Chuck and the History of Synanon

In the early history of Synanon, the word “cult” did not appear, either in the experiences of members or in the press. Later, during the group’s rise, in the 1950s and 1960s, members and outsiders openly celebrated its ability to brainwash people. The story of how Synanon put the fantasy of brainwashing into practice in post-war America goes like this: Charles E. Dederich (Chuck) was an alcoholic in the late 1940s, barely surviving in Santa Monica, California, reading Emerson, and living off unemployment. He started attending Alcoholics Anonymous and loved it. Dederich recalled his first meeting like this:

This kind of self-conscious, attention-loving trickster quality became central to both Dederich’s persona and the nascent drug recovery group that formed around him. The group originally wanted to call itself the Tender Loving Care Club (but that name had already been incorporated), and they felt that drug users (or “addicts” or “dope fiends,” as they called themselves) needed more accountability than AA provided.Footnote ¹⁵

From AA, Dederich borrowed the key idea that only addicts could cure other addicts, but, unlike AA, Synanon argued for a residential experience in which addicts separated themselves from their lives for an extended period and cut off ties to friends and family. Most provocatively, the group developed a form of “attack therapy” in which participants verbally abused one another and subjected themselves to punitive rituals. The root of drug abuse, according to Dederich, was a lack of character; it was through a complete submission to the group that character was rebuilt.Footnote ¹⁶ Treatment was also a home and a job, a model that allowed the organization to function entirely on donations during the 1960s and in which members were not required to pay for treatment. Instead, they scrubbed floors and ran the growing array of businesses that supported the group financially, from gas stations to furniture stores.Footnote ¹⁷

Dederich framed Synanon’s culture as a corrective to the 1960s counterculture’s immaturity and laxity. According to him, the group “points out [addicts’] stupidity in the hope that they will learn how to grow up and function like adults.”Footnote ¹⁸ We often associate communal groups with the countercultural movements of the 1960s, but Synanon formed its communal ideals as a direct repudiation of protests against the Vietnam War and music subcultures such as jazz and rock and roll.Footnote ¹⁹ Despite this refutation of counterculture, many of its early members came from the jazz scene, and the rituals and language of the group always maintained a kind of jive quality. They even produced their own jazz album.

Much like the jazz scene from which many of their members came, the group was proudly interracial.Footnote ²⁰ Dederich embodied this anti-“square” ethos in his marriage to Betty, who was African American, in his constant cussing (Synanon people loved to cuss), and in his whole bodily presentation.Footnote ²¹ Kandy Latson, an early participant in Synanon, described Chuck in very a Synanonese way: “What’d he look like? He weighed about 280 pounds. He had a big belly. He had a big fucking head. I mean a big fucking head. And he never wore shoes. He wore flip flops.”Footnote ²² The group may have called themselves “dope fiends,” but they were not trying to fit in with squares; they were an anti-counterculture counterculture.

We have a rich portrait of Synanon during the 1960s because celebrities, journalists, and social scientists flocked to the group. Social scientists wrote lucid (and celebratory) portraits of its methods, and, in 1965, Hollywood producers made a movie starring Eartha Kitt that portrayed the Synanon as a rag-tag group with the secret to drug rehabilitation. The group was then covered in Life magazine, whose ringing endorsement declared it “A tunnel back to the human race.”Footnote ²³

The core of Synanon’s approach was “The Game,” which was, I will argue, a form of abusive ritual rooted in military experiments of resocialization. In an instance of the Game, a person sat in the middle of a circle (called “the hot seat”) while the rest of the group yelled at them, insulted them, and tore them down emotionally. A taste: “You’re a low-life creep. You know that? You’re a no-class bastard, that’s what you are. A no-class bastard. That’s all you’ll ever be.”Footnote ²⁴ Fellow members “gamed” (taunted) the person in the hot seat by picking at their deepest insecurities; the gamed person was supposed to eventually feel a break between their internal resistance and the external critiques—what Dederich called “polarized” positions—creating a path to an honest encounter with the self.Footnote ²⁵ Looking back at the Game retrospectively in 1978, Bobby Kohl, a young man who had joined the group in 1966 to kick his addiction, reported that group members were “brainwashed to believe that anything Synanon does is right and everyone must do what Synanon demands.”Footnote ²⁶ Breaking people down until they were subject to group authority was a description of the Game that Dederich agreed with—and openly promoted—in the 1950s and 1960s.

Dederich saw group experience as central to drug rehabilitation. He was generally opposed to one-on-one psychotherapy because it did not come with the accountability of group surveillance.Footnote ²⁷ Carrying out manual labor as a group and monitoring each other at all times of the day allowed people to practice submission to the community “norms,” which would cure them of an adolescent need for individual rebellion, the character flaw that Dederich argued was at the root of addiction.Footnote ²⁸ The restructuring of character required public shame. People who slipped up were often required to wear signs that said “Ask me what I did”; in one case, a resident was required to wear a diaper to demonstrate his infantile behavior. Members could also be punished for not tattling on others for bad behavior and so surveillance became a central function of the group dynamic.Footnote ²⁹ The Game, labor, and punishments all served to heal the addict through eroding their individual resistance.

When the group was first described as a cult in the late 1960s, it was in relationship to its shift away from addiction treatment and toward religious utopian ideals. At that time, the Synanon leadership began to propose that they were creating a new type of self through a mini society that could model enlightenment to the rest of the world. Dederich introduced this next phase by introducing a version of the Game that could be performed by anyone. In 1966, Synanon opened its first “game club,” a subscription-based club that allowed non-drug addicts to participate in the brutal ritual for which Synanon had become famous. You could participate in these games at dinner parties, at work, or at official buildings owned by Synanon all across the United States.Footnote ³⁰ People with no drug addiction found the brutality of the group’s methods thrilling, and the success of these paid-for experiences provided a new revenue stream for the organization. It was during this transition that critiques of the group as a cult began. Writing about the possibilities for drug treatment in 1967, Dr. Doug Louria argued that, while Synanon had once been an option in the arsenal of drug treatment, it was now a useless “secret cult.”Footnote ³¹ His critique was not about a tricky charismatic leader; it was an allegation of a treatment that did not do what it said it did.

