Diskussion:Drei Prinzipien nach Sydney Banks

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Washington Post FOCUS By Eric D. R and June 2, 1992 Eight years ago, Greg Davidson of Skokie, Ill., was about to fall asleep when he was overcome with a feeling of terror. He felt as if someone had just pushed him off a building. He splashed water on his face, tried to read, tried to watch TV. Nothing worked. He started to scream. He did so for four hours.

In the weeks that followed, Davidson experienced another kind of panic: the fear that he was about to have an attack of fear. It kept happening -- in the movie theater, restaurants, nightclubs. He started to avoid those places. His world began to shrink.

He was desperate for help when, in 1990, his girlfriend told him about George Pransky, an unconventional therapist in La Conner, Wash. Pransky is a licensed family and marriage counselor who has a doctorate in psychology from Columbia Pacific University, a correspondence school.

On the phone, Davidson says, Pransky promised that he could get his anxiety "down to the size of a postage stamp" if he came to La Conner for a five-day residential treatment. The cost: $2,500.

In January 1991, Davidson got on a plane -- not an easy thing for a person with an anxiety disorder -- and flew to Washington state. After a few sessions, Pransky told Davidson that he thought the treatment would require another week and that he ought to ask his father for $2,500 for more sessions. Davidson balked. After 40 minutes of debate that left Davidson feeling insecure and flustered, Pransky relented.

Before Davidson left to go home to Skokie, Pransky congratulated him: He had made significant progress.

"Within a couple of weeks I got real bad," recalls Davidson, now 40 and living on disability. "Bad enough that I was housebound. ... I couldn't walk to the driveway. ... I was afraid to leave my bedroom. I couldn't take a shower." Finally, "I was afraid to get off my bed."

In a telephone interview, Pransky denied he promised Davidson specific results, but otherwise confirmed the account. He says he tried to help Davidson in free telephone counseling sessions. But Davidson evidently did not respond to therapy, he says, and he vowed he would send Davidson his money back.

The Psychology of Mind

Pransky, 50, is the highest priced and perhaps the most controversial among an estimated 50 therapists who use an approach called "Psychology of Mind" (POM).

POM -- also called "neo-cognitive therapy" -- holds that each individual lives in a world of his or her own mental creation. The first book on POM, "Sanity, Insanity and Common Sense," explains that everyone has a personal thought system: "a sophisticated, interwoven network of habitual thought system ... judgments, attitudes, opinions, beliefs and expectations."

People often are said to be controlled by their thought systems: "A woman who believes that men cannot be trusted is a woman who will never find a man that she can trust." People can overcome such problems if they simply decide to change their thoughts. POM advances the metaphor that the brain is a computer and the thought system is the software, and that people can change the software any time they want.

In contrast to other therapists, POM practitioners generally place little or no emphasis on exploring people's pasts or analyzing the causes of problems. "The more we think about {a problem}, the more we analyze it, the more we try to figure out where it comes from, the more we identify with our problem," says Joseph Bailey, president of the Minneapolis Institute of Mental Health (MIMH), a POM therapy and training center.

Instead, POM therapists try to get clients in touch with a "natural" state of mental health that POM hypothesizes exists in everyone.

"What we do in psychology of mind is try to help people become aware of this other state of consciousness where insights occur and we tend to see things fresh and spontaneously," Bailey says. This approach can work with any kind of disorder including schizophrenia, says Bailey, because even schizophrenics have a core of natural mental health.

While Davidson had a bad experience, several other clients interviewed about POM say it does work. "It's like taking a course in Life Management. I cannot recommend it highly enough," says Holly Shaner, a registered nurse who went to POM therapist Dicken Bickenbettinger in Burlington, Vt., to help her cope with divorce and child-rearing issues.

"They've had remarkable results," says V.C. Jordan, president of Poe & Associates, one of the largest publicly traded insurance brokerages in the country. His company has used Tampa POM therapist Sandra Krot and her associates for about five years. "People in our company have had all sorts of difficulties including drug addiction, alcoholism and a number of personal conflict situations," says Jordan. "In every case where I've referred someone to Sandy, within a matter of weeks -- not months, not years, but weeks -- these people are well on the road to successful living."

