It's surprising, isn't it, to hear that the decade of "peace and love" was also characterized by vicious manipulation of attitudes and beliefs? And it's equally surprising to find that those manipulative methods were passed down and around, to the point where they emerge as almost conventional practices.

But union organizers (for example) have not been the only ones to inherit and use resources from the less appetizing side of the Sixties. We continue to see some of the same things in fringe practices aimed at child guidance and child psychotherapy. For example, in the last few years we have seen caging of children in the Gravelle case in Ohio and the Vasquez case in California. A therapist who recently had his license revoked in Colorado was known for intimidating children by shouting and verbal abuse, by physical restraint, and by licking their faces.

Are these simply bizarre behaviors that occur spontaneously among a few emotionally-disturbed practitioners, or is there a historical connection that goes back to the Sixties, like the possible connection between the union organizers and Synanon? It's hard to prove that a historical influence caused some present-day event, but we can see a paper trail that leads from the Sixties through various intermediate steps to the present day. Beginning in the 1960s, Robert M. Zaslow, a psychologist who was a professor at San Jose State University, began to write and speak about certain beliefs he held on the subject of personality development. In 1975, he and a colleague, Marilyn Menta, published a book entitled "The psychology of the Z-process: Attachment and activity." The "Z-process" was Zaslow's term for a postulated set of events in personality development, in which fear, discomfort, and intimidation caused a child to form an emotional attachment to his or her parents. This attachment, according to Zaslow, was responsible for making children cheerful, affectionate, and obedient; lack of attachment caused a wide variety of behavior problems and even mental illnesses like autism or schizophrenia.

Zaslow theorized about-- and put into practice-the idea that if a child had somehow missed the formation of attachment at the usual time, later exposure to intimidation and pain could correct problems by causing attachment to occur. The correction would be based on the "draining off" of rage resulting from pain and fear; once the rage was gone, attachment could easily take place. Zaslow and his admirers carried out his methods with clients ranging from toddlers to adults. In sessions that lasted many hours, the individuals were held down by four or more people while Zaslow applied "tactile stimulation" in the form of painful prodding of the ribs and underarms. Zaslow stressed that it was necessary for this to hurt, and suggested informed consent documentation that stated that some bruises were likely to result from treatment. He continued to claim his treatment as effective for many problems, and in a paper in a German journal in 1982 described having cured the blindness of a child at the Colorado School for the Blind.

Zaslow eventually lost his license as a result of an actual injury to a patient. But he continued to travel and to write, and in the course of his travels encountered a Colorado physician named Foster Cline, now a major figure in the commercial parent education organization called "Love & Logic". Cline adopted much of Zaslow's thinking, and in material published in the 1990s stated baldly that in his opinion "all bonds are trauma bonds"-- an opinion which, to the best of my knowledge, he has never retracted.

A detailed account of the ways Zaslow's ideas were passed along would be very lengthy. Suffice it to say here that various organizations and individuals have continued to support the Zaslow approach, with disastrous effects for the children in their power. Perhaps the most important question is, why were the ideas and methods advocated by Synanon and by Zaslow not called down when they began, or soon afterward? Part of the answer is undoubtedly that most of the public, and indeed most professionals, had no idea what was happening. But another, less easily acceptable, part is that the Sixties admired unconventional thought, and tolerance of unconventional thought can be overdone. When we encounter really unusual ways of thinking or acting, we need to consider carefully the consequences of those ways, rather than being afraid that disapproval might make us "uncool". The Sixties were a time when "cool" was desperately desired. Let's hope that the Aughties have learned a lesson from this and become ready to think critically about the unconventional and the conventional alike.