In 1968, the success of the clubs led to a new category of membership in Synanon called “lifestyling,” in which non-addicts maintained their jobs outside of the group and lived in their homes but donated either part or all of their income. Alongside the inpatient members who worked for free, this economic model led to a lucrative structure for Synanon, which did not pay taxes because it had been incorporated as a nonprofit.Footnote ³² Synanon’s wealth peaked in 1969, as it was riding high on this form of dual membership, as well as the continuing influx of donations from fawning corporations who supplied the drug addiction program with free supplies.Footnote ³³ In 1969 the organization made a radical shift: all lifestylers were asked to either become residential (bringing their children with them and leaving their jobs) or leave the organization. Thousands of lifestylers left.Footnote ³⁴

As Synanon became a residential community for both drug addicts and non-drug addicts, it shifted into a model recognizable to Americans in 1970: a religious or political commune. Unlike many other communes, however, it had a massive fortune that it had amassed through the success of its industries and donations. In order to protect this fortune, Synanon lawyers made the decision to file as a religious organization as a way to shield the group from the IRS oversight.Footnote ³⁵ This was a practical decision, but by this point Synanon had fully transitioned to rituals that were self-consciously religious. The most significant decision in this transition to religion was the end of “graduation,” the term for an addict’s successful recovery when they left. In the new model, nobody ever needed to leave. This shift in the organization’s understanding of its mission happened in 1968, well before it filed as a religion with the IRS.Footnote ³⁶

It was not until the early 1970s that Synanon became widely understood as a cult by outsiders and was accused of abuse and brainwashing by members. In 1975 and 1976, the group adopted the practice of shaving their heads (a practice that had previously only been used for punishment), reproduction was banned (men were required to have vasectomies and women were asked to have abortions if they were pregnant), and married couples were asked to switch partners.Footnote ³⁷ I have sped through these last practices because, when assessing the use of the word “cult,” what you focus on matters. It is easy to confuse unorthodox sexual practices and non-heteronormative family structures with abusive religion. But the application of the term “cult” to Synanon—starting in 1971, and continuing into the present—by journalists, former members, and eventually the children who were raised in the community demonstrates these subjects’ sense that cults were a kind of bad therapy that used group pressure to brainwash people.Footnote ³⁸

Journalists began to use the terms “cult” and “brainwashing” alongside each other in 1974, when the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) was taken to court over brainwashing accusations, and in 1978 after the mass suicide of the Peoples Temple. In both cases, the language of brainwashing and subservience to a cult leader was loaded with racialized concern over non-Western religion and Black people’s susceptibility to a white leader.Footnote ³⁹ Concern over Synanon, however, points to an additional historical meaning of “cult” taking form in the late 1960s and early 1970s: cults as a form of ritual abuse and bad medical care. In 1971, before the group had begun their unorthodox marriages or head shaving, the psychologist Bruce L. Maliver wrote an op-ed in the New York Times about a young woman he had known who died by suicide in 1968 after seeking treatment with a Synanon group. Calling Synanon a cult, Maliver made the argument that the most distressing thing about its form of group therapy was that “encounter groups” were becoming a wildly popular form of alternative therapy far beyond this one organization. Maliver was concerned with the lack of medical training, licensure, and regulation. He used the word “cult” to name a form of psychological treatment that was likely to hurt people.Footnote ⁴⁰

In Maliver’s critique and in the autobiographies of children such as C.A. Wittman, who was raised in Synanon and calls it a cult, “cult” has a meaning that is distinct from (although, of course, adjacent to) the claims against ISKCON and the Peoples Temple. In Wittman’s analysis, she describes Synanon ritual as designed to hurt. She recounts the experience of being ten years old and participating in the Game with other children. The supervisors “took turns watching over us and encouraging us to keep going. . . . By midnight some of the kids had nodded off, spent, with nothing more to say. . . . Those who dozed were slapped awake. ‘Play the game! Play the fucking game!’”Footnote ⁴¹ The point was to play through demoralization, to feel sleep deprivation, to play past any desire to play: to feel and endure new levels of hurt until one became masterful at hurting others. Importantly, what Maliver and Wittman described as cult activity, and what Bobby Kohl described as “brainwashing” in his lawsuit against Synanon, were practices central to the group long before the cult panic around ISKCON and the Peoples Temple.

Dederich was not alone in his enthusiasm for this form of experimental ritual hurting in the 1960s. At Esalen, as Maliver pointed out, new age practitioners were developing an aggressive group therapy called “encounter groups.”Footnote ⁴² In 1960, David Wilkerson, a Pentecostal minister, was creating rehabilitative residential programs for “troubled youth,” called Teen Challenge, that relied on toughening up children.Footnote ⁴³ These ideas were clearly circulating between hippies, evangelicals, and people trying to treat addiction. But the historian Mark Chatfield has shown that the key principles of the Game were at work even earlier: in World War II, when military psychologists began experimenting on soldiers who had gone AWOL. While imprisoned, the soldiers were divided into two groups, pre-honor and honor. If the soldiers forced one another to “tell the truth” about their moral deficiencies, they were moved into the honor group. This experiment was done behind barbed-wire fences and supervised by armed guards. Chatfield explains that the “approach armed delinquent GIs with psychotherapeutic jargon to discuss their life histories and their deviance from Army regulations, giving them words to express how they were cured of their unpatriotic attitudes, making them fit for duty back on the front lines.” The therapeutic form seemed to work best when the soldiers dug into one another’s deepest insecurities. The psychiatrists, delighted with the soldiers’ ability to remold one another with mutual hurtful attacks, renamed the method “guided group interaction.” As Chatfield points out, the doctors and social scientists who pioneered and then disseminated the military’s findings from these experiments eventually played a role in establishing the treatment centers for drug rehabilitation that also used Synanon as a model. Clearly Chuck Dederich did not have a monopoly on ideas about how to use what Chatfield calls “nonphysical forms of therapeutic violence.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Dederich’s unique spin on this form of “nonphysical” violence, however, was to give it the trappings of both science and religion.

