Headgames

Two years ago, Erika Van Meir thought social therapy could change the world. Today, she calls it a cult.

Creative Loafing/May 21, 2003
By Steve Fennessy

For almost 15 years, the Atlanta Center for Social Therapy has quietly cultivated a thriving practice from its offices on Clairmont Road, just off I-85. Its two-column ad in the Yellow Pages under "Counselors-Human Relations" boasts that "We can help you create new relationships ... and a new life." Its director, Murray Dabby, says the center has helped hundreds over the years -- people from all walks of life, people who suffer from depression, marital woes, low self-esteem, substance abuse problems, sexual dysfunctions. In brochures and flyers, the center touts its "cutting edge" and "non-diagnostic" approaches.

On the day three years ago that she saw one of those flyers, Erika Van Meir was looking for a change. For the past five years, she and husband, Erwin, had been on the move. They'd lived for a time in Switzerland, where Erwin had worked as a cancer researcher. Now, finally, they had settled down: He was a professor of neurosurgery at Emory, their two daughters were approaching school age, and they'd bought a roomy house in Tucker. Erika Van Meir was finally free to resume her quest to become a licensed therapist. She'd finished the academic component years before; all that remained were the hours of professional supervision required by Georgia law.

She rang the Atlanta Center for Social Therapy and left a message. Within minutes, Dabby returned the call.

Almost immediately she felt a rapport with him. He was warm and friendly. They agreed that traditional therapies' habits of labeling clients -- depressive, anti-social, dependent, dysthymic, whatever -- could be stigmatizing. Social therapy, Dabby explained to her that day, didn't rely on that vocabulary. Instead, social therapy saw the client as a "performer" of his life, as someone who can take on a different "role" -- much as an actor learns a part -- and change destructive behaviors. Clients were even encouraged to take part in play readings in public, as part of a small independent theater run by social therapists. To Van Meir, who'd enjoyed acting as a child, the approach sounded compelling. Best of all, Dabby was willing to be her supervisor. Of course, she still had many questions, but they agreed it would be best if she attended a series of workshops at the center, just to get a feel for social therapy.

At the center, the therapists welcomed her warmly, treating her like they would an old friend. They smiled at her, thanked her for coming. She savored the attention. This, she thought, was Southern hospitality.

But the classes themselves puzzled her. There were therapists and clients together in the room, but it wasn't group therapy. Instead, it seemed to be some sort of philosophical discussion, about what she couldn't understand.

After the first few classes, a therapist called to tell her how much she enjoyed Van Meir's participation. Would she sign up for another one, the therapist asked. The next morning, another therapist called, thanking her for her participation and repeating the invitation in almost the same words -- "like it was from a script," Van Meir says now. This struck Van Meir as odd, especially considering that she'd hardly said a word in any of the classes.

"I felt left out because they were talking about a lot of concepts that I didn't understand," she recalls. "And they kept referring to this guy named Fred Newman, and I didn't know who he was."

By one measure, Fred Newman is a Renaissance man. He is a playwright, a director, an author, an entrepreneur, a political activist, a dynamic public speaker, and the founder of his own school of therapy. He lives in a townhouse in lower Manhattan and is ferried around in a luxury sedan. His followers adore him; his enemies loathe him. As it turns out, many of the latter once were the former.

Newman was born in 1934 and grew up in the tenements not far from Yankee Stadium. He served in the Army, then returned to New York where he attended City College, finally earning his doctorate in philosophy from Stanford. Returning to City College as a professor in the 1960s, he implemented an unusual grading system.

"I didn't want to participate in having young people sent over to Vietnam to be cannon fodder for a bunch of people who fight all kinds of wars for mythical reasons," he writes in The Myth of Psychology, a book published by Newman's vanity press, Castillo International. "So these young people would come into my class and I'd say something like, 'OK, let's get it straight here. Everyone's got an A. You've got an A whether you come or you go or you stay or you write or you don't write. Frankly, I don't care, I'm giving everybody an A here. Now if you want to talk about some philosophical issues, we can do that, and if you don't, that's fine, too.'"