One application of POM has been to address the problems of inner cities. Roger Mills, a POM leader in St. Petersburg, Fla., used it as the foundation of an intervention program at the Mondello housing project in Miami. The program involved 150 families, including 650 youths. He has reported a 75 percent reduction in delinquency; a 65 percent reduction in drug trafficking; a 50 percent reduction in substance abuse problems; and a high incidence of parents returning to school, enrolling in job training or finding work.

Teaming up with Mills is Charles Spielberger, immediate past president of the American Psychological Association and a research professor at the University of South Florida in Tampa. Spielberger is helping Mills apply for grants to conduct a controlled study of POM-based community intervention.

Is POM a Cult?

There are questions about the legitimacy of POM and the true nature of the movement.

First, psychology of mind is not a recognized field of psychology. There is no professional organization, no standards for admittance to training programs, no standards for the content of training programs and no restrictions on who can or cannot call themselves a POM therapist. Although every state licenses psychologists and most license marriage and family counselors, anyone can call himself a "therapist" and hang out a shingle.

"I don't give it a great deal of credibility," says Bryant Welch, executive director for professional practice at the American Psychological Association, who hadn't heard of POM until called by a reporter. "You can't just shift your focus and be well."

A half-dozen therapists formerly associated with psychology of mind say it isn't a psychology at all. They say it's a cult masquerading as a psychology in an effort to achieve acceptance.

"This is a level of cult no one can fathom yet," says Enrique M. Suarez, a licensed psychologist in Coral Gables, Fla., who was the founding president and chairman of the board of the first POM therapy training center -- the Advanced Human Studies Institute in Coral Gables, now the Florida Center for Human Development in Tampa.

Suarez, who has a doctorate in psychology from Baylor University, is also the primary author of "Sanity, Insanity and Common Sense." The book is now out of print because both Suarez and one of his two coauthors, Darlene Stewart, want to be disassociated from the POM movement.

Suarez, Stewart and others formerly associated with POM contend it is a cult built around a most unlikely prophet: a Canadian welder named Sydney Banks. Banks has been a key inspirational figure and financial beneficiary of POM.

In a telephone interview from his home in Sault Spring, Canada -- a small island near Vancouver -- Banks said the assertion that he is a cultist is ridiculous. He describes himself as a simple man who had an insight in 1973 about how people can be happy by understanding the nature of thought. He says he shared that insight with professionals who launched a new psychology. He attributes Suarez's comments to "a lot of professional jealousy."

Indeed, there is a dispute over who deserves credit for developing the ideas of psychology of mind. The parties cannot even agree on who originated the term. Suarez says the term is his and he wants to reclaim it. Mills, the St. Petersburg POM leader, says he thought Banks first used the term. Banks says it was Mills and Pransky.

'The Highest Person on Earth'

In speeches over the past decade, Banks has not represented himself as a spiritual leader. He has consistently told people to look inside themselves for answers and not to follow him.

But therapists and others who worked in POM centers say Banks was nevertheless revered as an oracle of wisdom about how to achieve a higher level of consciousness -- to get "high," in POM parlance.

"Syd made no bones that he was the 'highest' person on the face of the Earth," Stewart says. "His real stout followers believed that."

Banks's most visible role was as the keynote speaker at countless POM seminars in various American cities. There was a quasi-religious tone to much of Banks's message. "We've discovered the secret of life," Banks said in a tape-recorded 1990 seminar. "We've started to realize that all life is a divine thought. ... We've found the way. ... We've learned how to arouse this super-conscious state and bring it to life. ... There's only one way. We're going to show you the way. And all I'm asking you to do is stop whatever you're thinking of what you already know. ... If you hear what I'm saying, it's the beginning of the fixing of the problems of the universe."

Banks's status has been so special that former therapists at POM centers say that for years they have allowed a portion of their paychecks to be siphoned to Banks, to repay him for his insight. The Advanced Human Studies Institute in Florida used to raise $1,000 to $1,500 a month for Banks in this way, according to Stewart, who managed the institute's accounts. Banks continues to receive money from the Minneapolis center, Bailey confirms.

