In 1954 an intelligent, pretty, seventeen-year-old French girl, living in Paris, had a severe schizophrenic breakdown. The girl, whom we shall call Collette, had been an excellent student with an active social life. After the breakdown she became slovenly and uncommunicative. She lost interest in everything around her and could not even care for herself. Her divorced mother, who worked as an electrical draftsman, had her committed to a sanitarium, but Collette made little progress. Eventually electric shock therapy was used, and Collette became more responsive to the world around her. After a time, she was able to live at home again; but she was no longer the bright, active girl she had been. She practiced the same profession as her mother, but she had lost her sparkle. She had been a voracious reader before the breakdown, but now she hardly read at all. She had little interest in social activities and lived a dull day-to-day existence.

Collette continued to receive psychotherapeutic treatment in France and later in the United States when she came to live with her mother, who had married a black American soldier. After living in the United States, Collette married a friend of her stepfather; he was also black. She had a child and continued to have psychotherapy, but her mental health was clearly deteriorating. Her husband left her after becoming a black militant. Collette was now having severe emotional problems and undergoing a schizophrenic withdrawal. She could no longer hold a job or care for her child. Her mother, who was now separated, took charge of the child and had Collette committed to an American sanitarium. In the sanitarium she got progressively worse; not even shock therapy seemed to work. One psychiatrist claimed that her problems stemmed from her interracial marriage and her husband's abandoning her. Another claimed that her problem came from being dominated by her mother. Collette's whole life had been, so he claimed, an attempt to emulate her mother even to the point of acquiring the same profession and marrying a black man as her mother had. He made a very convincing argument with what seemed to be a sound psychiatric foundation.

It was decided that the best treatment for Collette was to be kept apart from her mother and her child. She did not see them for a year, and all the time her condition became worse. The rapidly deteriorating health of her daughter caused the mother to take her from the sanitarium and to change psychiatrists once again; Collette had already undergone therapy with five different psychiatrists. However, she was now so wasted physically as well as mentally that she was subject to infectious diseases.

Her mother took her home. A nutritionist was called in. He gave Collette massive doses of vitamins and nutrients. In a few weeks she looked much better. However, much to everyone's surprise, Collette had also completely recovered from the schizophrenic symptoms which had been getting steadily worse for several years. She was recovered to the point where she was as active and alive as she had been at seventeen. She has since been well, exhibiting no schizophrenic symptoms for several years. It was found that Collette's mental problems had stemmed from an organic disorder which could be treated with large doses of vitamins. She had spent fifteen years, her entire youth, suffering and receiving useless psychotherapeutic treatment. She was a victim of psychofraud (175).

The history of psychofraud is as old as man. Tens of thousands of years ago, our ancestors had the witch doctor drill holes in their skulls to let the evil spirits out. This was psychofraud. In ancient Babylon, young girls were sold into temple prostitution in order that their parents and future clients could obtain the favor of the gods. This was psychofraud. In ancient Rome and until very recent times, psychotics were tortured with red-hot irons and whipped to drive the devils possessing them out of their bodies. This was psychofraud.

During the Middle Ages, pilgrims traveled all over Europe and the Holy Land to touch the bones of some alleged saint in the hope that this would cure them of diseases ranging from leprosy to gout, or perhaps win them some prize ranging from a maiden's hand to a kingdom. This was psychofraud. We can see the same phenomenon today at Lourdes. Millions of Moslems, Hindus, Catholics and Protestants have died fighting each other in the belief that theirs was the one true religion and that to die in its service was to be assured eternal happiness in heaven. This was psychofraud. It is still happening in India and in Ireland.

Tens of millions of persons were slaughtered by the Nazis because they were considered to be of an inferior race and had to make room for the one true master race, the Aryans. The wealth and intellect of Germany, one of the most creative nations in history, was wasted perhaps forever in order to achieve this end. This was psychofraud.

Millions of persons sit in orgone boxes, go to palm readers, astrologers, priests, witches, and psychotherapists so that they may find spiritual and emotional comfort, guidance, and understanding. This is psychofraud. Why do they do it?

Psychofraud is practiced because it works. Psychofraud can unite nations, cure blindness, induce or remove warts, bring happiness to one's friends and death to one's enemies. Above all, it can bring inner peace and contentment. It can do this because people need to believe. They will believe the most outrageous nonsense if it promises them something they value. Faith may not move mountains, but it can move persons, even to self-destruction—both physical and mental.