Not surprisingly, Newman burned through teaching positions rapidly. In 1970, he took a test for a drug rehabilitation counselor with New York State's Narcotics Addiction Control Commission. He passed, and soon he was counseling inmates in the prison system. It was there that he says he first questioned the notion of addiction. And it was then, he said, his hunch that psychology was a "pseudo-science" was confirmed.

"[M]y belief [is] that bourgeois psychology is a myth -- that it is based on profound methodological errors, that it is essentially an intellectual and bourgeois methodological fraud," he said in a 1986 speech.

In response, Newman created "social therapy." More to the point, he assembled a gumbo of ideas from his intellectual heroes: Ludwig Wittgenstein; a long-dead Soviet psychologist named Lev Vygotsky; and, most importantly, Karl Marx. Newman himself has written tens of thousands of words on social therapy, and descriptions such as the following are typical:

"Social therapy does not try to help people to 'modify' their behavior. Rather, we help people to break out of their societally over-determined patterns and to become the active creators of their lives."

While Newman may hold mainstream psychology in contempt, it has treated social therapy with little more than indifference. "Our profession has a very laissez faire attitude toward fad psychotherapy," says Scott Lilienfeld, an associate professor of psychology at Emory and consulting editor of Skeptical Inquirer magazine. "There's this attitude of 'let a thousand flowers bloom.'" The result, Lilienfeld says, is a movement like social therapy, which to lay people sounds legitimate, but whose theoretical underpinnings are "complete gobbledygook."

As a Marxist, Newman has spent his career trying to create an alternative to capitalism. In the early 1970s, he founded the Centers for Change, a disparate collection of clinics, schools and meeting places in New York City for like-minded revolutionaries. It was at the Centers for Change that Newman first began practicing social therapy.

In 1974, he and his followers forged an alliance with Lyndon LaRouche, the perennial presidential hopeful and, some say, fanatical cult leader. Although once seen as an ardent leftist, by the early 1970s, LaRouche was starting to weave the conspiracy theories for which he'd become famous in his many campaigns. That might explain why the alliance between LaRouche and Newman lasted only a few months. Critics, however, say the merger was a cynical attempt by Newman to learn LaRouche's leadership techniques -- techniques Newman himself would adopt and use later on.

On his own again, Newman quickly formed the International Workers Party, whose goal was to spark an "international socialist revolution." According to the Anti-Defamation League, the party recruited members under the guise of social therapy, and therapists were often IWP members.

By 1979, however, Newman had abandoned the IWP and created the New Alliance Party. At its forefront was Lenora Fulani, the black radical who in 1987 led a New Alliance Party contingent to Libya to meet with Moammar Qaddafi and protest the U.S. bombing of that country. A year later, she got her name on the presidential ballot in all 50 states, an organizational feat that resulted in about 200,000 votes nationwide. Four years later, she was on the ballot again, raising $4 million in her second presidential bid.

But for the next several years, the party drifted. A defector from within the New Alliance Party told federal authorities that the party took advantage of the government by using matching funds to spend not on outside vendors, like public relations firms and ad agencies, but on groups connected to social therapy.

In 1997, the Federal Election Commission ordered Fulani's 1992 campaign to repay $117,269 to the U.S. Treasury. The repayment was for, among other things, $73,750 for campaign expenses to individuals that couldn't be traced.

By that time, though, Newman and Fulani had turned their attention to the Reform Party; their lobbying helped put Ross Perot on the California ballot in 1996. And in 2000, Fulani threw her support behind the presidential bid of Pat Buchanan, irrefutable proof that politics makes for bizarre bedfellows. In interviews, both Newman and Fulani justified their alliance with the arch-conservative by explaining that it was a call for political reform, not an endorsement of Buchanan's platform. Newman told The Washington Post that if it was Buchanan's social positions that got him elected, "I would pack my bags and go to Canada."

