Claire D. Clark. The Recovery Revolution

Historians of revolution work in a field whose subject matter is particularly chaotic and confusing. This was certainly the case for what Claire D. Clark identifies as the “Recovery Revolution” in U.S. drug addiction treatment over the last half of the twentieth century. After the Second World War, illicit drug use became a mainstream preoccupation in American society, and by the late 1950s a flurry of new therapeutic approaches emerged to combat habitual drug use, or “addiction.” The proliferation of techniques, acronyms, policies, and actors is intimidating, but Clark’s study The Recovery Revolution: The Battle over Addiction Treatment in the United States finds narrative order and coherence in this complex and otherwise confusing history. Clark traces the beginnings of the recovery revolution to the emergence of Synanon and to its charismatic leader, Charles Dederich, in 1958 Santa Monica, California. Dederich, who was influenced by Alcoholics Anonymous, devised a system wherein members participated in “the game,” a group therapy session that encouraged them to tear down each other’s defense mechanisms and to rebuild their personalities from the ground up in order to foster abstinence from drug use. Newspapers, television, and even cinema gave Synanon a great deal of positive coverage, and soon a variety of other “treatment communities” followed similar paths. Clark explains how Daytop, Phoenix House, Cenikor, Hazelden, the Betty Ford Center, Straight, Inc., and many others were all at least partly influenced by Synanon.

Battle · Mainstream · Media studies · Political science · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Psychology · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies