiatric casualties were first received), and see what I could do by setting up a similar project near the front lines, so to speak. I was excited about this possibility but before I was to go, he thought I should first spend some time with Max and see firsthand what he had done. I followed his suggestion.

chapter one

“MAX AND HIS GANGSTERS” The patient, the social milieu in which he lives and works, and the hospital community of which he becomes temporarily a member, are all important and interact on one another.

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S A TWENTY-NINE-YEAR-OLD lieutenant, I had “hitchhiked” with my friend and colleague, Lieutenant Commander Lina Stearns, the psychiatric nursing supervisor, from California to London on military aircraft. Max was in the midst of struggling to develop his therapeutic community at what was then Belmont Hospital. But I’m not sure what I had expected. To begin with, my experience with the British was limited to the aristocratic portrayals in the movies. And like other Americans, I looked on Europeans in general—and on the British in particular—as the epitome of civilization and sophistication. The accent alone intimidated me; for my own, in contrast to theirs, sounded loud and flat. Nevertheless, my enthusiasm was greater than my anxiety. We arrived in the town of Sutton early on a cold Monday morning in April 1956. When we got off the train, the fog was so thick we could scarcely see fifty feet ahead of us. There was a red double-decked bus that would take us up the rise leading to the hospital, but it didn’t run very often that time of the morning. The station master suggested we set out on foot for the half-hour walk. Half-way up the hill, we saw a lighted shop where workmen with their lunch buckets were stopping for their morning tea. We entered and were served oversized white mugs with milk and large, hand-cut slices of white bread, lightly toasted. Cautiously, we asked one of the workmen if he knew the whereabouts of Max’s hospital and indeed we not only got directions but a curt commentary about Max’s hooligans and how they should be “treated”—quite a contrast to what we’d read in his publications! As we continued up the hill, the fog began to lift; in the distance, through the mist on yet a higher ridge, we saw the outline of a three-story structure. The main building had two

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square turrets; extending from each end were wings, and at the end of each wing, another, shorter turret. Acres of orchards covered the slope that ran down to the railroad track. We came to the entrance, Homestead Road, leading off to the right and made our way up the heights past some staff residences and crossed the railroad overpass. Now we could see the structure more clearly. It was one of those hefty Victorian buildings that exemplified the order and optimism of that era. Its solid brick façade was stained by coal smoke. Numerous dormers, looking for all the world like little houses on a distant mountainside, broke through the steep slate roof. At either end, the main turrets, capped with iron railings, defined the limits of the building, whilst at the center a thin clock tower rose against the sky. Max once described it as “drab” and added that the grounds “are quite the pleasantest part of the hospital environment.” It was ghastly quiet with no one about. All in all, it looked more like a movie set than what we’d expected. Yet, as we approached the turret at the end of the wing nearest us, we could see sections of apparently newer brick. In front of the turret stood a small, one-story modern-looking addition, in contrast to the older buildings with all their gingerbread architecture. Because this building was lighted, we went in to ask for directions. Belmont Hospital itself, from this beginning, was intriguing and foreboding. It had been a workhouse in Dickens’ time but the wing assigned to Max had formerly been an orphanage. Damaged during World War II and then patched up, it still showed the scars. The addition on the front seemed out of place; it contained a small combination reception-room-and-office where two secretaries were busy at work. We knocked timidly on the inside open door. One looked up and smiled pleasantly as we asked where we could find Dr Jones. “You’re in the right place,” she replied and before we could introduce ourselves, she added, “You must be the American visitors that we’ve been expecting. Come along, now.” Max had been away for a week and so there were many crises awaiting him. His secretary, Peggy McCarthy, brought us to meet him in his office which doubled as a meeting room. My first impression of him was of a man totally absorbed in his element.

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Surrounded by staff waiting to unload their troubles, he listened intently. When he reassured them, his voice had a certain calming effect which I would come to appreciate. I wish I could remember exactly how he looked at that time but I just cannot. I only recollect that he was tall, and at fifty, still athletic—which gave his movements a robust grace. His former colleague, Julius Merry, described Max as “a well-groomed, clean-shaven man with a strong chin, tightly combed scalp hair…and he often sported a bow tie.” That description seems pretty close to the Max in old photographs. As Peggy introduced us, Max interrupted his conversation and greeted us cordially. His accent was not what I had expected either. An equivocal mixture of Scottish and genteel English gave his words surprising weight: you listened to what he said for fear of missing some subtle point. This accent stood him in good stead at meetings where his rather light voice could be quickly overwhelmed. The combination of accent and build—especially striking in later years when he added a snow white beard—gave him a commanding presence. His office was a surprise as well. Large with high windows through which you could only see the sky, it was sparsely furnished. There was a bouquet of fresh flowers on his desk. Two coffee tables took up the centre of the room, whilst against the walls were numerous metal chairs. Obscuring one corner was a hospital folding screen with white canvas panels, behind was an iron hospital bed neatly made up. This was where Max took his half-hour “snooze” after lunch. Peggy advised us each to take a chair from his office and carry it into the room next door. Little could I imagine what was facing us just a few feet away. There, in a small, dark, smoke-filled room, again with only a few high-up windows, one hundred people were gathering, seating themselves closely in concentric circles, talking loudly and waiting for the beginning of the morning community meeting (known as “The 8:30”). I immediately felt awkward and tried to be discreet. But in our naval uniforms we stood out like nettles among daisies. The patients tried to welcome us in their British way by making light of our situation. Some wanted to know what part of the States we

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were from, whilst others related their wartime experiences with Yanks. (And for the remainder of the month, I was “the Yank.”) I had read and re-read Max’s first book (The Therapeutic Community) that described his three experimental communities beginning with that of soldiers during World War II. As much as I was impressed by the ideas, his writing could scarcely do justice to my experience of the next thirty days. Details that seemed incidental in the book suddenly came alive. The simple practice of everyone being on a first-name basis, for instance, blurred the line between therapist and patient. At first glance, you couldn’t tell who was “staff” and who was “patient.” That first meeting opened, for example, with a distinguished-looking gentleman reading minutes from other meetings. With his Etonian-like accent and monocle, he was the very embodiment of the upper class. (Only later that week did I discover he was actually a patient!) At the end of the first day, Lina and I were exhausted; we had attended something like eight meetings—if my memory serves me correctly. Before “high tea,” we took a walk down to Belmont Village and shared our impressions. Whilst we looked in one of the shop windows, a group of lively young people approached us. “What do you think of the Unit?” they asked. When we gave them some off-the-cuff remarks, they asked us about the US, lamenting on how dull and miserable life was in Britain and how exciting it must be living in California. After a few more pleasantries, they moved on. It wasn’t that simple; for in the community meeting the next morning the gentleman with the log read aloud that the American visitors had been seen “pairing-off” with some of the patients in Belmont. All eyes turned to us awaiting an explanation. We were speechless (to say the least); through a simple exchange we had become “involved” in the community. The complexities of relationships in a therapeutic community never cease to bewilder me. The setting I had just left, while informal to some degree, necessarily adhered to military protocol. Here at the Unit the community was informal, almost to the point of anarchy, yet they noticed everything. It was my own perception, of course, because I was used to clearly defined regulations and hierarchy. Max’s idea, in contrast, was to get the patients to

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participate in their rehabilitation as much as possible. In order for this participation to happen, there had to be more freedom than in traditional institutions. (“Permissiveness” is the term they used.) To avoid either the staff or residents from falling back on those old formal relationships, Max had done away with titles and uniforms. The result was sometimes a “Through-the-Looking- Glass” experience. Max had given me a room in the nurses’ quarters so I was able to move from the hotel in London. He thought—and rightly so—that I would learn more by immersing myself in the hospital atmosphere, for some of the most dramatic events occurred in the evenings and on the weekends. That way, I could get a glimpse of what the culture was really like and get to know some of the patients. At that time, Max wasn’t married so he also had quarters on the hospital grounds. He hoped that my living there would give us a chance to talk in leisure and without interruptions. He generously offered to share his knowledge with me and was eager to learn what I knew about the current treatment practices in America. On the side, his interest in politics prompted many questions about life during the McCarthy era. Living at the hospital gave me an opportunity not only to observe the other aspects of life in the community but also to see how others viewed Max and his project. His Unit was located on the grounds of the larger, more traditional mental hospital. One of the facilities the Unit shared with the hospital was the staff dining room. It was there I picked up many observations and interpretations, such as the euphemism “Max and his gangsters.” In contrast to the relaxed atmosphere of the Unit, the staff dining room was a sanctuary of British formality. Here hierarchy and titles were revered: no first names, and no patients in sight. When I introduced myself by my first name (as I’d learned from the Unit), I didn’t realize that I had not only violated etiquette in general but that of the medical profession as well. My behavior proclaimed me as yet another brash American. But they absolved me of my faux pas by addressing me as “leftenant” for the remainder of my stay. At 8 o’clock, the staff began to gather in Max’s office. Hector, the night nurse, went over the events of the previous night

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thereby forewarning Max and the staff of any unresolved crises. That way, they could catch their breath before facing the assembled community, pool their observations, and, if possible, come up with a resolution or two. At the close of the community meeting, they planned a “social” for that evening. Patients and staff volunteered their services to arrange activities and prepare refreshments. There was dancing, socializing, and games such as whist. Many of the patients participated but others preferred to spend the evenings on their own or go out to the Californian, the local pub. As it turned out, Max had been right: evenings and weekends were far from quiet. At the best of times, someone was usually upset with someone else. Fist fights sometimes broke out. But then the Unit was not meant to be a country club. Rather, one of its main purposes was to allow the patients the freedom to interact so that they and the staff could observe the nature of their relationships and, it was hoped, find more constructive ways of dealing with differences. I remember one weekend’s activities vividly. At The 8:30 on Saturdays the community concentrated on what the patients who remained could do for the next two days. On this particular Saturday, they decided to have a “ramble” for those who were brave enough to dress warmly and face the chilly, foggy day. And so a dozen of us assembled in the reception room and set off over the hills. Our self-appointed guide collected our fares and boarded us on one of the double-decked red buses in order to impress us with a bit of history. Sylvia, middle-aged and heavily made-up, came in a long coat with an enormous fur collar. Her bright red lips seemed to extend well beyond the corners of her mouth and the smudged mascara gave her eyes a slightly demented look. She was what the British would call a “tart.” Sylvia took me by the arm, addressed me as “love” and seated me beside her on the bus. Because of her thick cockney accent, I could only understand a word or two of what she said. When we arrived at the designated stop we all disembarked and the ramble through the marshes began. Eventually we arrived at a formal garden with a splendid stone residence that turned out

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to be where Henry VIII had kept one of his wives. Sylvia was terribly animated as she recounted details of scandalous occurrences in this isolated place. Though many of her details may have been counterfeit (as far as Ann Boleyn was concerned), they were most likely true of herself, as I later learned. Apparently Sylvia had run quite a successful business before she came to the Unit and had employed a force of young ladies to serve a distinguished clientele. Going back to the weekday activities, after the community meeting, the staff re-assembled in Max’s office to discuss what happened and to prepare for the day’s schedule. Pots of tea and plates of delicate sandwiches (crusts removed) filled the coffee tables. This time was a cozy, almost social, get-together, at least at the outset. Tea affects the British the way the Martini affects Americans: it relaxes them to the point of “unwinding.” How many armchair historians have orchestrated worldwide events over tea and crumpets we shall never know! But in Max’s office, strategies for dealing with problems were as common as cucumber sandwiches and some of them just as tasty. The staff’s routine ended at the evening meal around 6 o’clock. Usually by then most of us were exhausted; but it was a time I looked forward to because Max would invite me for a conversation over a glass of that dreadful English “cocktail,” Pimm’s Cup. I’d give my impressions of the day and Max would comment and interpret. There in his room by the fire, he’d unfold his ideas and chew over what he was doing and where he thought he was going. His ponderings always with a hint of self-doubt surprised me: in my experience, authority figures never revealed them He’d always begin with my observations, keen as he was for my perspective both as an American and as a social scientist. I was overwhelmed by this treatment as a valued colleague: here was one of the great minds in social psychiatry soliciting my comments and speculations—me a neophyte! And I was amazed as he’d extrapolate the beginnings of a theory, or read an existing one, or reevaluate an entire meeting, all because of what I had said. Sometimes he’d give me material to read—such as a draft of a paper he was working on, some notes he’d written, or some

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relevant publication to extend my understanding. Then as if he had run out of energy, he’d say, “I think we’ve talked enough for one day.” I soon learned to leave the time of parting up to him; for, in addition to being sensitive to the subtle communications in meetings, he also had a keen sense of timing. There was a point where he intuitively felt a meeting should end whether between two people or a group. At first, it was difficult to see the rationale behind a seemingly abrupt exit on his part—there was always something else to say, some other observation to make, some truth to discover. But as he once explained, a tension should remain to encourage additional “inner work”—a little like Hemingway when he finished a day’s work in the middle of a sentence. That way he had something to start from when he resumed his writing. Max’s way of operating whetted my curiosity so I was eager to learn all I could during the month. I was especially interested in the training of the social therapists whose energy, like that of the patients’, seemed to be boundless. Their daily “tutorial” with senior staff was a cauldron of ideas. I was especially impressed with the those that Eileen Skellern, the nurse, conducted. In one, the matter of an emotional attachment to a patient and his subsequent sexual “blackmail” was the initial focus. By the end of the tutorial, Eileen was reviewing David Henderson’s types of psychopaths and strategies for dealing with each. In a working-paper he gave me to read, Max noted: “Social therapists must be allowed to make mistakes in early training without being made to feel bad, e.g., getting too close to patients emotionally before they have learnt something about transference, etc.” Oftentimes, this permissiveness made for precarious situations, especially when a patient sought to act on his transference and the social therapist might reciprocate. Needless to say, sometimes there were “emergency” meetings. Transference difficulties, however, weren’t limited to the social therapists. The major crisis over the Easter weekend when I was there concerned one of the psychiatrists, a young woman who was doing a residency. She and a patient disappeared for the holiday weekend and phoned in the next week to say that they’d eloped. Although the community was

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understandably upset, I was moved to see how they handled the situation. They seemed to accept the circumstances and were more concerned as to the aftereffects—where the couple would reside, how their affair would be viewed by others, and so on. Just before I arrived at the Unit, Max had put in a bid for a more active part in patient activities. But they had turned his offer down. They viewed his role as that of “an approving patriarch when things were going well, and an authority-figure in case of crisis.” This observation delighted him: for it meant that positive leadership was emerging among the patients; and he concluded at that time, “the role of the social therapist was now growing away from the over-simplified one of a parent or sibling surrogate.” His conclusions fascinated me. I had seen young hospital corpsmen in the Navy move in similar directions while working with patients but somehow didn’t know how to further the trend. And where might it go if encouraged to develop? I urged Max to write up more of his ideas about social therapists and was pleased when he took time that Easter weekend to draft a rather detailed paper on their role that he gave me for comment. I was doubly pleased five years later, when I was working in another therapeutic community, to receive the final version from Max, published in an American psychiatric nursing journal.2 Max was as eager as I was that I should learn as much as possible during my brief stay. In addition to opening all his personal sources, he arranged for me to visit others in the country whose work was relevant. One visit took me to Warlingham Park where I met Max’s great friend, T. P. Rees. Dr Rees had operated his enormous mental hospital without locked wards. In the afternoon he sent Lina and me to visit Champion House, a manor in the countryside inhabited by a dozen patients whom he realized could never otherwise live outside an institution. During another visit at the Ministry of Health, I spent an afternoon with Max’s former boss during World War II, Sir Walter Maclay, who’d now become the nation’s top psychiatrist under the National Health Service. Max also arranged for me to spend a day with his former arch “rival,” Tom Main, whom he jokingly referred to as one of the “pirates” who’d stolen some of his ideas presumably without

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appropriate acknowledgement. I was especially impressed with Doreen Waddell, his head nurse, who was also a qualified psychoanalyst, and likewise with Gil Elles, whom I met, not in a nurses uniform, but casually dressed, seated at her sewing machine on a balcony surrounded by a group of patients having a “therapy” session. And he even scheduled a visit to the Marlborough Day Hospital with Joshua Bierer, though Max had reservations about him and the way he operated. Nevertheless, he thought I should see a wider spectrum than just his.3 Max was drawn to his use of social clubs as an adjunct to therapy. After each visit, we’d sit by the fire and over a Pimm’s and “crisps” I’d crunch out my observations that, in turn, would become grist for his seminar. (I even got to liking that strange, bitter liquor that Max served in a tall glass with a slice of cucumber—next to tea, the bane of every meeting.) These conversations, that for me were the core of our friendship, were to continue until his death. In the later years, when we could no longer meet face to face, our seminars took place over the phone on Sunday mornings. Even when I was living in Italy and his health was failing, he’d phone around 6 a.m. when he knew I was sure to be up. COINCIDENTALLY, DURING THAT first visit Max received, for his comments, a paper written by J. Douglas Grant. He asked me if I knew this psychologist and his work. By chance I did. Max was intrigued by the ideas in the paper. Doug was proposing that we enlist the assistance of offenders to study themselves and their surroundings as “participant observers.” A prison could contain a “field lab” as he had demonstrated by his experiments in military confinement. He’d developed what he called “living groups” where he matched the personality types of prisoners with those of the paraprofessional staff (resembling Max’s social therapists). Doug furthermore had assembled a staff of some forty other prisoners and trained them to carry out the research aspects of his experiment along with trained professionals.

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Whilst I was visiting the Unit, Max was in the midst of an intensive study of his own programme by a team of social scientists which included anthropologists, sociologists, social workers and a psychologist, some with psychoanalytic backgrounds (1953-1957). Doug, however, recommended that the “client” be included as collaborator, a factor Max had realized early on as the basis for his practice of social learning. And so he was quick to pick up Doug’s ideas and extend them to mental hospitals and prisons. Max was also extending rehabilitation beyond the community itself. I was attracted to the social club he had established in London for former residents where they could drop in on an occasional or regular basis and bring along family members and friends. Henderson staff and patients conducted the informal meetings. One night a man turned up who’d been at the Unit several years previously and wanted to show the staff that he’d done well and to express his gratitude. JUST BEFORE I left to return to the States, Lina and I invited Max to dinner at the American officer’s club in London. I was uneasy in this place where service was just a snap of the fingers away. I was still naïve enough to believe that democracy actually meant equality. But the military, where the privilege of rank was jealously guarded, had made me conscious to its inherent inequities. Also my recent experiences with the “down and outs” of London at the Unit was still keen in my mind and the contrast between that unpretentious world and this bastion of privilege humbled me. And when he arrived I immediately regretted the invitation. Max, on the other hand, was delighted with the evening, and eased into the plush surroundings as if they were his natural habitat. Nor did the parade of uniforms daunt him in the least. In fact, I think he was secretly amused by it all. One of his great strengths was being able to move from one situation to another with ease, be it in the company of fellow doctors, eager students, or outright psychopaths. He intuitively found the person behind the mask and communicated directly with her or him. Such a person is not easily impressed or intimidated.

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As we parted, I realized how much I had yet to learn, how much Max could teach me. I was about to leave for my two-year stint in Japan. As it turned out, it was to be my final two years in the Navy. For I was rapidly outgrowing the relationships that the military necessarily imposed on me. What Max said about the changing role of the social therapist I found also held true for relationships among equals: as relationships change, so the need for the parent or sibling equivalent diminishes. The person can find the same quality of understanding in a friend. That simple statement was to change my whole concept of what a friend is, what a family is, or indeed, what it is to be human at all. I GIVE THESE incidents as examples of the mutual respect that formed our relationship from the beginning. That respect, along with sharing ideas and building on each other’s experiences, served to reinforce the friendship that emerged over the next three decades.

chapter two

THE 1960S What priority is given to learning as opposed to teaching? Students everywhere are rebelling against the strictures of an outdated educational system.

Maxwell Jones consulting at the California Institution for Men at Chino with the founder, Kenyon Scudder (right), and the author

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DIDN’T SEE Max again for the next two years. During that time we maintained our friendship through letters and drafts of papers. Max’s life changed fundamentally. He got married to one of the social therapists (Kerstin, a young woman from Sweden). Then our mutual friend and colleague, Harry Wilmer, arranged a visiting professorship for him at Stanford for a year. And so Max packed his bags and moved to California, a fortunate event for both of us. My own circumstances had also changed. During the latter part of my two years in Japan, I had been thinking about getting out of the Navy. I had been in the service now for over nine years and I’d had some very stimulating and fulfilling times. I thought that if I remained any longer I might yield to the temptation to hang on until an early retirement. And I wasn’t sure what that option would do to me. Whilst I was in Japan, Harry Wilmer brought me to the Naval Medical Research Institute at Bethesda, Maryland, for a month to contribute a chapter for the report he was writing about his work at the Oakland Naval Hospital.4 My month there (April 1957) coincided with David McKenzie Rioch’s symposium held at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center and co-sponsored by the National Research Council.5 Its theme was preventive and social psychiatry and the conference brought together some of the most knowledgeable and creative professionals in the field. In all, it was an incredible gathering of people who were defining this new area of psychiatry. I felt most exhilarated at this symposium and wanted to identify with people of this calibre who could stimulate my own thinking rather than continually passing on to others what little I knew and struggling to set up new projects.

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I returned to Japan, submitted my resignation, and took a research job with Doug Grant, whom I had known whilst I was working on a project with the submariners. He’d just been appointed Director of Research for the California Department of Corrections and was interested in setting up some therapeutic community projects combining Max’s ideas with some of his own that he called “living groups.” The projects were to be conducted at the California Institution for Men, a minimum-security prison located at Chino, about an hour’s drive east of Los Angeles. I took a year to acquaint myself with the prison and I returned to the University of Southern California as a PhD candidate, but that experience lasted only one day. I attended classes and walked out—never to return. The experiences I’d had over the past ten years far surpassed anything that I saw in the classrooms or in the professors. I decided the commute just wasn’t worth it, and so returned to Chino to devote my full time to the prison and do some teaching myself. It was when we were preparing to launch our first transitional community project in the prison that I received the news that Harry Wilmer had brought Max to Stanford. Max had looked forward to working with Doug for some time—since commenting on his paper—and it would be possible now during his “sabbatical.” Their collaboration, as far as I know, resulted in the first therapeutic communities within a prison in North America. Whilst at Stanford, Max revealed the blueprint in one of his Isaac Ray Lectures delivered before the American Psychiatric Association in 1959 at Georgetown University. Doug was in a position to get the projects authorized; and I was privileged to carry them out.6 We began with a transitional community at a forestry camp and then started another one located within the prison itself. Max visited these projects regularly to hold staff training sessions and meet with all the prison staff to put our efforts into a larger perspective. It was an exhilarating time for us both because we saw things happening to prisoners that we previously thought unthinkable. For one thing, we found that it was possible to change “snitching” or “grassing” on one’s fellow prisoners to “painful communication” (to use one of Max’s terms). Even the

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notion that talking itself was a good thing in prison at first seemed like a difficult obstacle to overcome. Later on, some of the prisoners actually took positions resembling those of the social therapists that Max had introduced. Max worked tirelessly training staff, orienting administrators and politicians, and keeping me on an even keel. We both looked forward to these visits that seemed to revive something of that month at Belmont (later the Unit became autonomous and Max renamed it Henderson Hospital in honor of his former teacher, Sir David Henderson). Our talks resumed as though there had been no interruption. Aside from our professional relationship, I was now pleased to acknowledge that we liked each other personally; I gladly substituted Martinis for Pimm’s at our fireside discussions. Max’s visits were occasions for social events; when he came I usually hosted a party to get the prison staff together with people whom Max wanted to see and get to know each other. The Isaac Ray Award and his professorship at Stanford gave Max considerable prestige that allowed him to move about the country easily. For the first time in his professional life, however, he was a professor rather than an active participant, and the contrast was difficult for him. The academic post set him apart from the rabble, as it were. In reality, nonetheless, he said he was little more than a figurehead at Stanford and he welcomed every invitation to visit the project where he could—so to speak—get his hands dirty again. At this time, he also collaborated with Harry Wilmer on a program to establish a comprehensive mental health service in nearby San Mateo. He thought that the curriculum at Stanford’s medical school lacked opportunities to learn about social psychiatry and he saw this service as a chance to make up for the deficiency. This center was one of the first of its kind in North America and attracted a good deal of national attention from professionals, administrators, and politicians alike. It was the prototype for which a great deal of Kennedy’s Community Mental Health Act of 1963 was based. The year’s sabbatical extended into a three-year stay for Max in the US. During that time he published two books, forty-one papers, and attended at least three world conferences; he

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accepted invitations from countless mental health and correctional facilities, universities, and private groups nationally. Richard McGee, then Director of Corrections for California, retained him as a consultant for the year. Max visited many of that state’s prisons, met with staff, conducted workshops, and lectured widely to correctional workers. As a result of his “missions,” he’d become well-known—I might say, even famous—in these circles. On many of the visits, he took me along to enhance my own experience and as someone with whom he could talk about the event. Often, he would try to get me involved—not just to back him up, but as an active participant. He strongly held that social learning should incorporate the teacher as the “object for learning.” That notion may sound vague or abstract, but he often said that one way of teaching is to jump in and take a risk, the risk of making a fool of yourself: to become a “living experiment,” by placing yourself vulnerable to criticism. It was through this active participation—followed by discussion—that you could get a clearer picture of how you operated, and appeared to others. Your position and the nature of the organization in which you worked could, of course, hinder such learning. Some persons viewed risking censure by authority or by your peers as hardly worth the effort. But, in Max’s view, growth meant risking the established for the possible. Although he remained within its context, Max fought the medical establishment all his life. He never gave in to its authoritarian structure; spontaneity was especially important to him. For he was deeply aware of the need to eliminate hierarchies, and, trickster that he was, to inject a certain amount of the unexpected (or humor) into serious events. I can’t recall the year exactly, but on a visit to the California Institution for Women (at Corona) he deliberately singled out one of the parole board members for a lively conversation at lunch. It was a special event to honor Max (the visiting celebrity), so of course the high-level administrators were present and the ladies of the parole board had come dressed to the “nines.” The luncheon was all very polite and formal. It began with questions about Max’s work in Britain, his teaching at Stanford, and his

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observations of the prison that morning. For a while, he enjoyed the attention. But there came a point when he became self-conscious and saw a need to loosen up the formality so that people could become relaxed and, he hoped, engage in productive conversation. It was then that he spotted his unwitting cohort—a dowager who was wearing a rather unfortunate straw hat with a harvest of wax cherries dripping over the brim. He smiled. She smiled back. He burred his accent ever so slightly when addressing her, and within moments he had her in the palm of his hand. At her every breath, it seemed the cherries frolicked on the brim rattling, like castanets at a flamenco dancers’ convention. The more animated she became, the more they rattled. And the more they rattled the more Max encouraged her with questions about her personal life as well as her work on the parole board. I could scarcely suppress my inclination to laugh out loud for I knew what he was up to. After he had her completely under his spell, he shifted the focus of attention and referred to me as a well-known criminologist, and titillated the other women with vague references I was an eligible bachelor, and so on. This ploy not only served to ease the tension and formality of the luncheon, but allowed people to relax and risk revealing some of their true selves. The “cherries,” as he referred to it, became part of his curriculum as a symbol of the empty social conversation that inhibits real interaction. But with the proper encouragement, you could open up any situation. Yet his use of humor to illustrate his ideas sometimes unnerved me, especially when he used me as the “straight man” of the team. I didn’t have his capacity for showmanship and I was never sure how far he intended to go. It was never so far, though, that it couldn’t become the basis of our ensuing discussions. Nor did I always appreciate the spotlight he sometimes turned on me. On one occasion, I was outright mortified. We had spent the morning making rounds and attending ward meetings at the Metropolitan State Hospital in Los Angeles; Max was speaking to the staff and other mental health professionals in the afternoon.

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We entered the large auditorium where several hundred had gathered to hear him. The officials were already seated behind a long table on the platform waiting for Max to join them. He didn’t especially care for this kind of arrangement: it minimized audience participation. There wasn’t much possibility of interaction happening here, as far as I could see. Already exhausted from the morning’s activities, I was grateful that there was only one vacant chair on the platform. I excused myself and took a seat at the back of the room from which vantage point I could observe the audience. Of course, everyone took the lecture very seriously—you came to expect that—god forbid they should enjoy themselves! Nevertheless, Max was disappointed by the lack of response to his requests for involvement and he was becoming impatient. He continuously shifted about; his pronunciation was clipped, almost brusque. He looked through the faces and then directly at me. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he rose and pointed, “I would like to introduce a distinguished psychologist who is sitting in the back row in disguise. Stand up, Dennie; let yourself be seen.” I was too bewildered to obey. Instead, all eyes followed his finger. I sat there like an animal caught in the headlights of an approaching truck. “Stand up, Dennie,” he encouraged as I, red-faced, slowly got to my feet, and quickly collapsed back into the seat. Although I understood his reasons behind this performance, I didn’t appreciate the exposure. It was his way of including me in the lecture that hadn’t gone over well. And he felt rather isolated there on the platform with his psychiatric colleagues who really didn’t appreciate his style. I felt badly that I was not there to support him. Yet to turn the whole auditorium on me! I was only thankful he didn’t ask for my opinion on something, for at that moment I wouldn’t have been able to say a word. Max was captivated by a project at the Los Angeles County Hospital, run by Sherna Gluck, a sociologist, for skid-row alcoholics who had active tuberculosis. He felt quite at home with these men who resembled many whom he’d known at Henderson from London’s East End. She found that as the project matured, patients dispensed reading from the log in the community

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meetings and instead appointed a clerk who took notes in the meetings and read them back in the subsequent one. One of the most significant changes occurred among the staff, similar to the course of events Max had experienced at Henderson. The roles played by the staff to this point were not the traditional ones, but there were still symbols and real barriers separating them from the patients. A new process, i.e., the relinquishing of the white coat by the social worker and the hats by the nurses. This process led not only to an examination by the entire group of roles, but also of the function of the group, the question of power, etc. With this re-focusing there was a movement away from solution orientation to understanding and examination of processes. Thus an almost total breakdown of the old patient-staff relationships occurred.7

DURING THE YEAR at Stanford Max spent time with Richard McGee in Sacramento, for whom he had the greatest respect. Director McGee received his appointment to head the state’s correctional agency from Earl Warren (at the outset of his first term as Governor of California) and it was through Richard McGee that Max met Earl Warren (then Chief Justice of the US). The meeting was no doubt one of the highlights of Max’s stay in America. He was greatly encouraged that men of such integrity could reach the highest levels of government and still remain compassionate. Max further showed his admiration for Richard McGee by passing up prestigious psychiatrists and invited him to write the foreword to his Isaac Ray Lectures when they were published; he asked Doug Grant to write the preface. The admiration was obviously mutual. Doug, for example, wrote: “It is hard to say that cultures would not have started systematically studying themselves if there had been no Maxwell Jones. It is easy to say, however, that, because of Maxwell Jones, the concept of social psychiatry, and the therapeutic community program, society’s growth towards maturity has been accelerated.”8

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Max’s talent for putting people in touch with one another and cross-fertilizing promising projects was evident when, after his meeting with Earl Warren, he met Helen MacGregor. She was a lawyer who had been Warren’s deputy and private secretary while he was District Attorney, Attorney General, and Governor of California (1935 through 1953). Shortly thereafter, Dr Isobel Menzies, from the UK, visited California. Helen MacGregor (then a member of the California Youth Authority) had long been interested in penology and scheduled Dr Menzies to visit our projects at Chino. At the same time, Helen MacGregor offered her assistance in case we needed administrative backing from Sacramento in the future. Harry Wilmer also arranged for Max to meet the Governor of California and talk to him about his ideas for changes in prisons. Max and I were both intrigued by what we’d heard and read about Synanon and its founder, Chuck Dederich. We decided to spend a day there during one of Max’s consulting trips. He especially wanted to learn more about the use of “games” and their general approach with addicts. Most of all, he wanted to exchange views with the founder who now was becoming well-known. We arrived at the large place on the Santa Monica beach but, instead of meeting the director, we were welcomed by residents. They proceeded to put us through the paces they did for all visitors and only at the end of the day did we actually meet Chuck Dederich for a brief social introduction. Max, who by now had become very critical of the program, surprised me: instead of inquiry, he was telling the founder about his own approach and not very subtly suggesting how he would change Synanon. This encounter, of course, was disastrous—the two exchanged few further words and the meeting was over. AFTER MAX LEFT Stanford for Oregon, he maintained his interest in our projects. He continued his consulting visits with us and at one point invited me to visit him in Salem after he’d been there for some time. By now he had successfully decentralized the state hospital into mental health teams that offered service similar to what he’d realized at San Mateo. He wanted me to see what he

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had accomplished and get my views. He also thought I might get some ideas that I could use in prison; some of the prisoners in our projects were now being paroled and we were working out an after-care program. I was very impressed with Max’s achievements in such a short time. His mental health teams had jurisdiction over the communities the patients had come from and where they would be returning. Whilst hospitalized, the patients were housed with their “neighbors,” enabling support groups to form that could continue when they left hospital. The teams spent a good deal of their time in the community in prevention that cut down the need for hospitalization. Max was able to so reduce that need that they had closed some of the wards—but not without strong resistance. I began to wonder how we could use some of these ideas in our project; for example, by getting more involved with the prisoners’ families and friends. During the week he also arranged to take me to visit the nearby state prison. He and a few of his staff were trying to get the warden and others to offer prisoners something more than confinement and punishment. He thought I might help, as my experience was perhaps more relevant. I was frankly appalled at conditions in the prison—as something out of a 1930s Hollywood film. The atmosphere was far from cordial to communication. There were, for instance, two white lines painted on the floor of the long main corridor, the middle reserved for the staff, outside of which the prisoners had to walk. It reminded me of the boulevards in Paris that had been constructed for Napoleon’s army to gain easy access to the city. They needed to do so much to this prison just to make it more humane. I thought that working in such conditions must be soul-destroying and that everyone would welcome change—if only to alleviate the tension between prisoners and guards. But no one—including the warden—seemed to be much interested. We both left feeling depressed. Early the next morning, Max sent for me. He’d been up for several hours and had papers and books piled all over his desk. “I’ve been thinking,” he said, “about that dreadful experience we had yesterday.” But rather than simply dwelling on its ugliness, he

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had gotten out all his reports on projects in prisons including the original paper of Doug Grant’s (where he had presented the idea of using prisons as self-study laboratories). Whilst confined, Doug argued, why not teach the inmates how to study not only themselves, but the situations in which they found themselves? Teach them skills such as interviewing, constructing questions to gather information for analysis, and so on. The idea was to make their time more constructive and perhaps these skills would help them outside prison (by leading fuller lives and acquiring job skills). Specifically the paper proposed a new role for prisoners: [T]hat of group aider and clarifier (culture therapist) who, as a participating member, helps the culture become aware of its own processes of development… It is not only possible, but probable, [his argument went on] that a self-study correctional institution would prove to be a ‘therapeutic community’ both for the staff and inmates.9

Doug had read this paper at the annual meetings of the American Psychological Association in 1955 and later submitted it to the British Journal of Delinquency. In one of those ironies of fate, this paper was the one that the editor had sent to Max to critique during my first visit at Henderson. Doug’s ideas of personality integration levels and “living groups” had tantalized Max, who was moved enough to write in his commentary: The introduction of a role for prisoners (or psychiatric patients) which involves active collaboration with trained staff personnel in an attempt to better social understanding and circumstances (or treatment) is the distinctive quality of a therapeutic community.10

Max had discovered the quantum physicists’ finding that observer and the observed could not be separated, and, by taking this inseparability into account, you could gain new insights from the interaction itself. The journal had not only accepted Doug’s article, but published Max’s commentary as well. Max had this article in his hand when I entered his office that morning. He suggested we collaborate on a paper outlining, and

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giving reference to Doug’s and others’ ideas in criminology that psychiatry could use. He also suggested his long-time colleague, Joy Tuxford, as a collaborator. She was working there in the community phase of his project and had spent time with me at Chino. And so, over the weekend we drafted this paper, the title of which was a question (as the titles of many of his papers were): “What Has Psychiatry to Learn From Penology?” There are many therapeutic communities to be found in mental hospitals, but where the [California] Department of Corrections has something to teach us in mental hospitals is that their therapeutic communities are being developed for quite explicit reasons, these being specific treatment for “types” of individuals based on experimental classification schemes.

