Free The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry by Jon Ronson Page A

the mid-1960s. Elliott Barker was a budding psychiatrist back then, just out of college. While trying to decide which career path to take, he began reading in psychiatry magazines about the emergence of radical therapeutic communities, where the old hierarchies of the wise therapist and the incompetent patient had been torn down and replaced with something more experimental. Intrigued, he and his young wife took a bank loan and set off on a year-long round-the-world odyssey to visit as many of these places as they could.
    In Palm Springs, California, he heard about nude psychotherapy sessions occurring under the tutelage of a psychotherapist named Paul Bindrim. The hotel the sessions took place in combined (as the advertising material back then stated) “abundant trees and wildlife” with the facilities of a “high class resort.” There, Bindrim would ask his fully clothed clients, who were strangers to one another and usually middle- to upper-class California freethinkers and movie stars, first to “eyeball” each other, and then hug, and wrestle, and then, in the dark and to the accompaniment of New Age music, remove their “tower of clothes.” They would sit naked in a circle, perform a “meditation-like hum,” and then dive headlong into a twenty-four-hour nonstop nude psychotherapy session, an emotional and mystical roller coaster during which participants would scream and yell and sob and confess their innermost fears and anxieties.
    “Physical nakedness,” Bindrim would explain to visiting journalists, “facilitates emotional nakedness and therefore speeds up psychotherapy.”
    Bindrim’s most divisive idea was what he termed “crotch eyeballing.” He’d instruct a participant to sit in the center of the circle with legs in the air. Then he’d command the others to stare at that person’s genitals and anus, sometimes for hours, while he sporadically yelled, “This is where it’s at! This is where we are so damned negatively conditioned!”
    Sometimes he’d direct participants to address their genitals directly. One journalist who attended a session— Life magazine’s Jane Howard—reported in her 1970 book Please Touch: A Guided Tour of the Human Potential Movement a conversation between Bindrim and a participant named Lorna.
    “Tell Katy what things happen in your crotch,” Bindrim ordered her. Katy was Lorna’s vagina. “Say, ‘Katy, this is where I shit, fuck, piss and masturbate.’ ”
    There was an embarrassed silence.
    “I think Katy already knows that,” Lorna eventually replied.
    Many travelers around the California human potential movement considered nude psychotherapy to be a step too far, but Elliott, on his odyssey, found the idea exhilarating.

     
    A Paul Bindrim nude psychotherapy session, photographed by Ralph Crane on December 1, 1968.

     
    Elliott’s odyssey took him onward, to Turkey and Greece and West Berlin and East Berlin and Japan and Korea and Hong Kong. His most inspiring day occurred in London when (he told me by e-mail) he “met with [the legendary radical psychiatrists] R. D. Laing and D. G. Cooper and visited Kingsley Hall, their therapeutic community for schizophrenics.”
    As it happened, R. D. Laing’s son Adrian runs a law firm just a few streets away from my home in North London. And so—in my quest to understand Elliott’s influences—I called in to ask if he’d tell me something about Kingsley Hall.
    Adrian Laing is a slight, trim man. He has the face of his father but on a less daunting body.
    “The point about Kingsley Hall,” he said, “was that people could go there and work through their madness. My father believed that if you allowed madness to take its natural course without intervention—without lobotomies and drugs and straitjackets and all the awful things they were doing at the time in mental hospitals—it would burn itself out, like an LSD trip working its way through the system.”
    “What kind of thing might Elliott Barker