The Anti-Defamation League has long had Newman in its crosshairs for his comments on Jews. Newman, Jewish himself, has been quoted as saying the Jewish people sold out after the Holocaust. "The contract with Jewish people, with the Jewish leadership, has been: 'We're going to let you live. We're going to let you survive. We're going to make sure it never happens to you again as long as you function as the stormtroopers of decadent capitalism against people of color the world over!'"

These days, aside from Newman, Fulani is the most public face of social therapy and Newman's myriad nonprofits in New York City. Those interests include the All-Stars project, which promotes the arts to inner-city youths, and the Castillo Theater, where Newman's own plays are staged. And of course, there is the East Side Center for Social Therapy, the therapeutic arm of Newman's empire. At the same address is the East Side Institute for Short Term Psychotherapy, which bills itself as an "international training and research center for new approaches to human development and community building." Outside New York, there are a handful of social therapy centers -- including Boston, Atlanta, San Francisco, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C.

Politically, much of social therapy's activity is now devoted to the Committee for a United Independent Party, whose website says that it "develops strategies and provides leadership training for America's growing independent movement. Our mission is to transform the political culture, making it democratic, citizen activistic and developmental."

In Atlanta, the local organizer is Murray Dabby, director of the Atlanta Center for Social Therapy.

Erika Van Meir started out wanting to be a sociologist. She even won a full ride to Northwestern's Ph.D. program in sociology. But the work was too academic, too detached from reality. Volunteer work at a battered woman's shelter outside Chicago convinced her to abandon sociology and instead study to become a therapist. She met Erwin when she was getting her master's degree in San Diego.

Now, in Atlanta, she was thrilled that Dabby had agreed to act as her supervisor, putting her that much closer to being fully licensed. The agreement the two struck was typical for the profession: She would have a place to see clients and would discuss her cases with Dabby. In return, she'd hand over to the center 60 percent of the fees she earned.

Quickly, Van Meir's life became wrapped up in the center. There were her own clients, of course, and the frequent meetings with Dabby. But as a student of post-modern approaches to psychology, she also felt obliged to learn about social therapy. In the evenings, after putting her children to bed, she'd read Newman's books and essays, as well as the writings of Vygotsky. If the concepts frustrated her, she'd look around at the other social therapists, who seemed so confident, so well-adjusted, so happy. They gathered at each other's houses to talk politics and psychology. They e-mailed and called each other practically every day. Their life was the center. It was as if it were a club, and the price of admission was time and study.

But as exclusive as the club seemed, it was also constantly attracting new members. Van Meir recalls joining other social therapists on pleasant weekend mornings in Little Five Points. There, they solicited donations to something called the Atlanta Independent Theatre. Although their pitch was scripted, Van Meir was surprised to find she was good at approaching strangers. "Hi," she'd start out, "are you interested in theater?" She'd then explain she was part of a group starting up an independent theater -- a place that wouldn't be beholden to corporate interests or government money. "It just clicked," she says. "I was talking to these interesting people and having these conversations and I really believed what I was saying."

If she couldn't squeeze $5 or $10 out of someone, she'd settle for a name and address. In that way, social therapy could expand its network even further.

The Atlanta Independent Theatre, Van Meir realized, wasn't a place. It owned no stage anywhere. Instead, the center rented out space at, say, a local church and advertised the event haphazardly (including a listing in Creative Loafing). Clients, clients' spouses, therapists -- all would be cast. They'd sit up on the stage and read their parts. All the plays were written by Fred Newman. Once, in a study group at the center, Van Meir wondered aloud how a theater devoted to the writings of just one man could be "independent." The group leader, she recalls, was so furious that tears welled in her eyes. She turned on Van Meir, telling her it made her sick to hear someone criticize such a "wonderful, benevolent" man.

Over time, Van Meir began to feel she understood what social therapy is. "Basically, social therapy says it's never too late to initiate growth, that people can develop and do new things at any age. That you're not just stuck with your personality. That people can grow and try new things by participating in a supportive group. These people complete you in ways where you're deficient."

To Van Meir, it sounded great. But she was having trouble seeing how social therapy was applied in practice.