The notion of types of treatment for types of personalities had impressed Max. The paper concluded: It would seem that, despite the obvious differences between the inmates in prisons and the patients in mental hospitals, the practice in both types of institutions is becoming progressively more similar. This is mainly due to the increasing awareness in both fields of the importance of the social environment in implementing treatment.

It was an exciting twist in our relationship. Now, Max was consulting me for information to relate to his own experiences and to address his peers. That weekend, we went through mounds of papers and reports, pulled out relevant material related to them; then when his secretary arrived on Monday, she typed a first draft, and we began anew. By the end of the next few days, we had completed the manuscript. I was impressed by Max’s ability to condense an incredible amount of diverse information and make the necessary relationships between the two seemingly dissimilar fields. And he showed a great amount of patience with me whilst I was trying to understand that relationship from his perspective. Then, when he finally got the paper published, it appeared not in a psychiatric journal but in the British Journal of Criminology,11 which was a rather interesting departure but not at all surprising:

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Max was forever trying to unify institutions. And if his “marriages” didn’t always work, they did go a long way toward humanizing institutions. This venture added a new dimension to our relationship; although we talked about it many times, unfortunately we never published anything else together. We did, however, spend a great deal of time with one another working on his autobiography and on transcripts of the dialogues we had in the last decade of his life. Some years later, Max wrote me wondering why we had not collaborated more in publishing. I didn’t have a ready answer but regretted that we had not. Perhaps it was that we were more engaged in activities. Sometime later, I was sad to hear that Max had suddenly decided to leave the US. He had the opportunity to become superintendent of Dingleton Hospital in Scotland. It apparently was the chance he’d been waiting for: a position where he could make the changes he was committed to. He was ardent about getting into prevention of mental illness; it seemed to him that working with general practitioners, the clergy, law enforcement, etcetera, in their home territory would have greater effect than remaining solely within institutions. And I think he wanted to return to Scotland for nostalgic reasons as well as some peace and quiet. His three daughters were beginning to take on “American” characteristics and this fashion bothered him too. But when all the reasons for his departure came out, it appeared that Mark Hatfield, the Governor—via Max’s superintendent (Dean Brooks)—had politely asked him to leave. His ideas had caused unrest in the community epitomized by the psychiatric technicians going on strike. MAX RETURNED TO Scotland. We kept in contact by letter and by his annual visits. He continued to consult with us on the prison projects until they ended in 1964. Following these projects, Doug, Joan (his wife), and I resigned from the Department of Corrections and began the New Careers Project for Offenders at the California Medical Facility, a prison located at Vacaville. We received a grant from the National Institute of

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Mental Health (NIMH). Max visited the project and was delighted to see us put his concept of social learning into practice and carry his social therapist role further, expanding it considerably into that of a “social change agent.” Our first field placement from that project was to work within a school composed mainly of economically disadvantaged children and parents in a rural ghetto in Southern California. Max was enticed, for he could see an opportunity to try out some of his ideas in a totally different setting. Would the therapeutic community concept actually work beyond bars or walls—in the open air as it were? And with children? We decided to set up a program to study these prospects. We chose—or rather didn’t have much choice about it—this rural ghetto area, populated mainly by blacks—as other communities had turned down our offer. A team of two ex-prisoners, a graduate student, and I spent a summer with two hundred children and forty staff, some of whom were parents. We hired young people from the community as teaching assistants. We taught them how to carry out discussion groups in each of the twelve ungraded classrooms and how the older children could teach the younger ones. Professors Ron and Peggy Lippitt from the University of Michigan, who had originated peer or “cross age” teaching, were consultants to the project. I arranged for Ms Lippitt and Max to visit at the same time so that they could get to know one another. Max held workshops for the teachers and their assistants and became highly involved in this project which, at the end of the summer, was extended to other schools. He carried the ideas back to Scotland where he introduced them in some of the local schools and, upon his retirement to Denver, did the same there. He came and spoke as a guest lecturer (around the ideas from the project) in the classes I was teaching at the University of California at Riverside. There was one time when we held a Saturday workshop at the university so that he could interact with a dozen children who’d become quite skilled in group discussions and peer teaching. Max had requested this arrangement so that he could use it as a live teaching situation for the workshop which included about 100

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teachers, administrators, parents and children. The workshop was televised in a large amphitheater used for teaching medical students—not the best arrangement for interaction and participation. But the children nearly got the better of him and it was the only time I ever saw him so vulnerable in a group. Inadvertently, the children centered on Max: his tone of voice, his accent, and his use of psychological jargon. When he attempted to “wrap up” the group and close it, they wouldn’t stand for it and so he had to remain until they were ready to leave. Max was no match for those youngsters. He tried to intervene: Pupil:

Did you think we were mad at you?

Max:

You’re a wee bit bothered now in case you might have hurt my feelings, which is very nice of you. But I think the point I was trying to make was that, to some extent, we all do this if we’re anxious or upset; we look for someone to blame. Like when you kick the cat when you’re in a bad mood. Don’t you do that?

Pupil:

Do you? [laughter from the group and from the audience] I wasn’t mad anyway. But if I had been mad, I wouldn’t get mad at you, so I don’t know why you’re saying these things.

Max:

Well?

Pupil:

They don’t make sense to me.

Max:

My feelings are that this would be a good place to stop and involve the audience.

And there he ran into trouble. The children would have none of it; they would end the discussion when they were good and ready. Max tried again. They ignored him. He was fast becoming fidgety, checking his watch every few minutes, shifting around in his chair, crossing and recrossing his legs. The meeting continued for

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another ten minutes and I felt that I had to rescue Max, so called it to a close myself. I asked him if he’d like to add anything in closing. He did. It seems to me that we did focus on behavior and we looked at making fun and so on, perhaps like someone said, of relieving tension. But it also gets you away from the subject and oftentimes from subjects that people don’t want to pursue. It’s encouraging to see that at your early age you’re looking at your behavior.

IN THE SPRING of 1964, I spent three months as full time consultant at the Institute of Government at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, to help them set up a transitional community for juvenile offenders. As with the school project, we hired former prisoners from California. In fact, Lee Pollard (who’d gone through the Chino project and was one of our first social therapists), became the director of this new one. Max came to visit this project while I was there following a scary experience in which someone broke into the arsenal at the Institute (which also trained law enforcement officers) and stole guns and ammunition. As the ex-offenders and I were living at quarters within the building, we became the prime suspects. Max, of course, was in his element. There was nothing like a crisis to inspire him and he proved to be invaluable as he used the situation to teach the university staff about social learning and therapeutic communities. The professional staff still had their doubts, even when it became known that we were all together at a party away from the Institute the night the burglary occurred. Max’s use of the incident showed them vividly some of the resistance facing the young offenders from their own project. And so in the end, we were not only vindicated but taken more seriously after they caught the burglars. Max had found a rare opportunity to use a real catastrophe for teaching and changing attitudes. Max and I left town together. On a side trip we visited Monticello. As we paused to rest in a gazebo on Jefferson’s lawn,

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we were finally able to breathe a sigh of relief and even giggle over the escapade. At this distance, it seemed more like a fantasy than the harrowing experience we’d just been through. I WAS INVITED to San Francisco State University in the fall of 1966, for a semester as a visiting lecturer in the sociology and psychology departments. There, I had the opportunity to teach about the therapeutic community in prisons. I also worked with a group of students who had been admitted experimentally for their freshman year (since they didn’t meet the formal academic entrance requirements). Many were residents of urban black ghetto areas and, if not actively involved in criminal activities, were highly acquainted with them. At the end of the semester, Drs Gibbons and Freedman, the respective chairmen, asked me to remain for the year and subsequently for the following year. In the spring of 1968, I was anticipating one of Max’s annual consulting visits. This was the time of the student uprisings worldwide and San Francisco State was one of the universities at the forefront of the US movement. In France, the “events of May” were raging in the streets. The demonstrations against the Vietnam War were spreading. It looked like Europe was coming apart at the seams. The student movements took me by surprise. For five years I’d been totally immersed in the prison projects and, I’m sorry to say, had not kept fully abreast with the student turmoil over the country, let alone the world. Even though I’d traveled around consulting and visiting projects, my focus was narrowed to therapeutic communities. I’d had little contact with protest or advocacy groups. In fact, I’d isolated myself from political action altogether because, at that time, politics per se didn’t much interest me. The campus continued to become the focus of student activities which extended to Berkeley and, later, to Stanford. Max’s next arrival coincided with the greatest turmoil yet on campus. Students were attempting to put their new social awareness into action. Max had recently been lecturing at Columbia during its own time of upheaval, and he’d been struck by the professors’

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reluctance to use the situation as a living learning experience. In the rich matrix of change, they preferred to stick by the security of their lectures and textbooks. Now, striking students had immobilized our campus and Max wanted to see for himself how we were coping. The president, the late Dr John Summerskill (a clinical psychologist), had attempted to meet student demands head on. He’d allowed them to organize an experimental “open” university and a black studies department (one of the first in the country). Each day he made himself available to anyone who wanted to speak to him. Noons, you could find him outside the student union on the speaker’s platform discussing the Vietnam War, the politics of education, and other concerns of the day, answering any question or addressing any issue that the students posed. But it was not enough. Some students pressed further and staged sit-ins outside his office; at one point, they even occupied it. It was in the middle of this ferment that Max visited. In fact, on the day I’d arranged for him to meet with the president, we had to go through picket lines to get inside Dr Summerskill’s office. All during the discussion, there were noisy protests just outside the door. I was impressed at how easily and quickly Max established a relationship with the beleaguered president and won over his confidence. Max was soon supporting his actions and offering suggestions. Dr Summerskill later wrote, [N]one of us had the wisdom and the guts to solve the human problems of race and war which have torn up campuses across America… If you are an educator you must say what you believe is true, whether that means acknowledging one’s own ignorance, reversing a stand, or rectifying an error. That is what education is about.12

Later in the afternoon, Max himself met with some 100 students who surrounded him as they sat on the floor in the student lounge where he carried out an amazing three-hour discussion. He was totally engaged and I had never before seen him attend a meeting

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for that length of time without trying to end it. He tried to use the current strife as a touchstone to teach about conflict resolution and the importance of open communication. Max loved these times. There were possibilities now never dreamed of a decade earlier. The upcoming generation was daring and radical—risk-takers. Large-scale change could take place not merely in mental hospitals and prisons, but throughout society as a whole. There was no telling where it all would end. At the same time, our relationship was changing too. I was no longer working strictly within the prescribed parameters of the therapeutic community; granted, it was always changing. But if I say that I found it too limiting a concept, I would have to add that my whole education up to that point reflected this limitation. It now seemed to me that most of what I had ever learned and believed in seemed inadequate to the task at hand. I even had doubts about the university (which then was one of the most liberal in the US). Through the students, I’d become more politically conscious: I now believed there must be deeper social change if conditions themselves were to improve. Like many sociologists, I saw mental illness, crime, and delinquency also as symptoms of a more distressing malaise in society. But where Max saw a role for the therapeutic community concept, I had doubts that many of its practices were adequate to the task of changing political frameworks. In short, we were beginning to drift apart—not so much in ideology, but more in practice. Max had remained within the system to use the position that his life and work had prepared him for. Most recently, he’d concentrated on one mental hospital, slowly changing it from within—from on top. I had given up in that respect (as far as prisons were concerned). I was now more interested not only in prevention but in young people: the students had shown me the great creative potentials they had and how they needed the right opportunities—what Max would call the proper structure in which to grow and develop. So, in reality, we were not poles apart but working in different areas and with different means. I was living in the Haight Ashbury area at the time and Max wanted to see what was going on there. I took him to visit places

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where he could meet some of the young people and even to a “happening,” one Sunday in Golden Gate Park. Although he felt uneasy at times and was reluctant to get involved, nevertheless he did try to experience some of the momentum. He found the hippy movement enticing and we talked for hours on its implications. He and Aldous Huxley had discussed the latter’s experiences with psychedelics and other consciousness-expanding substances. Max first met him, I believe, during a meeting at Berkeley and later when he was giving a lecture in Los Angeles (someone had told Max that he was in the audience). Whilst Max was at Salem, Aldous Huxley spent a few days with him as he wanted to see a therapeutic community for himself. But Max viewed the experimentation with drugs in Haight Ashbury primarily as a waste of human potential. It was little more than joy-riding, a carnival of the unconscious. Whereas Huxley had used drugs to probe the deeper reaches of the mind, the hippies were using drugs to escape. And there was a great difference between the two experiments, even if the means were the same; also, without a supporting structure, the results of casual drug use were often tragic. Needless to say, in some respects Max was leery of the movement’s outcome. And the prevailing practice of “doing your own thing” was terribly autocratic and frequently infringed on the rights of others. I felt the need myself to take a “sabbatical.” The prolonged war in Vietnam was very distressing to me. I discussed my heightening despondency with Max when he visited in the spring of 1968 and he suggested I come and spend a year with him at Dingleton. We could work together. I’d have to find my own role, of course. I wasn’t much concerned, however, since I’d been doing that pursuit most of my life. And the money wasn’t great—as head of the hospital, Max’s salary was about the equivalent to that of an intern in the US. But I needed rest rather than money. Still, the financial loss would be great: I owned a home in southern California, cherished mementos from my two years in Japan, plus quantities of books and papers. I couldn’t very well ship them to Scotland. In spite of these considerations, however, I welcomed the chance to escape for a while. It was only years later that I realized the extent of my “burnout.”

chapter three

PAINFUL COMMUNICATION A leader has many roles to play depending on the circumstances: however, by seeking to please too much the leader may block the process of change or growth in the group. A leader must at times risk being disliked or being unpopular, knowing that growth is often a painful process. Dingleton’s story will be judged as a success by some and and as an attack on the establishment and the traditional hierarchical hospital system by others.

Maxwell Jones, Physician Superintendent, Dingleton Hospital 1962–1969

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OW THAT I was on my way to Europe, I wondered what it would be like living there. I hadn’t been back since my first visit to Max (1956). I’d had a brief glimpse recently of European culture during one of Max’s visits, when he took me along to have lunch with Jurgen Ruesch and his wife in their San Francisco garden. The geniality of the company was deceptive because it was based on a formality whose grace and calm seemed so natural as to be spontaneous. Yet I knew Max well enough to spot the telltale signs of British noblesse oblige. And although they never made me in any way feel a bumpkin, I was aware of my ignorance of social etiquette. The memory of that lunch now ran through my mind as I prepared to leave. “Well, at least the language is the same,” I consoled myself. I’d arranged with Max to arrive sometime in October as I wanted to take a month off before beginning to work with him. I didn’t consider my self to be a workaholic, but I realized that over the past ten years, I’d hardly taken a day off—let alone gone on vacation. I was too busy enjoying my pursuits to think about such things. Consulting had taken me to interesting places from time to time and I’d met lots of wonderful people. But my work largely defined my life—and my identity. I wanted to break out of the mould. To help me deal with the changes I was undergoing and to give me some perspective on myself, I decided to keep a journal—a practice I have continued. San Francisco. September 10, 1968. Last night in the US for a while. Mixed feelings. Saying goodbye to students the hardest. Am I abandoning them? Hadn’t thought in such terms before; only considered my own well-being. Steve came by for a few final words. He received notice from the draft board: “Their

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gracious invitation to kill.” He’s decided to “visit our neighbors up north for a while.” Such euphemisms and the ironic tone of voice from one so young exacerbates my own depression. So young to have to deal with such moral dilemmas: my nation or my soul. Such choices undermine the nation’s character. If I see the future in Steve’s face—and I think I do—am left with the question whose answer I dread: What are we doing to our younger generations? At 1:00 AM airport crowded with young people waiting for charter flights; they all seemed delayed. Even so, a festival mood reigned. Guitars and patched knapsacks; bright clothes, beads and beards. Now and then, the whiff of marijuana. Many students waiting for the same flight to London. Can’t help wondering if, like Steve, some are leaving because of the draft. No doubt they are. What will happen to them? Will they be able to return without suffering the wrath of Uncle Sam? This damn senseless war! In Flight to London, September 11, 1968. Somewhere over Western Canada. First light of sunrise gleams on the edge of the wings. Most passengers napping. From the rear comes the muted twang of a guitar in counterpoint to the drone of the engines.

IT WAS MORE romantic than nostalgic, that month’s vacation. In my adolescence, I’d watched Gene Kelly, the proverbial “American in Paris,” dance over the cobblestones, live in a garret, and sing his way through a bohemian life. He’d turned Place de la Concorde into his personal stage. More recently, I’d been following the student demonstrations and had read Sartre’s interview with Daniel Cohn-Bendit —an attempted dialogue that disappointed me because the great philosopher and radical student leader seemed at intellectual cross purposes. Sartre couldn’t understand what the students were saying.13 Nevertheless, I was thrilled about the prospect of seeing this city of cities. And so, on arrival in London, I immediately set off for France.

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The Paris I imagined was as much a state of mind as it was a place of cafés, artists, and intellectuals. I was determined to experience the life of an ex-patriot à la Hemingway. With A Movable Feast as tour guide and a new beret, I set out from my hotel in Place de la République to trace the steps of the famous. But, at every turn, reality denied me my fantasy. I looked up the “sawmill” where Hemingway had lived only to find that it had been replaced by a modern apartment building. Many of the cafés still existed, of course, the Flore, and the like, but tourists now inundated them and they had become, consequently, expensive. There were cafés in the Latin Quarter and Place de la Contrescarpe that were more “working class,” and there I found a few students who had participated in the events of the previous May. The radicals I’d hoped to see along the streets were nowhere to be found: it was still vacation time and another few weeks would pass before the Latin Quarter would take on its hectic atmosphere again. Then I journeyed to the south of France for the rest of the month. I phoned Max when I returned to London to tell him I was ready to go to work. He was delighted: “Come as soon as you can, your room is ready.” On his advice, I broke my journey with an overnight stay in York. The city, he said, would prepare me for British culture. Perhaps after the free and easy life in Provence, even Paris would have seemed a bit confining; but the narrow twelfth-century streets of York were somber and containing. The ale too, after the bright southern wine, was as bitter and dark as the northern climate. And the young people I talked to in pubs weren’t much concerned about the political events of the day. In spite of all these negative qualities, York remains fondly in my memory though now I can give no reason why. My stay at Dingleton got off to a good start. The day after I arrived Max asked if I’d like to accompany him in the evening to Cockburn’s Path, a tiny village on the Scottish coast where he had an invitation to speak about the hospital. It would be an opportunity for me both to see some aspect of the local culture and get a glimpse of the social and community psychiatry he was practicing. There, in the little church, Max first had to judge cakes and pies the ladies had made before he could talk. He punctuated his remarks with some restrained role-playing and then we had

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refreshments. Although there were many opportunities similar to the “cherries” incident, I noticed that Max was more reserved than before. But then he was on home ground and these people were his constituents. His caution grew out of experience, of course. And as I came to know the area and the people better, I understood what he meant when he said I must learn to use “the system.” The general climate of the hospital and of Melrose, the nearby village, was restrictive; attitudes in northern places can be as harsh as the weather. Max also warned me about various people with whom I would have close contact, and urged caution in moving too swiftly or attempting to make changes before the staff and patients were ready. In spite of this warning, I was eager to get going. At first, Max and I resumed our discussions from the previous spring. He relaxed in our private conversations; he shed the mask of the administrator and the Max who emerged was as charming, witty, and intellectually keen as ever. But something was different. His own reserve never quite left him, even if he didn’t outright mention it. Perhaps he could never completely abandon the role of administrator; perhaps some of its after-image remained enough on his shoulders so that it pulled him down to “reality” whenever his flights of fancy took him too far. For this reason, I suspect, he resented, as much as reveled, in his privileged position. Max always talked about the importance of “having sanctions from above” if you wanted to run a successful therapeutic community. I’d heard the accounts of his many attempts to hustle and cajole—if not outright manipulate—his immediate superior while at Henderson to get his necessary wants. Now he was in that position. But rather than feeling free, he was more aware of his limitations, a feeling which held him back. If he tended towards being overly cautious, he still didn’t let it inhibit him. His goal was to make the entire hospital (that had four hundred patients and a hundred staff) into a therapeutic community and eventually convert it into a self-supporting village for the elderly. To him at that point, a therapeutic community meant “that the people involved have an opportunity to interact, listen, learn, plan, evolve and grow in a way that reflects their own individual and collective capability and potential.” Max believed

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that motivated people made an institution work. He later wrote (1982) that he arrived “…with a clear idea of what I wanted to do…I wanted to test out these principles in a suitable setting and Dingleton seemed to offer an ideal opportunity.” His experiences at San Mateo and at Oregon had convinced him of the importance of decentralizing the staff into mental health teams which he had done soon after his arrival in Scotland. Now the teams were working in three counties. Democracy had come into the teams to an extent I’d not seen anywhere. Composed of doctors, nurses, social workers, social therapists, and so on, each team “elected” the person it thought most competent as the team leader regardless of rank in the medical hierarchy. The team I was on had elected the social worker to lead it and the third group had a male nurse. Max had assigned himself to one team and they had elected him their leader. He was subsequently “sacked” from the team, however, because he was spending so much time abroad that they couldn’t depend on him. Outwardly, he was disappointed, but delighted that democracy had come so far. Max had enticed people of various backgrounds and nationalities to come for a year or so at low wages. Many had made personal sacrifices to work with him. Despite the shortage of money, the bleak weather, and the heavy food, there was an air of excitement in the place. And the mixture of foreigners and locals was often a lesson in international diplomacy. The arrival of visitors, some well-known, frequently broke the daily routine. Max took every opportunity on his trips abroad to invite people to Melrose; some had read his papers or heard him speak. And while a famous face might be a diversion, it was not always welcome, particularly when a crisis was brewing. He had made a noble effort to enlighten the staff and get them to think beyond the narrow boundaries of their professional lives. He had introduced a seminar (held one night each week) which focused on specific topics and became a forum for some of the many visitors who came. The locals didn’t always attend with regularity, except the “higher-ups” who were seeking outside information. The topics ranged from book reviews to creativity.

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After the discussion, some of the group would adjourn to the local pub for more lively conversations. One evening stands out quite memorably. Max had invited the well-known artist and textile designer, Bernat Klein, to give the seminar. In 1961, he’d taken over a closed local textile mill. He not only designed new forms in textiles but had discovered the importance of color in the human form, especially the eyes; color fell into six main groups. He believed that, by knowing your predominant eye color, you could create harmonies and minimize discords in your clothing as well as your surroundings. He brought along generous samples of his weaving that he donated to the hospital. Art, he believed, really had nothing to do with beauty ultimately, but was the expression of the artist—emotions, perspectives, and so on—and was not to be confused with fashion. He tried to show how all people are artists, good or bad, in the selection of colours they surround themselves with. I asked him if he believed that children could be trained to be more aware and responsive to his notions about color and begin to design their own environments accordingly, rather than being so influenced by fashion. “Children,” he responded, “are not burdened by their culture.” He continued that children are uninhibited and have free choice—until they come in contact with schools. He spoke of developing “color literacy” in which children would not be “taught” about color, but rather, at first, merely be exposed to color generally and to become aware of color in their daily life. I was very excited about his implications in regards to education more generally, and so was Max. But how to apply his ideas? Max closed the evening seminar with the remark that the artist had literally brought color into the room. Later, I did have a private giggle when Max showed up in a suit he’d had tailor-made from cloth that Bernat Klein had chosen for him to complement his eye colors!14 Two other evenings come to mind. Max was absorbed with the relevance of object relations theory and incorporation, promulgated no doubt by his former analyst Melanie Klein. He saw evidence in so many instances and used to point it out in meetings but it went over the heads of most of us. We’d recently had a seminar on “social distance” following some incidents with the

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social therapists. Whether by design or chance, Heinz Wolff was coming from London to visit. Max wanted me to get to know him because of his work in psychoanalytic group therapy and so asked me if I’d go to Edinburgh and fetch him, rather than sending an official car, and then take him back. We would have an hour each way together. Dr Wolff was indeed helpful both in clarifying the concept of social distance and in his elucidations of psychoanalytic applications to groups. On another occasion, Max brought his long-time colleague, Jock Sutherland, to visit and give an evening seminar on object relations theory. Dr Sutherland had recently retired from the Tavistock Clinic and returned to his native Edinburgh where he was lecturing at Max’s alma mater. MAX LIVED IN Kilorn, a lovely old graystone on a hill overlooking the hospital. Kerstin, his wife, had decorated it in modern Scandinavian furniture and with bright coloured fabrics in contrast to the white painted floors, it was at once spacious and warm. Max’s position in the community made him equivalent of a local lord. The hospital was the major source of employment in the village; many staff were third-generation employees. Thus his word carried considerable authority. It never seemed to bother him that so many people had placed him on a pedestal. Not that he took it for granted or in any way used his position to gain favors, as others might have done. Despite Max’s Scottish heritage, the villagers viewed him essentially as an outsider. Had he pretended to be one of them, I realize now, he would have earned their contempt rather than their friendship. He had changed many of the fundamentals in the hospital, such as prolonged confinement of patients. In the community, he was resettling patients who had been hospitalized for a long time, some of them for most of their lives. Many of the villagers who worked at the hospital had their powers drastically cut and were forced to learn new ways of working. For one thing, they didn’t have the security of automatic confinement at their disposal any longer; instead, they had to educate families as well as

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family doctors and constables in the ways of dealing with mental illness at home. And as far as the more basic social and cultural values of the community were concerned, Max came to symbolize the strangeness of the outside world. He was of the same land—but his education in Edinburgh, his marriage to a young Swede and his association with America made him, in the eyes of the villagers, something of a subversive in this cradle of Protestant conservatism. To make matters more suspect, he’d brought people from other cultures and races to work with him, people with foreign accents and different perspectives on life. The publican tartly referred to the presence of Africans, Japanese, and Dutch at the hospital as “the local United Nations.” One incident in particular caused somewhat of a stir in the hospital and more than a minor crisis for the administration. At Max’s invitation, an unmarried couple from the US had arrived and were looking for a house in the village to use during their stay. Looking back, it seemed the most natural thing in the world, but at the time it threatened to cause a local scandal. The reason was simple, the publican argued. Living together “in sin” not only went against all sense of decency, it just wasn’t done—end of discussion! Despite the hubbub, the couple went ahead with their plans. They found a cottage in the village and settled down. The “problem” seemed to lie more in the anticipation of villagers’ reactions than in reality. Although he had inherited most of the staff from the village, Max had introduced a democratic form of administration. He was the authority to consult in time of crisis but he was not the “lord.” Particularly the Swedes and the Dutch had grown up in cultures much freer than here. Consequently, their idea of a democratic institution was perhaps even more open than Max envisioned. The old taboos (such as close relationships with patients) were often stretched to the breaking point. Had Max laid down the law, I’m not sure they would have heeded him. But if the villagers were suspicious of this new way of doing things, the patients for a long time were outright confused. Many had spent most of their lives in the hospital. Their “treatment” had ranged from drugs to leucotomies. Some, like Martha, had come

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to view the hospital as “home” and simply refused to leave. She’d originally been committed during World War II for having an illegitimate child by a “Yank.” It was hard to believe that a civilized country—for many Americans, the cradle of Western civilization—should resort to such extreme measures in dealing with something so simple and natural. As mentor, employer, confessor, healer, Max was all things to all these 500 people. The responsibility was certainly great and it kept him busy most of his waking hours. It was not at all like Henderson, as I’d hoped, where we spent time alone in serious discussion in the evenings. I remembered how he continued to make time for those meetings in the past, at Stanford, at Salem. Here, he arrived each day at 6 o’clock, went over the mail and worked on administrative matters. True, from 7 to 8, he was available to see any patient or staff member privately, but people were always waiting. When Cathy Wilson, his secretary, arrived at 8, he dictated letters for half an hour until his two top administrators arrived to meet with him. Together, they made up the “holy trinity.” Then precisely at 9 o’clock, the SSC (Senior Staff Council) assembled. And the remainder of his day was fully scheduled. Max seemed much busier than he needed to be: he had a competent enough staff. But, as he would have pointed out, many were still efficacious in the old ways of running things; in Max’s administration, they were yet foundering. So he had to oversee each detail of the hospital which suited his need for active participation at every level. On the whole, he was inaccessible individually throughout the day. Of course, I saw him in various meetings or passed him in the hallway. But we were rarely alone. The few times he did ask me to his home in the evenings, he also included other staff or visitors. These were mainly social events, so a quiet conversation wasn’t likely. Being at Melrose was a totally different experience with Max and a frustrating one at that. Looking back, I’d have to say that I saw much more of him on his annual visits than when I was working for him. There was another disappointment. For some time we’d talked about writing a book together and Max had suggested my

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stay at Dingleton would be the perfect opportunity to pool our resources. But whenever I broached the subject, Max complained that he was just too busy. First he said, after the holidays and then he was occupied with preparing a paper for an upcoming meeting on the Continent. Those few Sunday mornings I went on outings with his family (whilst he worked), I’d hoped to spend some time with him afterwards but he always seemed to have plans for the remainder of the day. To sum it all up, I was disappointed in the way things had turned out. Not having the access to Max that I’d anticipated left me somewhat at a loose end. He’d assured me in California that I’d be able to define my own job, which sounded ideal. In reality, it was exasperating. My position as “activities organizer” was little more than a title. I was assigned to one of the teams which meant about half my time was spent in the community; the other half I spent in a ward that housed a mixture of long-term patients and “management problems,” a benign term for “troublemakers.” I was not very enthusiastic about training recalcitrant staff. I’d done enough of that activity over the years. I was especially irritated by some of the “experts” who’d come to Dingleton only wanting the glow of Max’s reputation while continuing to practice their orthodoxy. Real change was something they weren’t interested in—at least for themselves. Even though Max maintained that it took a year to become absorbed into the atmosphere, understand it, and make a contribution, some just never caught on. There was an American physician on the staff but our philosophies in treatment couldn’t have been more different. In time of crisis the doctor prescribed medications rather than using the situation on the ward as a living learning experience. His viewpoint was the typically “white coat” when it came to the patients: he managed them; they were his responsibility, his charges. Only afterwards could we talk about problems. An eager young psychologist from the US was also there at the time, fresh out of college and bursting with ideas (such as operant conditioning) ready to put what he’d learned into practice. He wanted to put the patients, especially those who were

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“institutionalized,” on a token economy, and so on. Max seemed interested in this approach. I was still very pained by the war in Vietnam and by the violence that had taken the best of our country in recent years. The sound of the American accent above the soft Scottish burr symbolized for me the notion of American domination. In the wards, in the cafeteria, the harsh, flat vowels and consonants were to me like an announcement over a loudspeaker turned up too high: my ears were left ringing. My own voice happened to be rather low and people often took me to be Canadian—a mistake I didn’t often correct. I avoided my fellow Americans as much as possible in and out of the hospital; though looking back, in reality, perhaps I was trying to avoid my own conscience. Had I not been so absorbed in my own agenda, I would have been able to see why Max seemed to have changed so much. Crises at the hospital were a daily event both for patients and staff. The mixture of liberal foreigners and curious young people from the village was always potentially explosive, sex and drugs being the common meeting ground. Now that he was the authority figure, Max had to deal with the fallout from the various confrontations between the two groups, soothe irate villagers, assure the local authorities that everything was under control, and so on. When a housekeeper found a young male nurse (who lived in the community) in bed with one of the Danish social therapists, Max took this information to the next meeting of the social therapists hoping that they would take appropriate action. But apparently the affair had quietly been going on for some time and the younger staff knew all about it. Indeed, they very much approved. The group was indifferent to Max’s concern; they maintained that their personal lives were their own business. Max was quite upset, and even annoyed, not so much by the incident itself, but because word of it might get out into the village and be misinterpreted. Undoubtedly, the investigations of his stewardship at Henderson still haunted him and his concern may well have been justified. He did talk to the young woman in private after the meeting, a procedure unusual for Max; and the

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young man was asked to appear before the “holy trinity” at their 08:30 meeting the next day. But if Max thought the matter was closed, he was surprised at the next SSC. The young social therapist took his concern as a challenge. She responded by demanding that the administration give young members of the staff greater freedom in their private lives. The senior members for the most part took the matter lightly, one going so far as to remark that the only mistake the couple made was getting caught. Then someone wondered facetiously if Max was jealous? And so the whole incident was put behind until a few days later when the young man was back in the female quarters taking a bath. We (the social and work therapists) discussed the situation in a seminar with Joy Tuxford. She pointed out that there were two forces operating simultaneously in the hospital: the official and “unofficial” structures. The situation under discussion belonged to the latter: there was behavior which violated the norms but officials winked at it. I wasn’t under any illusion that Dingleton was perfect, but I was disappointed to find that many of the old-timers had developed two sets of standards. They voiced many of the principles that Max had promulgated, but, in reality, the changes were greater than some of them could, or were willing to, carry out. They used the so-called structure of the hospital when it was to their advantage and slighted it at other times. It was difficult, of course, for Max, as he proclaimed an open system and strove constantly to reveal this undercurrent. I was perplexed whenever I heard the phrase “you’re being destructive” used in the meetings because this tactic tried to silence opposition and to voice the prevailing norms of the community. When I finally managed to corner Max to talk about some of the staff’s dual attitudes, he simply reiterated that everyone had to protect the image of the hospital. I could hardly believe my ears! Here was the man I had known to take risks, who seemed to enjoy shaking up people, whose very unorthodoxy was his strength—and yet he could be concerned, and even personally offended, by this simple instance of passion between two young people. Also, I wondered if something of his Scottish puritanism wasn’t beginning to affect him.

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It wasn’t much longer before there was another crisis in the works. There was a charge of pot smoking in staff quarters. This time, it was a much more serious matter and Max was right in being concerned both for his own sake and that of the social therapist who had furnished the pot: there was a distinct threat of the authorities prosecuting and deporting her. A call from the local constable only served to heighten our fears. But some of the senior staff took a liberal position: the whole matter would blow off in no time. I was worried enough to drive to a pay station in the nearest town and telephone a contact in London to find out what the legal consequences were. I didn’t dare to use the hospital phone because the local operators, I’d been informed, listened in on calls and I didn’t want to risk further damage in an already delicate situation. Max had enough influence with the local authorities to prevent filing of charges. But then the “internal police force” (made up of senior staff) took over the situation and asked the social therapist not only to leave Dingleton, but to voluntarily return to her own country. At the same time, two other social therapists left abruptly: they asked one close friend of the therapist (who continued to protest the action) to leave; and a young male social therapist also left in sympathy. I believe they all went to London where they could have more freedom. It was a dark time at the hospital and it left its mark on Max as the administrator. For one thing, I began to notice how annoyed he became when staff were late for meetings. He’d always liked punctuality and never suffered latecomers well but now he made a point of chiding them for such lapses. Coming late to meetings disrupted the proceedings: they had to repeat important points then re-establish the “flow”; in fact, it could be an entirely different meeting by virtue of the latecomer’s presence. It was also a matter of professionalism and simply good manners. Again, I wouldn’t say he was wrong in his attitude—merely I was uncomfortable with his method of handling the situation. There was an element of manipulation in it that made me uneasy. I had seen how easily Max could get his way. He himself was keenly aware of the seductive power of authority and tried to

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neutralize that power so that he might not abuse it. But if he really wanted something, he usually got his way. His methods were all the more effective for their simplicity: charm and silence. When, at the SSC, he asked for the “fifty-minute” hour throughout the hospital, no one objected. His attention span was intense and often just about that long—he’d been leaving meetings a few minutes early to have time for the next. So the new arrangements seemed a good idea. But on the following Friday, the case conference was still in session at three o’clock. I’d watched 2:50 come and go and wondered when Max was going to end the meeting. After all, he was the one who’d wanted time between meetings and there was another due to start on the hour. At 2:55 the meeting seemed far from over. When the hour struck, I left to attend another meeting while Max remained behind. Fifteen minutes later, he arrived with some of the other doctors and interrupted the proceedings with a lengthy apology: it seemed they had an important decision to make, emanating from the case conference, that concerned the whole hospital. This inconsistency between his demand for punctuality and his own behavior troubled me because of its message to the staff. It was a classic example of what Bill Caudill found in his study of the social structure of hospitals: doctors used “emergencies” to get their way or excuse their behavior; everyone else was subject to the rules. I was furious because Max had interrupted the meeting unnecessarily. Yet had I confronted him, he would no doubt have said that I was “being destructive.” Two weeks after he had instituted the fifty-minute hour, Max came to the social therapists’ seminar and raised some other issue of staff behavior and how the villagers might view it. I can’t recall exactly what the issue was but, to my surprise, he requested extending the seminar for another hour to go further into this matter. It was Friday and I had another meeting to attend but when I asked to be excused, Max became annoyed. I explained there was a critical situation on the ward: a new patient leader, due to job pressure, had left the hospital, leaving unsettled conditions which the patients and staff needed to settle.

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“Isn’t this one time Dennie could be a little flexible?” Max asked the group. Flexible? Yes I could be flexible—under different circumstances. In this case, however, I could not. I’d given my word and I thought it important to be there for the patients who’d had such a disturbing week. The loss of their leader was no small matter and I thought Max’s reaction not only unreasonable but insensitive. I thought his request for the hour’s extension was more to handle his own anxiety than to benefit the social therapists. Besides, the matter could have waited until next week. At any rate, I left the meeting, knowing that Max would be peeved at me. Reg Elliott, one of the assistant directors of nursing, said I was seeing the hospital at an unfortunate time: “We’ve reached an all-time low in decision-making.” As if to illustrate the point, David Anderson (then the current chairman of the SSC) found that he sometimes agreed with decisions made in the SSC only to disagree with them entirely upon reflection; but since the group made decisions by consensus, he had to support and defend them regardless of his own feelings. I should not have been surprised. It was so obvious an example of how the staff in a therapeutic community go through many of the same ups and downs as the patients. The staff were reaching the point of disintegration, the oscillations that Robert Rapoport had come across in his study of Henderson. “By this,” he wrote, “we mean the process of fluctuation in the state of social organization between the two poles of perfect equilibrium and disintegration.” He observed a four-stage “cyclical process” occurring both within individuals and the groups, as well as the community itself, wherein there are periods of enthusiasm, constructive activity, followed by conflict and destruction; then a new reorganizing phase emerges “as reparative forces come into play.”15 I had seen this cycle of events occur time and again in the three therapeutic communities I had worked in. And now this fluctuation at Dingleton was nearing a crisis point for a number of reasons, chief among them, Max’s impending departure nobody was yet discussing openly.

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When I asked Max to discuss his ideas and perhaps write them up, he illustrated them with an incident that had occurred on the ward on which I was working, and he later summarized the situation by pointing out the effects of my own behavior: He [Dennie] is undoubtedly having a profound effect on the ward and arousing a tremendous amount of enthusiasm and optimism amongst patients. The danger is, I think, that Dennie does tend to become the good internalized object and I think he should try to make himself more familiar with the concepts of object relationships, incorporated in Melanie Klein’s ideas. He offers himself to schizophrenic patients as the gratifying internalized father. By activating this excitatory part of the individual schizophrenic ego, he forces the staff to appear as being destructive and punitive. Thus, within the schizophrenic’s ego, there can be quite a difference between the introjected objects which are represented by the id and superego (if one wants to use Freudian jargon).

This summary was all well and good, but I was still not sure how he was using such terms as “introjected objects,” and so on. Jargon, particularly professional jargon, made me suspicious. I thought of the doggerel: “What is being said/ And what is being read/ Leads you to think/ It’s all in the head.” Nonsense, of course, but to me it made sense. I knew that Max wasn’t talking nonsense; he had to use the terms available to him. In private conversation, when he was being spontaneous, his vocabulary was free of psychiatric lingo, his references were intimate and human, his thinking sustained and, at times, extraordinary—almost frugal in its complexity. Yet I was never lost, never felt out of my depth. Those terms with psychiatric explanations he now used were shortcuts through difficult areas: generalized principles used with the force of a law, like that of gravity. I should have realized that Max was in a hurry to make as many changes as possible whilst he could; and that he, too, was under pressure to “toe the line.” His use of technical terms was also a way of seeding the minds of the staff, hoping to inspire them to think in new ways. Being an administrator or being an educator are both difficult tasks; being both at once would seem to tax anyone’s

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capacity. But this dual role is what Max was—what he had to be—at Dingleton. And being in so complex a position, I should have realized, would, at critical times, distance him from his friends and colleagues. One of the meetings that I looked forward to the most was for the young work and activity therapists: a weekly seminar in addition to our sensitivity groups. Although I was twice their ages, they took me into their group as one of them primarily since I had a similar job. I think that they also looked upon me as an approachable elder because I had had a considerable amount of experience in several settings, most recently in the university. Most of the young people were potential students. There were about a dozen at the time, more than half coming from other countries. Sometimes, we invited visitors to come to the seminar and share their experiences with us. At other times, staff members came on their own. In January 1969, Michael and Pat Howard came to visit Max and Joy Tuxford, and to see the hospital. I had not met them previously, but Max often referred to Pat Tait (her maiden name) as the “first social therapist.” She’d been with him at Mill Hill, Dartford, and during the early days at Henderson. I had met Joy and gotten to know her during my first visit to Henderson and as a consultant at Chino. I thought it would be especially rewarding and invigorating to have Max, Pat, and Joy give us some special seminars to recount their early experiences. At least for me, the seminars turned out to be one of the highlights of my stay at Dingleton. I felt rather in awe, or in wonder—what a great gift to be privileged to hear these personal accounts of the roots of a whole new era in helping people. In excerpts from these seminars, Max related the development of his first therapeutic community at Mill Hill for soldiers and how his procedures originated and evolved: Max:

They were real people and they had enormous latent energy but they all had the same cardiac condition—left chest pain, breathlessness, palpitations, giddiness, and fainting. We studied their rapid, shallow breathing by the range of diaphragmatic

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movements on the x-ray screen. (We were screening people’s chest movements when the bombs were dropping and we could see the actual movements and put in a mark to measure the constriction.) We studied blood chemistry. Using a bicycle ergometer, we found that the soldiers used up more oxygen in exercise than they should. Their rapid, shallow breathing was associated with diminished diaphragmatic movement, which in turn, was related to tension of the chest muscles, causing pain over the heart. He then described how he set up a series of lectures for the 100 soldiers on the anatomy and physiology of their conditions; how these lectures developed into a question and answer form with those patients who’d been there the longest taking over the leadership, and finally became community meetings. Max:

As the mystery was taken out of their condition and they better understood the functioning of their bodies, the soldiers became more relaxed and began to talk about the conditions that were contributing to their stress. And then about their concerns for the future: What did people think about them no longer being in the War? How would they be seen by their families and friends when they returned home? Questions like these. And the amazing thing was that they were now able to talk openly about these intimate matters even in a large group of 100. Through these candid discussions, the unit took on a more personal nature—the discussions spilled over onto the wards, and the men wanted to talk in smaller groups with the nursing staff. They began to relate to one another on a more human level. The unit was becoming a “community” of sorts. Each ward of 50 had its own democratic organization with daily

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community meetings. They’d look at what was happening. There was a large meeting room which held 100 men for the classes. Due to the shortage of medical personnel, Max had enlisted young women as his key staff who had been conscripted into military service. Max:

You see, they were the people who made it possible because they weren’t acculturated to the medical profession; they wanted to learn. So we developed a new concept of the role of the “social therapist.” I remember being almost lynched by the sisters outside the superintendent’s office because they were not going to put up with this new-fangled stuff—I thought they were going to physically attack me. This was at the height of change when the forces of change were terribly threatening: this was the beginning of the therapeutic community. We had a great man, Walter Maclay as the leader [Superintendent]. He believed in us and that we knew what were doing. It was with his sanction when as I said I was nearly lynched by these furious sisters, Dr Maclay came out of his office laughing and said, “Poor Max. Don’t destroy him!” That somehow cleared the air and this public sanction from above saved us. Positive high level sanctions are all important if you’re going to have a revolution! By the end of two years, the research had proved conclusively that the condition was not heart disease as such but a psychosomatic disorder. The psychological factors however, were inevitably different in each case. There was the extraordinary feeling of destiny; that fact of a hundred patients plus staff—very good

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staff—we all knew what we were doing could be a very important factor in British psychiatry. Max recounted how, at the close of the War, he moved further into social rehabilitation by having been given the task of forming a transitional treatment program for the most severely disturbed POWs [Prisoners-of-War]. He began by establishing a social structure similar to the one he had evolved at Mill Hill, including taking along some of his staff. Max:

We were given sanctions and we did have a thankless job. The government had seventeen resettlement civilian units scattered all over Britain for the POWs. We got the most severe of the whole hundred thousand and because we had a thankless job they really did give us a free hand.

Joy:

There was a kind of sanction to try to treat them as human beings; again it stems from it being a war. [Addresses the seminar group.] You find it a surprise that all these revolutionary things occurred then?

Social Therapist: Yes I do, because I’ve been trying to set up a democratic organization with recent ex-servicemen. Max:

These men had been cooped up so that discipline was an intolerable problem and so it was to hand it to them; they disciplined themselves or we’d never have gotten away with it. Drinking, you know was a temptation, it was very strong but by setting up this democratic system, it saved us. They took on responsibility. They had their own structure which they brought with them; they learned sociology the hard way. There was a careful study by Adam Curle and Eric Trist which is a classic really where they singled out fifty ex-POWs who went to the Oxford area and interviewed them. They found from the wives that

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these men were very much more sensitive about the roles they played: Would the wife have to do all the washing up? Could we both decorate the room together? New ideas about role-relationships. It was social learning from a POW camp—an asset which didn’t get much credence. A lot went on but the good ones learned a lot about living; it has some relevance to the present-day student riots. In a following seminar Max, Joy and Pat described some of the beginnings of the Social Rehabilitation Unit which became Henderson Hospital. Joy:

Well to me, of course, Henderson was terribly exciting and probably the most fun job I’ve ever had or am likely to have. It was exciting and rewarding and frustrating and I remember it as a hugger-mugger place where people were talking and hashing out problems all the time and I think like Pat and Max, things that happened at Henderson had their beginnings at Dartford and Mill Hill.

Max:

We’re talking about 1947.

Joy:

And when I went there, in 1948, the task in the Unit then was to try to rehabilitate the chronic unemployed. This was a time when there wasn’t enough people to fill jobs in the country and they wanted to enhance the labour force. They sent to the Unit the chronic unemployable. So it was a place for the down and outs—and they really were very down and out. In some ways, it—not having worked in a hospital before—reminded me of in part what I’d expected of a hospital. You could recognize the doctors, they still had things like stethoscopes and occasionally they wore white coats and they carried these things to take blood with. Staff were in uniforms and not known by

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their first names, but by their titles—nurses were addressed as nurse. There weren’t enough nurses so Max began to recruit people who weren’t nurses to work in hospital and this was—as I see it— a revolution, really. Max:

It was our good fortune really rather than planning. We had a request from a social work instructor from Norway who asked: “Would you take a student who hasn’t got a nursing training?” That’s how we got started. There was strong motivation and they didn’t have middle class consciousness—they didn’t care if you’d been to Eton. They were amazingly good because of their capacity to treat everyone alike and they had a good education. They didn’t know anything about nursing—didn’t give a damn about it—and we didn’t need nurses because these were psychopaths and we always had at least one nurse. We discovered they were going to have to find a role for themselves from the onset that would be much more appropriate than this preconceived idea of the nursing role. So they found a role which we eventually called the “Social Therapist.”

Joy:

And they wore this hideous type nurses’ uniform at the beginning which they discarded.

Max:

For a very pretty one, like an airline hostess!

Joy:

That Pat wore when she came back in the early 1950s. The other thing that was so important about social therapists—because they came from Norway—they had some difficulty with the language and they didn’t know their way around London. Because of this, they were forced to ask patients for help, so there was a very good egalitarian relationship from the very beginning with these social therapists and the

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patients—they were the staff who were with them most of the time. They helped each other with their problems. In the early phases, the staff acted out the patient’s difficulties on the stage in front of the patients and then the patients were asked to change anything and discuss it—this was first done at Mill Hill—but after the staff presentations, the patient would be asked to come up and play the part. I thought this was a very significant piece of projective technique because a young patient would take the place of doctor/leader, who’d been ranting and raging and hitting his wife. We were frightfully naïve and green and we never asked ourselves what effect we’d have with the patients if they saw us in these roles [laughter]. It was wonderful! Max:

We were beginning plays which were based on the themes that patients showed in the unit for cardiac neurosis and each ward took it in turn to present a play which might be presented directly with characters and props of some kind, right? Some forms might go all the way from one room to another so you might need a microphone. It was an interesting technique because it was like listening to a radio and was impersonal. From that we began to look at the whole question of how could we recreate the real situation so that people became a part of emotionally charged situations and empathize with what was going on. So that from individual case histories, which were usually masked at first, we moved on to things [skits] like the “Misfit Family”… Well somewhere between 1943 and 1946, the patients themselves were involved in social problems and we had, for instance, one family of the dominant mother and three daughters; one was a schizoid, one

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was delinquent, and the other was hysterical. Week after week these four characters performed, with the doctor playing the “normal” father. [Laughter.] This is where the “Misfit Family” was really a way of getting patients involved in social problems which were very familiar and kind of crystallized out in our concept of social learning, not that you don’t learn by listening—you learn by interacting—if you just listen you’re not being taught and you memorize. The community meetings became so alive—they became the psychodrama—they were humming! You’d walk in and be greeted with, “Who the bloody hell are you?” And you’re in, you can’t sneak out! “You look a bit odd; you like my being tall?” You’re a person from the minute you walk in. You really are entering a psychodrama where communication actually is free—fantastic! Dennie:

Max, was this a combination of your own progress in changing the structure, so you’d have more freedom and communication plus having psychopaths at Henderson, who would be more blunt?

Max:

Because the here-and-now became more important that the re-creation of the past—and now it was a group.

Joy:

I remember, and this is only my impression of it, [The 8:30 or community meeting] coming out of the “Grumbles Meetings”—that the Grumbles Meetings concentrated so long on food, draughts, and bad beds and uncomfortable toilets, and all the rest of the things—weeks on end the lavatories would be discussed and it was always the same. The other thing that went on was that each ward had its own meeting, so there was a feedback from the wards into the

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Grumbles Meetings and the realization that maybe we should spend more time looking at the here-and-now and so the Grumbles Meetings ceased to be just a gripe session and became a way of looking at the total structure. In some ways, I think that the follow-up had a little bit to do with this because one of the things that the patients who were followed-up said, without exception, when they were asked what it was that helped them to get better, everyone thought they’d say it was the ECT’s [electro-convulsive therapy], or the pills, or the discussions with the doctors or something, and they all said it was just being in the place. And so, self-consciously, I began to be more conscious of the effect the place would have on people. Max:

We didn’t use the jargon, “living learning” but it was a living learning situation—social learning essentially.

MY STAY AT Dingleton, nonetheless, was becoming increasingly difficult. Alongside the turn my relationship with Max had taken, there were aspects of the institution itself that I found increasingly annoying. I had long been concerned about the dual system for patients and staff in mental hospitals. Aside from the ideology of a “community”—albeit a therapeutic one—Dingleton seemed to have a long way to go in light of the fact that many patients and most of the staff had been there so long. Furthermore, the staff literally were their neighbors and so often knew the patients’ families intimately; some were even relatives. Yet, at the hospital, there was still that line drawn between patient and staff. What was worse, the patients accepted the situation (how could they do otherwise?) and acted accordingly: that is to say, they became passive, even servile. For their part, the staff talked about the need to extend their closeness to the patients. But in so many examples, this closeness was still superficial—at best, that of authority to subordinate. A

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relationship between equals in human terms—notwithstanding one is a care-giver and the other a patient—was not the way they perceived their “closeness.” Even when the context was social, the two groups still went their separate ways. When Max first arrived, he had turned the existing staff dining room into a staff meeting room, thereby leaving the staff without a place where they could retreat and dine by themselves. Since most of the staff ate their main meal at the hospital, they had to make other arrangements. To have both staff and patients share a common dining room seemed a good solution. Because the tradition of hierarchy was still strong, the staff, however, maintained a separate section of the dining room with its own serving counter. The staff also had different food, e.g., breakfast was made to order, while the patients had to take the standard menu. Not only did the staff have better utensils, glassware, and so on, but the separation was carried to absurd proportions: the two sections were cleaned with different detergents: government issue for the patient’s side; commercial detergent for the staff side. (The commercial detergent was supposed to be sweeter smelling—the government issue was so strong it fairly overwhelmed even the aroma of the food!)16 I got myself into hot water one day quite innocently when the cleaning group I belonged to invited me to join them for lunch. I asked several of the senior nurses, including the one who supervised the dining area, if it would be proper to accept. They pointed out that Max had eaten with the patients a few days after his arrival and they saw no objections. It wasn’t that simple at Dingleton, however. Reg Elliott saw me eating with the cleaning group and reported it to Max, who, in turn, brought it up in the SSC. I wouldn’t have minded if they had put it into context but, instead, Max implied that I was trying to forward integration faster than the staff were willing to move (which of course wasn’t true). I was furious that some of the senior staff viewed my act as defiant, even after my explanation. From that point on, I couldn’t bring myself to eat meals (which were a fringe benefit for low wages) in the dining room. The sight of patients on one side and staff on the other was too disturbing. In the corridor outside my room was a small “cooker.” So I bought food in the village, cooked

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it, and ate in my room. I didn’t bother to tell anyone but it wasn’t long before Max asked in the SSC why they didn’t see me in the dining room anymore. My explanation was brief and to the point; I was too annoyed about the whole affair to embark on a long discussion. One day shortly thereafter, I went to fix my lunch only to find the cooker gone. What had happened to it? The doctor in the room next to mine had given it to the ladies on a ward who were preparing to keep house for some long-term male patients living in a hostel outside the hospital. They needed to practice cooking, the doctor later explained. She had made the donation without consulting anyone. By this time, I was seriously considering leaving Dingleton, so got food in the local market and ate most of my meals in my room. NEW YEAR’S IS the one time of year when the Scots’ native reserve gives way. I had heard stories about the festivities and was looking forward to the experience. Over New Year’s, they open their doors, bring out their best malt whiskey, and feed you mountains of haggis and trifle. People go from house to house to share, gossip, and renew friendships, so that by the time the festivities are over everyone is hung over and content. The hospital wasn’t excluded from these festivities. The staff planned a formal ball for the patients and everyone dressed up, the staff in attendance, as they did each year. Max took great pleasure in this social affair and saw it as a positive move towards integration. But when a night or two later, the staff dressed up again, this time to attend their own official dance in private at the local hotel’s ballroom, I could not share Max’s enthusiasm. Frankly, I saw the whole affair as rather Dickensian: give the charges an extra bowl of porridge for the holidays, but let’s keep the chocolates for ourselves. When I didn’t attend either ball, there were comments and misinterpretations. I just could not participate in what I saw as hypocrisy. Furthermore, I don’t like to dance—never did. I find such social affairs awkward and I’d often been embarrassed when someone enthusiastically insisted (as one invariably did) on my dancing. I simply wanted to avoid the whole situation. But people

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saw my absence as a slight, that I somehow disapproved of their enjoyment. It was difficult to have private feelings—let alone a private life—in such circumstances. The staff wanted to know every aspect of your existence and, when accounted for, debated and judged acceptable or not according to the local mores. THE TWO-TIERED SYSTEM at the hospital continued to bother me. I had hoped for a more fully-open, democratic one, a model of Max’s theories in action. Instead, I found a variation of the same theme played out in every hospital, civilian or military. There were differences of course. Max had done his best to introduce new methods and change the structure; indeed, he had accomplished an astonishing feat in spite of overwhelming obstacles. But in contrast to the revolutionary instigator who had encouraged me to break down barriers in my own projects, Max now seemed very conservative in his methods. He was, to my mind, far too cautious, proceeding at a much slower pace than his writings advocated. I thought, certainly, as the administrator of Henderson, he had been more cavalier and daring. He had no doubt learned a great deal since then. And the south of England was far more liberal and indulgent of “eccentrics” than the no-nonsense moors of Scotland. The fact that I couldn’t talk to Max about these matters was very frustrating, most of all because I realized that our relationship was changing in a way which saddened me. Was it obvious to him, too? I knew it wasn’t merely a case of the pupil outgrowing the master: it was more a case of the pupil becoming dissatisfied with the whole field of mental health. Mental hospitals, no matter how they are run, are still the domain of physicians, psychiatrists, and nurses. Since I was none of these, I would always be on the fringes, in a manner of speaking. Besides, I wanted to move on to other areas. Max’s basic ideas still interested me, however, since I had seen how effective they could be in prisons. Now, I wanted to see how one could apply them in a broader sense, particularly with young people. That pursuit meant getting to know young people who hadn’t gone to university, who were neither rigidly conforming nor

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outright rebellious—but who just might eventually end up “conformist”—and others who had potentials they hadn’t realized. I also wondered how student activists (whom I had recently met) would react to Max’s ideas. How workable were they in a variety of educational settings? What about in the workplace— factories, for instance? Could workers and management sit in a circle and freely share their feelings and aspirations? Would his ideas work in families, or myriad other settings? There was so much to explore, and I wanted to get on with it. And so it was the accumulation of many little incidences that drove me now to consider leaving Dingleton sooner than I’d originally planned. A significant portion of my year’s “sabbatical” was gone and it seemed I had little to show for it. True, the horror of the Vietnam War was a world away—something we read about in newspapers. In Dingleton, there were no demonstrations, assassinations, or other upheavals; none of the trauma that the rest of society was going through at that time. You could say it was a “charmed life”; Scotland easily lends itself to romantic vision, even if the people themselves had the cynical edge typical of Celts. I was not the only one thinking of leaving Dingleton. Rumor had it that Max himself was quietly making plans to retire. He had invested eight years in the hospital, so the decision to leave must not have been easy for him. I wondered if he were not suffering from burnout himself—a not too uncommon happening to those in his position. He certainly looked tired at times. He later wrote in his book: The events of 1969 occurred on a background of my possible departure from Dingleton, and the fluctuating emotions aroused by speculation, anxiety, unrest and anger… My decision was prompted by numerous factors, the most important being my disinclination to face retirement at the age of sixty-five, which would ensue automatically [had] I remained in the National Health Service.17

So what would he do? Max was not the type to fish for the rest of his days—nor play golf. And his pension was hardly adequate now that he had a wife and three children to support. He did have some

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“nibbles” (as he put it). Most of these were in mental hospitals but, like me, he said he wanted to free himself of institutions for a while. I arranged to return to London where I would spend the last months of my sabbatical at Henderson. My imminent departure caused surprise and even some disappointment. One of the nurses who’d been there the longest took me aside to tell me how sad she was to lose an “ally”; she’d hoped my presence would bring about more changes, but that expectation was unrealistic. It was customary for people who were leaving to throw a farewell party but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. I was pleasantly surprised when one of the most “recalcitrant” of the senior nurses rose to the occasion and gave one for me at her council house. I was touched when most of the staff (especially the locals) showed up—all this affection from people normally so reticent about their feelings. The night before I left, Max asked me to come by for dinner with the family. No one else was there. For those few final hours, our relationship seemed to resume its former tenor. The evening was what I’d been hoping for during the past several months. What a shame, I reflected, that it took my imminent departure to bring it about. Max was still surprised: He had anticipated that I would be at Dingleton for the full year, if not longer. But at the same time, he must have been relieved for he, too, had felt the strain in our relationship during the past few months. Max had a bottle of “bubbly” and “crisps” to begin the occasion. The tension that had been part of our relationship of late vanished as we reminisced about California and looked forward to his next adventure, which he hoped would be in the US—Denver, to be exact. I took it as a sign of goodwill towards me when Max generously dipped into his stock of chocolate after dinner— something he rarely did without great anxiety; he was almost to the very end a “chocoholic.” Then, ensconced before the fire, he asked me if I’d listen to some ideas he’d been jotting down, hoping to put them together for a new paper, and eventually a book, about his tenure at Dingleton. He was finally going beyond the therapeutic community as a treatment mode, he said. Now he wanted to turn his attention to

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its larger aspect: how could people use his “system” to bring about change in society at large? (Max mulled over and wrote about this subject to the end of his days.) There was no one answer, of course. And the potential for abuse was great, as ventures such as Synanon and, later, at Jonestown had shown. This aspect of the therapeutic community worried Max; it was a “weak spot” because the integrity of the community as a whole depended so much on the quality of its administrator. We were sitting before the fire much as we used to a dozen years before at Henderson. So much had happened to us in our personal and professional lives. Max had left his legacy on Henderson and soon on Dingleton; he was now married with three daughters and would shortly be retired. I not only had left the military, but had been through the prison and educational systems; I’d found both unreformable. We were “champions of lost causes.” At any rate, that’s how I saw it at the time. We had both struggled to evolve democratic systems in organizations—schools, mental health, prisons, the military—that were inherently anti-democratic. Given the circumstances, what were we thinking of? We’d set ourselves goals that were well nigh impossible to attain in one lifetime. Max was the more successful but the barriers he’d managed to tear down were erected in new forms elsewhere. It was a never-ending process. No wonder we were both burned out. We parted in good company, though I had mixed feelings. I felt a great loss, as if something were gone that could never be replaced. At the time I felt let down both by Max and—more importantly—by my own expectations. I could choose whether or not to see Max again; but I had to live with myself. There was no escaping those feelings of complicity. Perhaps had I not expected so much of Max, he would have been more forthcoming. Perhaps my admiration stifled him so that he felt scrutinized and his actions pre-judged. On the other hand, I felt a great relief that I was now free to get on with the rest of my year off. I had only a few months left and I wanted to make the most of it.

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IT WAS SNOWING heavily when I left the Borders. By the time I reached York, a blizzard was raging over the whole countryside. It persisted and for two days I was snowbound. I didn’t mind: York was one place I wanted to see more of. The snow on the turrets of the wall around the ancient part of the city gave the place a romantic air. It was easy to imagine past ages here, although I was glad to be a twentieth-century visitor rather than a medieval resident. Tourist literature called York “quaint.” But under the soft snowy exterior were the stones of a culture that had persisted through invasion, famine, war, and pestilence. Accordingly, the people were tough and seemed to enjoy themselves to the full. The pubs were crowded with young people whose passions were darts and bitters and exuberant conversation. Only when President Nixon arrived at Buckingham Palace for lunch with the Queen did they pause. They informed me that it was the first time officials had allowed television cameras inside the palace. Seeing Nixon and his entourage brought me back to my situation of five months before: not the noble reasons that had caused me to leave the US in the first place; rather, thoughts of creature comforts such as plumbing that worked, central heating, private telephones, the variety of foods, the sun… After the storm subsided, I continued to London by way of Cambridge where I found a room in a small inn in the centre of town. As I had expected, there were students all over the place bundled against the weather, their noses red from the cold. As I set out one evening looking for a pub, I almost collided with a small group of students at the door of the inn. At first, I didn’t take much notice—they were a typical bunch of students with their school scarves fashionably thrown over their shoulders—but one caught my eye. I’d seen that face before in the papers: Prince Charles, no less. I couldn’t help chuckle at the thought of Max’s receiving his CBE. How he must have felt in a morning suit lined up with all the others to receive his award from the Queen. England was, after all, an interesting place with all its history and artifacts, its quaint customs, and idiosyncrasies.