Suarez says he left the Institute in 1978 because he wanted to promote POM in connection with more established ideas of cognitive psychology, and it was clear to him that POM was going to be a spiritual movement centered around Banks.

No Negativity Allowed

Former therapists, patients and clients at POM counseling centers say they found the POM approach to be harmful. A former patient and her therapist at the Minneapolis POM center both describe an atmosphere in which emotionally troubled people had to censor their thoughts to maintain a pretense of being "high."

Eileen Jarvise, 51, says she has a chemical imbalance that affects her moods and has been treated with antidepressant drugs since 1978. In 1987, she became severely depressed, and in February of that year she began counseling at MIMH.

"For nine months, it was: 'If you don't like your feeling, change your thought,' " Jarvise recalls. Eventually, something did happen; Jarvise appeared cheerful. "I was brainwashed into negating my feeling."

More than a year later, she became depressed and returned to MIMH for group therapy. She recalls being ignored by staff members as she sat sobbing in an office during one suicidal episode. Being depressed was unacceptable at MIMH, she says.

Jarvise has reconciled with one of her former MIMH counselors, Donna Mayotte, who has left the clinic and also describes herself as a victim of an authoritarian thought system.

Mayotte, a licensed psychologist, says she was frustrated by the failure of some of her patients to respond to POM therapy. But she says she felt she couldn't express such concerns or ask colleagues for help. It was wrapped up in the POM philosophy, which holds that therapists are supposed to be exemplars of higher consciousness for their client/pupils. Expressing a negative thought, she says, was tantamount to confessing that one was out of touch with one's natural mental health.

"If you talked about it, you would expose that you're in a bad place," Mayotte says. "I would blame myself: 'I'm just not getting it. I'm not in a high enough place.' " Former POM therapists in Florida and Hawaii describe similar experiences.

Asked to respond to such criticisms, MIMH President Bailey says that in "isolated" cases, some clients and therapists may have gotten the message that they could only exude happy feelings. "That was a huge mistake to get that message out. I acknowledge that ... in the last several years, there's been a far greater openness and feeling that people can just be themselves."

He says a central tenet of POM is that the level of mental health of the therapist has a huge bearing on the effectiveness of the therapy, so therapists may have felt pressured to always seem to be upbeat.

Bailey says his clinic has an excellent record of successfully helping thousands of people with myriad problems. Asked for an independent reference, he referred a reporter to Karen Jarnot, an employee counselor at Cargill Corp. in Minneapolis. Jarnot says she has referred 10 to 15 people to Bailey and the "feedback has been very positive."

A Science in Infancy?

Although Suarez says "Psychology of mind is really valuable," he questions the tactics used by some of its practitioners. While some practitioners trained in POM may be qualified, compassionate and ethical, Suarez says he urges prospective patients and therapists to exercise caution in dealing with anyone advertising himself as POM or neo-cognitive therapists or trainers.

"The theory was, you're teaching people to think for themselves," says Amy Crystal, a licensed marriage and family therapist in Florida who worked with Pransky in California 10 years ago and spent several years affiliated with the Advanced Human Studies Institute. "But in actuality it was the opposite, I know that."

Crystal says she hopes POM is "cleaned up" and pursued under the umbrella of established cognitive psychology. "It'd be a real shame to throw the baby out with the bath water," she says.

"I think we need to see this as a science in its infancy," says Bailey. "We need to be extremely open to criticism ... but also have the conviction of what we're saying, because this is helping people tremendously."

Resources

Among books on POM:

"The Serenity Principle: Finding Inner Peace in Recovery," by Joseph V. Bailey (HarperCollins, 1991).

"Divorce Is Not the Answer," by George S. Pransky (McGraw Hill/TAB Books, 1990).

Books, videotapes and cassettes on POM are available from the Minnesota Institute of Mental Health, 1-612-870-1084.

The 11th annual POM conference will be held at the Claremont Hotel in Oakland, Calif., June 18-20.