Word: desisto
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Dates: during 1979-1979
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...Though DeSisto may sound like a work camp dreamed up by Dickens and Freud, it has successfully straightened out disturbed youngsters who had failed to respond to treatment elsewhere. One boy, who is due to graduate next spring, had previously been expelled from a state mental hospital as uncontrollable. A recent graduate, now working on the school staff while he waits to enter college, had a long theft-and-burglary record. Until the school turned him around, he had an unusual career goal: to be a bank robber...
...school is the brainchild of Mike DeSisto, 40, a bearded and pudgy teacher turned therapist. For eleven years, DeSisto was the salaried director of Lake Grove, a Long Island school where he developed his therapeutic program. Fired after he was accused by the Lake Grove trustees of trying to break up the school, the strong-willed DeSisto announced plans to found his own school; and most of the faculty and student body quit to go with him. Parents of the kids were loyal too. DeSisto bought the Stockbridge property with tuition money they paid in advance...
...DeSisto's basic ideas is not unique to Gestalt psychology: that all youngsters, not just troubled ones, need structure and responsibility to get through adolescence. Says he: "You can't change anybody. All you can do is set up a supportive, warm, natural environment and then a natural process takes over." But all is not sweetness and light. At endless and merciless dorm meetings, rationalizations and excuses are brusquely dismissed as "bullshit," perhaps the most commonly used word on campus...
...basic question at DeSisto, in and out of therapy, is "Where are you?" The answer usually comes in Gestalt terms of physical feelings. "My heart is pounding," one girl will say, or "I'm shaking all over. I'm very embarrassed." The student will be urged to "stay with the feeling." There is a lot of gentle mockery, and requests for hugs are granted, but no Esalen-like, nudie-feelie techniques are allowed. Guilt feelings are frowned upon, and youngsters are not allowed to blame themselves for long. One girl whose parents beat her is coached to tell...
...DeSisto requires that parents get involved in therapy too, so that they change along with their children. He regularly brings together as many as eight families for week-long sessions of parent-child group therapy. There are also monthly meetings of DeSisto parent groups in New York, Chicago, Detroit and Boston-nuclei for what DeSisto hopes will some day be a nationwide chain of therapeutic schools. Says he proudly: "I want to make this one a flagship...