(First of a series)

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago when I teased you with the promise of “the history of attachment therapy straight from the horse’s mouth”, I once had the opportunity to spend several hours visiting with Russ Colburn, former Executive Director of Forest Heights Lodge in Colorado. Russ regaled me with stories of working with Foster Cline and Robert Zaslow in the early ‘70’s. Additionally, I have had several opportunities to listen to Foster Cline describe his early years as a psychiatrist and his therapeutic experiences. The stories were fascinating, and in response to Angela’s blog about “US History of Attachment Therapy”, I thought it would be fun to give you the scoop from the folks who were there….



Foster’s involvement started when he was a psychiatric consultant at Forest Heights Lodge where, according to Foster, “they had extremely disturbed boys.” Russ Colburn attended a psychiatry meeting in 1968 where he watched 8mm film of autistic kids “running around and acting crazy.” After Zaslow worked with these kids, the film showed them sitting in chairs and coming when called. Foster recalled that Zaslow had been banned from this meeting and actually showed these films in his hotel room. Foster went on to say,

“Zaslow was an extremely egocentric and demanding person and named his therapy ‘Z therapy’ after the Greek God Zeus, but everyone knew it was named after Zaslow. One of his great comments that endeared him, of course, to everybody was that Zaslow insisted that ‘everybody should go through Z treatment!’ (Zaslow felt) it was such a life changing experience that everyone should go through it….”

Russ was so intrigued by what Zaslow was doing that Russ arranged for Zaslow to come to Forest Heights Lodge. The question became, who should be Zaslow’s first patient?