Janet, you won't lose me as a friend for your opinion. Everyone who was there has an opinion about Rory's movie (if they watched it) and about every charactrization of Synanon made over the past 50 years. Yours seems to be that Rory (with the enthuiasm of those she interviewed, me being one) were "soft" on Synanon's horrors. You are right, Rory had the editor's and director's discretion on what to pick for publication that came out of these long interviews. From my perspective she did a good job on the "horrors", perhaps did not do an equally good job on what seem to me the singular achievment of a racially integrated community, subverted by a megalomaniac, narcissistic leader (without which, admittedly, there would have been no community--paradoxes abound in this story). But most of the comments of people who lived the experience are somewhot myopic--all reiterations of their own experience and reflections. The thing that Rory missed (and probably HBO was't interested in) was that Synanon's existence and its spectatular failure was in fact it's success. The first few years provided a template for a community based approach outside the medical paradigm that is in place around the world and which has benefited millions of people--most of them poor and marginalized and stigmitized in their own societies. So was Synanon a failure? Or in fact a really significant success? It's the flipping box, isn't it? In a couple of weeks I'll be a speaker at the World Federation of Therapeutic Communities in Sao Paulo, Brazil, where many hundreds of TC leaders aroudn the world will be meeting, as they do every two years (since 1976--btw CED was invited to the first meeting in Rome in 1976 and, characteristically, refused to attend, probably because he wouldn't be reciiving the tribute to which he felt entitiled).
When Naya, Bette, and I were contacted by the Department of Justice decades ago and we had a choice whether to testify against Synanon or not, we made a decision to kill something that we had once loved unconditionally. I don't regret the decision, but I still love and respect Synanon's aspirations, the aspirations that brought me into the community, and which equally propelled me out of it.
Janet, you won't lose me as a friend for your opinion. Everyone who was there has an opinion about Rory's movie (if they watched it) and about every charactrization of Synanon made over the past 50 years. Yours seems to be that Rory (with the enthuiasm of those she interviewed, me being one) were "soft" on Synanon's horrors. You are right, Rory had the editor's and director's discretion on what to pick for publication that came out of these long interviews. From my perspective she did a good job on the "horrors", perhaps did not do an equally good job on what seem to me the singular achievment of a racially integrated community, subverted by a megalomaniac, narcissistic leader (without which, admittedly, there would have been no community--paradoxes abound in this story). But most of the comments of people who lived the experience are somewhot myopic--all reiterations of their own experience and reflections. The thing that Rory missed (and probably HBO was't interested in) was that Synanon's existence and its spectatular failure was in fact it's success. The first few years provided a template for a community based approach outside the medical paradigm that is in place around the world and which has benefited millions of people--most of them poor and marginalized and stigmitized in their own societies. So was Synanon a failure? Or in fact a really significant success? It's the flipping box, isn't it? In a couple of weeks I'll be a speaker at the World Federation of Therapeutic Communities in Sao Paulo, Brazil, where many hundreds of TC leaders aroudn the world will be meeting, as they do every two years (since 1976--btw CED was invited to the first meeting in Rome in 1976 and, characteristically, refused to attend, probably because he wouldn't be reciiving the tribute to which he felt entitiled).
When Naya, Bette, and I were contacted by the Department of Justice decades ago and we had a choice whether to testify against Synanon or not, we made a decision to kill something that we had once loved unconditionally. I don't regret the decision, but I still love and respect Synanon's aspirations, the aspirations that brought me into the community, and which equally propelled me out of it.
Good insight Janet!
Thanks!