"Sessions would start with the lead therapist saying nothing," she says. "Sometimes you'd sit there for 10 minutes and the therapist wouldn't say anything. And you'd wait for someone to start talking. Finally, someone would start talking just to break the ice, and they'd talk for 45 minutes about nothing. There was no sort of effort to get things moving in a meaningful way. A couple times I tried to do that and they told me, 'Stop rescuing people. You've got to let the group build itself.'

"It was kind of weird because on the one hand they'd talk about how there's no hierarchy in social therapy, but on the other hand you'd see that if there were people who got out of line and started expressing individualistic kinds of notions, there was a hierarchy. There was definitely a therapist in control."

The Atlanta Center for Social Therapy's website expands on that: "The social therapist does not possess the true interpretation or explanation of why a client feels the way he or she feels, or does what he or she does -- an underlying truth which the client must come to understand in order to solve the problem. The social therapist is more like a theater director who helps the client to create, along with other people, new performances of affection, anger, anxiety, depression, desire, excitement, grief, happiness, humiliation, impotence, panic -- new forms of emotional life."

Typical discussions between a supervisor and a therapist-in-training are rather mundane. The trainee discusses her clients with the supervisor, who points out different approaches. They map out strategies together. Imagine an intern discussing an X-ray with an attending physician.

For Van Meir and Dabby, that's how it worked -- for a while. But as Van Meir describes it now, something odd began happening not long after starting at the center. Instead of keeping the conversation on the cases before them, Dabby would allow -- even encourage -- Van Meir to talk about herself.

After a while, she says, "it seemed we were talking a lot more about why I saw the clients as I did and what that said about me." By the end of their discussion, they'd be talking about their childhoods, or their relationships, or their home lives. Weighty questions -- about her role as a therapist, a wife, a mother, a daughter -- would be left hanging at the session's end. At night, Van Meir would follow up with a phone call or an e-mail, and Dabby would respond in kind. Conversations might last hours; e-mails take up page after page.

For Van Meir, it felt like she herself was in therapy. Their sessions made her question herself and the choices she'd made. Everything was in doubt. At the same time, she found herself dependent on those sessions, confessing to Dabby things she'd never told anyone before. "He seemed very safe," she says. "He was calm and reassuring."

But outside his office, the stress was showing. At home, she'd hide controversial literature about Newman from her husband. She'd wake up in the middle of the night, stricken with an anxiety she couldn't explain. Once, she confronted Dabby with some of the negative press she'd dug up on Newman. He brushed it off as attacks from Newman's political enemies. But at the same time, he seemed offended and hurt that she'd even asked.

"He said, 'I know you care about me and wouldn't want to hurt me. I think it is important that you learn how you affect others.'"

Van Meir got the same treatment when she raised questions to other social therapists. "They would say, 'It's not that you ask questions; it's how.' So I would change. I would change my tone of voice or insert things like, 'with all due respect.' I wasn't really being myself."

But at the time, the center -- and especially her sessions with Dabby -- gave her a sense of inclusion she found hard to resist. And Dabby himself kept bringing up Newman, and how she should see him in person in New York. One day, Van Meir announced she was interested in going. Within hours, it seemed, her itinerary had been arranged.

In New York, the topic of Newman's speech was "Giving in the culture of getting." But his talk wandered, and Van Meir couldn't help but think about the $150 or so she'd just spent for the two-hour session. Around her, though, everyone else seemed mesmerized. She found their obeisance unnerving.

"Nobody asked any questions. Nobody. They were like children. I felt like they would have done anything he'd asked. Like if he'd told them to take off all their clothes and go walk down the street in the freezing cold, they'd do it."

On the subway, Van Meir started grilling her traveling companion, a social therapist from Atlanta. But the answers were no help. "Why don't you just jump in?" the woman told her. It was then that she first began thinking social therapy was a cult, and Newman its leader.