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Still, I felt a growing discomfort. I found the formality of the British stifling—even in their “informality.” I missed the spontaneity and casualness of life in California. There was no denying it: I was a little homesick. What I’d seen of London and the few people I’d met there led me to believe that it would be a livelier environment than conservative Scotland—and it was nearer to France. Besides, I told myself, being at Henderson would be interesting. I spent the weekend with Pat and Michael Howard at Little Finborough Hall, their home near Stowmarket, in Suffolk. The house was a “fixer-upper.” It was four hundred years old, with thatched roofs and beamed ceilings. The Howards had converted it into a lovely, comfortable country home, blending antiques with modern furnishings. Beside the house was a large pond complete with ducks. Despite the cold, the first crocuses were popping up through the snow. On a walk over the moors, Pat pointed out a village on the coast that was probably the setting for Benjamin Britten’s “Peter Grimes,” the first opera I’d ever seen. I was scarcely settled at Henderson when Max wrote. He sent along a copy of his “impressions” for the two weeks following my departure—the weekly notes or summary he regularly kept of relevant events. I was a little surprised when he said in his letter, that the notes paid tribute to my positive influence and that I’d made “an enormous” contribution to changing things while I was there. Then he went on to say that he was gratified that we were back to our original satisfying relationship. Somehow, I wondered if separation (distance) hadn’t enhanced the satisfaction in our relationship he was referring to. At the time of my leaving, there was a question I couldn’t bring to full consciousness, but which nevertheless rankled: was my presence threatening to Max? And if so, why? But why—if I were a threat—would he have invited me to Dingleton in the first place? I looked through the notes he’d sent. Most of his impressions were related to his leaving now that it was out, and the anxiety it was causing the staff, not to mention rivalry. Once his job was open, the doctors’ true colours began to show. Who would succeed him? The image of all the bickering amused me. Originally, he had wanted the head social worker (and not one

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of the physicians) to replace him; so the struggle seemed even more baffling. Two items among his notes caught my attention. One was the strong position emerging among the young staff as a group. I had had the distinct impression that the older members were holding them down. Granted, they were young and had little relevant experience. But they filled an important gap especially when the older, more experienced staff were not available. As a social group, no one took them too seriously; because of their personal activities, they were more of a source of potential embarrassment in the community. Nevertheless, they were beginning to have a voice in the affairs of the hospital, as they should have. The other item was the progress in the community of Max’s introduction of peer teaching and holding group discussions in classrooms. Whilst I was there, some teachers had discussed this practice and given it a cautious trial. I had met with some of them. But now, I was glad to see that Max had taken the initiative, gone out with the new education director, and visited some classrooms. Also, he had instituted a monthly seminar at the hospital for teachers. He didn’t conceal his enthusiasm, and as I read his notes, I was pleased and relieved for I’d felt guilty that I left before educators had taken up peer teaching. Was I competitive? I certainly didn’t see myself as such. I’d spent six years in mental hospitals, five in prisons, finally two in a university—more than a decade all told. And every setting was inspired by Max’s ideas. Most of this time, he’d kept watch over my activities, supported what I did, encouraged my thinking, and critiqued what I was doing. We’d traveled around together visiting projects, attending meetings, consulting, oftentimes behaving much like two school boys with our private jokes. I had noticed he’d become more critical of my methods during his later visits to the prison project. I’d found that dealing with some delinquents with an openly directive approach at times was far more effective than religiously employing Max’s technique. In retrospect, I think I perturbed Max by moving strictly away from some of the principles he had developed. Or was it that perhaps Max saw me as a threat to Dingleton in terms of possibly mobilizing social action among the young

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people? He sent me a copy of a letter Michael Howard had written, calling me “emotive, fugitive, charismatic and potentially explosive,” and “will pay close watching, and I hope to be able to observe his career more closely than perhaps you will.” He continued, “He has perhaps the potential to play a role quite outside psychiatry, for which there are none too many qualified candidates, and which could perform exceptional service to the emerging society.” Certainly Max was innovative in his craft and there were others at Dingleton willing to take his place. I now see that our attempt to work together was full of sand traps. Our personalities were decidedly different, yet harmonious. I, too, had some of the trickster in me. Accordingly, our methods of dealing with people and situations at times tended to contradict each other. Whether he liked it or not, there was much of the doctor in Max; whether I liked it or not, there was much of the upstart in me. Perhaps it could be best summed up this way: admiration and envy, much like love and hate, are so often part of the core of any close relationship. Our deepening friendship (over three decades) bears testament to the best that was in both of us. I SPENT THE next few months at Henderson where I worked part-time in exchange for room and board. After I’d been at Henderson for a while, I wrote Max: It is quite a tribute to you, to the principles you have developed and the people you have invested in, to see it in operation. And when I see only two persons who were here in 1956 (Hector [the night nurse] and Peggy [Max’s secretary]), I am more convinced than ever of the soundness of the concepts you have developed—what a testimony—for this much transition to have occurred with so many staff and patients …

In the late spring, I received news that the tenants (to whom I’d rented my home for the year) had suddenly moved out, leaving the house and grounds in disrepair. By now, I decided that there was little chance that I would ever want to return to the relative isolation of my place in the country. The stimulation and anguish

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I’d experienced of those two years in San Francisco had fundamentally changed my life. I was now thinking of ways I could remain in Europe after my year was over. And so, I put my house up for sale. Max was preparing for his annual consulting trip to the US. He spent most of the time at Fort Logan, where they finally came through with the offer he’d hoped for: to come and work full-time beginning in September of that year (1969). He wrote me about the news and added that he and Kerstin had bought five acres of woods outside the city and were planning to build a home there. Kerstin was going to set up an antique business of her own in Denver. I was getting along well at Henderson. Stuart Whiteley, the Medical Director, wanted to begin a project in London for pre-delinquent youngsters with some of the patients and staff operating it. He offered to set up a job for me in the coming autumn; again I’d have to develop my own role. I NEEDED SOME time to think things out. So much—too much—had happened in these months away. And so come Easter, I impulsively decided to take a vacation. I took off for Paris, spent a week there and then headed south. I re-visited St Paul de Vence and stayed again with the Magauds at their little pension, which, being early spring, was practically empty. Mornings, I spent on the balcony writing. I had taken notes whilst at Dingleton and Henderson and now wanted to try to understand what had happened to me thus far in my year off. On clear days, I could see all the way to the Mediterranean. And it was not difficult when the breeze was coming from the south to imagine the sweet whiff of Africa in the air. It was Mme Magaud’s café au lait and croissants. She and her husband had been up for hours, been to the market, and now were preparing the day’s meals. A lot of people came to the pension for lunch. I decided to return to California for part of the summer. I was excited about the prospect of teaching again and with my house no longer a concern, I was fairly free to do what I wanted. Within weeks, however, I became disillusioned with America. Nothing

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had really changed—or perhaps I had changed more than I had realized. I knew I could never be content with life as I’d known it there. When I left at the end of the summer, it would be ten years before I returned to live in California. I DIDN’T HAVE much opportunity to talk with Max when we met the following autumn in Edinburgh. Max, as the elected chairman of Social Psychiatry (International Multi-Disciplinary Federation), and Morris Carstairs, as President of the World Federation for Mental Health, combined forces to hold a joint meeting at Edinburgh University (September, 1969). This conference, supposedly different from traditional ones, was limited to 150 invited guests representing various disciplines from many countries. Max wanted a format that would allow the participants to share their views as much as possible. During each of the five days, a speaker would present a paper followed by a panel discussion and questions from the floor. Afterwards, the members would be divided into a number of groups each with a resource person and someone to record the discussion. Late in the afternoon, all would gather for a final plenary session to wrap up the day’s discussion. Max invited Jurgen Ruesch and Eric Trist to read papers and he and Morris Carstairs took the last two sessions. He invited Pat and Michael Howard, and me, to try to record the event with the hopes that Michael would eventually publish the proceedings, with some drawings by Pat. The conference went well and the format allowed focus on many issues in social psychiatry; the participants did have ample opportunities to expound their views. Since our leaving Dingleton, Max acted as if nothing had happened. Those few occasions when we got together, he joked about “old times”—which for him meant California and before. I wouldn’t say our meetings were forced—quite the contrary. Now that we were dealing with each other from a distance, we were freer to explore our separate ideas.

chapter four

DREAMS DIE HARD As a psychiatrist turned social ecologist, I like to dream of a healthy environment.

Maxwell Jones re-visits Mill Hill with his wife Janette 1972

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OR THE NEXT ten years we went our separate ways, keeping in touch mainly by letter and phone with occasional brief visits. After he’d settled in at his new job, Max wrote me at Henderson where I’d returned in September. He said that Fort Logan was much as he expected—excellent people but there was not much inspiration aside from Paul Polak. And he added that he felt very warmly towards Henderson—as he put it, a unique experiment where the values of patients outweighed those of the medical profession. I didn’t hear much more from Max that year (1970). I presumed things were going according to his plans. But I should have known that his expectations were far too high for Fort Logan: imagination often holds much more promise than reality does. In his next letter Max announced that he was “sick of psychiatry.” He was now trying to get involved in local schools with the long term goal of establishing a therapeutic community in one. Henri Ellenberger and Claude Morand of the Institut Phillippe Pinel in Montreal were planning an international symposium focusing on prisons. Max had been invited and wanted both Doug Grant and me to attend. He hoped I could come so he could bring me up to date on his work in the schools and learn more what I was doing at Henderson. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to raise the money for the trip. And then the symposium was postponed; so Max and I were not able to meet that year. The job Stuart Whiteley set up for me at Henderson involved looking at the work aspect of their program. Many of the ideas Max had originated—such as the community meeting, the doctors’ groups, the admission procedure, and so on—were now ritualized. The work projects he’d established were still largely intact although the population of Henderson was now much

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younger and not so poor. The tailoring group had met its demise but the home group (cleaning) still existed as well as the group that did repairs. Henderson now had its separate eating facilities and the residents did the cooking and serving. There was a lot of friction in this group and often it was miraculous that meals were served at all. There was also a writers’ group that put out a newsletter and the psychologist was involved in a research group. Each Friday afternoon, the community assembled for a work group chaired by the PLO (Project Liaison Officer) who was a resident elected to that position each month. My job seemed to evolve into coordinating these different activities. I was as fascinated here as I had been at Chino where mass unemployment was a central factor in people’s lives. It was different from retirement, as these young people were at the peak of their lives mentally and physically. Just how do you use time when the basics are provided for? There was enough routine prescribed to absorb much of the day: meetings took the entire mornings and work groups, the afternoons. But in the latter there was more room for trying new things. Everyone had to join a work group and at least attend the sessions. Many did not take to work even though there were few real production standards. Productivity itself was not the goal, but rather the opportunity to examine work attitudes. In this respect, the work groups were very useful. Taking orders, sticking to a task, interacting with co-workers, and supervising others were key issues that they played out day after day in the sessions and in the discussions emanating from them. Still, many of the residents wanted well-defined work situations and did not like to have to fashion their own. Although I visited all of the groups regularly, I joined the writers’ group which couldn’t formulate a work situation. They felt somewhat abandoned without a regular staff member. With the exception of the editor and her assistant, the others in the group came and went. The writers group had focused on their newsletter, the Chicken Quill, that they put out with some regularity. It gave them a focus and those residents who dropped out usually couldn’t meet deadlines but preferred to spend their time on “creative writing” (which seldom produced anything tangible). They would go off to other places to write and talk about their

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ideas. Putting pen to paper was another matter. A few residents tried to use the writers’ group to advance their political ideas, seeing the newsletter as a means of propaganda. But rarely could they put their ideas into articles and most soon abandoned this channel. On occasion, other residents and staff would submit contributions that livened up the newsletter staff; they now could criticize others’ writing and make decisions as to acceptance and rejection. At one point, the newsletter staff decided that they would try an advice column; yet after its inauguration, there was no response. In utter frustration, the two-member staff wrote letters themselves that they proceeded to answer. Even this temporary respite from the community’s general apathy did not work and so they abandoned the column. The writers group began to attract a few residents whose social action interests were compatible with producing the paper. One member thought that there was too much lethargy in the community at the time and had futilely tried to stir up some interests. At a newsletter meeting, he suggested that we needed to bring in some outsiders to raise interest and to broaden cultural pursuits. He noticed that Leonard Cohen was to appear in concert in London. Why not get an exclusive interview with him? What if they could obtain tickets to the concert for the whole community? Better still, why not invite him to come to them for a concert? He was able to contact Leonard Cohen’s agent and, to the amazement of everyone (especially Stuart), they arranged a performance at the hospital. The concert provided the lead article for the next issue of the Chicken Quill. This achievement scored big with the community, for now the writers’ group had status—but not quite in the manner the group’s leaders had intended. Nonetheless, it did help the community to look beyond its own boundaries. And more residents wanted to transfer to the writers’ group. I thought about Max’s similar endeavors with the former POWs who had relentlessly complained about the food at Dartford. They placed a cartoon on the cover of their newspaper, The Grapevine, that showed some of them as very lean, pleading with a German prison guard to let them back in so that they could get a decent meal. Whereupon, officials in London’s City Hall

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sent them a dietitian and the food improved. Max said to me once that he saw for the first time the importance of social action in rehabilitation—for that matter, in mental health generally. People, he said, must have a sense of redress for wrongs and a belief that they do have some power to change things that are important to them. I wrote Max of the exciting events I’d experienced on recent visits to Holland and our rather abortive attempts to apply them to Henderson, but he did not respond; I thought this silence was unusual for him. In fact, I heard no more from him until the end of the summer. He’d been consulting in South America where he’d had a harrowing experience. He’d gotten his name in the Brazilian press, linking him with a political figure who was murdered while he was there. He didn’t tell me anything more about it but he planned to return there in November and then go on to Cuba. In the meantime we had both become more disillusioned —Max with Fort Logan; I with Henderson. Then I received a letter from him. It was cheerful and full of enthusiasm: the seminar was finally going to take place in Montreal, where he’d see Doug Grant. Then there was a workshop in Hawaii and plans for several papers. The letter ended with another invitation to come and stay with him as long as I liked. It was not until the following spring (March 1971) that I saw Max again. He stopped off in London on his way to a meeting of a world congress on therapeutic communities in Hanover. His marriage to Kerstin had broken up and now he was married to Janette who had been on the staff at Dingleton when he was there. On the way to spend a weekend at Pat and Michael Howard’s place in Suffolk, he asked if we could make a short detour to Mill Hill. I felt we were stepping back in time as he showed us where his cardiac neurosis unit had been located. To our delight, he became more animated as he recounted the past: the London blackouts, the casualties of war, the bombings coming ever closer, the windows crossed with tape, Dr Maclay’s running for cover with the patients, desperately trying to save his books; then moving here where his first therapeutic community had evolved.

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I HAD A chance to spend a month in California later that summer and taught two classes on the therapeutic community at the University of California at Riverside. Then I went on to see Max and Janette in Denver. Max was his old jolly self. By now his hair was almost totally white and, with a jaunty silk scarf loosely tied around his neck, he looked quite the suave professor. The scarf, I gathered, was Janette’s contribution to his appearance. The administrator of Dingleton had certainly changed! His place in the mountains was now finished and he held a wine and cheese party for the Fort Logan staff so that I could meet them. Much of my time with Max was spent reminiscing about our experiences together. I’d brought along the audio portion of the closed circuit television session he’d held with children at the University of California some years previously and wanted to get him to discuss this. With his experiences in Scotland and more recently in the Denver schools, I thought we might learn something about that meeting. But Max declined. At first I was surprised at this rebuff; I hadn’t realized how deeply that experience had affected him (although he mentioned it several times later, he would never go beyond cursory comment). From Denver I spent a week with my family whom I hadn’t seen for some while. The reunion was a qualified success. At forty-one, I was still a kid to my father. He was always authoritarian but now I found him merely domineering. That final meeting with my father brought home to me the contrast of my relationship with Max. Max’s manipulations were more subtle, but I felt that he respected me and had confidence in my abilities. I’d never consciously thought of Max as a father figure, but I could see that there was something of a father–son element in our friendship. It was different from similar relationships, however. There was a high degree of giving and taking, learning and teaching, and always respecting and trusting. Now the relationship obviously had something of the guru-disciple aspects in it also. But it was too personal for that category. The best term I can come up with to describe Max is one

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used by Robert Bly: “male mother.” By that, the poet meant a man who takes a younger man under his charge, and develops, supports and encourages, strengthens and enriches him. These were the qualities Max brought to our friendship. And despite all the setbacks, there was enough persistence in both of us to take the friendship to the very end. Thirty-four years is a long time for something to endure in this world. I can only look back with gratitude. Looking back, Max had a phenomenal tolerance for “chaos” within a group, honed no doubt by his twelve years of dealing with psychopaths. While the sound and fury might have unhinged some, he could sit amid the ranting and raving and never become perturbed. You could say he derived inspiration from all the fracas. For he knew that every group had several levels of participation. He was aware of the games some people play: there were always those who wanted to see just how far they could go. As “leader,” he was the one to be tested and, if possible, deposed. He knew that he was being closely observed; at the first sign of weakness in him, the group would disintegrate into a parody of itself and lose whatever gains they had made. His quietude, then, was no mere affectation: it was a conscious action that allowed the different aspects of the group to play themselves out, sans peur et sans reproche. A GROUP, IN Max’s view, must do three things: 1) allow for equal participation among its members; 2) challenge each member and help each to face her- or himself; and, 3) support each member in her or his growth towards full personhood. Any group that failed to meet these criteria got his severest criticism. He did not suffer dogmatism gladly but in a group, dogmatism was especially abhorrent to him. I saw firsthand his reaction to one particular group at Oceanfields, one of a number of youth treatment centers in New Jersey, set up by sociologist, Albert Elias, a friend of mine who’d consulted with me at Chino. When I was on my return to London, I arranged for Max and me to meet Al in Philadelphia a few weeks after our meeting in Denver. Max had just done a workshop in New England. We all

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arrived together early on a Saturday morning just as the boys were cleaning the facility. Vince Reagan, Oceanfields’ superintendent, gathered a few boys together and showed us portions of a video-tape of the previous night’s meeting, hoping to discuss it with us. But it wasn’t long before the boys had turned the meeting into a typical group session focusing particularly on one boy who was soon reduced to tears. Max immediately tried to intercede, acting more as a facilitator than a visitor. His psychoanalytic interpretations were completely beyond them and his influence on the group diminished accordingly. “This is really operant conditioning,” he whispered to me at one point. “It’s really destructive and we should end it, I think.” When I didn’t respond, he addressed Vince: “Well I’ve gotten what I came for. Can we close the group now?” There was no response from either Albert Elias or Vince Reagan. Max said that he didn’t want to be “destructive,” but he was afraid continuing the meeting would upset some of the boys. Then he rose and said he was leaving. The group ignored his departure and continued with their discussion. Outside the window, in full view of the group, Max paced back and forth. Finally, he went and sat in the car. After the meeting ended, Max returned to have a discussion with Vince and Al. Max was very upset. He was hesitant and his voice quivered. I couldn’t understand why he had become so disturbed. He referred to the group as a “hare-and-hound” group and continually used the term “destructive” in describing what he had witnessed. His sympathy was obviously with the boy whom the others had confronted in the meeting. What he didn’t realize was that both Al Elias and Vince Reagan were skilled group leaders who had years of experience with street-wise boys and knew just how far to let things go. The “hare” would get plenty of support; but for now he needed that confrontation. Unfortunately, we could not stay to resolve the issue: we were on our way to Maryland where Max was to consult at a residential treatment program for delinquent boys. The experience, though, troubled Max for quite a few years. Later, he wrote me for Albert Elias’ address and asked if I had a reprint of any of his work so that

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he could learn more about his “persuasion technique,” that he still didn’t fully grasp.18 As I look back over this incident, I can only attribute Max’s reaction to his own boyhood experiences. No doubt the boy who’d taken refuge in his room after school now saw some of himself in the boy in the group. How much of the past influences our reaction to the present is a matter for conjecture—in this instance it seemed to make sense. Max was constantly looking at other’s work although in most instances he visited programs in the role of a consultant and offered his advice. He had certain things he looked for that he considered basic and was thorough in his scrutiny. One of these criteria was leadership and how to use it effectively. He maintained an eternal vigilance for the abuse of authority and was quick to call people to attention, no matter what their status. Sometimes his watchfulness clouded his objectivity, but intuitively he was able to ferret out underlying motives and get to the heart of the matter (as I found when he came to consult in my own projects). He upset others by his ability and perseverance to unravel complex matters and bare us. It was like having major surgery, yet, after he departed, we were left to recuperate on our own. I TOOK AN immediate dislike to Alfredo (not his real name) who, to my mind, was overly aggressive and rude. Max had met him years before in South America. Short and plump, Alfredo compensated for his lack of stature with bold statements and grand gestures. If he was not always the center of attention, he made sure that he got as close as possible to it. Alfredo was director of a group home for delinquent boys in Annapolis and had just attended a workshop in Connecticut conducted by Max. He had driven him to New Jersey where we visited Oceanfields. By that time, he had sorely tested Max’s patience more than once. In Connecticut, Alfredo had first raised Max’s suspicions by inviting several people to a farewell dinner in their hotel and then asked Max to sign the check; he, Alfredo, would reimburse Max when they got to Maryland. By the time I joined them in New

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Jersey, Max was anxious enough to take me aside and warn me that “there was something strange about Alfredo.” I didn’t have long to wait for proof of Alfredo’s showmanship. On Saturday evening, he invited some of the staff of the treatment center we’d visited that day to our motel and ordered champagne and expensive hors d’œuvres. Again he asked Max to sign the check with the same understanding of reimbursement. We arrived in Annapolis late at night. But, contrary to the arrangements that would put Max in an historic inn, Alfredo took us to the large Holiday Inn. He maintained that there was some celebration in Annapolis at the Naval Academy and all the rooms had been taken. Alfredo and the girlfriend he’d brought along on the trip also checked in, which Max and I thought was strange for he was living at the group home that he ran. We were to visit his “place” the next morning. We had no more gotten into the old southern mansion than a very angry woman (whom I’ll call Nancy) appeared at the door of the dining room. Physically, she reminded me of a good friend of mine and I immediately took a liking to her. After a formal introduction, Nancy invited us to lunch at the delightful basement bar of the inn where Max was to have stayed. She talked a great deal and it soon became apparent that she and Alfredo were at loggerheads. Nancy was a lawyer and chairwoman of the non-profit corporation that ran Alfredo’s program. There was a lot of trouble in Alfredo’s house. While he was away, Nancy, unable to tolerate the confusion any longer, had taken over. Alfredo had forewarned us that Nancy was domineering and difficult to get along with. As the lunch progressed, she didn’t appear to be quite the ogre that Alfredo had painted. We returned to the group house for the afternoon meeting. It opened with confrontations against Alfredo: the boys were angry that he had left them. During his absence, there had been a considerable amount of “acting out”: someone had painted a peace sign and “love” on the roof which upset the neighbors; the police had recordings of obscene telephone calls made from the house, and so on. Then, they specifically confronted Alfredo about bringing girls to his room, about drinking in the house; and

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there was some vague reference to checks. Max pitched in as a facilitator and I tried to assist him. But the real conflict between Nancy and Alfredo was so overwhelming that it kept erupting throughout the meeting. After meeting with the boys, we met with the staff. Max attempted to review the meeting, but the unresolved anger between Alfredo and Nancy continued and we couldn’t learn much from their conflict. Nancy finally said that many things had happened which she was not at liberty to discuss with the staff just yet; she wanted to meet privately with Max. When Max protested, she insisted. The room at the historic inn had not only been reserved for Max, but had been paid for in advance. Nancy preferred he stay there and would have his things moved from the motel. Apparently Alfredo was in quite serious trouble with the police. Someone in town had filed charges against him for fraud. It was then that Max realized how much Alfredo had duped him. Max had even given one of his credit card numbers to Alfredo in Connecticut when he needed it to cash a check. As it turned out Alfredo had been given a cash advance for the trip and there was no provision for reimbursing Max for the expenses that Alfredo had incurred. Furthermore, there was no way that they could pay me, as the corporation members knew nothing of my coming and thus had not authorized it, even though Alfredo had assured me that he would take care of it. That evening we met with the board members, some fifteen people in all. It was a social gathering—a time for speeches and introductions. Alfredo bored everyone with a long account of his first meeting with Max in Peru, I believe it was, or, as Alfredo would have it, Max’s first meeting with him. Max spoke of trends in social psychiatry. Then I talked a bit about my work in prisons. After the dinner, Nancy informed us that the board was going to meet later that evening and if they authorized my expenses, would I consider remaining on for rest of the week. As I had no fixed agenda, I agreed. At breakfast the next morning, she announced that not only would the board pay my expenses, but they were relieved I would be there to assist them after Max left on Tuesday. Once she had

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gained our confidence, Nancy told us that Alfredo must resign immediately: the authorities were about to issue warrants for his arrest. Max was right: indeed, a first rate psychopath had swindled us. In the group home, rumors abounded: the CIA was keeping watch on Alfredo; he was a spy, a thief; he had murdered a man. (I wondered if this was a reference to Max’s harrowing South American experience, the one that he never seemed to want to talk about.) The boys had begun to look at Alfredo in a new light. All during the day, Max and I expected the police to arrive and dreaded the possibility of witnessing his arrest. We sought to avoid him as much as possible; but Max, being a celebrity of sorts, was Alfredo’s shelter—so our “host” kept close to us. By late afternoon, Alfredo finally announced his resignation and made a dramatic exit from the house. But if Max thought he was rid of him, he could think again. Alfredo insisted on driving Max to the airport so they could talk. Max didn’t want to be alone with Alfredo and persuaded me to accompany them. Alfredo was as reckless in a car as he was in life. Gesticulating like a conductor and hardly paying attention to the traffic, he talked about his “troubles” with Nancy. He’d worked so hard for “his boys,” given them the love and attention they deserved; they were like sons to him. And now all this fuss over a few checks. He would leave, he would go to Paris, and after he was gone, they’d really see how much they needed him. The “few” checks Alfredo mentioned turned out to be quite a few! The situation became very delicate. One phone call after another testified to the extent of Alfredo’s machinations. There were bad checks everywhere. A phone bill arrived for several hundred dollars for long distance calls including South America. Alfredo had even gone so far as to steal money from one of the boys (who was saving to buy a bicycle and had entrusted his money to Alfredo). Some of the boys were also involved in his activities. When someone found narcotics in the house, the police came to investigate. It was all too much. Finally, they arrested Alfredo. I could scarcely believe my ears when Nancy told me that, just prior to his arrest, Alfredo had asked her if she would lend him

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enough money to cover the checks. And, if that weren’t enough, upon being arrested he had the audacity to ask her to represent him legally! I didn’t know what eventually happened to Alfredo: I think he was deported. In any case, I’m sure he survived long enough to regale some future employer with his “experience” in American social psychiatry. I managed to get through the week. I worked with the young former student who was now temporarily in charge, suggested some changes in the program, recommended terminating some of the boys who were wrecking it, and consolidating the home with what was left of another of their group homes. We eventually got it back on track. When I got back to London, I had an urgent message from Max. On his return to Denver, he’d developed a bleeding ulcer and was under medication. Max asked for Elias’ address as he wanted to write to him for information about his treatment approach. Another example of Max’s constant effort towards self-examination be it from a physical, intellectual, or emotional clue. He also wanted to know if I’d heard anything about Alfredo’s whereabouts. As a matter of fact by that time I had: he had written to Al Elias from prison and wanted my address to see if I could get him into some kind of rehabilitation program. DURING HIS LONG career, Max maintained contact with countless people and programs throughout the world. He traveled widely often in order to learn. He usually arranged to take his vacation as part of his annual month-long visit to the US. He was eager to visit me on his annual trips and it was not too difficult to arrange to have him consult or lecture and pay him for his services. It always amused me when he would call or when his initial letter would arrive informing me of an intended visit. He planned up to one year in advance as it was difficult to make definite arrangements for an extended trip both in terms of getting commitments and preparing his replacement at work. He liked to have a schedule he could count on and then have some room to maneuver—to do things spontaneously as

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opportunities arose. Sometimes he couldn’t meet all these needs. His visits, stimulating and absorbing at the time, invariably left me exhausted. There was the time, for example (1972), when our positions were reversed: he was living in the US and I was still in London. Dingleton was going to celebrate its Centenary. He had mixed feelings about returning; his farewell, three years previously, had caused considerable disruption and the staff of the hospital were still working out how to operate without him. Furthermore, the administration no longer had the singular position of physician-superintendent; he’d convinced the authorities to replace it with a committee. He wrote me that he was going to speak after all at the Centenary and might return via London. He wanted to get together and catch up on things we’d both been doing. Later, he phoned and asked me to work out any meetings to which he might contribute. His “schedule” was to begin with a seminar for the social work faculty of the North London Polytechnic (where I was teaching), followed by lunch and a nap. Then, he was to address the students, faculty, various social services agency staff, and some former colleagues of his who wanted to see him. The evening was kept free, as he had requested. I wanted him to meet with some of the staff at NACRO’s (National Association for the Care and Rehabilitation of Offenders) hostels for ex-prisoners and drug addicts where I was consulting. My hunch was that he’d enjoy meeting, in a seminar, with staff and students as well as clients. At the time, Parliament was debating the new Criminal Justice Bill and I thought it would be interesting if Max could speak with those and others concerned with this legislature. Nicholas Hinton, Director of NACRO, and I arranged an all-day session at the House of Lords and invited twenty rather high-ranking guests, chaired by Lady Barbara Wootton, whom Max frequently referred to in his lectures. Lord Donaldson, the chairman of NACRO, hosted the meeting. Finally, I arranged for Max to give a lecture at the London School of Economics. In all, quite a busy week.

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Max was introduced to the faculty of the polytechnic and opted for a nap rather than the luncheon. At the lecture, he came to life when he found several of his former younger colleagues from Dingleton in the audience. At the onset, the session seemed to be a disaster when Max tried to get the large group (one hundred and fifty) to interact with him. Most of the audience were “mature” social work students. The polytechnic was in the midst of turmoil following the appointment of a director who not only was very conservative in his views, but authoritarian as well. The students had gotten fed up with the new director who would not allow their greater participation in the curriculum. Furthermore, he had removed the little representation they already had on academic committees under the previous director. They had gone on a prolonged strike. The students wanted Max to speak about their dilemma, but he didn’t want to get entangled in the politics. But that concern hadn’t stopped him when he’d visited me at San Francisco State. When he couldn’t get the kind of participation he wanted, he spoke of things that he’d observed in the schools he’d worked in—but that topic didn’t seem to interest the audience. Eventually with the help of some of the Dingleton group he was able to turn the large meeting into a mutual learning situation and got the audience involved—so much so, it was difficult to end the session. It continued well over the allotted hour and, as with the students in San Francisco, one of two longest sessions I ever saw Max engaged in. He didn’t want to leave, but we had more than fifty hostel people waiting—some of whom had traveled a long way to meet with him. Some of his former colleagues trailed along; so he was able to pick up where he had ended and the session went well. He had tremendous audience participation with his former colleagues playing their parts, still “high” from the previous session. In contrast to the students, the next day at the Lords was a calamity. Lady Wootten presided in a very formal fashion and Max seemed to be in competition with her throughout the day. Things didn’t go as planned. At one point when Max was talking, there was a ruckus outside. A former prisoner, who had published a book, attempted to enter the committee room and disrupt the

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discussion with charges of prisoner neglect. A good potential for a living learning session! Lord Donaldson, however, removed him. Though he tried, Max never succeeded in getting the kind of participation he wanted, nor lightening up the discussions, nor even focusing it on matters of interest to him. In the end, he seemed to give up, let Lady Wootten have her way, and became silent. I’D NOW BEEN away from the US for nearly five years. I had decided that I didn’t want to return and had applied for British citizenship. (I even went so far as to take a course in elocution at City Lit to try to disguise my accent somewhat.) It was strange to read my own advertisement in the paper requesting that anyone who knew why I shouldn’t be granted citizenship should write to the Under Secretary of State. Lord Donaldson sponsored me and even though I met the eligibility requirements, I received a very formal letter from the Home Office to the effect that I’d taken too many trips outside Britain since my arrival to be considered: “It is the practice,” the letter said, “to interpret the word ‘residence’ as a continuous personal presence in this country, although brief and occasional absences abroad for business or holiday purposes are disregarded in assessing residential qualifications.” The civil servant who had reviewed my application went on to say that my absences “had the effect of reducing considerably your residential qualifications for naturalisation purposes under the provisions of paragraph 1(b)” and so on. “And as you’ll appreciate these are statutory and the Secretary of Sate has no power to waive or vary them in any way.” Well, if I didn’t appreciate this rejection at the time, I did later! At any rate, I was toying with the idea of leaving England for France. Max wrote in the early summer that he’d been asked to give the opening address for a conference in Zurich and was going to make arrangements for work to be done on his Edinburgh apartment. I’d written him of my discouragement both at the polytechnic and with Britain. He was feeling much the same about Fort Logan and was eager for a change. He proposed stopping off

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for a few days in London and asked me to reserve a room for Janette and him at a hotel. In the meantime, he’d also written to the Howards and made arrangements to spend a weekend in Wales. I thought it might be nice for him to visit Henderson; to my knowledge, he’d not been back since he left (1959). Besides, the staff and patients needed a boost. He was agreeable but didn’t seem too enthusiastic. Our arrival at Henderson before the day’s activities began gave Max a chance to look around and to talk with Peggy, his former secretary, and Hector, the night nurse, who’d been there with Max. If my memory serves me, I believe that this occasion was the first meeting of Max and Stuart Whiteley. The staff were waiting in what used to be Max’s office and the meeting was turned over to him. The meeting was rather uneventful with Max ruminating over his days there, about Dingleton, Fort Logan and the deteriorating political situation in America. They held a buffet luncheon for Max in the doctors’ dining room in adjacent Belmont Hospital—a place where it’s doubtful they would have received him in the past. They invited a number of outside guests who had known Max or wanted to meet him. Soon it was time for Max and Janette to leave and Stuart drove them to Heathrow. STUART WHITELEY HAD asked Merfyn Turner (who ran some interesting hostels in London) and me to collaborate on a book, sharing our therapeutic community experiences in three different settings. When Michael Howard arranged for his Hogarth Press to publish it, Max sent a glowing letter. He said in effect that it looked to him like therapeutic community models still had to have an inspirational leader who ended up without power but remained as a facilitator. I chuckled when he added a “PS” to remind me that I still hadn’t sent him any materials on the “New Jersey treatment model.” IN EARLY 1974, Max wrote me that he’d decided to leave Colorado and had bought a home in Phoenix where he was

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assured a half-time position at the state hospital. He hoped to do some teaching. Once more he said that he was tired of mental health but had to have additional income to provide for his three daughters, the eldest of whom was now ready for college. In the meantime, Max was offered a job setting up a comprehensive mental health service for the Virgin Islands, financed by the US National Institute for Mental Health (NIMH), and became very excited over this new possibility. I had finally made up my mind to go to Paris. Through a friend, I found a part-time job teaching English to French businessmen. And so I began to fulfill that boyhood dream that would last for the next four years. Four months after he’d arrived (in 1975), Max wrote that coming to the Virgin Islands was a mistake. Accomplishing his goals in anything less than ten years seemed impossible and, of course, he didn’t have that kind of time. Earlier he’d written to me to see if I would join him there and whilst I was tempted, I wasn’t yet ready to go back to work in this area—although what Max was now proposing would go far beyond conventional therapeutic communities. The local Commissioner of Health, Alfred Heath, had told Max to take some time to “dream” of what he might accomplish in that setting. What Max proposed was not the usual community mental health clinic but a broader use of his social learning principles. Specifically, he had recommended that the governor (whom he’d met) make some television appearances to talk to the people about the social conditions in the territory and explain decisions the administration had made. From this information, he’d hoped that schools would initiate discussion groups and include their parents and neighbors. Even at some point, there could be live interaction between the chief executive and the people. In a memorandum he wrote to Dr Heath, Max said that through his proposal the governor would have the opportunity to be a real person in his own right, not in some abstract form as a power figure hidden behind a bureaucratic screen. The people, so Max thought, would see the governor as a human being beset by problems familiar to everyone and that he handled them in a way that elicited the people’s respect of authority and a new level of

