ODYSSEY: A MEMOIR {PREFACE} POST # 9

{In response to some readers who requested the "beef" instead of the process I am posting the preface and chapter one of Odyssey.}               

                                           PREFACE                                                                                                 

I am a psychoanalytic psychotherapist who has been in private practice for the past thirty-four years in New York. However, in December, 1967, I was a novice vocational rehabilitation counselor searching for a creative job. I had obtained enough training and experience in psychology to know that I was on the right path to solving my longstanding vocational quandary of what to do now that I had grown up. Finally I was certain that I wanted to be a psychotherapist; but, as I also needed a break, I hoped there would be someone who would notice my determination and enthusiasm, and give me a start. It was in this context that the job offered to me by the then Director of Odyssey House, a therapeutic community for the rehabilitation of narcotic addicts, was a dream come true.

This book is the story of my experience at Odyssey during a period of seventeen months, describing and evaluating the process wherein I underwent a profound inner change as the result of the program's effect on me, both personally and professionally.

What started out as the fulfillment of a life long dream evolved into an extraordinarily confusing 'mind blowing' nightmare – wherein I revived the worst of my unresolved childhood and adolescent experience.

From this complicated experience two main questions became obsessions demanding to be answered: (I) Why do people who are reasonably sensitive and intelligent like myself get 'hooked up' with cult-like institutions such as Odyssey House was then; and (2) once having seen the light, appreciating the 'craziness' of the leader, what motivates people like me to stay on?

Like all human events, Odyssey is embedded in the context of a particular space/time continuum. Geographically, it spans two locations: Miami Beach and New York. Historically, the book covers a period from nineteen forty - seven through nineteen sixty - nine. The major emphasis is the latter two years.                                                                      

As an adolescent growing up in The Fifties, I was encouraged as an individual to think for myself, but as a citizen I was taught to honor the values of adjustment, acceptance and fitting in. Maxims as, 'Don't make waves', 'Let sleeping dogs lie', 'que sera sera' (a thinly veiled prescription for denial, passivity and conformity) characterized the tenor of the times. A compromise value derived from this cultural contradiction was to think for yourself but don't be a trouble maker. This emphasis on maintaining a calculated surface serenity in all situations no matter what was an idealized standard masking internal stirrings of increasingly escalating rumblings.

My central rumbling was an unremitting argument with God- to the point of finding Him, for all practical purposes, 'Dead' in so far as I was personally concerned. God dead, meant that whether I liked it or not, I would have to face up to the fact that I was existentially on my own. This meant that except for 'death and taxes' there were no more absolute laws, thus my life long task would be to discover, or create, my own 'good' set of laws.

I was willing to assume this responsibility but; while, dedicated to finding clear truth, instead, I found only increasing confusion and insecurity. I looked to the outside for good guidance but found it wanting as there was too much contradiction, denial, covering up, hypocrisy, and superficiality with my actual and potential role models. As a result, in late adolescence, I suffered a twin crisis of trust – one with external authority, another with me accepting myself as my own final authority.

I also discovered it was far easier to demolish whatever authority, whether located internally or externally, than it was to affirm authority. Unable to resolve these twin crises of trust, I, like many of my contemporaries, experienced what might be referred to as a spiritual vacuum. This uncomfortable psychic state took the form of a gnawing emptiness in the core of my being -a palpable 'hole in my soul.'                                                                                                                           

I felt a personal connection with the counter culture revolt of the Sixties that pressed for significant social change, demanding that it happen with dispatch. I also found there were two distinct paths to follow in attempting to realize these goals. These were the ways of the political activists and, or the human potentialists.

Whereas the political youth movement believed that change largely comes about by altering external social conditions; the human potential movement believed change largely comes about from the inside by exploring one's inner psychological space to discover what makes the human machine work so as to be able to control it. At Odyssey House I would walk both paths.

Among other locations - including Boston, Berkeley, Chicago, Madison, and Ann Arbor - an acknowledged fulcrum of these two movements was New York City, most particularly, the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The Lower East Side radiated a source of energy that fueled these two movements as well as serving as their common center.

This same location became the point of origin and base camp for a number of radical groups. Included were the Hippies, the Yippies, the Beats, the Diggers, the Performance Artists, the Conceptual Artists, and, the Mother Fuckers. Collectively, they were deemed the vanguard of the Counter Culture.

