Snapping

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by Flo Conway; Jim Siegelman




  SNAPPING

  SNAPPING

  America's Epidemic of

  Sudden Personality Change

  FLO CONWAY AND JIM SIEGELMAN

  A DELTA BOOK

  A DELTA BOOK

  Published by

  Dell Publishing Co., Inc.

  1 Dag Hammarskjold Plaza

  New York, New York 10017

  For Hal Conway

  In chapter 4, the quotation from Eldridge Cleaver is from Newsweek

  magazine, October 25, 1976. Copyright 1976 by Newsweek, Inc. All rights

  reserved. Reprinted by permission.

  In chapter 5, the excerpt from 73 Poems by E. E. Cummings is ©

  1963 by Marion Morehouse Cummings. Reprinted by permission of Harcourt

  Brace Jovanovich, Inc. The excerpt from Hanging Out With the Guru

  by Sally Kempton is copyright © 1976 by the NYM Corp. Reprinted with

  the permission of New York Magazine.

  In chapter 10, the excerpt from Cybernetics: or Control and Communication

  in the Animal and the Machine by Norbert Wiener is copyright 1948 and

  1961 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Used with permission

  of The M.I.T. Press.

  In chapter 13, the excerpt from "Choruses from 'The Rock'" is from

  Collected Poems 1909-1962 by T. S. Eliot, copyright, 1936,

  by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.; copyright, 1963, 1964, by

  T. S. Eliot. Reprinted by permission of the publishers.

  In chapter 15, the excerpts from Helter Skelter: The True Story of

  the Manson Murders by Vincent Bugliosi with Curt Gentry is Copyright

  © 1974 by Curt Gentry and Vincent Bugliosi. Used with permission

  of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. The quotation from Patricia Hearst

  from Patty Hearst -- Her Story copyright 1976 by CBS News. Used

  with permission.

  Copyright © 1978, 1979 by Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman

  All rights reserved. For information address J. B. Lippincott

  Company, New York, New York.

  Delta &tm; TM 755118, Dell Publishing Co., Inc.

  ISBN: 0-440-57970-8

  Reprinted by arrangement with J. B. Lippincott Company

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Delta printing -- November 1979

  Contents

  PART ONE: A New Phenomenon

  1 Snapping 11

  2 The Search 19

  3 The Fall 28

  4 The Roots of Snapping 37

  5 Snapping as Something New 53

  6 Black Lightning 62

  7 Wanted: Professional Help 79

  8 The Crisis in Mental Health 88

  9 Beyond Brainwashing 98

  PART Two: A New Perspective

  10 Information 109

  11 The Law of Experience 125

  12 The Snapping Moment and Catastrophe Theory 134

  13 Varieties of Information Disease 152

  14 Snapping in Everyday Life 183

  15 Snapping and Punishment 193

  16 The Future of Personality 218

  Postscript: Jonestown

  The Face of the Eighties 227

  Acknowledgments 253

  Notes 255

  Selected Bibliography 269

  Index 275

  With the exception of publicly known figures, the names and identities

  of all the participants in religious groups and cults and mass therapies

  who are quoted in this book have been changed. Names used for these

  individuals are fictitious and do not refer to any person living or dead.

  Scientists and other professionals whose interviews are partially quoted

  do not necessarily endorse the authors' views, opinions, or conclusions.

  PART ONE

  ----------------

  A New Phenomenon

  ----------------

  1 Snapping

  Lo! I tell you a mystery.

  We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed,

  in a moment

  in the twinkling of an eye . . .

  -- 1 Corinthians 15:51 (RSV)

  Since the early seventies, America has been gripped by an epidemic of sudden personality change.

  On the surface, it appears that a new age of enlightenment is at hand. People of all ages are discovering new faiths, beliefs, and practices that are changing them in ways they never dreamed of. Around the country, college students are finding meaning and purpose in new forms of worship and religious devotion. Upwardly mobile young couples and working singles are taking part in new therapies that root out painful episodes from their past. Businessmen and housewives are learning simple self-help techniques that eliminate stress and tension from their daily lives.

  Has mankind crossed the threshold of a great new era of human fulfillment? Many people think so. Vast numbers of individuals who have experienced these profound changes in their lives talk of "big breakthroughs," moments of spiritual "rebirth" and "revelation," and of "getting it," "finding it," or suddenly "becoming clear." Or they describe soaring "peak experiences," "ecstasies," and levels of awareness they call "transcendence," "bliss," and "cosmic consciousness." There are those who boast miracle cures for lifelong physical ailments and inconsolable fits of depression, while even more report rich new supplies of "inner energy" and creativity. Since the sixties, millions of Americans have set out in search of experiences such as these, exploring new pathways to spiritual fulfillment and participating in the nearly eight thousand techniques for expanding human awareness that have been introduced into our culture. At last count, six million alone had taken up some form of meditation, and over three million young Americans had joined the one thousand religious cults active in the United States.