Trapped

When Time magazine broke the story of the Synanon’s transition in 1977 to a religion (and especially their embrace of open marriages, forced vasectomies, and shaved heads), it reported that the group had become a “kooky cult.”Footnote ⁴⁵ The focus on these issues by journalists missed the larger story.Footnote ⁴⁶ By the time that Synanon had become a self-described religious movement, its core features had already become the most popular model for drug abuse treatment centers, and Synanon itself was on the decline, having lost most of its members. But Synanon matters for the history of medicine and incarceration because it spawned, in concert with federal drug policy during the neoliberal 1980s, a larger movement of rehab facilities that followed its model.Footnote ⁴⁷ And Synanon matters for religious studies because the group and its offshoots define a historically specific form of religious coercion that is inextricably linked to being resocialized and spatially contained.

Synanon did not incarcerate people until very late in its short history, but its logic of containment was worked out in the 1960s. For most of the organization’s history, adults came and left of their own accord.Footnote ⁴⁸ But some people were actually unable to leave, and, importantly for the history of cult as a way of naming a particular form of religious institution during the late twentieth century, the group thought deeply about the utility of religious spatial containment, by which I mean the enforced separation of people both from their families and from the rest of society for the purposes of resocialization via ritual. Synanon first developed its emphasis on spatial containment by arguing that drug addiction could not be cured without cutting off ties to friends and families. As the group thought more universally about its philosophy of life, Dederich used the word “containment,” which he said he took from Emerson, to theorize the necessity of containing oneself spatially, so all one’s energy could be devoted to the work of the group.Footnote ⁴⁹ Synanon ritualized this idea by practicing intermittent lockdowns called “going on containment,” in which nobody was allowed to leave.Footnote ⁵⁰ “Containment” increasingly became the precondition of achieving Synanon’s benefits, as both lifestylers and addicts were asked to live permanently on the compound.

Synanon also incarcerated people on behalf of state agencies. As it gained fame for its drug treatment program, police, courts, and social welfare agencies began sending the program both adult addicts and children who got into trouble. Beginning in the early 1960s, parole officers sent their parolees to live at Synanon; in the 1970s, even as the group became more well known as a religious commune than a drug addiction program, social welfare agencies sent minors who had broken the law to live at Synanon for the duration of their sentences. The children were called the “punk squad” and they lived separately from other group members. While at Synanon they were required to live according to the Synanon lifestyle, shaving their heads, gaming, and listening to recordings of others playing the Game.Footnote ⁵¹ Another important example of this state-backed imprisonment at Synanon is the case that the lawyer Paul Morantz (a famous “anti-cult” advocate) won against the group, in which a woman sued the organization for wrongful imprisonment after a mental health clinic in Venice, California, sent her to Synanon. She accused Synanon of practicing medicine without a license, refusing her access to her husband, and inducing a psychotic episode.Footnote ⁵² Very few of Synanon’s members between the 1950s and the 1970s were forced to stay at the compound, but Synanon cultivated a model for imprisoning people in a ritually focused space, away from their family and the rest of society—and crucially at the behest of the state—that would live on in America’s conception of rehab and “troubled teen” treatment centers. One of the qualifications I would like to propose for historicizing religious spatial containment is that it is difficult for a religious organization to imprison someone without some level of buy-in from the state.

Compared with the number of people who were incarcerated in Synanon-style rehabs and forced to do Synanon-style programs in prisons between the 1960s and the present, the number of people incarcerated directly by Synanon is quite low. The historian of medicine Claire D. Clark shows that US policy makers adopted Synanon’s “treatment center” model in their approach to drug rehabilitation, especially in prisons, using it above methadone treatment and other treatment center models that did not stress punishment and shame. Former Synanon members led many of these programs throughout the 1970s and 1980s.Footnote ⁵³ The trajectory of governmental policy has been fundamentally shaped by Synanon’s philosophy: addicts, as the organization framed drug users, could not simply stop using drugs to recover; they needed to become different people in order to stay clean. And they certainly did not require medical care. Another core idea that migrated from Synanon into drug rehabs operating today was that labor is central to recovery. This has led to a practice of “hiring out” people in rehab as temporary unpaid workers for corporations such as Shell, Exxon, and Walmart.Footnote ⁵⁴ Finally, Synanon sowed the seeds of the American rehab industry by embracing the idea of spatial containment, a concept that sat very well with the drug policy officials of the era.

In contrast to asylums and prisons (the government’s only tool for getting people off drugs in the 1950s), Synanon offered a genuinely more humane option, through its provision of free care. But it was not working outside the mainstream understanding of drug addiction, and this is why its embrace of “containment” resonated with policy makers who favored incarceration. Harry Anslinger, who served as the Commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics from 1930 to 1962, under five different presidents, described “quarantine” as the answer to the post–World War II rise in heroin use.Footnote ⁵⁵ Synanon similarly believed in quarantining addiction; but the group was just as worried about the outside world contaminating its members as about its members contaminating the outside world. Ultimately, Synanon’s solution to drug addiction made sense to policy makers who had previously thought that the only answer was jail. Anslinger’s ideas and Synanon’s ideal of containment found particular resonance in the programs instituted in prisons starting in the early 1960s.Footnote ⁵⁶

Even Synanon’s more esoteric practices—such as the development of highly arcane Emersonian terminology and elaborate rituals—did not discourage drug policy officials from taking the group seriously.Footnote ⁵⁷ In order to understand Synanon’s theology in its full context, it is crucial to look to the ideals and practices that the organization shared with social scientists and government officials.Footnote ⁵⁸ Synanon’s focus on Emerson, Ouija boards, and describing the true self as an inner wizard could very usefully be put into a genealogy of esotericism; but thinking about the group primarily in those terms would miss its sacralization of midcentury social science. Specifically, by ritualizing Cold War social science, Synanon created a theology and a set of rituals that could be easily adopted by evangelical or secular treatment centers.