Because of the interaction of mind and body, belief can have profound physiological effects (73, 140). These effects are not always beneficial, and they may in fact be deleterious in the long run. Nonetheless, these beliefs persist, and their physical effects have been documented and can be demonstrated scientifically. Psychofraud is any method, device, or process which changes our behavior only because of our belief in it and not because of its intrinsic merit. Psychofraud is an ideology about human behavior. Ideology is any belief in cause-and-effect relationships which is not supported by scientific evidence. Psychofraud cannot work when there is no faith. The more faith both the practitioner and the recipient have in its effects, the more effective psychofraud will be. At worst, psychofraud is destructive or ineffective. At best, it is a placebo.

 

Placebos

Placebo is Latin for "I will please." It has long been known in medicine that physiologically inert or nearly inert substances, such as chalk or sugar pills, can have profound physiological effects, if the persons who take these substances believe they will work. When these substances are administered medicinally, they are called placebos. In their excellent treatise on placebos, Kissel and Barraucand (73) give the following formal definition of a placebo.

A therapeutic measure of no intrinsic efficacy or weak efficacy with no logical connection to the illness but effective through a psychological or psycho-physiological mechanism, if the patient thinks he is receiving an active treatment.

We say that a treatment has a placebo effect if this effect can only be produced when a person knows that he has been treated; if the person is treated without knowing it, there is no observable effect.

The history of medicine is primarily a history of placebos and their effects. This ranges from the sympathetic magic of 20,000-year-old Cro-Magnon cave paintings to the 4,000-year-old Babylonian practice of concocting and administering certain medicines only in the full of the moon; to ancient Egyptian cure-alls made of lizard blood, frog semen and hippopotamus feces; to the Roman wearing of necklaces made of wolves' teeth in order to prevent all childhood diseases and convulsions; to the treatment of Pope Boniface VIII for nephritis and colitis with a gold papal seal applied to His Holiness's right buttock; to the practice of bleeding persons suffering from infectious diseases with leeches in order to remove the evil humors from the blood; to the twentieth century treatment of mental illness by free association, dream analysis, Oedipal regression, primal screams, marathon tickling, sexual intercourse with the therapist and other patients, and similar modern psychotherapeutic techniques (23, 65, 66, 132, 161). It is important to note that all these placebos work. Most of the patients treated become and/or remain well, and most claim to feel immediate benefits after the placebos are administered (73, 91, 146, 112). This is the way medicine first developed and is still being practiced in this century. However, the scientific method was introduced into medical research in the nineteenth century. This was when truly effective medicine began to replace placebos.

 

Placebos and Science

The scientific method in medicine has been applied for the most part to the development of drugs and physical treatments. The placebo effect was first recognized early in the nineteenth century. This discovery resulted in part from the tremendous success of Cagliostro and later Mesmer in using hypnotism to treat many kinds of diseases. Mesmer's "animal magnetism" was the rage of European salons. It was disparaged by the orthodox physicians, but anyone who saw a public demonstration of Mesmerism was soon convinced. Through hypnosis, Mesmer restored the use of sight or limbs to persons who had been blind or crippled for years. He and others were able to induce general anesthesia in patients so that major surgery could be performed without pain and the subsequent death from shock. It soon became clear that mere suggestion could have powerful effects (95).

Subsequently, increasing numbers of medical researchers began to use a placebo control for testing the effectiveness of experimental treatments. This involved dividing treated patients at random into at least three statistically matched groups. One group was given the experimental treatment, another was given a placebo and the third, called a "control," was left untreated. By comparing the results on the three groups, it could be determined how much effect each "treatment" had.

