Word: synanon
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...fund-raising auction on New Year's Eve. At a wooden table a grizzled, gruff man who wears a cap emblazoned with the message I'M THE MEANEST S.O.B. IN THE VALLEY nodded his approval. Charles (Chuck) Dederich, 64, was adding another ritual to his famed commune Synanon: wife swapping...
Calling themselves the Delancey Street Family, these unlikely tenants have formed a new "therapeutic community" that is partly modeled after the well-publicized Synanon program, yet is crucially different from it. Both organizations seek to rehabilitate addicts. Synanon members usually expect to live out their lives in one of the organization's residences. (Says Synanon Founder Charles Dederich, "I know damn well if they go out of Synanon, they are dead.") The new group, however, believes that its members can look forward to a future as nonaddicts. Consequently, the Delancey Street Family asks its members to stay only...
...family was established in 1971 by John Maher, then 30, and three other ex-addicts. All four had served prison terms, and three were disillusioned dropouts from Synanon. The name they chose for themselves was inspired by Maher's boyhood on Manhattan's Lower East Side, where, in the 19th century, Delancey Street came to symbolize the self-reliant spirit of Old World immigrants working their way into the mainstream of American life...
Rough. Although Delancey Street's orientation toward the future sets it apart from Synanon, the new organization is carrying on one old Synanon tradition: subjecting members to rituals of a kind that Sociologist Erving Goffman calls "degradation ceremonies." New male residents are required to shave their heads; women are compelled to go without makeup for as long as six months. All residents must take part in "the circus," Delancey Street's version of the Synanon "game." Under the leadership of a "ringmaster," members indulge in three-hour bouts of name-calling and mutual criticism. Admits Family Member George...
Some specialists consider such tactics destructive. In an American Psychiatric Association study of Synanon and other therapeutic communities, five drug experts observed that if addiction is partly the result of low selfesteem, "one can wonder whether the most appropriate corrective experience is to persuade the person of his worthless-ness." Members of Delancey Street, however, defend their rules on the grounds that they provide an opportunity to let off steam, teach humility and prepare the way for a kind of rebirth by erasing an addict's old image of himself...