Putting Cold War Social Science into Practice

Synanon became a religion by framing antisociality as a moral problem that could be solved through ritual. The group invited people with no drug addiction issues into its community in the late 1960s because it conceived of drug addiction as one among many antisocial impulses. When Synanon opened the game clubs, this is how it pitched its value: everyone had something that made them antisocial and thus everyone could benefit from gaming. It called the people outside treatment “squares,” and explained that squares suffered from what Dederich called “character-disorders,” which was why they gambled, lied, and struggled in life.Footnote ⁵⁹ As squares became integrated into the community, Synanon developed a much wider definition of the antisocial that could include anyone, on a fluid scale.

The cure to the condition of being antisocial was resocialization (these were the terms Synanon used). Dederich described the “dope fiend” as someone who thinks “anarchistically,” and that is why “they wind up being separate and apart from society.” But this was also a special avenue of possibility, because, as Dederich said, addicts “usually have few ties and are, therefore, quite easy to organize into the autocracy that we have here.”Footnote ⁶⁰ The addict always had a revered place within Synanon mythology because they were valued as highly moldable. Squares needed remolding too, but, ironically, their enmeshment in society made it more difficult for them to start from scratch in their resocialization. The goal of Synanon’s resocialization was for an individual to become tough, and thus capable of deflecting cultural cues that led to addiction and bad feelings. The group’s motto, “Hang Tough,” was written on a life preserver at the door to the headquarters.Footnote ⁶¹ The irony of this formulation—that you needed to be beat down to stop being so weak—was not lost on Dederich, who explained both to participants and to the public that another name for this approach to resocialization was brainwashing.

Brainwashing was on the Cold War American mind during Synanon’s rise, and it is a crucial element of the group’s history that, instead of deflecting this critique, Dederich and other leaders embraced the term. The usage emerged in the 1950s to describe why a group of American POWs captured during the Korean War became communists. In order to account for this incredible transformation, psychologists working on behalf of the CIA described “brainwashing” as a form of communist political indoctrination that was completely distinct from American liberal, capitalist education.Footnote ⁶² As the historian of Cold War literature Timothy Melley shows, the term’s history is a crucial example of the way that fiction becomes fact.

“Brainwashing” was initially popularized by a journalist, Edward Hunter (who later turned out to be a CIA operative), to explain the communists’ special psychological techniques for thought control and reprogramming. He argued that communists used techniques such as overworking and denying people sleep, but also raising children in collectives, rather than in a family. This combination of methods created a Pavlovian response in its victims. Hunter’s description combined well-known torture techniques, lifelong participation in collectivism, and mesmerism.Footnote ⁶³ It became enshrined in American popular culture, both in anti-communist art such as The Manchurian Candidate and in leftist art such as novels by Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Kurt Vonnegut, and Philip K. Dick.Footnote ⁶⁴ It felt particularly resonant to an American public increasingly aware of the very real power of advertising in their lives.Footnote ⁶⁵ Melley’s argument is that this fiction “proved so effective that elements of U.S. intelligence believed it and began a furious search for a real mind-control weapon. While the search did not produce a miraculous form of total mind control, it did produce a method of coercive interrogation and a program of simulated brainwashing designed as a prophylactic against enemy mistreatment.” This resulted in the attempt to practice brainwashing in the covert experiment MK-Ultra. “Fifty years later,” Melley claims, “this simulation became the real basis for interrogating detainees in the War on Terror.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Much as the CIA was inspired by the fiction of brainwashing in their refinement of torture techniques, religious leaders in the post-war American landscape were inspired to put this idea into action.Footnote ⁶⁷

When critics accused Synanon of using brainwashing, the organization argued that drug addicts needed to have their “brains washed out” regularly, much as the body required washing. During one of the studies done of the group in 1965, the sociologist Lewis Yablonsky found that participants used the term to describe positively the process they were undertaking. In order to be cured of addiction, a person’s values and norms had to be changed, and this required a wiping out of their brain and a replacement with a new culture.Footnote ⁶⁸ In the late 1970s, the Synanon member Bruce Gilbert’s rhythm-and-blues song “Brainwashed,” written for a fundraising album, celebrated the term by turning brainwashing into a badge of honor: “till I found a little place to save my soul,” he sang, “to get back on track and get under control, and now I’m brainwashed.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Synanon took anti-communist panic over communalist automatons and turned it inside out, arguing that, precisely in order for deadbeats to become upstanding Americans, they needed to become communalist automatons. As in the Gilbert song, it was a defensive joke; but it was also a useful way of describing the forceful transformation that the group required of its members.

There is plentiful evidence for Synanon’s earnest interest in mimicking the fictional account of brainwashing. The group embraced a Pavlovian behavioralist understanding of change: you had to do before you could believe. Thinking became “the enemy of recovery.” As one participant explained:

This process was conceived of in aggressive terms. Dederich described the transformation of an addict into a resocialized person as a violent process, but “So is surgery or amputation. The process of cutting out an emotional element which might turn into a deadly gangrene tends to be brutal.”Footnote ⁷¹ Much as brainwashing could flip back and forth between fact and fiction in public discourse, in Synanon the fiction of mind control moved back and forth between a joke and a method.

