The idea of attack therapy is horrifying. Why.... would therapists ever think that was a good idea? Like, aside from the ones that wanted to be cult leaders, I mean
It definitely IS horrifying.
Attack therapy came out of the particular social context of the 1950s/60s/70s, when there was a lot of cultural anxiety about How People Are Bad and How to Make Them Better. About whether you should force people to rigidly conform to society’s expectations, or place your trust in the inherent goodness of humanity. These debates haven’t really left us, but they’ve become a lot less stark than they were, partly because we have data from that era to help us out.
Specifically, as far as I understand the history, attack therapy came from the specific milieu that was psychologists coming to understand the power of group therapy and people in groups. The emphasis in group therapy, especially encounter groups, was about getting people out of their mental ruts and authentically experiencing other human beings.
While psychotherapists were supposed to be neutral and non-judgmental, people in encounter-groups could challenge each other and provide alternate perspectives, and that had enormous value. Still has, I guess--social media sites like Tumblr are one big encounter group.
It’s just... you need a basic baseline of self-esteem and emotional coping for someone to be able to venture out safely into the world of Everyone Else’s Opinions, and you also need someone who steps up to say, “Whoa now, that’s too much, everybody back off.” And a lot of groups DIDN’T have that, and therapists thought, “Well, if a LITTLE challenge produces such amazing change, what if we tried a LOT of challenge?”
And, well, some of the people in those encounter groups, including therapists, bought into common social narratives about what produces beneficial change. From the idea that children need to be “scared straight”, that “tough love” and “discipline” will help people. That if people only knew the consequences of what they were doing, they would stop. That if you want to improve someone, you need to strip away all their usual defense mechanisms before you can build them back up again--”to make an omelette, you have to break a few eggs.”
I can be so absolutely confident now that people NEED love and support and a basic sense of belonging and being good enough before they can make positive change because we HAVE data from that era. When someone goes “We just need to yell at this person to toughen up,” I can literally pull out all the research studies and say, “Sit down, asshole, we know that doesn’t work because we tried.”
A lot of people don’t WANT love and kindness and unconditional positive regard to be the answer. I didn’t want it to be the answer for myself! I wanted to be able to be disciplined and exacting and high-achieving and flawless. For one, it’s so goddamn emotionally unsatisfying--when someone else is fucking up, it’s far more satisfying to be able to lash out in anger than lean in with compassion.
So it’s kind of like... as a culture, we needed to try. To try it out and watch it fail and meticulously document its failure, or it’s always going to be on people’s minds, like, “What if we just punished people to deter crime instead.”
The hard part is to make it a lesson that sticks. For every parent who learns positive parenting skills, it feels like there’s always another who thinks yelling at or hitting their kids is the best/only strategy available. Sometimes I think it’s not so amazing that people thought of being shitty and mean--it’s that we have such a strong basis on which to promote the alternatives.