Early in the nineteenth century a British admiral learned through hearsay that lime juice, regularly administered, could prevent scurvy. He ordered one of the first scientific medical experiments performed. Three groups of sailors were treated respectively with lime juice, placebos, and providence. The effectiveness of the lime juice was clearly demonstrated. British sailors became regular drinkers of lime juice and, as a consequence, acquired the name "Limey" while avoiding scurvy. Napoleon ordered a similar experiment for testing the effectiveness of vaccinations. In a similar way, modern drug therapy, from quinine for malaria to penicillin for syphilis, has been developed. In the area of surgery, the scientific approach has not been as vigorously applied; and many types of operations, such as tonsillectomies, lobotomies, and hysterectomies, continue to be performed without the scientific determination of their full benefits and liabilities. These are not, strictly speaking, placebos, since they may have deleterious effects. However, many types of surgical procedures, such as cancer operations, are fully documented by comparative, long-term follow-up studies; and they can be shown to be effective in reducing the morbidity and/or mortality of the treated patients.

The latest scientific technique for controlling the vagaries of placebo effects is the "double-blind placebo control experiment." In this type of experiment, neither the patients nor the experimenters know when a placebo is being used. In this way, the experimenter will not inadvertently treat his experimental groups differently than his control, thereby biasing his results.

The only area of modern medicine where there is almost no scientific investigation of the effectiveness of alternate treatments is in psychotherapy (38, 148). There have been some attempts to investigate psychotherapy scientifically (91), but with few exceptions, modern psychotherapy seems to consist entirely of administering placebos (183). In some cases psychotherapy may be equivalent to destructive surgery when it has an iatrogenic instead of curative effect. Iatrogenic refers to illness induced by improper medical treatment. In his book, Trick or Treatment: How and When Psychotherapy Fails, Dr. Richard B. Stuart (148) has given many examples of psychotherapeutic treatments which led to a worsening of symptoms for "treated" patient groups while the "untreated control" groups got as well or better than the "treated" group. He concludes that traditional psychotherapy is at best a waste of money and at worst a harmful experience in terms of objectively measured behavioral changes. Studies by Eysenek (38), Kissel and Barraucand (73), Meltzoff and Kornreich (91), Strupp and Bergin (147), and many others lead to the same conclusions, even when they are trying to prove the opposite.

The power of placebos in psychotherapy is illustrated by the following examples:

A 26-year-old man, depressed, a failure in his work, is becoming more depressed and increasingly neurotic even after two years of psychotherapy. He completely changes his personality after being treated by placebos for four months. He becomes dynamic, aggressive and successful (73).

A 30-year-old woman is filled with anxiety and sexual frustration. Her symptoms disappear when she is treated with placebos. Treatment is interrupted because of an infection which is treated with penicillin. Again she is sexually frustrated and anxious, and symptoms again disappear when she is treated anew with placebos (73).

Classical psychotherapy seems at best to be a placebo (183). As any victim of "black magic" can testify, placebos can have deleterious as well as beneficial effects: witch doctors have been known to kill and cure with their spells. Although some forms of psychotherapy may cause damage, the overwhelming evidence is that, intrinsically, they neither harm nor help (73, 183). They are inert, very expensive placebos.

 

The $20,000 Placebo

Expensive placebos, ranging from pearls dissolved in wine to powdered rhinoceros horn, all intended to produce an aphrodisiac effect, have been used for thousands of years and are still used today. However, no placebo has ever been quite so expensive nor so widely used as modern psychotherapy. The typical Freudian analysis takes about three hours a week and lasts three to five years and often much longer. At the typical $50 per hour rate, this "treatment" will cost $20,000 or more. Thousands of persons have paid for this placebo, and they have been victims of psychofraud. Did they get their money's worth?

If we regard psychofraud as a form of entertainment which makes people happy, then it may be worth the price. Strupp, Fox and Lessler (146) in their report, Patients View Their Therapy, did a survey of psychotherapy patients. Over 90 percent expressed satisfaction with their therapy. They felt that they were better persons for having undergone therapy. Not many forms of entertainment can make similar claims. But $20,000 does seem a high price to pay for self-delusion, since there is no evidence in terms of objectively measured behavior that psychotherapy patients are better off in the long run than people who do not receive this therapy (183).

 

The Need for Magic

In Tennessee Williams' play A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche DuBois says, "I don't want reality. I want magic." With these words she speaks for a large segment of humanity. Reality is often so unbearable that persons delude themselves into believing that things are not as they are but as they would like them to be. This is psychofraud.

Human beings seem to be born with an innate need to predict and control their total environment. When some aspect of their environment is unpredictable, uncontrollable, threatening and unavoidable, they will often delude themselves into believing that they can predict and control through some magic formula. For this reason primitive men propitiated or coerced the gods to control weather, fertility, and disease. Modern science has shown us more effective ways of dealing with the physical and biological environment; consequently only a few persons still try to use magic and religious incantation in place of biology and physics. However, science seems to have failed miserably in the control of the psychosocial environment. Humanity seems to be able to predict and control all of nature except itself. The need to find meaning in existence and emotional peace leads people to seek magic cures. Consequently, witness the continued success of religion, psychotherapy, and other forms of psychofraud.

From a purely emotional point of view, it is clearly preferable to believe that one understands something when one does not, than to admit that one is helpless in coping with an important aspect of nature. In the past, religion filled this need most effectively. However, as science preempted the authority of religion in one field after another, the belief in the traditional religious process itself became shaken. Psychotherapy developed the appearance of rational science without the substance of science. It replaced traditional religious counseling for millions of people. For example, since 1947, the number of primary mental health personnel—psychiatrists, psychotherapists, psychiatric social workers, etc.—has increased from 14,000 to over 100,000 while the number of ministers and priests has decreased from 250,000 to under 200,000. Only when it came to dealing with the seemingly unavoidable problem of death did science and psychotherapy prove less comforting than religion.

 

The Need to Understand

Traditional psychotherapy, by telling persons that their behavior was perfectly understandable in terms of unconscious sexual needs and suppressed desires, created in them the illusion of being able to predict and control their own behavior, and this in turn brought them an inner peace similar to that traditionally provided by religion (42). The behavior of all persons, including entire nations, could be understood, it was alleged, on the basis of psychoanalytic principles (112, 161). Psychotherapeutic principles were applied to child raising, education, industry and many other institutions. Some political leaders underwent extensive treatment. However, after psychotherapy had been in vogue for over fifty years, the problems of society and the individual were getting increasingly worse rather than better. Our constantly expanding mental institutions were filled to overflowing (157). Ten percent or more of the population suffered from mental illness severe enough to require treatment (157). The world was on the brink of destruction through war, pollution, over population and the depletion of resources. The youth revolted and rejected the values of their fathers. Sexual repression became an archaic, historical term. Epidemic venereal disease, resulting from the promiscuous "new morality," was more of a problem. Young men were becoming increasingly impotent (100). Somehow, it did not all fit together. Psychotherapy had been practiced for decades. Sexual liberation was at hand. Yet things seemed to be getting worse — psychotherapy was clearly ineffective. A new magic was needed, one that would appear more compatible with the changing, more entertainment-oriented, affluent life styles in the industrialized countries.

 

The New Magic

The new magic involved a synthesis of the pseudoscience of psychotherapy, mysticism and hedonism. This synthesis was actually begun in the early years of the twentieth century by Jung (70, 161). The hippie movement of the mid-sixties with its drug-induced trances, mystical symbolism and tribalism, found in Jung's philosophy an element of mysticism which could easily be adapted to their chosen lifestyles. From this grew a "new force" called humanistic psychology. It is the new magic. It is also psychofraud.

Humanistic psychology combines the rationalism of Freud in the form of Maslow's Psychology of Being (88, 89), with Jung's mystical notions of the collective unconscious, (70) and the youth revolt, to finally take the form of unbridled hedonism. In its final form, it is not only unscientific as were other types of psychotherapy; it is antiscientific.

The old magic required the learning of many complex formulas and incantations. One had to have an M.D. or at least a Ph.D. to be a full-fledged practitioner. The new magic has done away with all this. What matters is not discipline, but relating and feeling. Anyone who is so inclined can set up an "encounter" group where people will come together, feel, and relate. The alleged teachings of a witch doctor, Don Juan, from one of the most primitive Indian tribes in Mexico, are accepted as a new revelation and become the basis of several best-selling books (17, 18). To many, our own culture seems so destructive that surely truth and the way to a better life must be found in the teachings of nonscientific cultures. The possibility that these prescientific cultures are degenerate evolutionary dead ends, which exist only at the sufferance of the scientific cultures, is not considered. These people live in squalor, are ridden with disease, and are scientifically uncreative; yet the followers of the new magic perceive in the primitive societies a comforting wisdom and harmony with nature.