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public trust. Max believed the governor could set an example for social learning and growth that could effect the lives of all the islanders. And, in the same memo, Max revealed one of his longstanding “dreams” where he suggested they take an uninhabited island to set up a simplified living situation or “character building program”: a self-sustaining community for young delinquents. They would be identified with the common goal of a successful enterprise (of their own) that would imply a positive group identity and a responsible role in establishing a therapeutic culture. Max’s proposals fell on deaf ears. The federal government, under the new community mental health legislation, funded him but his ideas didn’t fit any of their categories—even under prevention. Officials in Washington, as well as locally, put pressure on him to hire black staff and set up conventional programs. He persisted to no avail. During an encounter with NIMH officials, he suffered his first heart attack. He decided that the stress was too much and prepared to leave for Phoenix at the end of the summer. MY LAST YEAR in London, I had been writing a book on alternatives to prison. I finished it soon after I moved to Paris; it was published in the UK and was translated into French. I sent Max a copy, as he was leaving for Phoenix. He wrote that, upon reading it, he was tempted to get back into this field himself and reiterated how important early education was for forming character. I was terribly flattered when he enclosed a copy of a handwritten letter to the American Psychiatric Association’s selection committee nominating me for the Isaac Ray Award. Max seemed to have decreased some of his activities. After he was settled in Phoenix he’d been able to think, read, and write, still do some consulting and give a few workshops. He hoped to see me the next year as he’d been invited to Zurich and Yugoslavia. But for the next few months, I heard nothing. I’d learned to accept these periods of silence as part of our friendship; I also knew they meant more than that merely he was too busy to write. And then I

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learned that he and Janette had divorced; Max had married Chris, a teacher he’d known in Denver when he was working on a project in a Catholic school. She also was a talented artist, concentrating in wood sculpture. He wrote that they were finding Phoenix an invigorating place and he seriously urged me to think about returning to the US and settle in that area. He told me about some new projects that were alternatives to prison much like I had described in my book and thought I might find a job in one of them. He added that he was reading Thomas Szasz’s Manufacture of Madness and how much he was in agreement with his thesis. He continued to say that was why he had left the Maudsley and an academic career and drifted towards social ecology. He added that his latest book (Maturation of the Therapeutic Community) had been awarded the Book of the Year from the American Journal of Nursing, and that we needed to get together soon for a long talk. Actually I had been considering the possibility of returning to the US for a few years to make some money so I could buy a little place in the country, possibly in France. I was ambivalent about returning even temporarily. Despite all the frustrations, I had enjoyed being in Europe—there was a certain tranquility here. At first, my feelings were of relief to be away from the US. I knew that Nixon’s administration was not interested in making needed social changes. The war seemed endless. I didn’t know what appealed most to me: the stability, the adventure, or the absence of the American agenda. Perhaps it was all of these. But my financial struggle clouded the picture. I wrote some articles for UNESCO and had hopes that I might eventually find a job there. It came close when I was one of two nominated to go on a mission to Iran to assist in training non-professionals. But I was saved from a possible “misadventure” when the Iranians chose the other person who happened to be from the USSR. And then Max suffered his second heart attack—this time it was more serious. When he had recovered, he wrote that it was an interesting and informative experience being so close to death. He now realized that he had to curtail some of his activities further. His health was improving but he would no longer be able to undertake intensive workshops and referred to Annapolis. He sent me a chapter for comments that he’d written for a book on

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treatment in correctional settings where he’d cited another project that linked up with our NJ experience—he said when he’d “walked out.” Now he mentioned that he’d bridged the gap and thought we could stay together in a Synanon-type group. IN THE SUMMER of 1976, Max and Chris went to Edinburgh, where Max did some teaching in the medical school. He was to speak at a world conference on therapeutic communities in Zurich and another in Norrkoping, Sweden, where he would address the first World Conference of Therapeutic Communities. He had arranged to stop off for a few days in Paris. I was living in Montmartre on a tiny street so steep that it had steps for a walk. I knew the approximate time they would arrive and so had been looking out my window. It was a momentous sight to see Max with his new wife begin the ascent and I rushed out to assist him. I hadn’t been with him since his heart attacks so I didn’t know what his physical condition would be like. To my relief, he not only allowed me to carry his luggage but seemed grateful for the assistance. In former times, he’d have resisted. He looked in fine shape physically but had to pause now and then to get his breath before ascending more steps. He was alert and excited. Although we hadn’t seen each other for some time, there was still a deep feeling of continuity between us. This occasion was my first meeting with Chris. Although Max had written to me about her, he had said very little other than they were happy together and that she was just what he needed. They shared many interests including their classroom work with children. Chris, being an artist, was a great source of delight for Max. He had always talked about creativity and the creative process but he saw it as something beyond him. Now that he was living with an artist, he was closer to the creative source than he had ever been. In his later years, her love and common sense would help Max through his worst health crisis. For now, Chris was introducing him to the world of art—a world that hitherto had been a puzzle to him, albeit a beautiful one. I suppose my impressions were coloured by Max’s enthusiasm; in any case, I took an immediate liking to Chris. Not only was

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she attractive but she had a down-to-earth quality that quickened her blond good looks when she offered an opinion. Max sometimes liked to stretch the facts to fit his hopes, but Chris was not that easily impressed; even if she was from Nebraska, she would call him up short, often contradict him. I was eager to hear about his “misadventure” in the Virgin Islands (which he went into with great gusto), and his open-heart surgery during which he came close to death. What followed was a blow-by-blow account of Max’s nine months in the Virgin Islands culminating with his coronary attack as he confronted his superior from NIMH. Now removed, Max could recount the episode in an almost psychodramatic fashion. He went “green” and everyone thought he was dying. Then “this bloody woman from New York” told him to lie down! He said he refused although he felt awful and, through a sweat, told her that he’d spent his life fighting the abuse of authority and he was not going to buckle down to her now. He told her he was giving a ninety-day notice. According to Max, a cardiologist, who was nearby, advised him to have a check up but, instead, he took his usual 100-yard dash on the beach that evening. It was almost like being there the way Max told it. And I must admit that I was a little concerned: suppose he had another attack whilst he was here? That steep climb up to the apartment was enough to make a younger man stop for breath. Eventually our conversation became a discussion, as it usually did, when Max saw one of Ivan Illich’s books on my desk. He opened it and read: “The learner must be guaranteed his freedom without guaranteeing to society what learning he will acquire and hold as his own.” Then he read another sentence. “Each man must be guaranteed privacy in learning with the hope that he will assume the obligation of helping others to grow in uniqueness.” Max was delighted overall with Illich’s views but also had questions. How can you assume that others will grow in uniqueness? He proceeded to answer his question by saying that only by allowing them to learn what they want to learn. If they wanted to learn to be a blacksmith, to take an example, he guessed we’d have to fit it into the structure (in a therapeutic community for instance). But

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he didn’t think that choice would necessarily help them to live. It would only be part of one step as he expressed it, in the mosaic of growing into uniqueness and assuming the obligation of helping others do the same. Then he said, that to him, there was a kind of contradiction in what Illich said: How do you assume the obligation of helping others to grow into uniqueness? He paused and then, after reading another quotation, said: what bothered him was structure. If each person, even in Paris with its five million, achieved this freedom to learn, freedom to use the tools to understand how bridges are built, or whatever, well then how do you fit all these pieces together to avoid a totally egotistical, ego-centric, self-centered world? How do you organize a structure so this freedom can occur? Max returned to his long-standing concerns of elitism in education and how from the beginning, admittance to education is still limited to certain people. The higher one goes, the more elitist it becomes. Academic degrees in our culture are one entrance to privilege. In contrast, he cited the barefoot doctors in China whose structure allowed people to learn new skills so that they could be of better service to others. It’s this good of the whole, he concluded, that was missing in this highly individualized concept of education. He stressed the importance that, at some point, you must have law, you must have limits to destructive behavior—even creative behavior. If you’re going to create an atomic bomb that is going to destroy society, someone else has to contain you. Although I understood the context of Max’s remarks, it was still a scary thought that, in the wrong hands, the state might control creativity, no matter how benign its form. But now, it seemed like he was saying that society had to set limits to human endeavors. After lunch, Max wanted Chris to tell me about their recent experience in Scotland where they visited Jimmy Boyle (who was incarcerated for murder) at Barlinnie Prison. He was rapidly becoming a well-known artist and they had been impressed both with his works and with him as a person. Max called him “a philosopher in art.” Chris described some of his work, especially his sculpture and a large mural that he had recently done. We

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wondered among ourselves how he was able to create art while confined in such a restrictive prison. Would his creativity continue if, and when, he was released? And would creativity supersede criminality? And then Max said that if we had learned anything from Henderson, it was that basically we all have to have some form of peer group identity. Jimmy said he would like to return to the crime-infested Gorbels of Glasgow and train gangs because he’s got leadership skills and could be leading people away from what he’d experienced. Max’s guess would be, given an identity as a reform agent with his own kind of destructive use, and given the understanding in which his destructiveness grew, he just might be better than a Bowlby! Max reminisced on some of the things we’d done. He seemed to deplore the fact that I had “copped out” and was simply enjoying a new life that, despite its own frustrations, was far less stressful. At one point, he declared that the responses of those around a person determined his self-image. I thought the idea strange until I realized how different Max and I really were in our approach to living: Max was still traveling around the world giving talks, writing papers, and consulting; on the other hand, I wanted detachment, solitude, quiet. To Max’s way of thinking, it was a retreat; there was still so much to accomplish. He talked about my returning to the US and resuming work in areas similar to his. He was confident I could find work in Phoenix—it would be just like old times, the two of us working together—I didn’t want to disappoint him—he was so enthusiastic. Although I had no plans of my own, his idea was the furthest thing from my mind. I had made the break physically and was struggling to move on to something else (I didn’t yet know what). I felt Paris offered me an opportunity to try other options. It was my second chance and I didn’t want to lose it. When I explained my situation to Max, he was certainly disappointed, but he also understood. And we parted in good company. IN THE AUTUMN of 1977, I decided it was time to end my fling in Paris. I didn’t seem to be getting anywhere in terms of a job:

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teaching English to French businessmen was not very satisfying and my salary hardly kept me above the poverty line. I had turned fifty and had been away from the US for almost ten years. I was out of touch both politically and professionally. My correspondence with Max since his last visit was minimal so I didn’t know much about what he’d been doing. By now, the economic situation had worsened, and there weren’t any assurances of employment —even in Phoenix. I was relieved in a way: I wasn’t sure I’d be able to live up to Max’s expectations since I’d moved quite far from his approach. Rather than get involved in amelioration, I wanted to go even further than prevention. I still wanted to see what I could do to activate creative (and socially useful) potentials in young people. The US Department of Justice had given Doug Grant a one-year contract to explore training young people for participation in program development, which included education, new definitions of work, uses of leisure, and so on. He offered me a job as project coordinator. Whilst Max was disappointed that I didn’t come to Phoenix, he was delighted that I would be working with Doug once again. I hoped that Max might also join us at some point. I was not convinced that the activist approach we’d attempted at Henderson was unworkable. The project came to life when Doug and I decided to hire a group of young people. We both wanted to see what they could do if given the opportunity to help solve some of the problems confronting youth. Modeled on the teams we had formed for the New Careers project at the Vacaville prison, the YAT or Youth Action Team we put together was composed of young people of high school age with two university students as coordinators. Together they learned the principles of program development, started some small projects in the local schools, and published a newsletter (New Dimensions in Youth Education and Employment) where they discussed ideas and the problems they encountered. Their eventual job was to assist in the preparation of a series of task forces being assembled around the country to improve “school climates.” The project culminated in a week-long conference near Washington, bringing more than a hundred people together to formulate action plans.

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In this project, I saw once again how Max’s basic idea of social learning could go further than “treating” mental disorder. Whilst working on individual projects, the team members met daily to share their results and the problems such close association inevitably generated. I thought back to the “tutorials” I had visited during my first meeting with Max. Now I could see the long-range possibilities of this basic way of learning. A youth worker from Australia visited the project and went back to form a similar action team there. I was pleased when he invited me to come and visit the project and speak at the annual meeting of the youth workers. In that talk, I emphasized the need to move beyond “volunteerism” (which was very popular there at that time) and said that the government and the private sector needed to create new jobs for young people so that they could make a career of helping others and learn from their experiences at the same time. Meanwhile, Max’s main interests likewise had turned to education. A year after the YAT project had ended, I was working on another project and scheduled a week-long workshop for teachers and school administrators in Los Angeles. I thought that Max would have a lot to offer, in view of his involvement in schools both in Denver and in Scotland. So I arranged for him to do a one-day session. The meeting was doomed from the beginning. He attempted a psychodrama, but they weren’t interested in interacting in that manner. They’d come looking for concrete and practical answers to the many “problems” in their classrooms, and his “living learning” approaches were too vague and unrealistic. Many had already found fixed solutions from other workshops; now they wanted more of the same thing. The times certainly had changed. The conditions of the workshop were further complicated because officials from Washington (who administered the grant) had come to observe the training. Max was not his former self: he didn’t have much energy. Whether it was due to his physical condition, his aging, or both, he lacked the old enthusiasm. A short time later (December 1978), Hans Toch (Professor of Criminal Justice, State University of New York) organized a conference at the Institute of Man and Sciences in Rensselaerville,

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New York, on therapeutic communities in prisons. The conference was to engage key administrators and prepare for the launching of a wide-scale treatment program in New York’s prisons. Hans had invited Fritz Redl and Max as two seminal thinkers. They would hold an informal round table based on their ideas and use material from some of us who’d run projects based on Max’s concepts. I was tantalized about this meeting: it would be a chance to see Max again and, together with Doug, we could pool ideas. I thought also it would be a rare opportunity to meet Fritz Redl. The conference went very well. The format was one where Max functioned at his best with unusually high participation by everyone present. He set the tone of the conference with his format of social learning. ‘Social learning’ is a term used in different ways by different people. To me it means that if the inputs from everyone in a room are matched against my own position, I can’t stand still, and I must begin to modify my attitudes, values, and beliefs so that I change, in some tiny, almost imperceptible way. That’s something happening to me which is affecting my personality, if you like, in a tiny way.19

I think he was satisfied with the conference although I noticed that many of Max’s contributions were sprinkled with terms and concepts such as synchronicity and synergism, topics he was currently engaged in, that at times seemed rather ostentatious. But Max was somewhat like a child with a new toy who wanted to show it to everyone and have them play with him. In a paper Doug prepared for the conference, he singled out Max’s contribution to social learning. The core concept was living learning. He explained how he had furthered these ideas in his own work: As an application of this concept, we have worked for thirty years to explore living learning that occurs when clients and front-line staff participate in social research. Our efforts involve democratizing the process of organizational development. While we have not eliminated emotional learning of the sort

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found in therapeutic communities, we have extended the concept of living learning to the acquisition of knowledge about contextual forces that affect problems of personal and organizational development. We have seen this as a merging of mental health and education through participation in applies social research.20

I WAS TO start a new job as Professor of Human Justice at the experimental Governors State University outside of Chicago. I had hoped to bring Max there to “lecture,” but the situation turned out to be far from satisfactory. What I didn’t know was that the university was in turmoil: a new president (from Harvard) was attempting to turn it into a respectable (i.e., traditional) institution and bring it in line with the other campuses. Most of the students were also disappointing. Although I felt a certain degree of affinity with them, it was difficult to create a learning situation. To begin with, most of them were working full time at dead-end jobs, mainly in one type of governmental bureaucracy or another. Classes were held in the late afternoon and evening. The long hour’s drive from Chicago left many students without much energy or enthusiasm. I tried to organize some situations from which they could learn, and a few did respond. I could see that it would take years to establish a framework where anything resembling action learning could take place. And I doubted if the new administration would be very supportive. The bright spot happened by chance. Some of the students were looking for a project where they could involve youth in solving their own problems. A nearby grassroots community organization was looking for a summer project for black youth and suddenly received a federal grant to employ some. We rather hurriedly put together a plan whereby we could employ students to supervise fifty of these youth. We brought them onto the campus and taught them some basic skills in interviewing, operating video equipment and computers and then sent them out in youth action teams (YAT) to study conditions in their neighborhood. Most of them had acquired a distaste for schools

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to the extent that they had burned down one of their own the previous year. But they took to the assignment and began to bring in their observations to share with one another and learn from them. I was convinced that we were on the right track, and that Max’s social learning had applicability for totally unselected— and “unmotivated”—young people. The university’s administration, however, was mounting resistance to anything other than traditional classroom procedures. And so, I decided to leave before my frustration got the better of me. I resigned at the end of the year and returned to San Francisco. FOR THE NEXT year or two, Max and I almost lost contact with one another. Our letters were minimal. He was trying to find a place for himself in Phoenix, that was proving to be less than the cultural and intellectual oasis he had originally fancied. A project for alcoholic Native Americans he had envisioned didn’t materialize nor did a project for school children. His hopes for teaching at a university went unrealized too. Instead he consulted in the local state hospital and in the jail. All in all, he’d found adjusting to retired life difficult—“active retirement” he called it. He still wanted to travel and conduct workshops but his health limited these kinds of activities. Upon returning to San Francisco, I found a part-time job editing for a small press where I’d hoped also to get some of Max’s and my own things published. By October 1979, Max had found me. I had been house-sitting for friends and hadn’t yet found a place of my own in San Francisco. He wrote that it was a relief to have tracked me down. Max had tried unsuccessfully for a number of years to find a publisher for his manuscript on his eight years at Dingleton. He wrote me that he’d given up ever finding one. I thought it might be something I could get published for him. He was leaving shortly for Italy where he was to attend a conference in Arezzo and receive an award for his contribution to “democratize psychiatry.” The organizer was the controversial psychiatrist Franco Bascaglia, whom Max had invited to his

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conference in Edinburgh and who brought along a film crew to document it. Dr Bascaglia had gone a great distance in his attempts to advance social psychiatry in Italy and had moved into the political arena where he got one of the most far-reaching laws passed of any country drastically limiting the use of mental hospitals.21 At the same time, the director of youth activities at the UN’s Social Development Center in Vienna had appointed me to an expert panel on youth development and I was to spend a week there. The meeting was to develop guidelines for training youth workers to help young people participate in events around them. I’d hoped Max and I could meet whilst we were both in Europe but our schedules didn’t overlap. On his return to Phoenix, he wrote me that his trip to Italy had shown him how therapeutic community concepts were adopted as a form of Marxism —therefore, more acceptable to left-wing psychiatrists there. He wrote of his concerns of the dichotomy between our ideas and the new autocratic drug treatment programs in the US, and his hopes there could be some way to bridge the differences. He mentioned the next international conference in the Netherlands might be the place where they could minimize this split. I was developing some proposals for international youth exchanges and had sent them to him for his ideas. He responded that, whilst my language was a little heavy at times, he nevertheless got the message, and that my enthusiasm was infectious. He said that we needed to interact and that he’d changed a great deal since our last meeting. The opportunity to meet again came soon when Max and Chris stopped by (in San Francisco) on their way to re-visit Oregon State Hospital and do some consulting in the Northwest. He’d recently been at the meeting in Holland and was impressed by being introduced to the Queen; never missing an opportunity to promote change, he’d given her a copy of his latest book. He brought along a copy of Marilyn Ferguson’s book, The Aquarian Conspiracy (that Chris had found). Max took to it immediately and wrote to the author about his own work. She suggested that they meet. When we got together in San Francisco, he had

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just come from Los Angeles where he’d spent an afternoon with her. Indeed, she was interested in his life and in his work; she suggested that he write his autobiography and arranged for him to meet with her editor (Millie Loeb at Jeremy Tarcher, publisher) to go over the prospects. She looked over Max’s writings and suggested that he find a collaborator who could put his ideas into a form that would interest the general public. Max was aroused about this prospect and upon his return to Phoenix, was going to find a writer in the area with whom he could work. Max failed to find someone he thought competent and compatible. In desperation he contacted me to see if I would be interested in interviewing him on tape that he’d use as a basis for preparing a text and then, perhaps find someone (not necessarily from that area) with whom he could collaborate on the writing. And so began the basis for a new turn in our relationship that was to involve us for the next ten years until Max died. He wrote me and asked if relationships get more complicated as one grew older. He added that he used to think they mellowed. And he mentioned a former colleague with whom he said he could no longer stand to work. He asked if I thought he was more perceptive, more mature—or “sick.” I thought to myself that it was a combination of the first two and grinned over his last suggestion—to think that he would still revert to his old reductionist ways. It was inspiring indeed to see Max still learning and groping for new ideas at this stage in his life. He was at a defining moment and though he reverted to the more familiar at times, he nevertheless was moving in new directions. He wrote me we were both tired of the “professional” role. He mentioned that he was currently reading William Irwin Thompson, Theodore Roszak, E. F. Schumacher, Gregory Bateson, and so on. THESE WERE IMPORTANT transitional years for Max. Whilst he was finalizing his book on Dingleton for Routledge, he was collecting his thoughts for the proposed autobiography. Although he’d recently concentrated on applying his concepts to mental health, largely through crisis intervention at Fort Logan,

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he’d entered elementary schools and was now focusing on growth and development. Although related, he was going beyond prevention in the limited sense of the concept. He was still maintaining an interest in therapeutic communities per se in his efforts to create a model in the local jail and mental hospital. And he was attempting to heal the schism between the “democratic” therapeutic communities which he’d been identified with and what he termed the “new” or “programmatic” ones, primarily those treating drug addiction. At the same time, he was moving far beyond the traditional boundaries of his original professional calling and flirting with what he called “futurism.” Which in the next few years would amalgamate into “spirituality.” Methodically viewing his life and work at this time was to allow him to see his accomplishments in perspective; the resultant examination became more than mere reminiscence, more than his psychoanalysis: the response set forth new forces which were to sustain his inquiries through his remaining years.

chapter five

RECYCLING THE PSYCHE My previous focus on people has now transgressed the boundaries of the human body and mind to include the spirit, which is in turn a part of the energy emanating from the environment as a whole. So now the question is, WHO AM I?

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CONTACTED MILLIE Loeb at Jeremy Tarcher’s who suggested that Max go ahead and submit a proposal for his autobiography. In April 1981, a letter arrived from Max with an airline ticket to Phoenix. He wanted me to come and spend a week interviewing him in preparation. He sent along a note saying this was my passport—to heaven or hell, it was up to me. And added they were a bit nervous about professional protocol—so please be tolerant! Chris and Max met me at the airport and took me to a restaurant to have drinks with one of Max’s colleagues, Dr Leonardo Garcia-Buñuel and his wife. The evening began on a festive-enough air with Martinis served in brandy inhalers on an outdoor terrace overlooking the desert. The beauty and vastness of the southwest lay before us with its subdued colors of oranges, yellows, burnt umber, and purples; it made subtle forms and shapes of curves and gullies, amidst the heat and stretches of emptiness. Dr Garcia-Buñuel (nephew of the film director) and his wife were another vestige of European charm; they maintained their home in Spain, and wintered in Arizona. Leonardo, himself, was somewhat of a controversial character; he’d directed a project in a mental hospital in the late 1950s that was years before its time. He had spoken of the “ecology” of mental hospitals in an article he wrote in 1960.22 All his life, Max seemed to draw such people to him and for some offered a haven whilst they sorted things out and regained their positions. Max and Leonardo brought me up to date on their work in the local jail over the past four years. They had established a small therapeutic community for about sixteen prisoners with psychiatric problems in addition to introducing a crisis intervention service throughout the jail. Their project was a training facility for

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the jail staff. Max served as a consultant two to three mornings each week. Earlier that year, Max had written me about the project comparing it to Chino prison. He mentioned that leaders had emerged from the prisoners who were as able as the staff and he could even see resemblances of the students with whom I’d worked. But things had not gone well, as I found out. There was a recent change in top management who had reassessed the program. The upheaval that followed was hardly conducive to the delicate workings of the project. I’m no longer sure of the details but it seems that an unsympathetic, authoritarian administrator took control of it. Finally, Max left. Now I understood better what he had been going though as he struggled to keep the program intact. Some months earlier, he had phoned and asked if I would be interested in coming there, either as a full-time consultant or in a key staff position. I said I was mildly interested. A few days later, he phoned again to tell me of the changes and said that I shouldn’t consider coming. After he’d left the jail project, Max wanted to concentrate on his autobiography full-time. But he still couldn’t find a collaborator. In the meantime, I suggested that he contact a person I’d met from the National Institute of Justice, to try to get a small grant to write up his experiences at the jail. I thought it important that this project be as well documented as possible. Max continued working on his autobiography proposal and sent me each draft for comment. Just before he left for a consulting trip to Canada, he sent a draft and wrote how often wonderful relationships get lost, referring to ours. He suggested that it was a fascinating study in itself. I resolved to keep it in better repair in the future. He’d also recently been consulting with Ralph Catalano at the new University of California campus at Irvine, near Los Angeles, and returned very enthusiastic about their program in social ecology. He now began to think more seriously in terms of this dimension to his work and spoke to me about how prisons and mental hospitals “polluted” the social atmosphere by sending out clients who were not only unchanged, but who would continue

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their anti- or asocial behavior. As well as amelioration, he spoke of “social inoculation” as a form of prevention.23 I wrote to Max concerning his ideas of “recycling” the psyche: In some ways, this is what is happening to our relationship and it is very exciting to me to be experiencing it—a much more mature relationship where mutual learning and enjoyment is taking place, rather than the teacher-student, no matter how important that was. It’s a discovery and a re-discovery which has me looking at my relationships with other people whom I value, and I’m excited to try this “recycling” with them.

Our plans for my return to Phoenix were interrupted by the national air controllers’ strike. Quite honestly I dreaded flying under such uncertain conditions and proposed to Max that we postpone the visit for the time being. Max continued to work on the proposal drafts and sent them to me for comments. I had contacted a close friend, Marvin Gluck, a successful television screen writer, for his suggestions about writing in autobiographical form. Marvin read the proposal and made candid comments: I don’t know what Max sounds like in person, but his writing style sounds extremely cold and formal. That could, in the short term, not be bad but in the long term, it might put off the reader, and I think that it’s important, in order for Max to communicate the meaning of this life-examining experience, that the reader identify and like him. And a lot of it is simply style. It would be more interesting for Max to discuss parts of his life—fragments of his childhood that he remembers—without necessarily knowing what they meant, or how they shaped him. But, knowing that they stuck in his mind: the effect of non-functional recall would make Max seem more human, more vulnerable, and in the long-run, more interesting. There is the danger of excessive dryness and over-seriousness in the book if you don’t cultivate that part of his personality.

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Based on these comments, Max made significant changes in his proposal and sent along another draft. Again, I discussed it with Marvin: You have to be a little more structured; there has to be a sense of discovery in the book. This autobiography is going to be about the growth in him and how he thinks this growth applies to others. The book is not just a summary, or even a synthesis, of his other books. It’s not simply listing events in his life. The readers have to think that they are being let in on something (not definitive answers) that’s come from a hell of a lot of experience. Then the reader can participate in what Max has experienced and what he’s concluded.

Marvin thought that, in his writing, Max was prescribing for others based on his experiences rather than describing what actually happened to him. “Even though he says it intellectually,” Marvin said It doesn’t sound like he’s willing to sit back and look at his own life in those terms—a constant self-examination. If Max could really, truthfully, do what he says for others to do, that is, “recycle” his own life and do it publicly, then you might have an extraordinary book.

Marvin also told me that the Mill Hill episode in itself would make a marvelous play, perhaps for television, and that he would help me with it if I was interested in giving it a try. I taped our discussions, transcribed them, and sent them to Max for his perusal. Two days later, he phoned full of enthusiasm: what a boost Marvin’s critiques had given him. He was now totally re-writing the proposal and, at last, sending it to Millie Loeb at Tarcher. In keeping with Marvin’s advice to re-examine his life more honestly, Max then sent me an account of his relationships with three women early in his life. Apparently he had maintained contact with them over the years. The account was very personal—the more so because it was the first time Max had gone into this side of his life in such detail with me. I thought it perhaps was too personal and revealing for his autobiography, but then he

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had sent it to me and asked my advice about where it could be put into his manuscript. He said he was going over past letters, photographs, and papers but it was difficult to find new material that he hadn’t already cited in his writings or interviews. Max had heard nothing from Tarcher regarding the proposal, and he was getting impatient. When I phoned Millie Loeb, she told me quite frankly that Max was not known well enough to interest Tarcher in an autobiography at present. Some “PR” was needed. She suggested I first try an article about him and get it published in a good newspaper or magazine—often these were the sources where they got ideas for books. I tried my hand writing an article about Max and his work and put most of it in dialogue form. I sent it to New Realities. One of the associate editors phoned me to say she was interested in the article for a possible cover story. She suggested some changes but when she presented it to the editor, he rejected it. Again, the idea was that Max was not well-known enough and since it was seen as an interview, they had their own staff to do them. I sent the article to several other of the more progressive magazines and to various professional journals but they too all rejected it. And then on an impulse, I sent a variation to the Journal of Holistic Nursing. Jane Martin, the editor, phoned me to say that she wanted to publish the conversation; she’d been to a lecture of Max’s in the 1960s.24 I hadn’t heard from Max for a while when he phoned one Sunday to say that he was abandoning his autobiography. The decision was a painful one. He had been debating with himself for the past month and was emotionally drained. Summing up his life in writing had made him feel it was ending; that he no longer existed. It was an obituary, not a biography. And the “protracted self-analysis”—the “psychological striptease”—seemed antithetical to his philosophy of life; he wanted to portray his life more positively, to show people one way of how to live. The call was a long one for Max—about an hour in all. He spoke about loneliness and vulnerability in general and how one could overcome some of this alienation through networks and associations. He was sad that having worked all his life to put a positive turn on things, it was still a dog-eat-dog world,

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particularly among professionals. He had approached life as an adventure and wanted to extrapolate the principles he’d learned from his experiences, beginning with his early involvement in athletics. But try as he might, he couldn’t remember much else about his early years. There were those times he had run home from school, frightened and appalled at the world, and barricaded himself in his room. There was so much chaos out there, so much uncertainty. Everyone was fighting for his own piece of turf. Adults had unquestioned power over children and even schoolboy culture reflected that hierarchy; the seniors wielded power over juniors. He had felt the will to power in himself and he was terrified that he would become like others: ruthless, authoritarian, uncaring. He said it was rugby that helped him get control over his tendency to dominate the situation. It was on the playing field that he first learned the principle of multiple leadership. There, teamwork was everything: no one member, not even the captain, could accumulate so much power as to go unchallenged. That story was the one he often recounted when, without consulting anyone else, he’d challenged an opposing team to a meet. His action had infuriated his coach and headmaster—and led to his insight into his own authoritarian tendencies. He realized that he was out of his depth. In sum, the enthusiasm he had shown at his meeting with Marilyn Ferguson had waned. Overall, he liked Marvin’s suggestions. They had helped him see the impossibility of the endeavor. But why didn’t I write about my own life? He was now doing the self-examination that Marvin had suggested and I hoped he would continue with his “painful communication.” But such communication with one’s self is sometimes too painful—it needs placing in a different context. Our conversation dwindled; finally, he put Chris on the line to sum up his feelings. Chris had suggested he try writing humorous fairy tales, perhaps slanting them toward youth. I didn’t want him to risk interruption of his self-examination although I feared that he was now preparing to abandon it. Finally, he said how disappointed he had been that I did not come to see him, as we’d planned. He asked if I could visit him

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again soon—this time socially. But there were to be no more interviews, no more work on the manuscript. I had a relevant dream; not strangely enough, Max was the subject. I was making a patchwork quilt of lovely hand-woven materials in various shades of orange and yellow (orange for the solar plexus and yellow the heart in the chakras). The quilt became an expression of Max’s ideas about futures—there was no overall coherent pattern, but rather shades of colors. And then a young couple were about to toast me on my accomplishment of the quilt. They brought out heavy crystal goblets and opened a chilled bottle of expensive, yellow coloured wine. The man apologized: “Afraid that’s all we have.” And then he accidentally dropped the tray and the stems of all the glasses broke. The couple were embarrassed, and the wife, under the stress, was so humiliated that she began to weep. MEANWHILE, THERE WAS another sudden shift in the administration of Durango Jail; a different administrative department took control and they asked Max to return. Now, he was involved five mornings a week and felt he was doing something worthwhile again. By early 1982, the reverberations from the air controllers’ strike seemed to be minimal and presented no threat and so we rescheduled my visit to Phoenix. Not only had Max returned to the jail project, but he returned to his autobiography which surprised me as he had given no indication to that effect. This change was all the more surprising because of the lack of enthusiasm following Tarcher’s rejection. He thought he could interest another publisher and I agreed. I was pleasantly surprised that he wanted to continue our interviews. To tell the truth, I missed those hours of conversation with him. Soon after I arrived, he got out his tape recorder and, despite the interval between this conversation and our last one, we picked up easily where we had left off; a week later, we had additional material to work on. The visits to Phoenix were some of the most enjoyable and stimulating times I ever spent with Max. Though we worked hard

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and the interviews stirred up a lot of memories for him (not all pleasant), our friendship deepened as did my respect for him. To be witness to so much of his personal life was a great honor: I like to think that he trusted me enough to explore past, forgotten memories. As he recounted his experiences, I felt both humbled by his courage to examine himself and grateful that I had known such an extraordinary man. After I returned home, I transcribed our conversations and sent them to Max. As he received them, he began writing and re-writing, sending me the drafts along with additional information on cassettes. Slowly the book took shape and evolved chapter by chapter. We were both optimistic that we would find a publisher. The first complete draft was almost finished when I approached Ernst Wenk (owner of the International Dialogue Press I was working for). He liked it and tentatively agreed to publish it once his senior editor, Nora Harlow, went over it. MAX AND CHRIS were seriously considering leaving Phoenix and locating somewhere else. Although he said he was enjoying life, they had no stimulating friends in this “desert.” On his consulting trip to Canada, Max visited a psychiatrist (Doug Archibald) in Nova Scotia who’d been with him at Dingleton. Dr Archibald discussed the possibility that Max help set up a community mental health program there with him. Chris and Max liked the rural setting; they found a little house at the edge of a woods, near the Bay of Fundy. They bought it somewhat impulsively, I gather. There, they hoped to find a simpler life, closer to nature, yet with the possibilities of active participation in the community. And so they made the decision to relocate. And then late in the spring of 1982, Max and Chris finally moved to Nova Scotia. After they arrived in Wolfville, Max wrote that the distance made him feel cheated out of our working together. He was reading a great deal and was fascinated by the concept of transcendence. He urged that we keep in touch and publish something when the time was ripe. He hinted that I might like the rural area where he’d located—and see Montreal as a “little Paris.”

