Incest 0000i-xiv FM 1 - William L. White

Sexual Closure 123
D. Social and sexual closure inevitably breaks the organizational
family into numerous cliques, dyads, and triads and results in
what Gregory Bateson has called “the infinite dance of shifting
coalitions” (Bateson 1967).
E. Sexual dynamics can rapidly get turned into power dynamics
and result in the sudden extrusion of staff members.
What was not included in the above case study, but easily could have
been, was the potential for violence. As an organization’s intimate relationships
become more intertwined, the potential for emotional destabilization
of the whole system and individual acts of violence increases.
Switching Partners: The Saga of Synanon. The history of Synanon is not
confidential. It has periodically made newspaper and magazine headlines
since its founding by Charles Dederich in 1958 as a therapeutic
community for the treatment of drug addiction. As Synanon’s organizational
family began to close, it evolved from a drug-abuse treatment
agency to a closed alternative community to a religious cult. Nineteen
years after founding Synanon, Dederich—the recovering alcoholic who
was hailed for pioneering a new approach for treating addicts—was arrested
in a state of extreme intoxication and charged with conspiracy to
commit murder and solicitation of murder. Investigative reporting and
court-seized tape recordings penetrated Synanon’s closed system and revealed
many of the company’s internal practices and changes. Anyone
interested in closed systems should study the literature on Synanon
(Yablonsky 1965; Mitchell, Mitchell, and Ofshe 1980).
The focus here will be on the period in Synanon history from 1975
through 1977. As Synanon moved closer to the status of a cult, Dederich
introduced a series of conformity and loyalty tests that drove out all but
the most committed Synanon members. The tests included requirements
that all members shave their heads and undergo vasectomies or abortions.
In late 1977, all of the couples living together in the Synanon community
were ordered to “change partners.”
Analysis. The Synanon story shows how the sexual culture in a closed
organization can become distorted and create a wide breach between societal
and organizational values. What is amazing in this story is not
Dederich’s demand that members change partners, but that over seven
hundred Synanon members complied with his request. Isolated from the