While it was probably quack medicine, and often dark (tied to beds and forced into diapers, forced regressed living for years on end), the reports describe some deeply intriguing events, including full diapering and use, spanking, adult adoption, breastfeeding, and so on, which is almost impossible to believe. Unfortunately it had a dark ending where there was an accidental death between two men, but the earlier stuff is impossibly intriguing.
Supposedly, the therapy was quite popular and simply went underground, as well as global outside the US, and may be practiced in various places today, though probably not to the same extent. A few of the more interesting snippets from stories (link 1) (link 2):
Dr. Schiff practiced a unique brand of psychotherapy: she, and many other psychiatrists of her day, believed that mental illness was largely the result of poor parenting: parents who were absent, parents who were neglectful, and parents who were abusive. She believed that the best therapy for such patients was, essentially, reverting to infancy and trying again.
That's right: Dr. Schiff's patients came to live with her in her home (considered a mental health facility in its day), and were regressed back to childhood. Many were diapered, fed baby food and baby bottles, and punished with corner time and other childlike punishments.
This went on for years. Dr. Schiff had dozens of patients, including many who resided in her facility for a number of years. She had high chairs and cribs, and the place was stocked with adult diapers of every size and style. Patients would either live with her full time in a permanent infant state, or even just drop by for a night of baby food and baby bottles.
Dr. Schiff's therapies were revolutionary. At one point she was doing monthly conferences where dozens of doctors would join her to learn how to perform transactional therapy in their own clinics. In some of these they would actually practice putting each other in diapers, soiling them, changing each other... you get the idea.
Over time, Dr. Schiff's reputation began to take a hit. She adopted several of her patients - not the taboo then that it would be today - and some of them even went on to become her assistants, serving as caretakers for the next group of patients.
Another patient gave a deposition in the case describing an atmosphere of terror in which the cardinal sin was failing to call Schiff "mom." For that, patients could expect a severe beating. She said that one patient was forced to drink dish-washing detergent every time he mentioned his natural parents. She said that she once witnessed Schiff suckling a patient and that she had been offered Schiff's breast as well, with the caveat not to be too disappointed if mom failed to produce milk.
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Schiff considered "sick feelings" and psychotic anger "relics of a sick infancy and childhood" and believed that if a patient regressed to infancy or childhood--to a period that predated the pathology--the therapist could eliminate the "negative messages" instilled by the parents and substitute healthy ones as the patient progressed through each developmental stage. Schiff called the process reparenting, and described it to her TA colleagues as "de-cathecting" the patient's Parent ego state and then re-creating it from scratch.
Reparenting required an enormous commitment from the therapist. Schiff's patients moved into her six-bedroom house in Fredericksburg, Virginia; severed ties with their biological parents; and began calling her "mom" and her husband, Moe (also a psychiatric social worker), "dad." Schiff identified each patient's regressed age as the age at which the patient seemed to function and then treated him as if he were actually that age--which meant she wound up diapering, bottle-feeding, bathing, and disciplining adult patients. Only she didn't refer to them as adults or patients, even when speaking about them to her colleagues. She always called them her children or her "schizophrenic babies."
The reparented child's new mother "is the most important thing in the entire world," Schiff wrote in a 1969 article that introduced reparenting to her colleagues. "Nothing must be allowed to threaten his relationship with her." By then, the 35-year-old Schiff had made herself "the most important thing" to a lot of people. When the New York Times published a feature about her that year, she was mothering 18 "children" whose real ages ranged from 9 to 29. "Between bottles," the reporter observed, "some of them smoke cigarettes."
Later that year, Schiff (collaborating with author Beth Day) published a best-selling book about her work called All My Children. She toured the country, a reparenting guru, with "cured" patients in orbit, demonstrating that they were smart, lucid, and undeniably functional. She legally adopted some of her "children," credited them with helping her develop her ideas.
Neither the press nor Schiff's colleagues seemed concerned that she'd written of administering corporal punishments, such as spankings and belt whippings. Although regression was controversial in traditional therapy and touching patients taboo--whether hugging or spanking--Schiff's peers generally lauded her efforts. When questioned about her methods, Schiff said, simply, that they worked. That was good enough. As one official of the National Institute of Mental Health told the New York Times, "She gets results, and you can't argue with that," though he cautioned that it was too early to tell whether the results were permanent.
Schiff collected more and more "babies," almost compulsively it seemed
Shortly after moving to California, Jacqui Schiff presided over a massive network of reparenting outlets. She founded the Cathexis School, for children with psychiatric problems; the Cathexis Institute, a research, teaching, and outpatient treatment center; and the Schiff Family, a residential therapeutic community consisting of more than a dozen households in the San Francisco area, populated by people with and without mental illnesses. (At some point, she'd generalized her treatment; anyone who'd been raised by less than perfect parents was a candidate.)
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Jacobs went to Alamo, California, in June of 1975 to learn reparenting from Schiff. By then he was a provisional teaching member of the ITAA, training therapists under supervision. He was only a three-part oral exam away from obtaining the highest membership level. Six of his trainees accompanied him to California. They stayed at a Christian retreat center Schiff had rented near her house to accommodate the 40 or so therapists from all over the country who'd come for the weeklong workshop.
In the mornings the group would sit in a big oval and listen to Schiff or someone on her staff lecture. The anecdotes they shared from the annals of reparenting usually seemed apocryphal to Jacobs. But when the group broke in two for therapy, Jacobs saw Schiff at her dazzling best, intuitive and effective.
