The teaching at the time was that underneath schizophrenia lay a massive amount of rage that wasn’t being expressed. Schizophrenics are flat and not very responsive. But there was supposed to be this tremendous amount of rage. Well, as a young therapist, I was like “Yeh yeh yeh” but I never saw it. Well, this young woman that I told you about, the young lady that Zaslow treated and had that session all day, she screamed her rage at her mom for about an hour and a half. Just absolutely—I never saw such raw rage as the way this girl expressed it towards her mom. It never came out during the year in the two hospitals and all the times I had seen her.


Zaslow insisted that when people were in an extremely regressed state and very rageful, but in the company of and being guided by a basically loving and caring person, that actual neurological pathways were being rearranged. And you couldn’t get that kind of neurological rearrangement unless very deep emotions were reached. If they didn’t reach real feelings, the realignment would not take place. So in those days, we were very pushy to get people into absolute raw feelings that now would be impossible to do in the present environment. Maybe that is for the best, but we had tremendous successes. We had one little boy at four that we saw that was completely autistic. No language, nothing. He went through intensive sessions and massively changed, started relating, began speaking and later graduated from college. So I see this type of therapy that is being done now with extremely difficult cases as being sort of a pale shadow of what was done in the past. But maybe that’s ok. In other words, you know, if I had my life to live over again—you know, I have taken so much heat about the therapy that was done, that sometimes I wonder if it was worth it. But then again, I am in contact with all these people that were helped so greatly… I have very mixed feelings about it. I know a lot of people were helped, but I know it caused a lot of good therapists—not just me, but other therapists who are extremely good therapists—to take a lot of heat because of the intrusiveness of the type of therapy. But I do know that lives were quickly and immensely changed by the early ways that therapy was carried out.

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