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Once settled in his new home, Max had a letterhead printed which identified him as a “Psychiatrist and Social Ecologist.” Whilst the new term announced the change he was going through, he retained the more established credential for professional reasons. When I teased him about holding on to “tradition,” he justified it by saying that he still had to get consulting jobs to augment his income for his daughters’ educations. Later that summer, Max wrote that he’d sent off the autobiography proposal that we’d originally prepared to two of his former publishers, Yale and Routledge. Both seemed interested but wanted something for a more “professional” audience. He mentioned that our attempt to reach a more general audience had been fun and invited me to send him a chapter on the Chino prison projects if he got a contract. So it looked as though our writing project was over. Not only was it shelved but more importantly, it had changed format. Even though it was taking a long time to get his autobiography in shape, I thought something very worthwhile was coming from our efforts at dialogue. Now he was retreating into a vein that was familiar and safe. And hadn’t he already tried enough to reach the professionals? In the US, his work was no longer so well-known. A new generation controlled what Peter Breggin called, “Toxic Psychiatry.”25 As far as therapeutic communities were concerned, the drug programs had taken over; but what they were doing was a far cry from Max’s model. I had hoped that this book would revive his work and introduce him to new generations. There was still some interest and a few good programs in Europe. Despite attempts to close Henderson during the Conservative administration, it was still operating. Max wrote me that at one time the government had actually set a date for its closure (4 January 1980). He sent me a piece he’d contributed to Mindout, titled, “A Requiem for Henderson Hospital” in which he summarized his work prior to its founding. In addition to citing applications of his work, he focused on character disorders: [T]here is the huge responsibility that any humanistic society must acknowledge of virtually no learning (treatment)

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facilities for character disorders… Character disorders, be they Hitlers, the Mafia, or just plain criminals, or unscrupulous businessmen or politicians, seem to dominate world affairs. We must learn to deal with, or better, prevent, the social disorganization which they cause (and are products of) and which threatens our very existence… Its [Henderson’s] expense which is relatively minimal, must be matched against its importance internationally.

After he’d reviewed some of the last transcripts, Max wrote me to ask if I thought some of our conversations ought to go in his autobiography—he suggested a mixture of text and conversation. While editing the manuscript, Nora Harlow became interested in the conversations we had added as a supplement to chapters. She thought the conversations themselves had more the flavor of what Max had done and encouraged us to expand them—perhaps do away with the text altogether. Toward the end of the summer of 1983, Max had reached the same conclusion. The last chapter on “Futures,” was already totally in dialogue format. Max was convinced that the conversational form was right for us in this project. Max returned the parts he had rewritten with his suggestions and a cassette which had his ideas for an introduction. Our project seemed to have come off the back burner. He wrote that he was happily engaged on “our book” but missed his collaborator. He’d finished rewriting the third chapter and asked me to phone him as soon as possible to discuss it. About this time, I happened to see the film My Dinner With André, on PBS (Public Broadcasting System), and got the script.26 I contacted Marvin Gluck and he agreed that André might be the way to do this book. Through various drafts, the manuscript was becoming a dialogue. The autobiography itself was shelved for the time being. We hoped that following Millie Loeb’s advice, we might be able to interest a publisher in his autobiography perhaps after the book of dialogues was in print. We continued to work on the dialogues and came up with a draft that Max liked. He had his daughter Lisa read it and although critical of some parts, she generally was very positive. She sent me

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a postcard after her visit to tell me of her enthusiasm. Max forwarded Lisa’s notes. She liked the dialogue format but pointed out we were still using professional jargon at times. Lisa called our attention to some inconsistencies, and pointed out that we were imposing Max’s open system onto participants. Sometimes people don’t want to be so conscious of their behavior—they just want to “hang out and chat.” She was calling her father up short. He had been stressing that the methods he’d developed over his lifetime did indeed have general applicability. He wrote about the need for all institutions to become the open systems that he had described. Although I agreed with him in principle, I thought perhaps he still didn’t have enough experience outside the medical community to make such speculations. He’d kept abreast, however, with developments in the business world where they had been using sensitivity training and organizational development methods. In fact, he brought many of these ideas back into mental health. I tended to agree with Lisa on her comment that the therapeutic community was not for everyone. I had felt its stifling nature myself at Dingleton and questioned whether you could not have a private life that did not interfere with the community. In one of his papers, Max asked the rhetorical question: “What would a truly democratic system entail?” And he answered by enumerating the characteristics that he had developed over his lifetime. In another paper, Max suggested that “The general principles worked out in a microcosm of society, a hospital, can be applied to all levels of our cosmic society if adapted to the culture and social environment as required.”27 More specifically he wrote, With the aid of our formal training in understanding human behaviour, the psychodynamics of interpersonal interaction and humanism generally, we [psychiatrists] might add significantly to global harmony by contributing to the development of open systems and social learning in all aspects of our society from infancy to old age.28

And then he said:

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In North America we pride ourselves on our democratic system of government and our democratic way of life. At the same time, we all know that more time and energy is spent on the abuse of our freedoms than in upholding them. Those people who do care about the spirit and practice of democracy are relatively overlooked while the “deviants” grow rich and powerful and enjoy the notoriety afforded them by the mass media… In our Western culture the word democracy, applied to a nation, has come to mean little more than an elected government as compared to a totalitarian regime.29

Lisa said that his methods could be coercive. I thought back to similar objections the young people in Paris had made when I gave them a paper of Max’s to read and their dismay that the therapeutic community was yet another means to control people. I didn’t take their objections too seriously (as their own doctrines were far more menacing). I nevertheless listened and wanted to think about it further. I also remembered the definition of “permissiveness” that the research team at Henderson had made: “all its members tolerating from one another a wide degree of behaviour that might be distressing or seem deviant according to ordinary norms.” I was confused at this point, for I could see merits in both Max’s position and in Lisa’s. Perhaps Lisa, in her disagreement, was honing in on the core of what Max believed. Did I feel that coerciveness at Dingleton which, in part, led to my departure? As I remembered Max’s extreme reaction to the meeting at Oceanfields, I now believe that it was the coercive nature of the confrontations that upset him. I thought about the many drug “therapeutic communities” and how authoritarian they were, both from the standpoint of the methods they’d adopted and the people who carried them out—all of which led me to ask: how much force had I used in my own work? Max had cautioned me numerous times to look at what I was doing, especially with the prisoners. I recalled a paper Dane W. (one of the inmate social therapists) had written, in which he foresaw difficulties in the survival and growth of therapeutic communities in prisons. “Should agencies,” Dane warned, “continue to construct rather than create, dictate rather than provide, control rather than consider, or design directions

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instead of creating opportunities, then it [a “therapeutic community crisis”] cannot be far off, the danger is very near.” Had I been “designing directions” or “creating opportunities?” I wasn’t sure; perhaps both. Lisa’s critique also called me to attention. I had doubts, not so much about the system itself, but about the people who would interpret the ideas behind it and put them into practice. Another comment of hers amused me greatly. Max used to tell the story about his visit to a class of school-leaver boys in Scotland. He saw the rebel in them: they wanted to make money to impress their girlfriends. Max had often said that he admired them (he thought they were dropping out of school for the right reasons). He suspected that if any of them got to university, they would lose their spontaneity and creative potentials. She didn’t agree at all. I WAS SUNNING myself in a park near my place one day when a young woman approached. To my surprise, it turned out to be Janette. She had returned to San Francisco and was living a few blocks from me. For the next hour or so we had a good “gossip” about Max and the old days. I was pleased that now I would have some immediate linkage. We ran into each other quite often after that meeting, eager to share any news about Max. I didn’t know Janette very well whilst I was at Dingleton, as I had only passing contact with her. But I had gotten to know her well while staying with them at their home in the mountains near Denver. And then we’d all been together during the times when Max visited Europe. We seemed to have an affinity for one another and, in social situations, had often “ganged up” on Max when we saw he was trying to manipulate or overpower someone. I ASKED MAX if he would write a foreword to a nursing course I was preparing on the Frederic Leboyer birth procedures. Max had first called my attention to his methods. Dr Leboyer had given a series of well-attended workshops in the San Francisco area which had gotten a lot of press coverage. Although Max readily agreed

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to do the piece, he was unhappy with the results, saying that now I would see that he was unable to write for the general public. The foreword was just what I was hoping for—and I was pleased to see that he was becoming sensitive to the impact of the women’s movement. MAX CONTINUED HIS search to find how change occurred, especially “sudden change.” Hans Toch had asked him to contribute a chapter to a book on prisons and Max took the opportunity to test his new thinking. He phoned to ask if I could recall any “case studies” from literature, citing his own dramatic change on reading William James’s Varieties of Religious Experiences. As he recalled, that book was instrumental in his own decision to focus on psychiatry rather than medicine. He also recounted an incident he’d read by Anton Makarenko where he reported that he’d struck one of his boys in a moment of anger. Paradoxically, it became a turning point for both educator and student; they could now examine themselves from a fresh viewpoint. During the phone conversation, Max said he wanted to “feel me out” to see if I would like to come and spend a month with him after he returned from Europe in the autumn, provided he could raise the money for the plane fare. He wanted to share some of his new interests and even thought we might be able to collaborate on another book since I seemed interested in some of the same things he was turning to—specifically “spirituality.” Max’s growing belief in the spiritual or paranormal was greatly reinforced by the material he was now reading. His search had increased since he settled in Nova Scotia. Whether it was due to less involvement in projects, the simpler environment with closer ties to nature, or his advancing age, he seemed to be reflecting more on his life. In April (1984), Max sent me a copy of some notes he’d written, saying that he had undergone a drastic change in the past few days while searching for a spiritual meaning in life, He said he’d suddenly hit energy that he compared to an oil gusher. He had been reading Lyall Watson’s Super Nature; the book demonstrated graphically that the old distinction between natural

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and supernatural had become meaningless. Now, the way was clear for an open-minded attitude towards parapsychology. His meeting with a faculty member from the local university was a synchronistic event that opened him to new possibilities. John Sumarrah had spent three years in India at the L’Arche community for the mentally retarded. He knew a great deal about Indian philosophy, and so was able to “educate” Max in the ways of Eastern thought. Max was greatly impressed with John Sumarrah and his wife, a former nun. Max had become interested in Father Bede Griffiths and his work at his ashram in the south of India. Then there was a lecture he attended given by a Catholic priest about the six Yugoslavian children who began seeing the Virgin Mary. He was quite taken when he heard details of the conversion. Max, John Sumarrah, and their wives organized an openended discussion group of ten local people (who were interested in exploring “spiritual” matters), meeting at Max’s home. He wrote that he was discovering the quality of “synergism” he found with a “healthy” group. He mentioned that we both had spent a great deal of our lives with behavior disorders that had constrained us. He wanted to maintain the momentum and see where it would take him. MAX’S TWO MONTH trip to Europe in the summer of 1984 was to combine work and visiting his family and friends in the UK. He would attend a two day conference given by the Richmond Fellowship where he’d be the featured speaker. He was to end his trip in Rome, where he was to give the opening presentation at the First World Institute of Therapeutic Communities (August 27 to 31) and, on the following week, attend the Eighth World Conference of Therapeutic Communities (September 2 to 7). The setting for the Institute was Castel Gandolfo outside Rome, for sixty invited participants. The agenda included a speaker each day, followed by plenary discussions with a panel, small group discussions, and then a wind-up plenary session with all the delegates. Max upset the organizers the opening day when he refused to prepare a paper. Instead, he sent the conference chairman a copy of a revised chapter from his last book that

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focused on creativity and “futures.” He maintained that his contribution (social learning) was an interactional one in which the total group needed to participate. Such numbers were no ordeal for Max. But sixty professionals, many of whom were intimately familiar with his ideas (some through practice), and the conference being bilingual, was something else. Without the structure that a speaker and a fixed agenda provided, the group floundered that first day. For a while, they directed their anger at Max, who was without much support from colleagues. In fact, some of his harshest critics were present. In the Proceedings published the following year, the editors noted: Maxwell Jones sent no paper but a chapter of a recently published book instead. Brian Haddon, as Bridge Person, dutifully wrote a piece based on Jones’ chapter. Unfortunately, the chapter was not really germane to the session that took place. Instead, Jones on principle resisted all efforts to make him present a pre-set piece, written or spoken, so the whole question of anything like a paper from him was moot… Readers will understand then why no title of a written piece or a talk by Jones is shown in the Table of Contents.31

Max opened his “presentation” by explaining that he was going to demonstrate his social learning process and invited the audience to participate. One would like to see the day when, instead of these ghastly lecture theatres, we will have something much more appropriate where everyone sees everyone. At present, you’re looking at the back of the neck of the people in front of you. And that is not a good environment for interaction and sharing and learning…32

Some were pleased at the day’s session, but many were not; they still wanted Max to give a lecture. Max concluded by saying, I have been bashed a bit but frankly I’m thrilled. I think this demonstrated a great deal to me… It is the best attempt I have ever had in my 77 years…to try to share information…when you open up this box, you don’t get anywhere for a long time.

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Learning is a painful process and I think that is the message to carry away with you. If you are hurting, good. Something is happening to shake your complacency, and initiate a process of growth.33

I do not know whether Max was able to have any lasting effect at his attempts to demonstrate his ideas with this group. It is certain that he stirred up a lot of them. Years later, when I visited Rome, people would tell me about this meeting and how Max upset them. It seems the memory of his actions remained with them longer than his message or that of any other speaker. Max himself later chuckled as he recounted this experience to me. He recalled how forming the conference of sixty into a demonstration of social learning in an open system raised tension to the point where it led to an open row! He was somewhat surprised: with all that talent and experience gathered from around the world in one room, they still wanted the traditional teacher—which indeed they got—on each of the remaining days of the conference. To my recollection, Max’s attendance at this Institute was his first visit to Centro Italiano di Solidarietà (CeIS), the Italian drug rehabilitation program. He was well received by its president, Mario Picchi, and Juan Corelli, vice president, who invited him to return and consult with them. Their calling on Max was a substantial turnabout for that organization that modeled itself after the Daytop program and was dubious of professionals. EARLY ON, AFTER he arrived in Wolfville, Max made several attempts to become involved in local programs. He had no success in getting a community mental health project going, despite the need. Max was attracted to that part of the world to some extent because Alexander Leighton of Cornell and a group of social scientists had studied the ethnology of the area very carefully in the 1950s. They had found a high rate of possible mental illness (higher, per capita, than in New York City, as I think back), although in some cases it was difficult to separate behavior from cultural characteristics.34

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Max well knew how to proceed in terms of making a needs assessment and so on. His experience at Dingleton in a rural setting gave him the clinical experience that the community could use. But it never got off the ground. Nor did his attempts to get something going in the schools, although he and Chris met weekly with the teachers of one elementary school for part of a year. But he was terribly flattered when a local high school asked him to give the commencement address. He did give talks and met informally with people in the community and at the local university (Acadia). There, Max met Professor Don Little in the teachers’ education program. They struck up a relationship, where, during the next four years, Max became a facilitator in some of Don’s classes. In a paper they wrote of their experiences, Dr Little confessed, [H]e had always thought of himself as being concerned, committed, congenial—a good teacher, only to discover from his students the existence of an overlay of conceit and need to control, to dominate, to be the authority. Feedback from course evaluations, and student input, slowly eroded the self-perception of competence and confidence as a teacher. [It] struck a blow at hitherto unassailable defenses.35

It is an interesting sidelight that Max and his colleague had difficulties in finding a journal to publish their paper. The reviewer for one journal said that their vocabulary was “strange” and that they needed a better grasp of the literature on college teaching and learning. The reviewer concluded that the paper was publishable only with major revisions including literature cited. Another reviewer, with the Canadian Journal of Higher Education, rejected it, saying such articles were examples of why faculties of education have such poor reputations on university campuses. It finally got published in the Journal of Humanistic Education. As the collaboration with Dr Little continued, a dozen of the students asked to meet with Max separately two times a week to “study interpersonal interaction at a deeper level than was possible in the regular class.” Max felt very discouraged, nonetheless, that he could not do more locally. Getting on in years (he was now in his late seventies),

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Max had hoped to make this “active retirement” a time of general application of his works in a small, well-contained, community. In retrospect, I believe that, although the community lost a great deal by not responding to his overtures, he was amply rewarded. Once and for all, relieved of community involvement and teaching, he spent more time writing, looking over his experiences, contemplating, and looking inward. HIS SEARCHES NOW led him further into transpersonal and spiritual realms to which he devoted his remaining years. By 1982, he had finally found a publisher (Routledge and Kegan Paul) for the account of his seven years at Dingleton. To that book, The Process of Change, he added an epilogue where he stated his present position with reference to the more general applications of his discoveries. (This was the chapter he’d sent to the Institute chairman in Rome.) He focused on creativity. I believe that creativity is potentially present in everyone and not limited to the concept of genius or exceptional people… [C]reativity does not occur at random, but is enhanced by environmental factors… [T]here are many more individuals who possess the capacity for the highest level of growth and creativity than achieve it.36

In April 1984, he wrote me that he felt since writing that last book (The Process of Change) that his awareness of parapsychology and the abstract spiritual phenomena had widened; he had a new zest for life and enjoyment of the positive—of futurism—despite world pessimism. Later that summer, Max was experiencing a transformation that, he said, had killed his interest in therapeutic communities—akin to my own turning away from corrections. His new interest occurred at the time he was having the weekly discussion group at his home. Here, he found a new experience personally in promoting “synergism” with reference to the group. Again, he contrasted his new support and inspirational group with the therapeutic types in prisons and mental hospitals that had formerly constrained both of us.

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I was organizing educational tours for nurses (1985) and proposed that he meet with a group for a one-day seminar during one of their trips in Europe. This arrangement would allow him to visit England. He was interested in the plan and so I scheduled a workshop at Chester. In a summary of his ideas for that seminar, he continued his interest in promoting the conditions for the development of creativity: We have misdirected education so that the inherent creativity of children and their intuitive potential has been lost. The resulting “conformist” product of modern education, while railing against the bureaucracy and lack of democratic structure, appears to be largely leaderless and impotent, even when desirous of a more morally conscious global outlook.

He was able to coordinate this trip with some other visits, including a workshop and month-long consultation at CeIS in Rome. He was initially impressed with the program since it had employed many of its “graduates” and wrote me that it reminded him of the prison project (Chino). And he added a bit of fatherly advice to remember that inspiration comes after hard thinking and it is not normally part of the process. In a summary of the visit to CeIS, Max and Chris wrote to Mario Picchi, saying how impressed they were at the intangible but mystical quality of love they had created in their communities. Max listed twelve specific comments and suggestions, most of which concerned sharing power by the two top administrators centered about a weekly meeting with the project directors. More emphasis on art and other creative activities he believed would enhance the spiritual climate. He recommended the addition of a behavioral scientist with a “wholistic” orientation as well as training in group work and systems theory. That person, he thought, could also become a facilitator for the staff and the various training programs. Increasingly, Max saw himself as a link between the “old” therapeutic communities which he had pioneered and the “new” ones. His first contact with programs of this kind was during that discouraging visit we made to see Chuck Dederich at Synanon in the 1960s. We were both disturbed by the basic authoritarian

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nature of the program and the personnel who carried it out. But now Max spoke of the “cross-fertilization” between the two approaches. In 1979, writing in the American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse, Max had said, “The drug-free therapeutic communities and the Asklepieion model in prison use the power of the peer group in a way that to many people seems more persuasive and even threatening than therapeutic.”37 In the spring of 1985, I received a phone call from Tony Gelormino at CeIS asking me to come to Rome on short notice to do a one-week workshop on therapeutic communities in prisons. This workshop was to be mainly a brain-storming session; more specific planning and training could come later if we aroused sufficient interest. When I called Max about this workshop, he was delighted. He had been invited to spend three months in Rome in the autumn. He couldn’t be there that long and thought that perhaps I could take his place. I was eager to discuss my plans with Max but any such discussion would have to wait. Max was finishing his stay in Europe and had arranged a prolonged visit to Rome. When I returned to San Francisco, there was a postcard from Castel Gandolfo which said that he had arrived and was just starting a three-day workshop. IN MAY 1985, Max sent the draft of a paper he’d been working on, that was an early attempt to review his own thinking about the therapeutic community in terms of extending his concepts universally. I thought that “An Attempt to Relate Therapeutic Communities (Open Systems) to a Global System for Change” was rather awkward and, at the same time, an apologetic title. In the paper, Max talked not only about the survival of his original concept but its relevance outside the narrow confines of mental health. Although he reviewed some of his own work, he was using terms such as “shaman,” “synergism,” “archetypes,” “synchronicity,” “wholistic thinking,” and quoting Joseph Campbell, Fritjof Capra, Marilyn Ferguson, Bede Griffiths, and Gary Zukav. As to the global system in the title, he mainly referred to schools. He affirmed that he had come to believe that every classroom

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everywhere should adopt an open systems approach. I phoned him to say how pleased I was with his paper and thought that it was one of the most interesting he’d written in the past few years. I followed up with a letter of several pages of comments. Max responded at once and said he needed this encouragement and hoped it would bear fruit in future efforts. The paper was printed in 1986 in the International Journal of Therapeutic Communities, I believe his last to appear in that journal whilst he was still living. And I was pleased that he shortened the title to sound more positive: “Therapeutic Communities (Open Systems) and a Global System for Change.” AFTER MAX RETURNED from that workshop in Rome, he phoned to tell me about it—especially how it ended in silence. The experience had a profound effect on him, and he always referred to it thereafter as his “State of Grace Workshop” that he described in some detail in his last book: [S]uddenly a silence descended on us and lasted several minutes. This time the feeling of a presence was so strong that everyone seemed overawed into silence. [He later wrote that, ”for most of the group it was some aspect of God.”] The nun who was sitting beside me and who had acted as…translator…said quietly, “A state of grace.” The group melted away without a word. None of the usual thank you’s or expressions of gratitude for a useful, if stressful, workshop, and so on… I walked into the garden and, standing alone, wept tears of joy—a feeling that returns whenever I recall this incident.38

Following his semi-retirement in Arizona, Max had had more time to read and to explore topics quite outside psychiatry. Marilyn Ferguson’s Aquarian Conspiracy had opened up many new areas. He often shared ideas he gained from her Mind/Brain Bulletin, and other sources. By chance, I’d learned about New Dimensions Radio in San Francisco and did some volunteer work for them. I met some of the guests who appeared on their twice-weekly programs broadcast over National Public Radio (NPR). Many were those whom Max had mentioned and I was able to lend him copies of the

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interviews. This exchange of ideas stimulated both of us and we spoke often over the phone about our discoveries. One of the guests was Rupert Sheldrake who’d spent a year and a half whilst writing his first book with Bede Griffiths at his Shantivananam Ashram in India. Max was intrigued with Sheldrake’s hypothesis of morphic fields and immediately saw a relationship to Jung’s universal unconscious. Max was particularly impressed by Jean Bolen. After reading her Tao of Psychology, he sent me a copy. He noted in an inscription that he had begun to see beyond wholism—how from subatomic particles to Eastern religions everything is part of one mystical network. Time and space, he continued, become a continuum where matter and energy interchange. The Tao related to everything in the universe. After re-reading the book a year later, he added that the Tao is so elusive it needs constant renewal by reading and contemplation. He called my attention to the first chapter on synchronicity. Joseph Campbell interested both of us. I had met him during one of his interviews on NPR. With Max’s heightened interest in spirituality we thought Joseph Campbell’s “hero’s journey” seemed to offer a somewhat different look at the psyche and its development than that of ours.39 I had also heard an interview with David Bohm and sent it to Max who responded with great enthusiasm and wrote to him. In one of his books, Bohm wrote: “My main concern has been with understanding the nature of reality in general and of consciousness in particular as a coherent whole.” What he said seemed to add to Max’s thinking about wholeness as an embracing concept—in contrast to reductionism. In one chapter, Bohm said, in effect, that separation is so invasive that language itself needed to be restructured in order for us to experience wholeness. He suggested experiments with new forms where the verb, rather than the noun, take precedence in an attempt to introduce a “series of actions that flow and merge into each other, without sharp separations or breaks.” He proposed a new form (the reomode or flowing mode) to correct the fragmentation that language had contributed to our general sense of being.40 Although I’d been reading a great deal about wholistic health and had discussed the

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general idea of wholeness with Max many times, this idea impressed on me just how much the concept of reductionism had seeped into our lives. David Bohm’s ideas seemed to be what Max had been looking for. He had recently read Gary Zukav’s The Dancing Wu Li Masters and Fritjof Capra’s Tao of Physics, and was trying to relate some of the concepts of quantum physics to his own work. Years before, Max had become interested in systems theory (Organizational Development) and now he’d found more basic concepts that allowed him to move further away from mechanistic theories such as those found in psychoanalysis. He was now fully embracing wholistic concepts. (Although it was popular to omit the “w,” Max preferred to spell the word in its original form [wholistic].) Max phoned one Sunday morning for a “seminar” and sounded exceptionally enthusiastic. He said the interviews and his reading were like spending a year at Berkeley. A few days afterwards, I received a tentative outline for a book on “futurism” and he asked if I’d like to collaborate. He mentioned that he’d been reading Ilya Prigogine’s theory of dissipative structures and entropy which might help to formulate a more theoretical basis for some of his work, especially the importance of “open structures,” or systems. He called my attention to a chapter of Renee Weber’s book which described open systems as living systems, far-from-equilibrium or near-equilibrium complexes of organization which Prigogine calls “dissipative structures.” These are states that reflect their interaction with the environment with which the dissipative structures are constantly trading energy, maintaining themselves through an endless dynamic flow. An important factor is contributed by fluctuations or perturbations, sudden shifts that allow for novelty to emerge even when entropy would rule it out… [A]vailable energy in the universe is inevitably running down, moving from maximum order to an ultimate disorder in which all available energy will have been spent.41

Max had been looking for a greater understanding of how people changed (or didn’t change) in the system he had created. But what interested him in Prigogine’s work was the notion that “living

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systems can to some degree escape entropy through their capacity for self-organization; in them a higher order not predicted by entropy can emerge out of the dead end of chaos.”42 For Max, Prigogine’s concepts were present to some degree in the “oscillations” that he had first observed at Henderson; that out of disorder within the community (provided the system remained open and not punitive) new ideas and changes could emerge. It meant that during a time of crisis, it was crucial that quick solutions should not be found to alleviate anxiety but rather, the situation be contained so that further movement could occur. I’d seen this situation myself on several occasions in the prison communities. Max and Chris had had a meeting with Dr Doug Archibald (the psychiatrist who headed mental health for Nova Scotia), in August 1983, to discuss the relevance of Prigogine’s work in therapeutic communities. As I said earlier, Dr Archibald spent a year with Max at Dingleton in the late 1960s, so he was well acquainted with Max’s work. Max recorded that conversation and sent me a transcript. In their discussion, Max said that it was more than mere support that occurred in a group, it was a loosening of potentials so the person could become more creative. He added that an open system wasn’t bound, therefore, not a controlling factor. And that the tension thus aroused could be a “crisis of perception” in which the person could rise to growth at a higher level. When the editor of the American Journal of Social Psychiatry asked Max to contribute a paper on his current ideas, he took the opportunity to review his work and put forth some of his new thinking. He reiterated: “In one sense, my life has been a reaction against the abuse of authority—first in my chosen career, medicine and psychiatry, and then increasingly in the wider fields of education, penology, business and politics.”43 From this statement, he traced his own work over forty years and then speculated on why the principles he’d developed had not been put into practice more widely: “…they belong to a future wholistic view of life if we are to survive at all.” Rather than concentrating on the usual resistance to change, Max now took a more positive approach to put his own work into the larger perspective of the emerging culture or “new ethic.”

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Hence, his referring to himself as a social ecologist. “Part of this changing climate of public opinion,” he said, “is the growing disenchantment with the abuse of authority by the professions such as law and medicine, and by government generally.” Going beyond improving social structures as they exist, “I have found it to be an evolutionary process which eventually embraces spiritual values.” He cited the influence of Zen and other Eastern philosophies and their relevance to the development of more wholistic concepts along with ramifications of the new physics. In reference to the latter, he pointed out that we would have to rethink “the meaning we give to ‘reality’…as the reductionist method no longer seemed adequate.” IN SEPTEMBER 1986, Max and I were invited to do a one week workshop for CeIS, in Rome. The topic was left to our choosing and Max believed that the idea of the role of an outside facilitator and the post-group seminar should be focused on. When all the arrangements had been made, he sent me a note and added: “We should have fun in Rome provided we don’t take things too seriously.” I arrived in Rome several days before him. I was concerned about his health and wanted to make sure he would be comfortable so the experience would not be too strenuous for him. The lobby of Leonardo da Vinci airport was teeming with travelers as I waited for his flight. I’d been reading Jean Bolen’s new book on archetypes. Instead of Apollo, Mars was evident everywhere in the lobby in the guise of soldiers with sub-machine guns. Since the recent terrorist attack in the airport, they’d become a regular part of the place, an unsettling reminder of the random violence that marks our age. As Max emerged through the exit from customs, I was surprised to see how well and energetic he looked. He was clearly excited. We checked in at the Maximus Dominus, the small hotel on the Palatine Hill, where Max had stayed at his last visit. The proprietor’s wife welcomed Max with the customary Italian embrace. He was delighted that she remembered him, but was a little embarrassed by her loud enthusiasm. Max was always uneasy

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with physical contact—even handshakes—hence his visits to Italy always caused him no small amount of anxiety. Max had a room with a small terrace overlooking the courtyard of the church next door. He wasn’t up to walking long distances so we found a pizzeria nearby and had a quiet supper. Max retired early as was his custom. Next morning when I came down to breakfast, Max was already there. With a shy smile, he handed me a chapter of a book he was currently working on, and asked if I’d read it whilst we were there and give him my comments. The week-long workshop, beginning on Monday, at the training center located at Castel Gandolfo, had a mix of former addicts who were now working in therapeutic communities and health care professionals. It got off to a slow start; Max, at one point, introduced the idea of spirituality but it got confused with religion. As Max was especially interested in demonstrating the role of the group facilitator, he asked for a volunteer for each session to take charge and then he helped the group to examine how that person had functioned. In the evening, Juan Corelli had arranged a dinner which included Dr Francisco Mele, a psychoanalyst from our group, Fernando and Monica Malaspina, anthropologists from Peru, and Carlos Tornel, who was to set up a drug rehabilitation program in Bolivia. The Malaspinas proved to be an interesting couple in that they had had direct experiences with Peruvian shaman. Max was intrigued because shamanic consciousness alterations resemble drug experiences. But whereas the shaman is in control of his journey, the addict is not. We moved to a hotel near the training center to avoid the trip to and from Rome each day. We were up early mornings to watch the sun rise over the mountain on the other side of the volcanic lake. How peaceful and quiet it all was. And how quickly it would change in a matter of a few hours as people went about their business. The Italian’s gioia di vita was boisterous and intense, even in this countryside. The remainder of the week was uneventful, but terribly exhausting for Max. He realized this would probably be his last workshop as his health would not permit this kind of stress. And

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yet, in the midst of all the turmoil, he could take me unawares by his sudden tenderness, such as the evening at dinner when we were alone in a restaurant and he said that he looked upon me as the son he’d never had. Although he tried to induce it, there was no “state of grace” at the close of the workshop. We returned to Rome for the weekend. During dinner at a restaurant near our hotel, Max spotted Dr Martien Kooyman, a psychiatrist from the Netherlands who was giving monthly training groups for CeIS, and his wife. After their greeting, Martien recalled his delight with Max’s first day at the Institute the previous year where he had “forced” a “living learning” situation on the sixty distinguished delegates. It was good to see Max relax and come to life again after the strenuous week. The following week we spent at CeIS's residential community at Santa Maria del Mare, on the Mediterranean, an hour’s drive from Rome. Max had visited the year before and was eager to see what was happening there. The director assigned Angelo and Mario, two of the residents who spoke fluent English, to look after us for the week. Angelo asked if we’d like to go “footing” (jogging) with him early in the morning. Max of course could not; but I said I would enjoy that. And so at six the next morning, Angelo appeared in jogging togs at my door. We crossed the road to the beach and ran in silence past the deserted restaurants and summer homes. The Mediterranean was a flat gray expanse that eased off into the horizon. In the early morning light, the sky was unwholesome and devoid of birds. At the shoreline dirty bubbles of foam floated in the shallows. After about a mile, I was out of breath, and so we slowed down to a brisk walk until we reached the village of Torvaianica, turned and retraced our steps. Angelo was in his early twenties, a hardy, handsome young Apollo with blond hair and blue eyes—not what you would expect in an Italian. He’d worked in his father’s bakery, delivering bread and pastries all over Rome. His day began at four in the morning, which meant that most of the remainder was his. He’d wanted to lead “the sweet life”: fast cars, beautiful women, the latest fashions. I could well imagine him as a man-about-town, with his good-looks and easy manner. More low key than the others, his

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curiosity didn’t feel intrusive: where was I from, what did I do, why was I visiting “the family?” I felt at ease with Angelo from the beginning. He said that Mario was going to be with Max for the week to interpret and that he would be with me. As we left the beach, he asked if I’d like to go “footing” with him again the next day. There were about thirty young men and women in residence at the center. They assembled at nine in the dining room with the tables pushed back against one wall. After Max and I had been introduced, six members went to the center of the circle, and with their arms on each other’s shoulders, repeated an oath to CeIS, and then kissed one another. When they’d returned to their seats, the staff member in charge put an ashtray in the center of the circle and demanded to know who had left it dirty. When one of the young men confessed, he was given a loud “dressing down” (a “hair-cut” in CeIS's argot). For the remainder of the forty-five minutes, there was a heated discussion about other infractions over the weekend, with one member reading the names of those who had been given “pull-ups” or who merited disciplinary action. At one point, Max attempted to put one of the situations into a psychodrama, but it fell flat, and the admonitions continued. The group ended with an interesting chant: the members clapped their hands on their thighs in a kind of crescendo, followed by a silence. A resident then gave a run-down on the six o’clock world news (Reagan and Gorbachev were having their historic meeting in Iceland), followed by national and local items, and then sports. After a round of applause, the residents remained in their chairs quietly chatting whilst two young men left. Angelo told me that they were preparing a skit. They returned with some improvised props. One sat at a table with his feet propped up on it. The other came in, saluted him, went out and brought him a newspaper, which he read without uttering a word. This exchange was repeated three or four times with the same newspaper, and finally the one reading the paper (who represented the carabinieri or state police) said to the other that the news never seemed to change. Everyone appreciated the satire on the stupidity of the