One morning toward the end of the week, Schiff sent Jacobs's group outside for a marathon therapy session, instructing everyone to "get little." Jacobs found the order to regress a bit odd--there wasn't a schizophrenic among them--but he went along with it. He even attempted to settle a grievance by throwing a rubber ball at someone, and then stood there shamefaced as he got hollered at for it. After a kid's lunch--cheeseburgers, french fries, Kool-Aid, and ice cream--Jacobs was wearing down. "At about three o'clock," he recalls, "I was like fucking bored." Schiff had disappeared inside with a few women from the group, so Jacobs told one of her minions that he'd had it with the kid stuff. He was informed that he needed Schiff's permission to be an adult again. He went to find her and came across a bizarre scene: the three women she'd taken inside lay on the floor in diapers.
Schiff motioned for Jacobs to sit down, and he watched in astonishment as she berated one of the women for failing to defecate, calling her "stubborn and resistant." Then, as if the scene wasn't weird enough, two of Schiff's sons--one reparented, one biological--burst into the room scuffling with a young female patient they were dragging toward a corner. Schiff often made patients stand in corners. She considered "corner contracts" a form of "passivity confrontation," as they afforded patients the opportunity to contemplate their behavior or issues of importance to them. The young woman getting hauled off to the corner, however, resisted adamantly and at one point tried to knee the reparented son, Shea
The next morning, Jacobs's cigarette burned into a windowsill while he was shaving. Schiff found out about it and upbraided him at the group meeting, encouraging others to follow suit. Everyone in the group--including his six trainees--laid into him. They were disappointed in him. They had looked up to him, and he had let them down. They were afraid of him.
It was humiliating, and it only got worse. Schiff pronounced Jacobs too dangerous to be left alone and put him on arm's-length supervision. For the next 24 hours, Schiff or one of her staff members would accompany Jacobs everywhere he went--even to the toilet. He found the punishment wholly absurd but felt coerced into submitting. Otherwise, Schiff had made clear, she would sabotage his career.
The punishment occurred on the last day of the workshop. While the rest of the group went into San Francisco to sightsee, Jacobs stayed by Schiff's side like a puppy learning to heel. They ran errands in her pink Mustang (pink, she told him, so her sons would be less likely to ask for the keys). That night Schiff brought Jacobs back to her house, where she lived with about ten "schizophrenic children." He slept on a mat at the foot of her bed. In the morning, the "kids" served Schiff coffee and toast as she lay in bed talking on the phone. When Jacobs asked if he could get up and get something to eat, she said no, he'd have to wait until she finished her conversation.
Later that morning, at the retreat center, Schiff asked Jacobs to address the group. He previously had arranged for Schiff and Shea to return with him to Chicago for workshops, and he worried that if he didn't say something that appeased them they would cancel. Jacobs conjured up a contrite speech about how he'd carelessly endangered everyone's life. He peppered it with Schiffian jargon, and all was well.
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Schiff, it turned out, had left Virginia in disrepute. A patient at the Schiff Rehabilitation Project in Fredericksburg had charged her with assault and battery, saying he'd been forcibly gagged, diapered, tied to a bed, and beaten
The home came under scrutiny in 1991, after a local council official complained that a friend who resided there had become totally dependent on therapists and unable or unwilling to assert her own will. The official, Mark Stein, accused the staff of exercising cultlike practices and of falsely diagnosing people as schizophrenic. Although Schiff at that point was no longer involved in the home (she and Robinson had parted ways over such philosophical differences as whether it was appropriate to use discomfort to motivate thinking), Robinson still employed Schiffian techniques, techniques that struck Stein, during visits to his friend, as weirdly terrifying. He told an English newspaper that he'd observed a woman tied to Robinson by a rope that represented an umbilical cord; on a subsequent visit he saw the same woman wearing diapers, sucking her thumb, and making babylike noises. He also once observed a patient standing in a corner for an extended period of time, and later learned that the patient had remained there for 24 hours, allowed to sit during the night but not sleep.
Back in the States, reparenting hadn't suffered much of a setback in Schiff's absence. Some therapists began calling the treatment by a new name, "corrective parenting," to distance themselves from Schiff. But others still openly aligned themselves with her, and some even hired her to give training workshops and lectures. In 1987, ten years after the first stirrings of the Schiff controversy, a California psychologist conducted a survey of reparenters and found that many still used classic Schiffian techniques. Of the 134 respondents, 22 percent admitted to spanking some of their clients; 82 percent to making clients stand in a corner; 46 percent to bathing clients; 48 percent to doing "toileting work"; and 7 percent to breast-feeding. That same year the book TA Today described reparenting as one of the three main schools of TA, claimed that the Schiffian method had "proven effective" as a treatment for both psychotic and nonpsychotic populations, and noted that some of Schiff's "children" were among "the most respected theorists, therapists and teachers in present-day TA."
I'm gathering from the story about Jacobs, that the four women diapered and made to use their diapers / stand in the corner weren't in fact patients, but therapists on the retreat learning about the technique, since it mentioned that there were no patients amongst them.
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I thought that a glimpse of what might have been would be fun, where a petite woman is seen here who only signed up to learn a little about the treatment for her PhD training, or perhaps just wanted some minor stress therapy... She finds herself locked into a nursery thickly diapered, and told that she'll learn to be one of the cute 'babygirls' of the family, which sounds an awful lot like more than just a short treatment. Her 'short stay' turns into days, weeks, months, with frequent punishment, re-education to see her therapist as her 'Mommy', signing a form which she eventually learns was agreeing to be legally adopted, and even being taken out in public to restaurants and such in the role, flanked by her oppressive 'siblings' and treatment helpers, one of several family babies, and soon realising that there's going to be nothing short term or temporary about her stay...
sign me up for that treatment ;) i'd stay there forever
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