Synanon’s interest in brainwashing was part of a larger embrace of Cold War social science as theory ready to be put into action. Social sciences such as sociology, psychology, and anthropology—often considered the “soft sciences”—received an unprecedented amount of government investment and public interest during the 1950s and 1960s. The idea that individuals could be controlled by social forces, including language and family structures, became a weaponizable form of knowledge.Footnote ⁷² During this era, sociologists were also writing bestsellers, and Synanon people were clearly reading them. The most popular social science book of the time was David Reisman’s The Lonely Crowd, which people understood (its basic argument was actually very misunderstood) as an argument that, in the era of mass culture, people had become “outer directed,” and thus vulnerable to the cultural cues of Hollywood, advertising, and group think.Footnote ⁷³ Synanon people often used this language of “outer directed” vs. “inner directed” to explain the work that gaming achieved, as a way to desensitize overly outer-directed people. Much like the most popular studies of the era, and, in particular, the Milgram experiments, Synanon described mental vulnerability as a gender problem. One of the most frequent topics of the Game for men was an overreliance on mothers. Men were frequently attacked for being “momma’s boys” and “mother lovers,” and the policy of cutting off ties with family was often linked back to this relationship.Footnote ⁷⁴ Much like the Milgram experiments, which depicted the American Cold War man as an “organizational man,” effeminate and too easily manipulated, Synanon also described outer-directed addicts and squares as needing masculine resocialization.Footnote ⁷⁵

Synanon used the language of scientific experimentation to describe gaming’s efficacy.Footnote ⁷⁶ At the group’s headquarters, Dederich had an office called R&D (Research and Development), where new game structures were developed and practiced. One new game, according to a former member, had been tested for five months before being introduced to members.Footnote ⁷⁷ In the 1960s, the novelist Guy Endore came to Synanon and stayed with the group while he wrote a report on its practices. He was smitten with its scientific experimentalism, writing that it was full of

As he pointed out, Synanon was practically a scientific discipline unto itself. Only a Synanon person could fully evaluate its efficacy because every failure was merely an opportunity to experiment again, a process that required participation and embedded observation.

Despite Dederich’s renunciation of the actual scientific method, social scientists working at universities found much to appreciate about Synanon. Many of its most ardent supporters came from the fields of sociology and psychology, and their studies of Synanon contributed to the organization’s sterling reputation.Footnote ⁷⁹ Its most famous admirer was the psychologist Abraham Maslow, who was impressed by the group’s toughness, which he saw as a corrective to psychoanalysis’s coddling.Footnote ⁸⁰ In turn, Synanon used celebratory studies by social scientists to make its case directly to Congress about the future of drug rehabilitation.Footnote ⁸¹ What social scientists loved about Synanon was the way it created a perfect experiment of human behavior with willing participants. The scholar of organizational behavior and Synanon acolyte Barry Sugarman (who had degrees in anthropology and sociology) described Synanon-inspired treatment centers as “a most valuable laboratory where” the scholar could observe socialization in its “most intensified form, uncluttered by other irrelevant processes.”Footnote ⁸² This mirrored other famous social science experiments of the Cold War era, in which social experiments were prized for creating high-pressure social dynamics with both knowing and unknowing subjects.Footnote ⁸³

Synanon shared with Cold War social science a fascination with social norms and people’s vulnerability to social influence, but it pioneered social experimentation as a form of religion. Dederich was, from the beginning, interested in the power of religious ethics and ritual, an element of AA’s practices that he never abandoned.Footnote ⁸⁴ In Yablonsky’s study of the group in 1965, he described members achieving a crucial phase of recovery when they began to do their assigned work whether or not they felt “rebellion at being ‘told what to do.’” It was during this phase that members were assigned readings from “the great teachers of mankind—Jesus, Lao-tse, Buddha, etc.”Footnote ⁸⁵ Once someone had been broken down, they needed to be given a new culture to replace their antisocial framework. Despite Dederich’s general lack of interest in Christianity (especially in its evangelical form), much like the Cold Warriors of his day, he reached for “religion” as a default American ethical culture.Footnote ⁸⁶

Most importantly, Dederich saw ritual as the key to resocialization. In addition to the Game (which the group described as its sacrament when it filed for religious exemption), he created new rituals (his own word) such as “the Trip,” in which smaller groups were taken on experiences in the woods that included gaming, lack of sleep, saunas, candles, incense, and readings of Emerson’s “Self-Reliance,” as well as live and taped presentations from the Synanon leadership.Footnote ⁸⁷ Religious ritual accomplished resocialization in ways that nothing else quite could, and, unlike AA, Synanon posited that full-time residency was essential to ritual’s function.Footnote ⁸⁸

In Edward Hunter’s description of Maoist education, brainwashing was inexplicable without analogies to religion and ritual.Footnote ⁸⁹ No other word could quite convey the force of Maoist persuasion and, since the Cold War, the word has transformed from an atheistic form of indoctrination (or a form of political mind control in leftist fiction) to a particularly vicious form of religious indoctrination.Footnote ⁹⁰ Synanon was at the forefront of this redefinition of the term. Its vision of resocialization was not “atheistic” but, rather, a jumble of religious ethics and rituals from around the world, all fused through an American Emersonian vision of spirituality.Footnote ⁹¹ But, for Synanon, religion was less of system than a sign: a sign that someone had achieved a lack of resistance to the group’s norms. Religion was merely whatever norm members of the group could coerce one another into maintaining, and this model required a constant shifting set of norms in order for members to elicit and demonstrate conformity. This is why the turn to mandatory vasectomies and hair shaving in the 1970s was a continuation of Synanon’s fundamental premise. The group’s followers and leaders did not necessarily believe anything, except that belief itself could be entirely engineered. This model of religious belonging has become enormously popular far beyond Synanon’s own history.