But asked why she didn't leave, Van Meir becomes uneasy. Her eyes redden. There were several reasons, she explains. She was desperate for the supervision necessary to get her license. She was energized by the people she'd met -- people who seemed alive and committed and passionate. Most of all, she'd come to rely on her heart-to-hearts with Dabby. So in the end, she figured that despite whatever misgivings she had about Fred Newman's intentions, social therapy itself had merits. Indeed, instead of leaving, Van Meir actually immersed herself further in social therapy: She signed up to attend classes in New York City. She would become a social therapist.

Looking back at 2001, Van Meir sees a different person. Every spare hour was spent in social therapy activities. She took part in play readings. She attended salons at the homes of clients and therapists. She hit up strangers in Little Five Points for money. She even once wrote out a check -- for more than $100, she recalls -- to an emissary from social therapy headquarters in New York to come down and critique their fundraising skills. She remembers seeing him sit in the shade in Little Five Points on a hot day and thinking, "This is strange -- I'm paying money to someone from social therapy so I can better raise money for social therapy."

She also traveled to New York herself -- twice in 2001 -- to attend classes with Newman himself. The classes cost hundreds of dollars, not to mention the plane fare. To Van Meir, it was just the Atlanta center, writ large: The talkative ones dominated; the withdrawn ones became even more quiet. The conflict within her started boiling up again.

That summer, she returned to New York for a weekend she recalls as "horrifying." An Atlanta client had come along, a person the now fully-licensed Van Meir recognized as depressed and fragile. A weekend with Newmanites, she worried, could make that person suicidal. She sought out Dabby, but he seemed too busy to talk to her. Finally, on a train ride to a retreat upstate, she took a seat next to him. But across from them sat another social therapy client, and so all Van Meir could do was sob softly.

At the retreat, Newman invited followers to talk about how social therapy had changed their lives. Van Meir watched as, one by one, Newmanites stood before the group and professed how the community had saved them. One broke down. Another cursed his former therapists who had "fucked up his father." Van Meir was reminded of a childhood visit to a fundamentalist Bible camp. She turned to the person next to her and asked, "It this rehearsed or is this really real?" A polite smile was her only answer.

Back in Atlanta, Van Meir started speaking out again. She argued with Dabby and other therapists. After one outburst, she was pulled off a clinical supervision group at the center. At night, she'd phone her mother, in tears.

"I told her, 'It sounds to me like the Amish. It sounds like they're shunning you,'" recalls her mother, Linda Goldberg.

But it wasn't until she hosted her daughter for a visit that Goldberg realized how bad it had become. "I was horrified. She had lost weight; she was losing her hair. It was then that the dam broke."

Dabby, Goldberg realized, had become a sort of father figure to her daughter. "Erika was challenging authority, asking probing questions as any good therapist would."

But without even realizing it, Van Meir had begun to engineer her exit. She confided to colleagues outside social therapy about her experience. One reminded Van Meir of how she used to work with abused women.

"So when will you know you've had enough abuse?" the colleague asked. "How much do you want to take?"

Van Meir and a social therapy client, Phyllis Shulman, also became friends. Although never a client of Van Meir's, they had seen each other around the offices. In fact, Shulman had been the client who'd sat across from Dabby and Van Meir on that train trip in New York. Quickly, the two realized they shared the same concerns.

"I had been making excuses and thinking it was my imagination," Shulman says. "She confirmed what I had tried to dismiss for years."

Over the holidays in December 2001, Dabby went out of town. The vacation from social therapy cleared Van Meir's mind. She was also emboldened by Shulman, who had simply called the center one day and announced that, after four years of social therapy, she was quitting. Van Meir conducted some Web searches and began reading testimonials from former Newmanites. She e-mailed some of them, talked to cult experts, and the doubts she'd tried to hide for so long were validated.

Not long after, on a cold and damp Sunday evening, Van Meir made the 10-minute drive to the Atlanta Center for Social Therapy for the last time. She let herself in with her key, made her way to her makeshift office, and emptied her clients' files into a garbage bag. Even though her mind was made up, she found herself hurrying, worried that another therapist might show up and make her second-guess herself all over again. But the office was quiet. At the door, she took a last look around, hoisted the bag in her hand and walked out into the drizzle.