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police. There was a huge round of applause; the actors took a bow and the meeting was over. It was obvious the skit relieved much of the tension produced by the morning’s confrontations. By now I had been at the various CeIS units long enough to know about the tensions that were invariably present in the meetings. Most of them were contrived, as in the “dynamic groups”; but, in all of them, there was undue moroseness. I couldn’t say whether the sternness of the Catholic Church was at play here, or the particular approach that CeIS had adopted. There was a staff meeting later that morning, but we couldn’t follow the discussion as none of the staff spoke English and our two translators were not permitted to attend. Later in the morning, Max was able to arrange a meeting with ten of the residents and the staff to discuss the morning’s meeting. I needed some time to myself to think. Angelo spotted me on my way to the beach and asked if he could come along. I told him about my concern over all the confrontations we had witnessed: they seemed to border on hysteria at times. What on earth could be so important about leaving a dirty ashtray? But Angelo explained that the system of “hair-cuts” and “pull-ups” was part of a routine form of confrontation. Focusing on the little everyday failings was important because they indicated larger things. Perhaps he was right. But as I understood them, these devices were very different from the log book we had used at Chino which the prisoners had initiated. On the surface the two practices might seem similar, but the “pull-ups” seemed to me punitive and moralistic. Two hours had slipped by before we realized it was time for lunch. Max’s psychodrama apparently had gone well this time and several of the residents wanted more meetings with him. In the afternoon there was a staff meeting scheduled with Dr Enrico LaPenna, an art therapist from Argentina, who was doing two sessions a week there. The meeting was rather lively with both Max and Enrico sharing the spotlight. Later, Angelo asked me to come to the art therapy session with him. At the end of the day, Max invited me to his room to share experiences. He was quite exhilarated by the day’s events, and to my surprise, suddenly produced a bag of crisps and a bottle of

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Doubonnet from his suitcase. We didn’t think we should ask for ice since alcohol was forbidden on the premises. Nevertheless, we both enjoyed the cocktail. Max was in a jovial mood and we talked about how much they could do in this community. The liveliness of both staff and residents was infectious though the rigidity of the place was depressing. There was obviously a lack of expertise, we decided, thus making it the perfect setting to introduce some of the ideas and theories we ourselves were exploring. Next morning there was the usual knock on my door, and I realized that it was time to go “footing” with Angelo. As we began our jog, he asked if I’d like to do it “professionally” this morning, by which he meant go further than we had yesterday. I agreed, and hoped I could keep up with him. Although his pace was naturally faster than mine, he adjusted it accordingly. On the return he said something was on his mind. Max had asked Letizia Pappalardo, the nun who had previously translated for him, to come and translate again. Both Angelo and Mario felt rejected, and, although Angelo wanted to continue to translate for me, he felt threatened that maybe we thought they weren’t doing a good enough job. What we didn’t know at that point was that Max had asked for Letizia so that she could translate for him at the staff meetings where the young men were not allowed. And later I found out that Max also hoped that her presence might help bring about another “state of grace!” I hadn’t met Letizia previously, and I suppose I had some misgivings. Being a nun, she would be tall and serious, and dressed in a black habit. I didn’t in the least expect the energetic middle-aged woman with graying curly hair and in casual dress, who embraced Max like an old friend. She drove her own car and spoke perfect English without a trace of accent. She’d lived in New York, I found out, and had gotten a master’s degree from Columbia. Her order had assigned her to CeIS, and she was in charge of aftercare for this particular community. Just as Max expected, the community meeting went well with Letizia present. Whilst Angelo translated for me, Mario sat on my other side, adding things he thought Angelo had missed or mis-translated. Ten residents enthusiastically gathered together for Max’s post-group meeting. After the meeting, Max got Letizia

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aside to spend some time with her and catch up on all the gossip about CeIS. At his last consultation, he’d recommended that the administration have a weekly staff meeting including all the project directors where they could form a consistent philosophy and more democratic way of running their programs. They had begun such a meeting, and, as Max predicted, were finding that an outside facilitator could help them better to look at their interactions. Whilst Max was talking with Letizia, Mario and Angelo took me to the garage to show me a large toy animal which residents were forced by the staff to pull around when they behaved “immaturely.” I was dismayed at this “intervention” which was an integral part of the program, just as making a resident sit alone at a separate table in the dining room because the staff thought he was too “egotistical.” And then Mario told me why he’d been assigned to the garage as a work project: the staff thought he worked too much with his head (he was a college student) and that he needed to be “brought down to earth.” This brief look behind the scenes gave me a better understanding of what the program was like, and quite frankly I was appalled. Max would have to know, too. Max was lively at dinner, buoyed up from the events of the day. He managed to steer the conversation at our table to spirituality and once more it was misinterpreted as religion. I did have a laugh when, at one point, I heard him say, “It sucks!” Our two translators were puzzled. Could he repeat that, please? With an imploring look, he turned to me. But I too was at a loss, for I’d never understood that phrase myself. Then Angelo whispered in my ear, fellatio? At which point I couldn’t suppress my laughter. We finally came up with the explanation that the expression was figurative, not literal, and let it pass at that. The momentum Max had built up in the community over the week was infectious. Staff and residents alike were excited about what was taking place although they didn’t quite know what was happening. Angelo told me that he thought important changes were about to take place. The post-group with staff and residents now seemed established. But what was to take place in the community meeting on Friday, our last day there, came as a total surprise.

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The meeting got underway with the usual pledge, but when the comrades finished, Sandro Salvatori, the young director of the program, asked them to repeat the ritual, this time joining them. When they finished, he genuflexed and gave a fascist salute, followed by a heated speech. I was flabbergasted to say the least and so was Angelo, so much so that he couldn’t translate until it was finished. What Sandro was trying to do was to show the community how much the ceremony had become another meaningless, autocratic ritual. He even questioned much of the physical affection they showed to one another (which the CeIS administration fostered); that it, too, had become robotic. Things had to change, beginning with the staff’s and residents’ working more closely together. Sandro’s spontaneous action gave a new infusion to the group. Residents and staff were alert and enthusiastic wondering what was going to happen next. There were none of the usual procedures such as “pull-ups” and “hair-cuts” that morning. Here looked like the beginning of what Max and I had envisioned. Max was at his best in the post-group. He was impressed with Sandro’s risk-taking and equally pleased with the residents’ positive response. It was a lively meeting, for the ten residents who attended had caught the spirit, if not the intent, of the change. After grace at lunch, Max was asked for his comments and he gave a short speech that conveyed his enthusiasm and thanked them for a wonderful week. The morning’s changes seemed to be on a backdrop of resistance. In the afternoon, I saw a resident sitting on the floor of the foyer, assigned by a staff member to read the CeIS credo over and over out loud from the large board on the wall. And then later I heard another staff member giving a “hair-cut” out by the garage. And at the evening meal, a resident gave a short prayer asking for forgiveness for those who had invented birth control devices, and for the salvation of all the new lives that had been conceived that day. I was dumfounded when Angelo told me that later in the evening a physician was coming to give them a lecture on sex. The lecture, Mario added, was always the same: abstinence, morality, anti-abortion and no birth control.

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Angelo and Mario drove us back to our hotel in Rome. Max was leaving the next day but I was to remain. We spent our last evening together on the balcony of Max’s room, overlooking the church yard. With a bottle of wine between us, we reviewed the week’s events. Both of us were pleased with the way things went. He hoped I would return to the community the following week to support the changes that had taken place. We wondered what repercussions the events would have on the central administration. No doubt the whole organization had already heard about Sandro’s dramatic departure from custom. Would it understand his message, or simply attribute the outburst to the heat of the moment? Sandro had not worked his way up the ranks in the organization, was not a former addict, and thus did not have the status of the other directors. Whether Max realized it or not, he had released the genie whose powers were as yet undetermined. Max was leaving me to deal with it. The situation was reminiscent of so many other times when Max would visit my projects, stir things up, and then depart. Now, I was being drawn into a setting where I didn’t command the same respect by the administration that Max did, but his faith in me was reassuring. As we said good night, he said with a smile: “We’d more drink than we’d any right to!” Max was to have been driven to the airport early next morning by Carlos Tornel, and I was to go along, but Max had taken a taxi. He left me a note at the desk, which simply said, “I may miss you. You’re off to a wonderful start, much interest and expectation, etc. Do let me know how things go. Best of all, we’re OK, so I’m content and relaxed. Yours aye.” I remained in Rome for a fortnight. Juan invited me to the next director’s meeting. He wanted me to see what Max had initiated, and to give him my opinions. Mario Picchi sat at the head of a long table covered in green felt cloth. Most of the project directors I already knew and had visited their programs. Letizia sat next to me and translated. Max’s visit was the first topic. Everyone agreed that it had been a positive experience, especially the week at Torvaianica, which Sandro related with great enthusiasm. I was surprised when Sandro added that he felt so inadequate in his

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position as director. An electrician by trade, he had given up his own business to work with young addicts. He added, half humorously, that perhaps he should be hidden away when important visitors came to visit Torvaianica. I was surprised to see that he didn’t get any support from his peers; instead they gave him pointers on how to handle specific “problems.” After each director had spoken about what was going on in their programs, Mario used the various instances to impart his general philosophy of drug addiction and rehabilitation. He cited his own efforts to give up smoking as an example of the difficulties addicts face when trying to kick the habit. He’d been trying for several months and had cut the number of cigarettes by one half. But withdrawal was still very difficult for him to consider. He was encouraged enough to continue to try, even though he realized that he might fail in the end. (The following year, the decision would be made for Mario when he would suffer a heart attack.) Most of the rest of that week Juan wanted me to spend at the training school at Castel Gandolfo. The bulk of the training was for those about to set up drug rehabilitation programs in Italy and in South American countries. In any one class there might be physicians and psychiatrists, along with ordinary citizens, some who were nearly illiterate, and many former addicts. I was especially eager to return to Torvaianica before I left and so spent a few days there. I was somewhat surprised following the meeting the next morning to see the staff retreat into their office with no residents joining them. They went about business as usual. Afterwards, as we walked along the beach, Angelo and Mario told me that the post-groups Max had initiated had been discontinued and things were back to “normal.” I felt terribly sad, and as if we’d both been conned. When I would return the following year, there would be more disappointment: Sandro would have resigned and returned to his electrical business, having become discouraged at his efforts. IN MARCH 1986, Juan Corelli invited me to Rome for a month as a writer-in-residence and resource person. He wanted help in setting up a project in prison. I thought it would be a great oppor-

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tunity to do something different. Traditional thinking had limited my own experience; new ideas about wholeness and spirituality might be an integral part of such a project. I had often wondered what turn my old projects would have taken had I known about morphic resonance, or the hero’s journey. Max had planned to visit Italy whilst I was there but was unable to go due to his health. He settled for a holiday in the UK instead. During his vacation he had a heart attack that hospitalized him in Cambridge. It was a bad year all around for Max: first, his brother died, then his sister-in-law—and finally his sister. He was the last of the family now, the youngest of the three children. When he wrote me that Edinburgh was now a city of the dead for him, it was obvious he felt terribly alone and vulnerable. When parents die, it’s an older generation gone; when siblings die, it is your own.

chapter six

THE ILLUSION OF REALITY Self-awareness opens our minds to the wider field of intuition and to our latent ability to get beyond the reality of the scientific rational world in order to find a new reality in spiritual experiences, intuition, and the mystery of life itself.

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AX PHONED ONE day towards the end of March (1988). He was ill and fearful of another cardiac failure due to the amount of fluid in his lungs. He had just gotten back from a visit to the UK and was very tired. Nevertheless, he wanted to know when I was next going to Rome as he wanted me to stop by on the way. He sounded depressed not only from his physical condition, but because his book on old age was far from complete and the manuscript was due in just three months. Two local colleagues who were to assist him with it had not come through and his group of students had disbanded whilst he was away. Now that he was unable to drive anymore he was “house bound.” Summing up his state, he said that he no longer felt “transformed” but quite the opposite—“defused.” All through the following week, I worried about him. But on Sunday when I called to see how he was, I found him in a totally different state of mind. His energy had returned and he was working on his book; he was now confident that he could meet the impending deadline. Then I received a letter from Juan Corelli asking me to come to Rome in October instead of April and stay for three months. I’d sent Juan a copy of the dialogues manuscript we’d been working on and he thought it useful for training his staff. He had just spoken to Max about it on the phone and had engaged Lucia Marsan (one of the founders of CeIS, and an active participant) to translate it and they planned to publish it in a few months. The publication date, Juan thought, would be an occasion to bring me to Rome and he suggested that I plan to stop by and see Max on the way over. Now that the dialogues were about to be published, Max re-read them. Overall he found us still in basic agreement. Even

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though he had lost the desire to be active and now found more satisfaction in reading, listening to tapes, and contemplating, he did manage to complete his book and sent me a copy of the manuscript for comments. Our letters and phone conversations that summer concentrated on my forthcoming visit to Nova Scotia, and the video workshops I was to give. Meanwhile, I worked on a syllabus for the workshops and sent a copy to Max for his comments. Whilst he liked the overall plan, he thought there was too much emphasis on technique and not enough on “process.” He wanted to discuss it further when we met. He’d been invited to a workshop on the therapeutic community at Esalen, California, later in the fall. Although he was eager to go, he didn’t think his health would permit it. His voice sounded weaker during that Sunday seminar—his angina attacks were more frequent. He’d had several visits from family, friends, and admirers, that had taken their toll. Much as Max had enjoyed their company, he was no longer up to prolonged socializing. Consequently Chris advised I should limit my visit to three or four days rather than a full week. Max warned me not to expect him to be his old self—full of enthusiasm and new ideas. As he was unable to drive any longer, his car was at my disposal if I wanted to do some sight-seeing. As I put the phone down, I realized the indisputable fact that time was running out for Max. It was a moment of muted shock, and in his mortality I saw my own. TUESDAY MORNING, THE seventh of September 1988, I awakened to a panorama of blue light streaked with orange. The big dipper and a sliver of a moon were suspended to my left. As I watched, moon, stars, and sky seemed to rotate as the plane angled towards descent. I was on TWA flight #44 less than an hour from New York. In a few hours I’d be with Max. What would he be like? Had he exaggerated his physical condition? After a lay-over in Boston, I boarded a little twin engine commuter plane for Canada. As we passed over the Maine coast, the view gradually changed: the landscape became flat and

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bleak; I could almost feel the cold desolation of the place. Why did Max choose to live here when he could have lived just about anywhere in the world? Was the memory of Scotland so precious to him that he sought to preserve it even now? Perhaps Nova Scotia was an appropriate final resting place for Max after all. He hadn’t exaggerated his condition. He was gaunt and stooped and moved about very slowly. As soon as I’d settled in, he told me that he was preparing for his death. His interest in spirituality had led him naturally to think about his demise. Even faced with the frail old man, I still couldn’t imagine Max gone. There was too much history between us, too much life; there was so much yet to do. He was about to “pass on the torch” to me, he said. His remark startled me and whilst initially a great compliment, it caused me to think more about our relationship and all that the metaphor evoked. I knew he wondered what I might do with his legacy: whether I would take it as he intended or abandon it. I didn’t believe I had the capabilities nor did I want the responsibility of carrying it on, yet I didn’t want to disappoint him. My ambivalence was further complicated by the fact that this visit might be the last time we would ever see each other. And I didn’t want us to part on a sour note. After his nap, Max set up two chairs out on the lawn and said he wanted to discuss “the universal mind.” He spoke of re-reading Jung and how it had inspired him to think again about archetypes and the collective unconscious. Apart from Jung, there was Rupert Sheldrake’s concept of morphic resonance to consider. And he’d recently read an article by Willis Harman on the reconciliation of science and religion that raised the question of consciousness preceding matter. He was particularly taken by Harman’s boldness: “Ultimately reality is contacted not through the physical senses, but through the deep intuition. Consciousness is not the end-product of material evolution; rather, consciousness was here first!” The idea of transcending consciousness harmonized with his impending death, gave him comfort— and the fact that there was someone to carry on his work.

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He was getting his papers and effects in order. From his vast collection of photos we selected several that we thought would be appropriate for my workshops. But I was more concerned about an archive for his work. He was planning to leave all his papers and memorabilia to the local university library. When I said it would be a great loss to have his things in such an isolated place, he said, in effect, that beggars can’t be choosers. The four days passed all too quickly. It seemed I’d hardly arrived, now I was getting ready to leave, and I hadn’t said half of what I’d intended to say. On the last morning, Max asked me to come by for breakfast before Chris took me to Halifax. I hadn’t realized that he expected punctuality: “You’re late!” he said abruptly, when I arrived from the motel. But his brusqueness hardly concealed his emotions. We were both rather subdued as we ate and I found myself searching for something to say. When we finally parted, there were no good-byes, no hurried last words. He simply gave me a copy of his last book that had just arrived. As I got into the car, I turned and saw him standing there in the doorway with tears in his eyes. On the plane I opened his book and read the inscription written in Max’s familiar neat hand: “Remembering our joyous times over a lifetime.” Max. Enigma. Full of paradoxes, complexes—and about to die. I HADN’T HEARD from Max for a few weeks whilst I was in Rome when one day Letizia Pappalardo, the nun who’d translated for Max in his last workshop, looked me up to tell me he’d had a major heart attack but was recovering nicely. In a letter he asked her to pass this information on to me as he was still too weak to write very much. I didn’t know whether to call or let him rest. This new attack must have depressed him utterly. I decided writing to him would be best. My long stay in Rome was about to end. Juan planned for me to return early in the new year and wanted me to stay even longer this trip. He telephoned the administrator of the Spanish Federation

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of Therapeutic Communities and arranged for me to conduct some workshops in Majorca the following spring. The first Sunday after my return, I telephoned Max. He’d recovered from his heart attack but was greatly weakened, and now had to restrict his physical activities severely. He also had news of his own. A former colleague (whom he’d employed in the Virgin Islands) wanted to interview him on videotape to show at a world conference. But his doctor had advised against it because of the possible over-excitement. Naturally, he was disappointed and asked me what I thought. Considering his recent attack, I had to agree with his doctor. Max was pleased that his former colleagues still remembered him. But I had the distinct impression that being videotaped instead of appearing in person was one more reminder of his approaching death. He called again a few days later and seemed to be in good spirits. He’d received a translation of the foreword that Mario Picchi had written for our dialogues that pleased him a great deal. “It is not always easy,” Mario wrote, “to keep in step with these pioneers in their fascinating search. Routine, one knows, is slower than ideas, and any process of change requires a gradual and simultaneous maturation of all the people involved.”44 Max thought Mario intuitively understood therapeutic communities but failed to comprehend how they operated. Why I should dream of huge pegs and a key that night is beyond me. But the dream impressed me as much by its absurdity as by its vivid depictions. I was in a vast landscape of some kind, quite devoid of features except for these enormous pegs. Apparently the pegs represented obstacles and accomplishments of my life. Some of the pegs were missing (but which ones!) and I held the key to their whereabouts, only I didn’t know how to get to them. In many respects it was a straightforward dream—not at all one of those “big” dreams that Max so wanted to experience. Still it was big enough to show me that I held the key to any obstacle or accomplishment in my life. And whatever successes or failures I might have they would be of my own making. The dream had given me just enough to work on; now the rest was up to me.

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I finished a paper that Juan Corelli had requested I draft on the current status and future direction of CeIS and sent Max a copy for his comments.45 Rather than waiting for the next Sunday, he phoned immediately to say he liked it and added some minor details. Early next morning, he called with additional comments. He was full of energy and talked for half an hour. Then he called a third time to say how impressed he was with my own “transformation.” He wasn’t specific, though, about the exact nature of this transformation, and I didn’t press him on it. I was supposed to return to Rome about the middle of January (1989) but had no word from Juan as yet. The uncertainty was nothing new; I was getting used to Juan’s long silences. I set aside plans to return. By coincidence, Jungian analyst Dr Linda Leonard was scheduled to give a workshop on addiction and archetypes at Esalen. I’d read her books and thought the workshop would give me more material for my own in Rome.46 Dr Keith Chapman, a psychiatrist, was co-leader. I was pleasantly surprised after he introduced himself, for he mentioned that he had worked with Maxwell Jones at Fort Logan. During that weekend at Esalen, Keith told me how much Max had influenced his life (he’d been a pediatrician before he went into psychiatry). I couldn’t wait to relate my weekend to Max, and as soon as I got home, I wrote him: The workshop at Esalen was just tremendous and I learned a lot, both about the content [archetypes, creativity, and addiction] as well as how to give this kind of workshop. You know how you always get a few difficult people who come for therapy and try to monopolize the workshop? They handled this very well, putting their behavior into archetypes [as energies] then looking into how it could be transformed into something positive. And finally, putting it back to the owner to do something about it. It was fascinating to me for they made the connection between the addictive process and creativity, starting with the works of writers who had been addicted and who had portrayed the process in the development of their characters: primarily

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Dostoevsky, who was three-way addicted. From this Linda had built an eight-level cycle of addiction and showed how at each level, along with the addictive process, there is also the possibility of transformation to creativity. Of course you knew this all along, but it was news to me!

Max hadn’t written for several weeks, which was very unlike him. I was concerned that something might have happened. And, sure enough, when I finally got through to Chris on the phone, she told me he’d had another attack and was in hospital. She’d made his room into an “ashram” (as he’d called his study) and was going in daily to read to him. He was weak but in good humor otherwise and eager to get home. I phoned Chris a few days later to inquire about Max. His recovery was interrupted by a virus infection and he was still in hospital. He was sitting up in bed a little but was too weak to read or write. I received a note in rather shaky hand. The doctors were trying to get him into another hospital to have an angiogram and, if indicated, they would do an angioplasty. He was rather optimistic that he could avoid further heart complications and would be able to resume a more normal life, which, for him, included a little travel. But this test was not successful and he became resigned that he would have to live with his heart condition and with no hope for improvement. He wrote that his mental energy now seemed separated from his physical condition, meaning that he was resigned to living with reduced vigor. I WENT AHEAD with plans to give the workshops. Max phoned me in Rome early on the following Sunday morning eager for news. But I had little to tell him other than I’d arrived. I should emphasize the “process review” he said, as this was the time and place where the staff could best examine their own behavior whilst it was still fresh in their minds. The workshop went better than I had anticipated: all the participants were highly involved. Roberto d’Agostino’s camera work was up to his usual high standards and I saw again the power of using videotape for training staff. I’d gotten to know Marcia

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Plevin, an American choreographer and dance therapist, living in Rome, who was doing workshops at the various CeIS centers. I asked her to join me for the first session to “open up” the participants. Roberto Bardelini, the new director of the San Carlo therapeutic community, was in the workshop. He wanted me to do something similar for his staff. So Simona (our translator), Roberto, and I spent the better part of the following week there (first with the staff and then with residents) to show them how to use videotape to study their own interactions. Needless to say, I was elated over the experience with the staff and eager to communicate it to Max. It was obvious that both the staff and the residents could move in new directions. MAX WAS FEELING somewhat better when he phoned the following Sunday after I was back home. He now had enough energy to go out to a local restaurant on occasion. He was even looking forward to my coming visit, and wanted to know the date of my flight. I was working on a paper on the use of videotape that I wanted Max to review. He thought it could link in with his own earlier work with psychodrama as a way to increase involvement and self-discovery. And then he phoned the last Sunday in May: he’d had another attack the previous week. His doctor said it was no longer necessary for him to come to see Max anymore—they could keep in touch by phone. It seemed the doctor felt there wasn’t much more that he could do for Max and Max agreed. He would finally let nature take its course. He sounded lonely and depressed. On the brighter side, he was encouraged by the events in Tiananamen Square. Once upon a time he had been enthusiastic about the Russian Revolution but he had become quickly disillusioned. He hoped that this uprising would lead to changes. But, of course, it didn’t. To his delight, that summer Joy Tuxford and Pat Howard visited Max. He phoned to ask my advice about renting a video camera to record a conversation with them. I thought it a splendid

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idea and he suggested that we do the same thing when I came in the autumn. He’d just heard from Juan who was off to negotiate a new project in Burma to work with the hill people to divert opium crops. The project would be housed in Buddhist monasteries. Max’s interest in Buddhism had peaked and he spoke of the great possibilities of incorporating Eastern philosophy with his own practices. He regretted that he was not younger and in better health for he would have welcomed this opportunity. Willingly he hoped I would fill in for him. The summer went by quickly. I wrote syllabi for the workshops that Juan had asked me to give. During Joy’s and Pat’s visit, Max called so that we all could talk to each other. I was very moved to hear Joy and Pat again. Pat’s voice especially brought back many happy memories of England: the weekends at the house in Suffolk; the castle in Wales. So much had happened, both good and bad, in the past few years. How old we’d all suddenly become! I wrote Juan to give him my plans and said that I would be stopping by to see Max in August, as he’d proposed. IT WAS OVERCAST and humid when I arrived in Nova Scotia. What a blow to see how Max had aged physically in the past year. He’d lost thirty pounds, was frail and moved around slowly. Now he was active for only two hours or so at a time before he had to rest. But during his waking moments, his mind was as active as ever and he was eager to talk about his ideas and specifically the affairs in Italy. Max wanted to continue our conversations so Chris had rented a video camera to record some of our talks. We started by reflecting on his work. He wanted me to begin by asking what proof did he have that therapeutic communities were effective? I thought it an odd beginning but as it turned out he quickly dismissed his own suggestion and talked instead about paradigms—soon he was back to spirituality and current world events and how they appeared within his own views. Max:

In 1947 when we began working along open system lines, the idea of a paradigm was certainly not fashion-

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able or was even being used. We were battling on without the amount of information we now have that a paradigm is an accumulation of knowledge on a certain subject which can be added to in light of further information. We are now comfortable with the idea of a paradigm because it’s no longer irrational, lacking in proof, but it’s allowing one to get away from the objective reality which is so stultifying and which is so very characteristic of our industrial age… A paradigm is not in any way limited to spreading out to more and more perimeters, and to talk about the global—people are always talking about the earth—and they’ve got a totally new perspective of our tight little island and that there are new frontiers and so on. And so I feel quite optimistic about the growth of new ideas about our responsibility for not only ourselves, but the group, the family—and the earth… The process becomes more important than the goal which is for me to see patients or help prisoners or whatever, but I think process means that you’re not taking it straight line to, let’s say, a more articulate group of prisoners. What you’re doing is allowing the paradigm to grow in the light of your information and your own interaction and as it grows you’re changing; everyone is changing in harmony, so that it’s a very subtle thing: a truly open system. It’s a most sensitive body and every day it changes. That doesn’t mean to say that it’s unstable, it merely means that it’s flexible… You begin to allow increasingly for some latitude in entering the world of fantasy or dreams or the abstract, even the spiritual begins to creep in because everyone knows that we are talking about consciousness at the everyday level; we’re conscious of the

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words, their meanings, their moods, but that’s a very superficial level of consciousness. We all know that there’s another person who goes beyond. We all have experiences where we get out of this organic and rigid Western civilization value system and suddenly feel free to fanaticize a better, a freer world and even one which is, let’s say, embracing a more global view of life, and these moments—you’ve had them, I’ve had them, and probably everyone—where suddenly the world changes to a very different place and not just something that’s dependent on what can be sensed by our five senses or time and space. Suddenly we begin to feel exhilaration and a new idea—or even listening to an audiotape—suddenly makes an idea you never thought of—a burst of energy, and you’re transported to a transcendental kind of experience. I think you meditate and perhaps in your meditation you get in touch with your inner self. Is that right? Dennie:

Is this beyond structure?

Max:

That’s a good question. That’s why I prefer the term social organization because it’s in constant flux and it’s got to leave formal reality, rationality, if it’s going to grow… If I said in a meeting that I felt the presence of a higher being, if I felt it, and there’s no room in the formal structure or organization for that kind of higher consciousness or inner consciousness, then you’ve got to re-organize your boundaries so that the old reality, which we call everyday life, and the new reality, which pays more attention to latent potential (inherent in everyone), and includes Jung’s universal unconscious. These ideas are gaining credence everywhere, even from the scientists and from religious pundits like Matthew Fox, who break away from the

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rigid concepts of Christianity into a much wider belief in the use of parables, and metaphors, going deeper than words, going into this new awareness of global potential which everyone has—which we all went through, let’s say from the age of three to seven, when we were very conscious of the fantasy world which seemed very real… Dennie:

In the thirty years we’ve know each other, I’ve seen you change within yourself. When I first met you, you were very much a leader, some called you charismatic, which you realized and you set up a system to check the possibilities of over-using your position of authority.

Max:

Right!

Dennie:

But also there was this other part of you—this awakener—which helped keep the evolution going, developing new ideas, inspiring others.

Max:

I think you’re right. And it’s very interesting if one could re-live one’s life.

Dennie:

I think you were evolving much more into a guru role while you were trying to change the social organization—especially at Dingleton—from a hierarchical system into something much different. And you did—in an extremely difficult position. But this other quality, this inspirer, was always there.

Max:

I didn’t even see it.

Dennie:

Max, what does spirituality mean to you?

Max:

Straight to the point as always. There’s no beating about the bush with you, is there?

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Dennie:

Well, after all these years, I thought we could dispense with the preliminaries.

Max:

Quite right. But to get to your question. What do I mean by spirituality? We are dealing with the ineffable. Terms such as “ego,” “egoless,” or even “state of mind” are necessarily obscure and relative.

Dennie:

Why relative?

Max:

Because language can carry us only so far and what we are dealing with in spirituality lies beyond words. The total experience of consciousness. Indeed, only in recent years has psychiatry realized the inadequacy of its terms in dealing with different states of consciousness, from depression to ecstasy, sanity to madness. Perhaps that’s partly why Jung has had such an appeal with his concepts like synchronicity, archetypes, and the collective unconscious.

Dennie:

Given that, what might you have encouraged in your work with therapeutic communities?

Max:

Well, the spiritual, for one thing. Other states of consciousness, the mystic side. In spite of the evolutionary aspects of our work, and, as radical as it was viewed in some quarters, I can see many instances where the patients or clients were on the verge of important new growth or understanding—I mean, had we been more knowledgeable in other areas, we might have been able to encourage them. I realize this sounds a lot like that age-old line, “If I knew then what I know now.” But looking back, I realize what opportunities for growth we missed. There are many approaches, of course. Take awareness, for example; it’s often accompanied by a feeling of immense relief. But this state is still within the treatment framework, and I want to go beyond

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that. Transformation is perhaps more what I have in mind, although that concept, too, is limiting. It suggests a mere rearrangement of what is already there, which inevitably takes one into transcendence if you want to think in terms of the spiritual (or transpersonal) if you want to remain with psychology. Dennie:

Or spirituality.

The conversation then turned to his impending death and it seemed as though he had resolved most of the personal matters he’d been working on. He was trying to put his many papers, notes, photographs and letters into some kind of order, but there was still a lot left to do and his energy level was steadily lowering. He’d just recently agreed to place his archives with the Planned Environmental Therapy Trust in the UK. Although he had not been out of doors for some time, he insisted we all go to a restaurant one evening. Although it took a great effort on his part, he managed the affair with his former aplomb and even engaged a waiter in a personal conversation. All through the visit, it was difficult for me to realize that Max was nearing the end. He had always been lean but his illness had stolen muscle from under the skin that now hung on the bone like frail gauze. To touch him was to feel the mortality of human flesh. Yet his eyes never lost their vitality; they seemed young—lost in that pale, tired face. Each night as I left for the motel, I struggled with a premonition of finality: would he last the night? Would he be there at the breakfast table next morning? As the week progressed I observed our farewells linger; they had taken on the weight of last acts. I WAS TO come to the house for breakfast the morning I left Wolfville but Max had Chris pick me up at the motel to take me directly to Halifax. Although I was disappointed, I realized that

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goodbyes had always been painful for Max. But this time was different for I knew that we would never see one another again.

chapter seven

AFTER THOUGHTS: A LIFE WELL LIVED I realize that my own deepest problems would not be solved by a therapist but would call for a new perspective of a deeper level than would the rational or analytic approach. A higher level of consciousness is evoked that introduces a more wholistic or global perspective, which diminishes the significance of my problem. I think of this twilight state as more related to my inner self than to my everyday self. It is a more abstract or egoless state of mind where I see that major problems are not solved but outgrown.

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O DRAW CONCLUSIONS from another’s life is perhaps somewhat presumptuous. But Max always saw himself as an example to others and lived his life accordingly. As I look back over the three decades of our friendship, I now realize I was witness to an extraordinary struggle for integrity in both his personal and professional life. Max would not have put it in such terms; nevertheless, he wrestled with his conscience every day. And though he lamented that he was unable to face his shadow more openly, he did so better than anyone I know. Certainly he was the first to acknowledge his faults and tried to come to grips with the influences of his dark side whenever he could. It must have been difficult for Max, who had his mother’s pride and determination, to admit weakness and failure on his part. In my own estimation, there was little of either in his life save for the common human folly of striving for perfection—a goal that inevitably emphasizes our faults. He must have realized this failure when he wrote that he seemed to be waiting for another transcendental experience that never came. Towards the end of Max’s life, perfection had taken on a spiritual dimension. Reading first Jung, then the new physics, and finally Buddhism, he came to believe that his work in therapeutic communities had ignored the meditative and contemplative side of life. But what he overlooked in his criticism was the fact that in those former circumstances, he needed action—not contemplation. And he had responded accordingly. He may have regretted the absence of spirituality in his work but he intuitively recognized what the proper response was to a given situation. Dealing with delinquents or drug addicts or soldiers in trauma, he knew enough to create an environment in which compassion and equality would move people towards wholeness.