  No doubt in the course of their explorations a great many people have in fact had powerful new experiences that were the cause or catalyst of some profound improvement in their lives.

  But there is another side to this epidemic of personality change, a side that has been largely dismissed, downplayed, or altogether ignored. It is the dark side of the experience, the side that cannot rightly be described in any of these glowing terms, one that has not been illuminated until now. Yet its signs are personally familiar to a large and growing number of Americans, and its effects have already been dramatically reflected in the headlines.

  The news of the decade contains appalling tragedies: the Manson family murders, the Symbionese Liberation Army's kidnapping of Patricia Hearst, and the wave of random killings in New York City allegedly committed by a young postal worker, David Berkowitz, who renamed himself "Son of Sam." What turned the former high school cheerleaders and homecoming queens of the Manson Family into obedient mass murderers? Why didn't Patty Hearst flee her captors when she had more than ample opportunity? What change could have come over Berkowitz, a young man who was almost court-martialed in the army for refusing to carry a weapon, that would prompt him to prowl the streets of New York with a .44-caliber handgun?

  What, if anything, have these transformations in common with the rebirth in Jesus Christ of two men as dissimilar as former Nixon aide Charles Colson and one-time black revolutionary Eldridge Cleaver, and what elements do they share with the mysteries of sudden personality change that abound in modern life? Beyond the headlines, countless paradoxes arise in the many popular group therapies and self-help techniques that have come out of the "consciousness explosion" of the sixties, in the mushroom growth of Evangelical Christianity in the seventies, and in the mounting controversy over America's rich and powerful religious cults.

  The college student leaves school without warning and is discovered by his pare
nts selling flowers on a street corner. The wealthy executive, taking full responsibility for his fate, quits his job at a moment's notice to sit on the beach and play the flute. A young mother abandons her children after having a "personal encounter with the Holy Spirit." A middle-aged housewife runs away from home to take a month-long course in levitation. A former Yippie leader gives up political activism to follow a fourteen-year-old guru, then embarks on a career as a life insurance salesman. These stories raise even larger and more perplexing questions. Are these changes good or bad? Are they permanent? What's really behind them? Who's susceptible? Me? My kids? Everyone?

  For many Americans, the quest for personal growth or spiritual fulfillment culminates in an experience that is unmistakably traumatic, an experience that has negative, and perhaps disastrous, effects on their personalities and their lives. In contrast to the reported pleasures and benefits of the "big breakthrough," for many individuals, sudden change comes in a moment of intense experience that is not so much a "peak" as a precipice, an unforeseen break in the continuity of awareness that may leave them detached, withdrawn, disoriented -- or utterly confused. The experience itself may produce hallucinations or delusions or render the individual extremely vulnerable to suggestion. It may lead to changes that alter lifelong habits, values, and beliefs, disrupt friendships, marriages, and family relationships; and, in extreme instances, excite self-destructive, violent, or criminal behavior.

  Former members of religious cults and veterans of mass-marketed group therapies and self-help techniques provide vivid confirmation of the existence of this phenomenon when they speak of what they have experienced in the process of some cult ritual or therapeutic technique. For the most part, these individuals are at a loss to explain what happened to them. Many, however, describe it in one graphic, almost visible term. "Something snapped inside me," they report, or, "I just snapped" -- as if their awareness were a piece of brittle plastic or a drawn-out rubber band. And, indeed, this is often the impression of those people who are closest to them: their parents, spouses, friends, and colleagues. To these observers, it appears as if the individual's entire personality has "snapped," that there is a new person inside the old one, someone completely different and unrecognizable.

  Because this exceptional transformation has not been looked at on its own -- although countless Americans have struggled in vain to understand their experience or gone to great lengths to rationalize it -- in this book we investigate the phenomenon we call 'snapping,' a term which designates the sudden, drastic alteration of personality in all its many forms. We chose this word not only because we have heard it so often from other people but because, to us, it depicts the way in which intense experience may affect fundamental information-processing capacities of the brain. Our research has confirmed that snapping is not merely an alteration of behavior or belief. It can bring about a much deeper and more comprehensive change in individual awareness and personality. And, as we have discovered, it poses an even more pervasive threat to our society as a whole, one that challenges psychiatric, legal, and social interpretation.

  ---

  As co-authors we come to this investigation from different vantage points. My colleague, Flo Conway, traversed the West Coast in the sixties, observing in the course of her academic and professional work the heyday of America's newborn human potential movement. Out of that glorious consciousness explosion came a flood of group techniques and radical therapies, among them encounter, psychodrama, Gestalt, primal therapy, and guided fantasy, some of which had been used professionally for years. Once popularized, however, elements of these techniques spread quickly throughout the West Coast and into psychotherapy, counseling and rehabilitation, and crisis centers around the country.