The essence of these groups was their collective challenge to the status quo's basic assumption concerning the location of final authority viewing it as residing in the individual and not in external institutions such as the government or the church. However, what began as a collective protest against 'uptight constrictions' degenerated into an 'anything goes' attitude equating freedom with license.

Caught in the squeeze between these two poles was a large group of people who were apolitical, and structure-less hence aimless and confused. Unable to cope with nitty-gritty stresses and strains of daily living they gravitated to various substances like drugs and alcohol to relieve their psychic pain. Their aim was to induce an altered state of consciousness that would enable them to experience a sustained state of perfect ease (perfesion). By trial and error, they discovered the benefits and escapist properties of heroin that in this rapidly increasing group became the drug of choice.

The effect of heroin is to produce an initial rush or high, soon followed by a global sense of wellbeing. Eschewing the 'Marat Sade' blind leading the blind excesses of the political youth movement (leading to its undoing), I believed that helping drug abusers overcome their addiction was, and is a noble, and challenging undertaking.

And, in this context located in the thick of the Lower East Side, at 309-11 East Sixth Street, between First and Second Avenues, New York City, was and is Odyssey House - a leading therapeutic community for the rehabilitation of drug addicts - born in May, nineteen sixty-six.

Odyssey was dedicated to hooking up the misunderstood and the not understood heroin addict thought of as a lost wanderer on his own personal Odyssey, frustrated in his search for meaningful connectedness. The Odyssey I knew was an experimental center aiming to be a bridge from aimlessness to purposefulness for a large group of spiritually, psychologically, and physically burned out souls. Other therapeutic communities springing up at that same time were the Samaritan Half-Way Society, Day Top, Phoenix House and Synanon.

Odyssey House was both a tangible place and a confluence of innovative ideas about healing addicts, which were formalized and expressed through the Odyssey Concept. The Odyssey Concept was based on the principle that one's final authority is the self but if that self is either hidden or missing, it must be rediscovered (reborn), or constructed (born). To accomplish this objective, the new inductee must choose to systematically work on his self, in a program organized and focused to provide the optimum conditions for maximizing the probability of success. In this light, Odyssey is both an example of a concrete institution that provided a structure for accomplishing this goal and also represents a microcosm of the best and the worst of the sixties. I entered Odyssey consciously aware that I was lacking a professional identity and was increasingly amazed to discover that I was lacking a personal identity as well.                                         

My consciousness gradually shifted from an initial experience of at-one-ment to a state of chronic fear, distrust, and paranoid-like feelings. My reality of Odyssey became a confused, dizzy whirl of positive/negative - good/bad experiences. I became obsessed with attempts to make sense of this radical shift. With my sense of reality in doubt, I could not trust my judgment leaving me feeling profoundly insecure. A journal entry made when I was twenty-one summarizes the state of mind I had both then and nine years later when I began working at Odyssey House:

        I identify with Haller, the Steppenwolf. I wish I could reconcile the overlap of romanticism and intellectualism, nostalgia and cold cynicism, division  and compulsion at work in my soul. I long to be objective; but how to be objective if the acquisition of knowledge  is based on my subjective self selecting 'facts' out of the flow of the raw data of experience to order reality? How can I ever hope to penetrate to the nature of reality when I feel so confused half the time? I find this problem becoming more and  more central to me as I come closer  to the essential facts of my life. I feel bound to a wheel that  inevitably repeats itself and, though I wish to get off, I am  unclear as to how to do it.

At Odyssey this problem resurfaced with a vengeance becoming the central preoccupation {obsession} of my life. Reality, I had thought of as black and white, was now viewed as overwhelmingly complex, multi-leveled, and multidimensional, perhaps best described as a smeared mess of colors on an artist's palette.

This book then may be simultaneously read on multiple dimensions. These dimensions include: The story of Odyssey House during a crucial phase in its early development (December 1967-through April 1969); a scientific dimension diagnosing the central problem of drug addiction as the lack of a solid identity, characterized by a lack of trust both of others and of oneself; a political dimension describing and exploring key conflicts that arose between various factions at Odyssey and their effects on the treatment process; a psychological dimension recounting the personal Odyssey of the author's identity quest; and a spiritual dimension exploring the crucial importance of the presence or absence of faith, trust, hope, love, and persistence.                                                                     

In summary, I consider myself a subject of one who freely subjected himself to the Odyssey experiment, whose main effect was to stir me to my core. The critical events that led to this stirring up, and what resulted, is what this book is about.

                              TO BE CONTINUED