Teen Choice

In the late 1960s, when Synanon was the most famous drug addiction model in the United States, many members left the group but used its methods to create other treatment centers with new branding.Footnote ⁹² The psychiatrist Daniel Casriel created Daytop Village in New York as a residential treatment center modeled on Synanon, but shorn of Synanon’s aims to create an alternative society. Daytop was managed by New York’s Probation Department and focused on men with felony drug offenses. Its founding directors believed in Synanon’s fundamentals: the Game, addicts surveilling other addicts, shaving heads, and breaking down people through humiliation, especially through unpaid work.Footnote ⁹³

Synanon-inspired treatment centers funded by both public and private money (Daytop, Phoenix, Odyssey House) took critiques of authoritarianism and used them as lessons on how to run an organization. Proudly adopting and inverting the sociologist Erving Goffman’s critique of “total institutions” (a term Goffman used to describe the horrors of psychiatric institutions), these treatment centers celebrated their “totalitarian” authority structure. Barry Sugarman, the director of Marathon House, which grew out of Daytop, proudly declared that they “were a ‘pressure cooker’ to bring about perhaps ten normal years of character development within two years.”Footnote ⁹⁴ Teen Challenge, the Pentecostal organization that had started in the 1960s, eventually used methods that, except for the addition of prayer and Bible talk, were indistinguishable from such treatment centers’ model of rehabilitation. Using the broadest definition of addiction, Teen Challenge saw it as any life-controlling mental state.Footnote ⁹⁵ In the Christian-teen focused world of rehabilitation, the word “troubled” replaced Dederich’s broad use of the word “antisocial.”Footnote ⁹⁶

As the ethnographer Kerwin Kaye argues, the “treatment center” approach to recovery that came out of Synanon and spread through centers such as Daytop now dominates the criminal justice system’s approach to addiction, which sends “clients” directly to standalone residential treatment centers, and approximately 45,000 people to therapeutic communities within prisons. Following Synanon’s model, through “explicit programmatic focus on the inculcation of normative moral values (called ‘right living’ within the TC [treatment center] model),” these programs seek “to alter the entire personality structure of the addict.”Footnote ⁹⁷ When we are describing the harms of Synanon, the group’s role in creating the norms of the current approach to addiction should be part of what we evaluate. One of the dangers of cult discourse, as it exists in popular culture, is that it tends to imagine discrete groups forming around one charismatic leader, leading to utopic hope or tragic ruin, but Synanon helps us think about the word “cult” as a model of community that is eminently replicable. Synanon produced institutions that embraced authoritarian control, with or without charisma, by making the fantasy of brainwashing a central ritual.Footnote ⁹⁸

Synanon’s model of incarcerating people for antisocial impulses, a definition of addiction that goes far beyond drugs, has migrated into a range of religiously inflected therapeutic centers that focus on spatial containment and that achieve their goals through the support of government agencies, but that have been given little regulation. In the 1980s and 1990s, two parallel forms of drug rehabilitation became the central players in American drug policy: the private treatment center industry and drug treatment in prisons. In the 1990s, Bill Clinton advocated for treatment centers in prisons as a way to deal with the drug war and as a justification for his pro-incarceration stance. As it became clear that drug treatment could not keep pace with the surging prison population, drug courts became a way to coerce people into treatment centers outside of prisons.Footnote ⁹⁹ Clinton’s director for the Office of National Drug Control Policy was also the president of Phoenix House, one of Synanon’s direct descendants, and he argued that federal funding for needle-exchange programs would work against the goal of bringing users into comprehensive residential treatment programs.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, George W. Bush poured money into the treatment center industry by creating the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives and sending federal funds to faith-based recovery organizations. As the historian Claire D. Clark shows, “By the end of Bush’s second term, forty states were reorganizing social services according to a new model called ‘recovery-oriented systems of care.’” This money became particularly important for the expansion of Christian treatment centers, such as Teen Challenge, that utilized the model of resocialization. Whether more explicitly Christian, or a complete replication of Synanon’s vaguely esoteric rituals, all of these centers rejected the science that came out in the 1990s, reframing drug addiction as a “chronic and relapsing brain disease” that should be managed rather than cured.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Instead, Clinton’s and then George W. Bush’s drug policy followed Synanon’s model of recovery: in order to be cured, you needed to have your character completely remolded and you needed to participate in a hierarchical social structure; because this process was unending, once remolded, you worked for the community by leading others through the same process. Spatial containment, whether in a prison or in a center that would not let one leave, was the first step in this model of rehabilitation.

In a 2021 New Yorker story about Teen Challenge, a teen whose parents entrusted her into the care of one of these facilities told the reporter that she was forced to wear long skirts, adopt an arcane lingo, not talk to others, and carry a child to term. In these Christian recovery centers, parents sign away their parental rights, and the teens cannot leave, call their parents, or the police. Teen Challenge maintains a cozy relationship with the state of Florida, which protects faith-based rehabs from standard regulation. “Recovery” as a category in the United States is understood as the province of religiously inflected communities rather than medical professionals, and this category derives much of its logic from Synanon’s privileging of ritual rehabilitation. In Rachel Aviv’s story about Teen Challenge, the young woman sharing her story tells Aviv that she asked fellow residents “Is this a cult?” They responded, “I guess this is kind of a cult.”Footnote ¹⁰² It is the work of this article not only to affirm these suspicions but also to flesh out the history lurking behind that word. I could stop at a different conclusion: that Synanon and Teen Challenge are religious organizations that have tried to turn the fantasy of Cold War social engineering into an applied practice. But, if the diagnosis of cult is the Teen Challenge residents’ response to the experience of a religious organization coercively reprogramming them, you can forgive them the confusion.

In this historical context, the teens incarcerated at Teen Challenge use the word “cult” to name a version of forced resocialization that relies on spatial containment. Considering the number of Americans who have had contact with drug treatment centers, with the troubled-teen industry, and with treatment center–style treatment within prisons, it is worth considering how Synanon has shaped the popular understanding of cults just as much as CAN’s demonization of the Peoples Temple. Further, it is worth affirming people’s use of the word “cult” as a descriptive and normative definition that elicits a specific historical genealogy. Tellingly, when scholars resisted the scientific and legal application of the term “brainwashing,” they pointed out that the original context (Maoist prison camps) was quite different from NRMs that people joined and left at will.Footnote ¹⁰³ But no one actually joins Teen Challenge (nor do people who are on probation join treatment centers): you are forced to go there and then kept there until you become a new person. In other words, in this historical and institutional context, brainwashing is not just fake science.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ It is fake science that has been used as inspiration for institutional practice.