State law requires that virtually anyone practicing therapy in Georgia be licensed. In turn, the licenses oblige therapists to follow a strict code of ethics, enforced by a regulating body called the Georgia Composite Board of Professional Counselors, Social Workers and Marriage and Family Therapists.

The ethics code outlines several practices that would constitute "unprofessional conduct." One of them is "participating in dual relationships with clients that create a conflict of interest which could impair the licensee's professional judgment, harm the client, or compromise the therapy." Another is "knowingly withholding information about accepted and prevailing treatment alternatives that differ from those provided by the licensee."

Currently, the Composite Board is investigating complaints lodged against both Dabby and another top therapist at the center, Rachelle Moore. Beyond confirming the existence of the investigation, however, the secretary of state's office declined comment.

Helen Coale is a clinical social worker in Atlanta and the author of The Vulnerable Therapist, a book about ethical relationships between therapists and their clients. She also acts as a consultant to Van Meir -- sort of a professional sounding board -- and so has heard Van Meir's story in depth.

Coale says the Atlanta center has engaged in "such clear, flagrant violations, they're appalling." For instance, as Van Meir's supervisor, Dabby should have restricted his interactions with Van Meir to a strictly professional level, Coale says.

"You cannot have some kind of overlapping relationship," she says. Coale also believes the center is failing to alert clients what they're getting into.

"It's called informed consent. You're supposed to tell clients what kind of theoretical orientation you use, what kinds of other choices might be available to them."

Coale sees no sinister agenda at the center. But she says what goes on there crosses ethical lines.

"I don't think there's intentional damaging of clients. It's not in the same category as a therapist who seduces clients and has sex with them. This is a different kind of seduction."

Rick Ross, a national cult expert and frequent expert witness in cult-related trials, has harsh words for Newman and social therapy.

"Is it ethical for a therapist to pull a client from a professional relationship into working for the Newman operation? These [clients] are vulnerable; they're coming to therapy for a reason. They have problems they want to work out. They're not coming to join a movement or embrace the philosophy of a neopolitical guru or self-described Marxist."

Although he stops short of calling social therapy a cult, Ross says its practitioners are, by definition, in conflict.

"I see disturbing parallels between what has been considered a cult -- that is, a group that's personality driven and controlled by an authoritarian leader with no accountability -- and the Newman group," he says.

"You've got a dilemma for the people in Atlanta who are Newmanites. What takes precedence in their life is social therapy and Fred Newman. If push comes to shove, and they have to make a choice, their loyalties are with Mr. Newman, and that takes priority over their consideration of other matters."

The state Composite board that regulates counselors has the power to strip a therapist of his license to practice. This is what Van Meir and Shulman want.

"Honestly, I don't even care about their politics," Shulman says. "I don't think they should be practicing therapy here -- well, anywhere, really, but I'm more concerned with Atlanta. They're con artists is what they are. Totally deceptive and manipulative."

Says Van Meir: "In my opinion, it is a cult. And I don't mean by that a bunch of a crazy, long-haired lunatics living in a commune. I think they're very, very sophisticated -- a modern-day cult."

In the cramped foyer of the Atlanta Center for Social Therapy, brochures and wrinkled magazines cover the desks and end tables. Newman's wizened face peers out of photographs. Upstairs, in the sunny group therapy room, are the requisite props of the therapist's office -- the paintings, the tissue boxes, the plants.

Dabby apologizes for the uncomfortable chairs as we begin the first of two 90-minute meetings. He is as Van Meir described him -- earnest, interested, self-deprecatingly funny. With his salt-and-pepper beard and stylish glasses, he could easily play the role of a college professor in a Newman play. A New York native, Dabby's voice sounds a bit like a younger Woody Allen.

Unlike Newman, Dabby knew early on he wanted to be a therapist. He'd already been a social worker for seven years when he first heard of Newman in the late 1970s, and attended one of his talks. The field of mental health was trending toward finding biological causes for mental illness, Dabby says -- an approach that bothered him. In Newman, he saw a kinship.