If humanistic psychology has a "spiritual center," it is the Esalen Institute in California, cofounded by the late F. S. Perls, M.D., Ph.D. (179). Here Maslow and many other leaders in humanistic psychology have been residents. A recent and long prominent associate of Esalen is J. C. Lilly, M.D., a neurologist and psychotherapist, whose 1972 book, The Center of the Cyclone (83), has been widely praised in major journals by seemingly prominent academicians from leading universities. In the book, Dr. Lilly discusses how after going "beyond science" into mysticism he has communicated through telepathy with beings from other planets, how his trances, induced through drugs and apparent brain damage, led him to meet his guardian angels, and how he had the mystical experience of giving birth to himself while having a massive bowel movement. It is a very popular book which has gone through many printings and has been taken quite seriously. According to Dr. Lilly, it is his intent to guide persons into higher realms of wisdom.

Although classical psychotherapy will continue to attract practitioners and older patients, the future almost surely belongs to the new magic. For by totally rejecting the need for logical coherence in dealing with the psychosocial environment, it has preempted both religion and therapy. Since religion and psychotherapy both derive their effectiveness from faith rather than scientific evidence, a new system of psycho-religious therapy which fulfills mystical, emotional and hedonistic needs with less intellectual effort on the part of both patient and therapist and for less money will prove to be the most popular new form of entertainment. It is psychofraud in its most effective guise to date.

 

The Need for an Alternative

If psychofraud makes people so happy, why should we fight it? Why not just give in to it and enjoy ourselves? Our so-called "scientific cultures" really have become destructive. What good is scientific progress if it leads to annihilation? These questions do not have simple answers. The answers will be explored in detail with the development of the Ethical Theory in Part Two. We will consider briefly what has happened to the unscientific, psycho-fraudulent cultures of the past.

Without exception, the psycho-fraudulent cultures of the past have stagnated, decayed and been replaced by stronger, more progressive ones. The pattern seems to be that when a new culture starts, it is technologically progressive. This progress brings wealth to the people, or at least to the leaders. Once the culture becomes wealthy, it becomes uncreative and turns increasingly to psychofraud for entertainment. The people then begin an intellectual and ethical decline, and they are replaced by a poorer but still dynamic culture. This happened when the Chaldeans replaced the Summerians and were in turn replaced by the Persians. This happened when the Hellenes replaced the Minoans and then the Persians and were in turn replaced by the Romans, who decayed in the same way.

It happened in India when the Aryans replaced the Dravidians. It happened on the world scale when the United States at the end of World War II replaced the European powers as the center of scientific and technological creativity. The psychofrauds of Europe were fascism and communism. The psychofraud gestating in the United States is the new magic: humanistic psychology and neomysticism.

We probably cannot have another great civilization collapse through psychofraud and still continue human evolution. This is the case because of the nature of modern weapons, the rapidly depleting natural resources which are irreplaceable, the interdependent net of modern technology, and the possibility of a world police state which stifles all progress (50).

The problems created by science can only be solved by science. Science works. It is the very real effectiveness of science which is threatening to destroy all life on earth. The problems which science causes are not inherent to the nature of science but to man himself, who uses science for predicting and controlling the physical and the biological environments, but uses psychofraud to predict and control his own behavior. It is not because man cannot predict and control the external world that science has become a menace, but because he cannot predict and control himself.

The creative prediction and control of human behavior is the purpose of Ethical Therapy and scientific ethics in general. However, this is also the stated purpose of many forms of psychofraud. In order to distinguish between methods which are scientific and those which are psycho-fraudulent, it is necessary to understand both psychofraud and science. In order to use science creatively, it is necessary to develop an objective system of ethics which does not lead to scientific contradictions as do most of the traditional ethical systems. Psychofraud is the major impediment to the development of scientific ethics, because psychofraud can make us happy in the absence of truth. Psychofraud makes it easy to avoid unpleasant realities by providing us with comforting illusions.

We can find temporary happiness in psychofraud, but reality cannot be avoided forever. If it does not catch up with us, it will catch up with our children. For this reason we need a scientific, ethical alternative to psychofraud if we have any concern at all with the future. Even for those who care for nothing beyond their personal happiness, Ethical Therapy is a better alternative because it will maximize their happiness (50). However, we cannot begin to use Ethical Therapy until we begin to understand the fatal attraction of psychofraud.