The Normative Grid

We need the word “cult” in the study of religion because, just like the word “religion,” it has a history of academic, popular, and state usage. When C.A. Wittman titled her memoir Synanon Kid: A Memoir of Growing up in the Synanon Cult, she participated in the historical sedimentation of the word as erotic and violent (this word will sell books!), and also as a way to describe containment and cruel forms of ritual that were designed to rob her of childish vulnerability.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Her use of the word “cult” in this context is not just true to her, and it is not just a pejorative aimed at her childhood bullies; it is an accurate historical and normative assessment of the context of her suffering. Her sense of these experiences as something cult-like is discursively and experientially tied to the history of brainwashing as an experiment on trapped people. Charles Dederich’s willingness to say all this out loud, and to openly theorize social engineering as a something that needed religion to achieve its full potential, contributed to the meaning of the word “cult.” His ideas spread because his assessment of the “the antisocial” person as someone deserving of spatial containment and a total reshaping of character seemed friendly to politicians, policy makers, and social scientists of many stripes during the second half of the twentieth century.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

Cold War enthusiasm for religion’s social engineering powers led to one historically specific and influential meaning of “cult”; but this does not limit our ability to identify other definitions of both “cult” and “resocialization” in the twentieth century. For example, if we connected the history of treatment centers to pre–World War II projects of civilization and reform that fueled state support for penitentiaries, boarding schools, and reform institutions throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Synanon might seem less exceptional. I also suspect that “cult,” as a particular, historically specific form of authoritarian religious coercion in the twentieth century, exists outside of Synanon’s model.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

This article is not a genealogy of the word “cult,” but a brief look at that genealogy shows that Synanon’s emergence as a cult cannot be separated from the word’s pejorative, neutral, and positive connotations. When Time magazine said “kooky cult” in the early 1970s, the writers invoked its benign sense, as a fad with serious devotees.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ They also drew on its long history as a word for bad religion, and specifically a religion led by a tricky charismatic leader. Cult as bad religion gained traction in the 1910s, with critiques of Christian Science as a form of religion that hurt people through medical malpractice. It was also at that time used to describe Black religion, or “Voodoo cults,” in Louisiana as erotic and violent.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ From the 1920s through the 1940s, both social scientists and journalists used “cult” to describe new Black religious communities after the Great Migration, especially in reference to Father Divine, the Moorish Science Temple, and the Nation of Islam. When newspaper articles written by white authors used the term for these Black religions, it was loaded with racist assumptions about irrational Black religiosity, but the African American social scientist Arthur Huff Fauset used “cult” to neutrally describe what he thought of as Black religion that was highly influenced by a new social context.Footnote ¹¹⁰

Journalists used “cult” to describe ISKCON in the 1960s (a use that carried into the “brainwashing” court cases of the 1970s). At midcentury, the press also designated leaders of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints as cult leaders. But in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, the more common use of the word described the political systems of fascism in Europe, the rule of the emperor in Japan, and Soviet communism.Footnote ¹¹¹ This period is especially important for the formation of Synanon because, when the group promoted authoritarian resocialization, they understood it as a political idea that could be put to religious purposes. Of course, subsequent labeling of Synanon as cult cannot be separated from the cult panic of the 1980s and 1990s, which scholars of NRMs have carefully tracked, dominated by the specter of Jonestown.Footnote ¹¹²

This is a very abbreviated and insufficient history of the term “cult,” but we need more historicizing that accounts for its meaning not just as a discursive epithet but also as a mode of experience. It is undeniable that the people who look back at their time in Synanon as belonging to a cult are influenced by various cult panics; but they also use the language of bad religion to speak of a religious experience designed to amplify authoritarian power. Historians of religion can track a shifting category between its normative and descriptive valences; we have already done it with words such as “spirituality,” “religion,” and “ritual,” the last being a term that has also historically functioned as a pejorative account of bad religion.Footnote ¹¹³ Teasing out the historical specificity of the deployment of the word “cult,” and how this deployment in turn contributes to peoples’ actual cult experiences, is what can differentiate religious studies’ engagement with this category from the “cult experts” who run deprogramming businesses and from the sociologists and popular culture critics who are searching for a universal, timeless category of mind control.Footnote ¹¹⁴ The religious desire to use social scientific models of reprogramming and political authoritarianism in intimate ritual structures belongs, I am arguing, to a narrow time and place.

But can we plumb this history (a neutral task) without slipping into the normative desire to distinguish bad religion from good religion? The cautions against this move are strong: as critics of cult panics point out, Americans love “cults” (in the form of documentaries and other consumable products related to them) because they perform self-flattering normative work, allowing the layperson and scholar the pleasure of naming unfreedom, and thus affirming their own agency.Footnote ¹¹⁵ This caution against the liberal pleasures of using the word “cult” as a way to understand unfreedom follows Robert Orsi’s argument that calling out bad religion is an erotic pleasure that distances the other in order to play with the potential for “surrender or repulsion.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ Religious freedom scholars such as Jolyon Baraka Thomas point out that the inscription of the good/bad religion dichotomy by religious studies scholars is very useful to secular governance because it clarifies what is religion and what is unworthy of the protections dictated by the American understanding of religious freedom (and exported through the American empire to other locations in the world).Footnote ¹¹⁷ Calling something bad religion, or a cult, is a way to say that it is not religion at all. In the words of Orsi, you have participated in the “obliteration of the other,” as well as their categorical participation in the economy of religious freedom.

Orsi is correct in his diagnosis of the study of religion in the United States as a latent Protestant privileging of the “rational . . . noncoercive . . . nonanthropomorphic” ideal of good religion. The issue, however, is where to go from there. Practically, this raises the question of what the religious studies scholar should do when, as Orsi puts it, “journalists, lawmakers, and fellow citizens” (and students), ask if a religion is bad or fake, and if it should be called something else (a cult?) to account for its badness.Footnote ¹¹⁸ One of the things that Charles McCrary’s work on critical secular studies has taught me is that a scholar bestowing religion on a subject rarely does what we want most: give them control over their land, prevent them from being incarcerated, or shield them from bullets or bombs.Footnote ¹¹⁹ The religious studies scholar’s answer to this attentive non-academic audience might be “These people’s autonomy or safety should not depend on whether we think they are religious or not.”

Orsi’s offering to a public who desire a good/bad religion distinction is to point out, following J.Z. Smith, that all religions harm, and that religion, as the gift we give our subjects, is the great equalizer. Interestingly, “religion” is not really a gift that any members of Synanon were asking for, even those who loved it.Footnote ¹²⁰ But perhaps the designation of a group as religious—especially those groups that have not received secular governance’s prizes, as Synanon did—means something substantive to its adherents. This certainly seems like the least religious studies can do, but it also seems very meager. It is a way in which religious studies plays the game of secular governance, eschewing conversations of how racism, transphobia, and many other prejudices will always beat religious protections.Footnote ¹²¹ It denies the big questions that, in fact, religious studies might not be expert in at all: what is good care, good racial justice, good sovereignty, good liberation, good governance, good kinship?

Synanon people’s meditations on the group’s achievements point to these not-necessarily religious ethical goals. In an assessment of Betty Beckham’s journey from jail, to the Nation of Islam, to Synanon, where she ultimately met and married Chuck Dederich, Jordan Mylet argues that Betty loved Synanon because, in 1959, it really was a space where, instead of being incarcerated, she was given the opportunity to join a raucous, truly non-coercive, mutual aid society. Mylet and her fellow scholar Carina Ray, both children of Synanon members, argue that the sensationalist accounts of Synanon as a cult have missed the benefits of Synanon’s “community as therapy.”Footnote ¹²² The conversation I want to have with them begins with the question “Haven’t we already seen what Synanon’s understanding of community as therapy looks like when applied at scale with no critique of mass incarceration?” Or, even more expansively, “What do you mean by community and what do I mean by community, and what would a better version of that idea look like?” These are the types of questions that an engagement with cult, as both historical experience and normative critique, could initiate. Community is a word that makes religious studies feel comfortable, so I would like to add another normative question that Synanon’s cult history raises and that I am not particularly well qualified to answer: “What is good drug addiction treatment?”

Orsi, despite his rejection of the normative grid, is deeply engaged in ethical questions.Footnote ¹²³ He has described his own experience of disgust with Catholic sex abuse, abuse which he clarifies is Catholic, is central to twentieth-century Catholicism, and fills him with revulsion. He argues that this is not a reinscription of bad/good religion because his disgust is intimate (disgust is a particularly Catholic, or maybe just plain old religious, feeling), but is born out of his love of and proximity to the community that disgusts him. Implicit in Orsi’s narration of his own disgust is an argument about Catholic ontology as distinctive, and one that he participates in. He writes, “Disgust lacks the cultivated reserve of the hermeneutics of suspicion that so easily slides into a posture of knowingness, with the accompanying reassurance of the scholar’s superiority over religious practitioners.”Footnote ¹²⁴

There is a suggestion here that it is fine to call out harm in a religion if you are also in the community. Maybe Larry Kornish can call Synanon a cult, but I cannot. Orsi’s slight to the hermeneutics of suspicion, however, denies a form of empiricism that I would like to promote as the ethical duty of the scholar, whether they be an insider or an outsider: the scholar, suspiciously performing hermeneutics, follows the money, makes a case for who knew what and when, and shows major shifts in policy or practice that might not be visible from the perspective of participants. These facts could be very useful in helping victims of religious abuse uncover the infrastructure of that abuse.Footnote ¹²⁵

Historians of religion work backward from our laden terms, suspicious that they mean more than we think they mean. One of the words in the present that we can use to work backward for more empirical understanding is “cult,” and specific reports from participants are the beginning point, but not the end of that process. Former members of Synanon describe the community as many things at once. “It was in equal portions exhilarating, exciting, fun from 1958 thru 1976 and a tremendous learning trip. Equally terrifying and unpredictable from 1976 to its closing by the IRS in 1990.”Footnote ¹²⁶ A former member, David Gerstel, points out the dissonance between his experience as a person who joined voluntarily and that of those who were forced to be there; he does not know what they experienced.Footnote ¹²⁷ The broader historical archive shows that C.A. Wittman’s experience of creating a “dissociative independent type of personality . . . to cope with the constant barrage of verbal attacks” was built into the infrastructure of the community. Children being kept from their parents, becoming hardened by gaming, was a theorized and implemented function of the organizational structure. Wittman models precisely the type of empirical work I am advocating when she senses that her memory of the constant shifting set of “demonstrators” (as the children’s teachers were called) might be faulty. She goes and checks the archives of Synanon’s school and finds out it was worse than she thought: they had mostly put teenagers in charge of the kids.Footnote ¹²⁸ That certainly structured her experience of feeling unsafe. Orsi comes to a similar conclusion about Catholic abuse: that it was theologized and embedded in infrastructure. This is an assessment that can only be reached through empiricism—or maybe empiricism initiated by disgust.Footnote ¹²⁹

The word “cult” is a heuristic for tracking the specific unfolding of hurt. Affirming people’s use of the word begins a search for more information, more historical connections, a better sense of what people hoped that good religion, good care, and good community could have been, and, for the Religious Studies scholar in particular, a willingness to engage in the not-always-religious ethical projects at stake. I affirm that, when C.A. Wittman calls Synanon a cult, she is describing how the organization used the Cold War fantasies of resocialization through torture as a blueprint for ritual life. “Affirm” is a funny word: it is not a creedal “I believe”—but it is an acknowledgment of the contextual truth of another’s experience. In the case of the young women trapped by Teen Challenge, affirming means doing the historical legwork inspired by their intuitions about what was happening to them, which, importantly, they do not know themselves. Affirming the word “cult” gets at the broader ideological connections between their experience and other therapeutic organizations that have offered solutions to “anti-social behavior” since World War II, based in social scientific hubris and an interest in religious ritual as a uniquely resocializing tool. This affirmation is another way to make “contact across boundaries,” as Orsi instructs.Footnote ¹³⁰ But we are moving across boundaries of difference toward something, and that something will be on a normative grid.