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His ability to respond appropriately to circumstances was his greatest talent. Whether it was on the rugby field in Edinburgh, or in his ashram in Nova Scotia, he was objective enough in his self-evaluation to experience his emotions without indulgence. The young rugby captain hated the sickly old man and resented his infirmity; the old man lamented the young captain’s ignorance of spirituality and the vast realm of the psyche. And so much had happened to the man in between! Max would estimate it was the old man in the end who had the richest experience of all. For it was the experience of the inner life—the dream life, the life of the soul. Gone was the hectic life of conferences, workshops, and lectures, and with it, the din of politics and controversy. Now there was time to contemplate in peace. If Max reminisced at all it was to reevaluate his life and work. It was during these times that he realized his previous neglect of the spiritual and so he set about rectifying the situation. Since he was not one to go about things haphazardly, he began in the field he already knew: psychiatry. But in Jung, he found more than a psychiatrist: he found a mind that dared to explore the outer reaches of the soul and a voice to match it in eloquence. Max’s excitement grew with every page. Jung had introduced him to the realm of dreams but to his dismay (and chagrin), he found that he had never experienced “big” dreams, only little everyday ones. After watching a documentary on Jung, he wrote that he had learned that his nightly dreams always reflected his current life—dreams from the personal unconscious—and he seldom got those about archetypes and the universal unconscious. So, he concluded, apparently he had been conditioned more by our culture than he’d like to admit and would have to wait patiently for transcendency. But in many respects, I think Max didn’t need to dream the big dreams, for his life, in form and content, was that of the archetypal hero. His work in therapeutic communities took him to the frontiers of psychiatry. There, he met with adversity both from fellow professionals and the powers that be. More than once he had to answer accusations regarding his personal and professional integrity; more than once he had to suffer disappointment and

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hypocrisy. Yet he never faltered in his quest for a compassionate and democratic alternative to traditional psychiatry. It was this same passionate adherence to the truth that he now brought to his study of the spiritual. The need for self-realization was as strong in him as the need for justice and it pained him deeply to see either corrupted. I well remember how depressed he became upon witnessing the humiliating treatment of a resident at CeIS in Italy. It was hard for him to reconcile the end with such means, for the dignity of the human being was the central factor in his own concept of treatment. He believed that degrading another in any way—even for the best of reasons—was a betrayal of the trust between authority and its object. Likewise, failure to take every opportunity to examine one’s behavior was a betrayal of the Self. He maintained that his own shortcomings were a great source of learning for him. And painful though they were at times, they always got a welcome response in him. No doubt, like others, Max wanted to be the best he could be. But where many refused to take the negative side of their nature into account, Max eagerly sought it out in himself and was often appalled at what he found. Though he maintained that Jung’s “shadow” baffled him, he never stopped trying to come to grips with it. And in frustration, he wrote that his failure to introduce the spiritual in therapeutic communities was part of his failure to face his shadow. What Max didn’t seem to realize was that in wishing to adhere to Jung’s concept of absolute evil, he had overlooked his own very real efforts to come to terms with his shadow. It seems to me that where he went astray is that he failed to understand that the archetype, though universal in content, is personal in form. For Max it appeared as authoritarianism. He recognized this tendency in himself early on and always made sure he had a counterpart who would neutralize it. In his self-examination, he didn’t see that he had already faced this part of his shadow and contained it. No doubt he was disappointed in his dreams for the same reason.

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AS FOR OUR friendship, it still remains something of a mystery to me probably because there was much of Max that was elusive. Though he said that he looked upon me as a son, I seldom heard from him in times of personal crisis. He revealed his marriages and divorces, like his heart attacks, only after the fact. And I will always regret that I couldn’t have been there on occasion to support him. But then my own private life wasn’t part of our friendship either. It was as though we had an unspoken understanding of the limits of our relationship. Still, it would be wrong (and unjust to our friendship) to say that we didn’t share deep feelings for each other. Even when I was exasperated with him (and he with me), I knew that our friendship was one of the permanent things in my life. Although it was inevitable, given his state of health, Max’s death was a great shock to me. I received the news in Italy from Chris. Nova Scotia seemed such a cold and lonely place to die although he’d said it reminded him of Scotland—Scotland, where he couldn’t abide the narrow-mindedness, the provincial outlook! Now his letters would stop, his Sunday morning phone calls, though I find myself still listening, just in case… THOMAS MANN OBSERVED that life is a succession, a moving on in others’ steps; in Max’s life, however, that succession had been a steady one, albeit with many obstacles and setbacks. He readily learned from others, professional or otherwise, and then he left their footprints and took his own.

chapter eight

SOCIAL LEARNING AND THE FUTURE: A CONVERSATION One of the things that struck me about living in America for several years was the heightening of consciousness of the public regarding ecology and politics, no doubt a result or a continuation of the 1960s. From the public’s disenchantment, more mature forms of participatory democracy will emerge.

Wolfville, Nova Scotia August 1988

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AX WAS WORKING on his autobiography in 1982. He had asked me to come to his home in Phoenix, Arizona to assist him in outlining a proposal for a publisher in Los Angeles. I spent a week “interviewing” him. Although Max had written extensively about his work and had been interviewed a number of times, he wanted to put his ideas into perspective and speculate on their relevance in the context of the times. Early each morning, before the heat of the day, Max would set up a table by his swimming pool with a tape recorder, and, whilst I took a swim, he would review notes from the previous day’s conversations. A flock of birds joined in, perched in the citrus trees surrounding the pool, their cries often so loud they interfered with the recording. Max, on occasion, would pick up a fallen grapefruit and toss it into the trees, but within a few minutes the birds would return, as we resumed our conversation. Over tall glasses of freshly squeezed grapefruit juice, Max would begin or ask me to single out a theme that needed expansion. Dennie:

You wrote some time ago, Max, that if the school system would give as much attention to learning as a social process as it does to subject matter, many of the problems of later life could be avoided. I’d like to hear more of what you meant by that.

Max:

Only that children should become as adept at solving life’s problems as they are at maths or languages. As they grew up, they wouldn’t have accumulated such destructive ways to relate to others and would have different means to handle conflict—to learn from it.

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Indeed, much of psychiatry and social work would simply disappear. How do you suggest that comes about? Well, by teaching people other ways to resolve conflict—constructive ways—at an early age. How early? From the beginning. Meaning? At birth. Frederic Leboyer’s gentle, loving approach, for example, in contrast to the intense, violent methods practiced by most pediatricians: the harsh lights in the delivery room, the slap on the buttocks and so on are totally unnecessary. Studies have shown that by the time they are three, they handle themselves better physically—and mind you, in social situations as well. They are generally happier, too, than children born using the traditional methods. That’s a good beginning then. Indeed it is. But what I had in mind when I made that statement you referred to, was that as soon as children begin to relate to others, they can learn to handle situations differently. Non-violently? Yes, and without the competitiveness which is so uniformly present today in athletics and later in the business world and so many other areas: the dog-eat-dog world that we’ve become so accustomed to. You could teach new ways that early? Of course. And they would persist just as our present methods do which later result in all the neuroses, psychoses, and behavior problems that we see in psychopathic personalities.

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You’ve come a long way since you started out as a psychiatrist. It’s been a natural progression, you might say an evolution. But even when I started out in practice, I was grasping for something that made more sense than the way I’d been taught in medical school. I noted on your letterhead that since you’ve retired again, you now call yourself a “social ecologist.” Yes. You see, I’ve left psychiatry as such and in a way, I’ve moved on. Have you even left your later work in therapeutic communities? Yes, but I’ve kept interest in them. You see, I always saw them as a means to an end and while I still think they have a respectable place in social change—or whatever you want to call it—I think we have to go further. But Max, you can say that from the comfort of your age and now that you’ve retired. What you’ve done has certainly had its impact especially in the fields of wholistic health and drug rehabilitation. Many of the drug programs, while called therapeutic communities, are not what you'd endorse—they tend to be autocratic, inflexible, and in the end, not very human regardless of how effective the claims. Some are damn good that I’ve visited, especially those in Italy. But what are you getting at? Other experimental communities have been the scenes of tragedies where members and their families were terribly exploited. You’re referring to Jonestown and the religious cults. Yes, and I wonder what went wrong? There’s no simple answer of course. But what was most apparent was that they developed systems which were closed—not open—and this allowed tyrannical

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leaders to assume incredible power over others and use it destructively. There was no check on their behavior. How could one insure that didn’t happen? By having a truly open system. Meaning? Any system, whether you call it a family, a classroom, or a community, has certain boundaries that set it apart from its environment. And at the same time it has to deal with that environment. So even if it sets up boundaries, it is both taking in and giving out. Do you follow? What keeps it open? Well, I hate to use the words, but I don’t know what else to call them. Two way communication and feedback. Both negative and positive. Negative feedback or criticism has a regulative effect in which one’s errors are corrected and you can get on about your business more effectively—whatever it is. Any community, even the experimental ones, needs to know not only what it does wrong, but what it does right. It needs to have that kind of information to meet the constantly changing environment if it is to remain vital and grow. Which Jonestown and Synanon lacked. Precisely. They both progressively isolated themselves from the environment. They refused to accept criticism and only emphasized what they viewed as positive. They demanded blind devotion to their leaders and so the dogma was perpetuated unchecked.

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We’re constantly hearing about leadership all the way from government to the family. Ah, that’s a crucial issue. How do you see it? In most cases with multiple rather than singular leadership. You must share in making decisions; but there are times when decision making by multiple leadership is not appropriate. Then you must make decisions by consensus—in effect everyone in the system is involved and has veto power. It’s this flexibility that gives any group or organization its vitality and insures that it remains constructive. How did you arrive at those ideas? By responsible participation—democracy if you will—and from realizing, early on, my own tendency to make decisions for people and to intercede with my solutions, especially during a crisis. My training in medicine and psychiatry was not very helpful in these areas—it’s all too easy to assume the authoritarian position that people expect from doctors. How did you handle this—or minimize it? I’ve always made it a practice to have several alternative leaders whose perspective is inevitably somewhat different from my own—be it a nurse in the ward or an assistant if I was in charge of a hospital or clinic. And to see my role as providing knowledge which is as accurate as I can determine, then leaving the important decisions to those whom are affected, whether the client is a group or an individual.

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But most people want authorities to make decisions for them. They equate democracy with voting and leave it at that. And then they complain when leaders don’t do what they want them to do. Exactly. How could this more responsible participation be brought about? In my view it begins with education. We’ve turned education into schooling for material success and financial security. Now we want to cram even more technical competency into the curriculum, so we’ve let no provision for learning as a social process or experiencing cooperation and shared responsibility. How would you start? There are many ways. I mentioned Leboyer’s gentle birth to begin with. Peer-teaching is another—giving children the opportunity to teach each other at things in which they are competent. Holding daily reviews and planning sessions in the classroom where students participate in their own learning, observe one another, and evaluate what they do. I’d like to hear more about your ideas about education for young children. Not just for children, mind you. Secondary, higher education, and that which we get on the job, is no different in principle. Education, of course, is a process that continues one’s whole life. And our practice of enforced retirement is absolute nonsense. But how and where does one begin? If we’re willing to let some things happen and not make our lives one long succession of mandatory goals based on material success, then we’re not bound to reason or logic, or even gainful employment for that matter.

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We’re free to be ourselves. We’re open to impressions from anywhere or apparently nowhere. But I’d like to ask how far this process of freeing oneself enough to change and grow can be a conscious event. And your answer is… For most people, it may seem to be entirely conscious when learning some definite subject, like maths or a language—or even to drive a car—but we’re all aware of circumstances that we can’t fully understand the more subtle changes in our lives, in our attitudes, our beliefs, and so on. This kind of change often happens unconsciously following a stressful event, like the death of a loved one, or getting married. Over time, we may not even remember the setting in which the change occurred, let alone recognize the change in ourselves. Is intuition involved? Most probably. But getting closer to my specific interests and yours too, I hope, when I speak about learning being a social process, as I have in my last two books, I include those changes that come about through discussions such as we’re having just now.47 I’m listening and responding to your questions while you’re listening to me. Listening is such a lost art and such an important skill that we generally give it little attention —I’m speaking now of responsible—motivated— listening as contrasted to the “noise” that makes up so much of social conversation. What happens if one listens “responsibly?” Then every third of fourth sentence begins to have just a slightly different emphasis, or even something entirely new

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to you. I’m not just waiting to put a full stop to your sentence so that I can get in one of my own. How do you get to be a “responsible listener?” Some come with more of it than others. But anyone can acquire it through practice. Through relationships. It depends on their nature and quality. You and I have a long-standing respect for one another and we go to considerable lengths to see each other and to keep up contact. You give me a new idea and I incorporate it, modifying my attitudes to embrace something new. So the process of social learning is partly one of incorporation. In a setting where older children are teaching younger ones, this can happen—the younger ones look up to the older ones who are their teachers, instead of competitors, incorporating those traits they admire. Then, if the younger ones also have the opportunity to teach other children who are younger than themselves, they can put these new characteristics into practice. And so you see the relationships amongst these children can become quite different from the competitive and exploitative ones found so often in the typical school—or family. How would average teachers find the time in their busy schedules to do all this? And could you say more about incorporation? I forgot who said that in education one must learn how to expend time in order to save it. I don’t want to go into it now, but there is sufficient evidence that children learn faster and it sticks with them better when they learn from their peers—whether it’s positive or negative. But getting to your second question, I am intrigued with this whole idea of incorporation—how something becomes a part of you. Usually it’s not a conscious process, like buying and wearing the latest

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fashion. I don’t always know what I’m incorporating, and often it’s only later that I ever know—if I’m aware at all! Sometimes change can only be realized in retrospect when pointed out by others. It seems to me what you are advocating involves taking risks. You may not be popular. By and large, risk-taking is frowned upon except by stuntmen and businessmen. One’s need for personal security transcends any temptation to deviate. You know, as I look back, I think I was fortunate, to some extent, to have acquired some of the basic values my mother set forth. My father died when I was five, so I don’t have many memories of him. My mother was content to let things happen to us at home. I don’t remember being told not to do many things. I don’t think I’ll ever understand my mother’s intention in raising us like that, or even if she was conscious of what she was doing. Could you say more about how this kind of growth or learning could take place more consciously? With all the concern about ecology, let me put it this way—and you were curious about why I refer to myself as a “social ecologist” rather than a traditional psychiatrist. Growth is a natural phenomenon of all living organisms—the process whereby things become connected with one another—whereas learning has more to do with acquiring knowledge be it from a teacher, through study, instruction, experience, and so on. But now social learning is more like growth and requires a special kind of interaction between people—and this is very important—in an appropriate environment, and at the right time. What I’m getting at is that social learning continually “recycles”

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aspects of one’s earlier life, usually at a more complex level, to create a new wholeness. It’s an ongoing affair, both unconsciously and intentionally. Does that make any sense? It does. But how do you go about “recycling yourself?” For one thing, there seems a need to de-structure the familiar, as occurs naturally during a crisis in one’s life. In Arthur Koestler’s words: the process of taking a step backwards in order to take a leap forward is an integral part of the human experience of learning and change. Put more simply: the death of old forms sometimes is necessary for new ones to emerge. Then achieving this creative leap forward can come from introspection—of “recycling.” But once more, that requires risk-taking, which inevitably involves a temporary state of insecurity and vulnerability. Without a doubt. But then, at that very moment when everything seems to be breaking apart, there is the opportunity to explore the unknown—and here’s where one’s new identity can emerge: when the insecurity gives way to challenge. I’m intrigued with how this recycling you speak of could be a more conscious process that we could use in our everyday lives—how we could use it to take stock of who and where we are and then make some changes, provided we wanted to. Of course. I said that crises are an ideal time to begin. We usually let these moments slip by, but the death of someone dear is a natural time when we are introspective. During such a grief, we look at our relationship with that person both in its positive and negative aspects. A serious illness is another. My heart attacks spurred me to take stock of my lifestyle and make a lot of changes. Marriage or deciding to live with another

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person is a time one has to make changes. Divorce or breaking up with someone is another. And whenever I retire, I seem to get more involved, rather than less, as I promise myself each time! Do you see there are these natural events, both unexpected and planned, where one’s life is temporarily interrupted? These are the very moments we can use to re-examine how we handle our lives. And to begin with, we need to change fear to challenge. How might one begin? With children. I keep coming back to that. You could teach this process in schools along with peer-teaching relationships. Children could learn to evaluate their lives—they are more open and less defensive—and make commitments in small dosages, observe what happens to them as a result, try out new alternatives, and then re-evaluate before taking on newer commitments. Such a process is generally helped if the teacher instigates a discussion group daily with the class where they are free to raise any topics they want to. They can become interested in what lies behind their everyday behavior. If the teacher has had some training in group dynamics she can even go further than conscious thoughts and show interest in their fantasies, intuition, and so on. Is there any hope for us adults? Of course. I merely used children as an example because there is so much to be gained with them. Governments need such re-vitalization—goodness knows—and it’s the same in business and industry where, to their credit, there is a beginning trend. Families. The church. And of course with all the leisure time these days, you could teach this process to millions.

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I don’t know many who have much leisure time. I was thinking of all those people who are unemployed or retired. And closer to your concerns and mine, there are all the homeless, those who are filling the prisons and mental hospitals making them dangerously crowded. I dare say that learning how to recycle one’s life would be far more satisfying and productive for all those people than the little bit of dubious treatment that’s going on today in those institutions. But getting back to education for a moment, most people see schooling as part of the preparation for life—ordained and predictable—to be something or somebody. Such near-sightedness prevents the growth of self-awareness. I think it was André Gide who said that the journey was towards the destination and that security and achievement was the end! In other words, learning from becoming rather than from arriving. To become an engineer, for example, and to be immersed in preparation for this specific goal is to deny the very process of becoming, which may lead anywhere or nowhere—it might even lead away from engineering altogether, as one develops an awareness of his or her own individuality. It could be terribly frustrating. Indeed it could. Max, you’ve spent most of your life in the company of people who deviated in one way or another from social norms. And in so doing, you evolved ways people could lead more satisfying lives. What broader aspects do you see for some of your ideas? Do you actually “favor” promoting deviancy?

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That’s not a bad idea actually. Let me say at the outset that in keeping company with—to use your term—deviants, I’ve met some interesting people—like your goodself, for one example! Society really does require deviants, you know, especially today. Many people equate deviants with delinquents, but they aren’t the same at all. A deviant, as I understand it, is one who departs from the mainstream, which would include most creative people. At any rate, these are people who may appear eccentric and may even have times of mis-judgement, but in society’s eyes, they don’t conform. I think we desperately need such people today. “Leavening agents,” as some put it, to keep society and its institutions on their toes so that they can be constantly examined and modified. Some activists are performing this service. That’s the point. Social learning, as I’ve conceived it, differs, however, from social action in some respects in that the latter usually stops short of learning from their activities. Take arbitration as an example. It’s aimed more at reaching an agreement between the two sides. Granted, some learning may take place, but the primary goal is to settle the dispute and then get back to “normal.” The goal overrides the process and you miss a terribly important chance to bring about much larger changes. Do you think social learning could occur on a large scale? It’s happening now to some degree, but I see it too as a means and not the end. Social responsibility and creativity are occurring on a large scale in spite of irresponsible acts and lack of imagination both by individuals and governments. Take your own country as a prime example. In spite of the administration’s conservative

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policies, large numbers of people are taking stands publically—seeking out alternative life-styles and new values. Marilyn Ferguson, in The Aquarian Conspiracy, estimated that about fifteen million of your countrymen—and women— are involved in such movements.48 And it’s beginning to happen in Britain, elsewhere in Europe, in the Soviet Union and in fact everywhere—it’s a worldwide movement. That extensive? It’s a calculated guess of course. The exact numbers are difficult to come by and not as important as the thrust itself. Fritjof Capra talks of a “rising culture,” 49 and Theodore Roszak spoke of “the creative disintegration of industrial society.”50 These are all encouraging signs. Creativity has blossomed at times when the social, political and economic forces encouraged it, for example during the Renaissance, or more recently during the 1960s.51,52 So much of that seems to have been lost. Perhaps. But even now during the politically conservative swing to the right, there are also many people who are bonding together, loosely connected by various networks which offer support and inspiration at a time when there is such a vacuum in leadership and an apparent lack of spirituality. You see hope then? Indeed. I see not only a relief from many of the social ills that over-industrialization has brought about, but the beginnings of a global Renaissance the likes of which humankind has never known. Coming from you, that sounds revolutionary!

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It is. A new kind. But let me back up a minute if you will. We have had many revolutions: industrial, political, technological. They’ve all had to do with order, with things, with systems, machines, and so on, and they have propelled societies forward. Some would say that revolution, not evolution, has been the force behind humanity’s rise. And in some instances that may have been so. They’ve been perpetuated by man, but never had involved him intimately. In fact, they have propelled us to the point where we can hardly keep pace. It’s all the ordinary man in the street can do to keep up. And it’s just this ordinary man who must change. The power he has at his command makes him a dangerous figure because while societies and machines have changed, that ordinary man has not. Do you realize, Dennie, that the human brain has not changed for the past 40,000 to 50,000 years? Imagine that! The brain of the ordinary man has been fully developed all that time. And what does that make us? Savages or geniuses? I’d say a bit of both! That’s it exactly. But the trouble is the genius has provided the savage with powerful objects of destruction and manipulation. That is why the ordinary man—and by the way, we are all ordinary men—is so dangerous: because he is part savage, part genius. And it is up to us to develop the savage—Jung’s shadow—bring him up to par with the genius; restore integrity, you might say. That’s asking a lot. It is.

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Then where would you say we are now? We are confronted with the dilemma of revolution and evolution: how to bring them together with regard to the savage. Jiddu Krishnamurti has said that we can no longer wait for gradual change—the evolution of consciousness—but that each of us must undergo a “psychological revolution”—something beyond transformation. Do you have any clues how to go about this? I believe we are on the verge of it now, but it will not come from any one source. And this has been a great stumbling block in the past. Religion, psychology and politics have each sought to render the savage in us benign, but he cannot be institutionalized. He is essentially a free spirit and must be respected as such. No, you can’t tamper with the savage and at the same time he can’t be denied. Where do we start? There are many people I see who are on the right track. The combinations of Eastern and Western wisdom— mind you, I did not say knowledge, but wisdom— may help us understand and come to terms with the savage in ourselves and in each other. I would hate to see “Mr. Savage” hang himself as he did in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, but he doesn’t have to come to such an ugly end if we grant him his place. Gandhi welcomed diversity in order to realize his own inner violent tendencies. That’s the point! Max, are you saying then… …that the Savage has a place in our lives, yes, we can’t deny it, but he must start behaving himself at last. The next

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revolution, as I see it, will be a re-evolution of humankind itself, involving each of us intimately and recreating ourselves as well as our world.

Notes and References Introduction 1.

This memoir is a personal account of my association with Maxwell Jones from 1956 to his death on 19 August 1990. Because memory is not always a totally accurate source, I have drawn freely on notes and tape recordings that I kept over the years and from our correspondence. No doubt there could be additions and modifications when additional material is available from his Archives at the Planned Environment Therapy Trust Archives and Study Centre. Max applied many of the methods he discovered to his personal life. The very constitution of his therapeutic community concept has a quasi-family nature to its structure; indeed, some of the programs which operate for drug addicts use the term “family” for the community itself. As Joseph Campbell said, however, “There are times when people need therapeutic communities but they should not be confused with a rich life—a therapeutic house is not a home.” When I first met Max (April 1956), he was the Medical Director of the Social Rehabilitation Unit at Belmont Hospital, Sutton, Surrey, south of London. A consortium arrangement between the newly created National Health Service and the Ministries of Labour and Pensions had previously established the Industrial Neurosis Unit following World War II (April 1947). Many professionals widely recognized his work at that time and, consequently, world visitors besieged the Unit (including me). From that first meeting we kept in touch personally and worked together on numerous occasions both in the US and in Europe. The quotations prefacing each chapter are from Max’s writings.

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Chapter 1 2.

Jones, M. (1961) “Nurse-Patient Interaction on the Ward.” Pennsylvania Psychiatric Quarterly 3,22.

3.

Briggs, D. (1959) “Social Psychiatry in Great Britain.” American Journal of Nursing 59,215–220. (1957) “Developments in Social Psychiatry: Observations in Five Selected English Hospitals.” U.S. Armed Forces Medical Journal 8,184–194 (co-author).

Chapter 2 Note: A transcript of the meeting between Maxwell Jones and the children is on deposit at the PETT Archive and Study Centre. 4.

Briggs, D. (1958) “Verbal Communication in Community Meetings.” Part 3, in, Wilmer, H. Report on Social Psychiatry: A Therapeutic Community at the U.S. Naval Hospital, Oakland, California. Bethesda, Maryland: U.S. Naval Medical Research Institute. See also, Briggs, D. (2000) In the Navy: A Therapeutic Community at the U.S. Naval Hospital, Oakland, California. Occasional Paper 2; 2001. In The Navy 2: A Therapeutic Community at the U.S. Naval Hospital, Yokosuka, Japan, Occasional Paper 3, Planned Environment Therapy Trust and Archive Centre, Online publication: http://www.pettarchiv.org.uk/publications.htm.

5.

Symposium on Preventive and Social Psychiatry. (1957). Washington, D.C: U.S. Government Printing Office.

6.

Jones, M. (1962) Social Psychiatry in the Community, in Hospitals, and in Prisons. Springfield, Illinois: Charles C. Thomas. Reprinted (1968) as Social Psychiatry in Practice. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin.

7.

Gluck, S. (1969) The Olive View Project: A Study of Alcoholism Treatment Methods as Applied to Tuberculosis Patients. Final Report on NIMH project, 26.

8.

Jones, Social Psychiatry, viii.

9.

Grant, J.D. (1961) “The Use of Correctional Institutions as Self-Study Communities in Social Research.” (With a Commentary by Maxwell Jones.) British Journal of Delinquency 7,301–307.

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10.

Ibid.

11

Jones, M. Briggs, D. and Tuxford, J. (1964) “What Has Psychiatry to Learn From Penology?” British Journal of Criminology, 227–238. For a description of the prison transitional therapeutic communities, see: Briggs, D. (2000) In Prison: Research and Demonstration Projects Conducted by the California Department of Corrections, 1958–1965. Occasional Paper 1, (parts 2 and 3). Planned Environment Therapy Trust and Archive Centre, Online publication: http://www.pettarchiv. org.uk/publications.htm.

12.

Summerskill, J. (1971) President Seven. New York: World, viii, 126. For a description of this project, see Briggs, D. (2001) In School 3: Enlarging Learning Communities. Occasional Paper 4. Planned Environment Therapy Trust and Archive Centre, Online publication; for descriptions of peer teaching projects referred to, see Briggs, D. (2001) In School: Creating a Learning Community, and In School 2: Growing Learning Communities. http://www.pettarchiv.org.uk/publications.htm.

Chapter 3 Note: a transcript of the seminars with Maxwell Jones, Joy Tuxford and Pat Howard, referred to in this chapter is on deposit at the PETT Archive and Study Centre. 13.

Cohn-Bendit, D. et al. (1968) The Student Revolt: The Activists Speak. London: Jonathan Cape. See Chapter 3: “Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Interviewed by Jean-Paul Sartre.”

14.

Klein, B. (1965) Eye for Color. London: Collins. See also, Carr, R. (1972) “Weaver’s Yarn: Richard Carr on the Life and Work of Bernat Klein.” London: Guardian, October 12.

15.

Rapoport, R. (1960) Community As Doctor: New Perspectives On a Therapeutic Community. Springfield, Illinois: Thomas, 136.

16.

For a further discussion, see Briggs, D.( 1991) “Reflections on an Incident at Dingleton: A Conversation With Maxwell Jones.” International Journal of Therapeutic Communities 12,145–154.

17.

Jones, M. (1982) The Process of Change. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 119.

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A LIFE WELL LIVED

Chapter 4 18.

McCorkle, L., Elias, A. and Bixby, F. L. (1958) The Highfields Story: An Experimental Treatment Project for Youthful Offenders. New York: Henry Holt; Weeks, H. A. (1958) Youthful Offenders at Highfields: An Evaluation of the Short-Term Treatment of Delinquent Boys. Ann Arbor, Michigan: The University of Michigan Press.

19.

Jones, M. (1980) “Desirable Features of a Therapeutic Community in a Prison,” In Toch, H. (ed) Therapeutic Communities in Corrections. New York: Praeger, 106.

20.

Grant, J. D. “From “Living Learning” to “Learning to Live”: An Extension of Social Therapy.” Ibid. Toch, 41.

21.

Bascaglia, F. (1980) “Breaking the Circuit of Control.” In, Ingleby, D. ed, Critical Psychiatry: The Politics of Mental Health. New York: Pantheon.

Chapter 5 22.

Garcia, L. (1960) “The Clarinda Plan—An Ecological Approach to Mental Hospital Organization, Mental Hospital, 30 November; Garcia-Buñuel, L. (1991) “Penal Developments in Arizona.” International Journal of Therapeutic Communities 12, 131.

23.

Catalano, R. (1979) Health, Behavior, and the Community: An Ecological Approach. New York: Pergamon.

24.

Briggs, D. (1986) “Social Learning, A Holistic Approach: Conversation with Maxwell Jones, MD.” Journal of Holistic Nursing 6, 31.

25.

Breggin, P. (1991) Toxic Psychiatry. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

26.

Shawn, W. and Gregory, A. (1981) My Dinner With André. New York: Grove.

27.

Jones, M. (1984) “From Therapeutic Communities to Social Systems to Futurism.” American Journal of Social Psychiatry 4, 5.

28.

Jones, M.. (1988) “Is Psychiatry Asleep?” Canadian Journal of Community Mental Health 7, 138–139.

29.

Ibid., 136–137.

NOTES AND REFERENCES

199

30.

Maher, J. (1988) “Two Stages of Birth: A Meeting with Frederic Leboyer, MD and Thomas Verny, MD.” Study Guide. San Francisco: Home University Extension, New Dimensions Foundation.

31.

Ottenberg, D. ed (1985) The Therapeutic Community Today: A Moment of Reflection on its Evolution. Proceedings of the First World Institute of Therapeutic Communities, Castel Gandolfo, Italy, 27 31 August 1984. Rome: Centro italiano di solidarietà, 7.

32.

Ibid.

33.

Ibid.

34.

Leighton, A. (1959) My Name is Legion. Foundations for a Theory of Man in Relation to Culture. Volume I: The Stirling County Study of Psychiatric Disorder & Sociocultural Environment. New York: Basic Books. Note: Robert Rapoport and Seymour Parker who were on the research team that studied Henderson (1953–1957) were associated with this earlier project.

35.

Little, D. and Jones, M. (1990) “Open Systems in Teaching: A Philosophical Approach.” Journal of Humanistic Education, 14.

36.

Jones, M. (1982) The Process of Change. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 152.

37.

Jones, M. 1979. “Therapeutic Communities: Old and New.” American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse 6, 52.

38.

Jones, M. (1988) Growing Old: The Ultimate Freedom. New York: Behavioral Sciences, 71–72.

39.

Maher, J. and Briggs, D. eds, (1990) An Open Life: Joseph Campbell in Conversation with Michael Toms. New York: Harper and Row. Soon the extended interviews with Bill Moyers on US National Public Television brought Joseph Campbell to public awareness, followed by his lecture series. Max viewed these conversations with great interest which extended his curiosity into metaphorical aspects of religion and mythology.

40.

Bohm, D. (1980) Wholeness and the Implicate Order. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

41.

Weber, R. (1986) Dialogues With Saints and Sages: The Search for Unity. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 183.

42.

Ibid.

200

43.

A LIFE WELL LIVED

Jones, M. (1984) “From Therapeutic Communities to Social Systems to Futures,” American Journal of Social Psychiatry 4, 5.

Chapter 6 44.

Picchi, M., (1986) “Foreword.” In Briggs, D. La Comunità Therapeutica: Conversazioni con Maxwell Jones. Rome: Centro italiano di solidarietà.

45.

Briggs, D. (1989) “Drug Addiction and Levels of Consciousness.” Rome: Centro italiano di solidarietà (co-author).

46.

Leonard, L. (1986) On the Way to the Wedding: Transforming the Love Relationship. Boston: Shambhala; (1989) Witness to the Fire: Creativity and the Veil of Addiction. Boston: Shambhala.

Chapter 8 Note: A modified version of Chapter 8 appeared in the American Journal of Holistic Nursing, 1988 6,1:3137. © 1988 by Dennie Briggs. Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications, Inc. 47.

Jones, M. (1982) The Process of Change. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; (1988) Growing Old: The Ultimate Freedom. New York: Human Sciences Press.

48.

Capra, F. (1982) The Turning Point: Science, Society, and the Rising Culture. New York: Simon and Schuster.

49.

Ferguson, M. (1980) The Aquarian Conspiracy: Personal and Social Transformation in the 1980s. Los Angeles: Jeremy Tarcher.

50.

Mitchell, A. (1983) The Nine American Lifestyles: Who We Are and Where We Are Going. New York: Macmillan.

51.

Roszak, T. (1977) Unfinished Animal: The Aquarian Frontier and the Evolution of Consciousness. New York: Harper and Row; (1978) Person/Planet: The Creative Disintegration of Industrial Society. New York: Doubleday.

52.

Harman, W. (1979) An Incomplete Guide to the Future. New York: W.W. Norton; (1988). Global Mind Change: The Promise of the Last Years of the Twentieth Century. Indianapolis, Indiana: Knowledge Systems, Inc.

NOTES AND REFERENCES

Photo and illustration credits Franco Lioce, CeIS, Fred Holle, cover Franco Lioce, 1,6,117, 171, 155. Harry Wilmer and US Navy, 13 California Department of Corrections, 27 Dingleton Hospital, 47 Chris Jones, 177

Set in Weiss by Natalie Stenson

201