(See
the new aacultwatch forum)
“Oxford
Group philosophy influenced Chuck Dederich in forming Synanon
philosophy. Synanon evolved to become a religion. (“The Rise and
Fall of Synanon”, Prof. Rod Janzen, pp. 16,107)
http://www.amazon.com/Rise-Fall-Synanon-California-Utopia/dp/0801865832/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1389542709&sr=1-1&keywords=the+rise+and+fall+of+synanon+Rod+Janzen
The
Oxford Group and Moral Rearmament philosophy with its fundamental
Christian values continued to be of great importance to the American
drug-free Therapeutic Communities movement:
“Concept
vs. Social learning
From
the beginning of the drug-free TC, the ‘concept’ of the TC which
is closely linked to the ‘values’ of the community, has played an
important role. In Synanon:
The Tunnel Back,
Yablonsky (1967:56) describes ‘the concept box’ : "On file
in it were about three hundred concepts. Emerson, Freud, Thoreau,
Nietzsche, Lao-Tse and Russell were some of the names I noticed".
Through the relation with the AA movement and the Oxford groups, the
influence of the ‘Rearmament Movement’, with a return to
fundamental Christian values, was of great importance to the
drug-free TC movement (Broekaert & van der Straten 1997;
Broekaert et al. 1996). This philosophy was adopted to a certain
extent by Daytop and has spread beyond. It is written down in a text
by Richard Bauvais and according to O’Brien (1993:100) “Those
nineteen lines are about the closest thing we have at Daytop to a
written manual for life” (“Retrospective Study of Similarities
and Relations between the American drug-free and the European
Therapeutic Communities for children and adults” (Prof. Eric
Broekeart and others, Journal
of Psychoactive Drugs,
Volume 32(4) December 2000, p.414) A pre-published pdf download is
available (with slightly different wording) for free at
http://www.ortserve.ugent.be/img/doc/definitiefpsychoactief.pdf
It
appears the rise of a fundamentalist Tough Love/ Back to Basics/ Big
Book Study movement in AA in recent decades, and which incorporates
Oxford Group revival, has something to do with the rise of the
Synanon cult and its influence in the US addiction treatment
industry. Like a cancer cut out of a body and the cancerous cells
then spreading to all parts, Synanon, although cut out of society in
1991, continued to live on in cells which spread throughout the
treatment industry and in AA. It continues to evolve and mutate in
various forms in an ever growing more powerful paradigm, now emerging
as the “new” organising paradigm called “recovery” or the
“recovery community” of which “Recovery Champions” is a
recent cell mutation. – If learning from the US experience of
12-step facilitation is anything to go by, Mark Gilman’s “Recovery
Champions” could be seen as a government and National Health
Service backed “Cults in the Community” care plan. Therefore, I
think AA groups in the UK will need to keep a vigilant eye open for
any trained para-professional “Recovery Champions” who might try
to use AA meetings in order to recruit newcomers to their own
organisations.”
Note:
Conference Questions can be downloaded in pdf from the GSO (GB)
website. They are on pages 5-11, AA Service News, Issue 157, Winter
2013
http://www.alcoholics-anonymous.org.uk/download/1/Library/Documents/AA%20Service%20News/157%20Winter%202013.pdf
Conference 2014 background material can be found on the GSO (GB) website. Follow the “Background Material for Conference 2014” link in the Document Library. http://www.alcoholics-anonymous.org.uk/Members/Document-Library
Cheers
The
Fellas (Friends of Alcoholics Anonymous)
PS
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