"Fred was talking about the impact of the institutions that fund mental health, as well as the academic institutions that shape what we study," Dabby says. "What he was promoting was the need to create institutions that were independent financially so that you could discover something else."

A child of the '60s himself, Dabby also shared many of Newman's political beliefs. And over time, he became one of Newman's top lieutenants, finally coming to Atlanta more than a decade ago to establish a social therapy center here.

Social therapy, he says, is a simple concept.

"People are creative producers of their lives. In contrast to the main approaches to psychology, which see people as passing through developmental stages, social therapy sees human beings as producing the stages in which they develop, in which they grow. We are producers, creative performers of our lives. We create stages wherever we go. There are different kinds of plays and performances. Some are scripted. Some are improvised. Some are bad scripts, like the war in Iraq. Some are so-so scripts. Some are developmental improvisations that help make it possible for people to develop and grow."

I ask how performance -- which by its definition seems to be a contrivance and not really genuine -- can lead to growth.

"Some people see performance as contrived; I don't. I see acting, faking it, as contrived. But there's a distinction between that and creatively finding new ways to do things in your life, whether it's talking in a relationship, writing a book, speaking to your boss at work, finding a new way to promote an idea or ask for a raise."

The theater, he says, is a natural extension of the social therapy approach. And yes, he says, the theater is overtly political; it stages almost exclusively plays by Newman, an avowed Marxist.

"We do a lot of Newman plays partly because they raise philosophical questions," he says. "They're very interesting plays from that vantage point."

He rattles off a few names. One play is called Sessions with Jesus -- a play about Christ in therapy. He goes into crisis after Osama bin Laden asks him for forgiveness. "It's a hysterically funny play and a very powerful look at different philosophical positions on therapy and war."

Clients take part, he says, only because they find out about the plays at the center. But, Dabby says, he doesn't "encourage it or discourage it."

"I think you've got to find out what it is. And then make your own decisions and judgments. People aren't sheep. I don't believe in clients being vulnerable sheep. If clients were vulnerable sheep they'd follow every therapist and be cured in three sessions. People are very stubborn and they have their own way of making choices."

That notion of free will is the root of much of the controversy surrounding social therapy. Even though Van Meir herself wasn't in therapy, she talks about being so caught up in the center that the choice to leave sometimes felt as if it weren't hers. And Shulman, the client who finally left, says when she once told her group she was thinking of leaving, a therapist said it was something the "group should decide."

Dabby won't comment specifically about Van Meir, citing confidentiality. "She has the right to say anything she wants to say about me. I'm bound by my standards, and they're appropriate."

Of the notion of informed consent, Dabby says he is up front with clients at the first session about his approach. "I believe in informed consent. I believe in making it clear about what you're doing and how you're doing it and what the process is. There are some -- an unnamed person -- who insisted that what I needed to do is give them every single attack article, and that would be informed consent. That's not informed consent to me."

Dabby says ethical guidelines regarding dual relationships are there to prevent the exploitation of a client by the therapist. But many in the profession, he says, carry that notion of professional detachment too far. "People want someone who really cares," he says -- not someone who turns off the sympathy after 50 minutes. "That notion of connection, that kind of intimacy, is important in my work as a therapist."

When I tell Dabby that a complaint against him has prompted a state investigation, he says it is the first he has heard. But he is confident the complaint will lead nowhere.

"I know how I practice," he says. "People complain."

Social therapy certainly has its success stories. One of them is Nanette Harris, who for 30 years has suffered from depersonalization disorder, a psychological condition that makes her sometimes feel as if she's in a waking dream, outside herself. Her hearing is muffled; her vision is altered. "It's like you're looking through a fishbowl," she says. For years, she was afraid to drive and too incapacitated to hold down steady work. By 1991, after trying out different therapies and therapists, she was seriously considering suicide.

Today, Harris has a part-time job at a dentist's office. Although she says she still suffers from shyness, and still weathers dark periods, she is forthright and funny. She is quite serious, however, about one thing -- she believes social therapy saved her life.