  In her doctoral research in communication, Flo studied these new techniques and observed their effects in a number of therapeutic and clinical settings. She was struck by the proliferation of such powerful tools in the hands of many therapists and group leaders who had little or no understanding of their immediate or long-range effects, and she saw the need for new theory, research, and follow-up studies. Throughout those years, her larger commitment, both professionally and personally, was to reach a new understanding of human development that would go beyond the conventional view that human activity can be wholly explained by drawing analogies to animals and machines. In her effort to validate those aspects of experience that are uniquely human, she developed new methods of interpretation; and before national and international forums, she presented new ways of looking at the profound changes taking place among people and cultures, changes which psychiatry and the traditional social sciences have been unable to explain. Choosing as the foundation of her theory the basic principles of the communication sciences, she offered steps toward a comprehensive view of the human mind as a system of interacting communication processes. This system contained within its framework the essential elements of traditional theories of personality as well as more recent discoveries concerning both animal and human behavior.

  At the same time, I was taking quite a different tack back east. In my studies of philosophy, psychology, and literature at Harvard University and later at Trinity College, Cambridge, I kept bumping into prevailing doctrines which proclaimed that the human "spirit," the human "mind," and even the human "imagination" didn't exist. Like Flo, I was startled to find that, because they were "subjective" and could not be "verified" or "reliably reproduced," vital human processes had been declared categorically off limits by both Western science and philosophy.

  From an academic point of view, I was drawn to those mysteries of consciousness that were all around me in the early seventies: the still-rampant use of psychedelics, the growing interest in Eastern philosophy and meditation, and the curious rise of the "new religion." However, I did not try to crack these riddles so much as humor them in a number of articles I wrote for national magazines and newspapers. I wrote about college classmates who returned from retreats speaking in "tongues," their eyes on fire, and othenvise "blissed out." I told of the public gathering I had attended to see a film that would reveal how anyone could attain a state of "perfect knowledge." (The presentation was delayed two hours because no one in the sponsoring organization knew how to run a movie projector.) But that was before anyone had begun to question what went on in America's religious cults.

  By 1974, the situation wasn't funny any longer. The Children of God, the first cult of "Jesus Freaks," was being investigated by the Attorney General of New York. The Hare Krishna and the Moonies had taken to the streets, and people were being jailed around the country for attempting to "deprogram" cult members who had allegedly been "brainwashed." To add to the confusion, a new breed of entrepreneurs had begun marketing human awareness on a nationwide scale, like fast food, in slick, prepackaged mass-group therapies and self-help techniques.

  That year, Flo and I joined forces in New York while working for a new national magazine. There we compared notes and personal experiences and immediately noticed some disturbing common patterns in what we'd been seeing all around us. The closer we looked, the more some of these profound breakthroughs people were talking about appeared quite different from what they were being called. Moreover, when we viewed our findings through the lens of Flo's perspective in communication, it became clear that at a much deeper level many of the techniques being used to create intense personal and spiritual experiences posed a hidden threat to fundamental processes of the mind. In the months that followed, I, too, became a serious student of communication, immersing myself in the major texts and seminal works of the diverse field in search of the key concepts and the plain language needed to convey Flo's intricate system of the mind in everyday terms. Then, together, we forged a joint framework for further exploration.

  For the past four years, we have focused our investigation on America's religious cults and mass-marketed therapies, threading our way through their various doctrines, rituals, procedures, philosophies, and private jargons to reach wh
at we now believe to be their common threat to human development. In the course of our research, we came to the conclusion that America's cults and mass therapies should be viewed together because they use nearly identical techniques of manipulating the mind and because, in this decade, many of them have become impossible to categorize. Some use sophisticated therapeutic methods yet call themselves religions and claim tax exemptions. Others invoke the names of Hindu deities yet advertise their medical and scientific credibility. For many, refined techniques of marketing and persuasion reap huge sums of money on a national -- and even international -- scale. Nearly all rely on the impenetrable legal sanctions of the First Amendment and defy both government regulation and consumer protection through the establishment of charitable trusts, foundations, or nonprofit institutions.

  We traveled to dozens of cities and towns across the country in the course of our research, in an effort to get an extensive cross-section of opinion and experience. Like most cultural trends, America's cults and mass therapies began in the major centers of media and population on both coasts and then moved quickly inland to the heart of America, where popular religions have always found fertile soil. Today the largest religious cults, such as the Unification Church, the Hare Krishna, the Divine Light Mission, and the Way, have centers and temples in every major city, in many smaller towns, and on most college campuses. The most popular mass therapies, Transcendental Meditation and Scientology's Dianetics, for instance, have dozens of outlets from coast to coast; and many of the newer ones, such as est and its latest outgrowth, Lifespring, are expanding into regional markets and spawning local imitators.

 

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