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On Monday the Headcase has a piece in the Los Angeles Times health section on four psychology movements—est, primal therapy, Transcendental Meditation, and lucid dreaming—that crashed the mental health establishment and burst onto the popular scene:
Typically these efforts tickle the fringe of accepted science, buoyed by celebrities and alternative therapy enthusiasts — which is to say, they often settle in California. Some, like est or primal therapy, traffic in mental transformation. Others, like Transcendental Meditation, whisper of ancient wisdom. Still others, like lucid dreaming, have echoes of science fiction. While the extent of their legacies varies, these four movements have all stood the test of time. So where are they now?
What follows is a brief history of the four movements. Here's a taste from the section on est, including a link to a great PT story from 1975:
In 1971, a former door-to-door encyclopedia salesman named Werner Erhard (born John Paul Rosenberg) launched Erhard Seminars Training, or est, in San Francisco. Promising direction, empowerment and enlightenment, the seminars challenged people to throw away their old belief systems and embrace the beauty of the present moment. This breakthrough, once achieved, was known as getting "it" — the term "est" is also Latin for "it is" — and those who got "it," according to Erhard's program, would also get control of their lives.
Gaining this new outlook wasn't easy: est training lasted 60-plus hours over two consecutive weekends, and the sessions were led by authoritarian instructors whose mission, Psychology Today reported in 1975, was to "tear you down and put you back together."
Read the rest of the piece here.