"It changes you in ways that are deep changes. It changes you profoundly," she says. "I used to always want to kill myself. I didn't want to live. But in social therapy, it takes you out of yourself in a way. I got the message that I wasn't just a mentally ill person within the psychiatric community."

Once a week for years, Harris sat in on group therapy sessions at the Atlanta center. At first, she was turned off by the approach. She wasn't used to accusatory questions from the people ostensibly trying to help her -- questions like, 'Why can't you drive? Why can't you hold down a job?'

"I was pissed off. I wanted them to coddle me."

Over time, Harris came to understand the message of social therapy: If you can't do something, act as if you can. Soon enough, you will become the person you are portraying.

"It works," Harris says. A social therapist "relates to people like they can do more than they think they can. And they rise to the occasion. It gives you confidence."

A cool wind has kicked up in Manhattan as Van Meir and I make our way through Greenwich Village. She wants to show me Newman's house. With us is Marina Ortiz, who has been a thorn in Newman's side since 1990, when she left social therapy and began speaking out against it across New York.

For years, Ortiz has maintained a website that includes dozens of photos of Newmanites from around the country, tax filings from Newman's nonprofit centers, and testimonials and speeches from former social therapy clients.

After Van Meir left social therapy, it didn't take her long to come across Ortiz's name. And although the two have talked often by phone over the past months, and e-mailed even more regularly, this is the first time they've met.

We head south, then west, past the playgrounds and antique shops, through the steam underfoot, navigating the odd angles and narrow streets of the west Village.

At the southern tip of 8th Avenue, Ortiz pauses and looks around. "Where is it?" she says to no one in particular. She spies an old woman walking by.

"Excuse me," she says, "where's Bank Street?"

"Right over there," the woman says, pointing south. "See the sign?"

Five minutes later, we're standing in the doorway of Newman's four-story townhouse. They ask me to take their picture. Van Meir steals a nervous glance up at the windows, but they're covered with yellow blinds.

Across the street, Ortiz explains how social therapy changed her.

"When I went in, it was for depression and anxiety," Ortiz says. "When I came out, I was obsessive."

I ask Van Meir if she considers herself obsessed. She bristles at the word. "I'm determined," she says. "I'm trying hard to balance it and not drive my family crazy."

Later that evening, we're sitting 20 rows back from the stage at Town Hall when Lenora Fulani walks to the podium. Her hair is cut fashionably short, and her pumpkin orange sundress seems to glow in the light. Fred Newman, she tells the thousand or so seated before her, is a man who asks questions that some consider subversive -- hard questions like what kind of leaders do we want in government. A conversation with him, she says, takes us "outside the box of conventional wisdom." Fred Newman, she says, is "someone I love and admire more deeply than I could ever express."

From stage left, Newman finally enters. The crowd applauds warmly. He shuffles slowly, like a man who's fallen before. His white hair hangs from his head in long wisps, and his moustache is thick and bushy. He plops down in the brown upholstered chair and looks around, squinting into the light.

"I can't see you," he says, and the crowd laughs.

For the next hour, with Fulani beside him, Newman speaks without interruption. The topic of his talk -- "Can there be honesty in a world without truth?" -- seems at once profound and banal. But for an old man with kidney problems, he oozes charisma.

"What's going on here in the world today?" he asks no one in particular. "Well, that's a tough one. ... From my point of view, as I understand it, as I see it, what's going on is that the world, the whole world, all of us, all of the six, seven billion people, we are collectively going through a profound social transformation -- what some people like to call, in fancy language, a paradigm shift. The way we see the world, the very way which we see the world, the way we see each other, the way we see how things are happening, is going through a shift."

The crowd listens politely. He goes on, talking about the Enlightenment, how man has tried to understand the workings of the universe through scientific and measured ways, how town clocks in 14th- century Europe were practically worshipped, how "new humanism" meant that people would create tools necessary to "re-order nature 100 percent clearly, accurately."

It's an elaborate set-up for what's next.

"Perhaps it is the case," he says in his Bronx accent, "that this universe in which we live, in all its complexity -- its physical complexity, its social complexity, its political complexity, its psychological complexity -- maybe, maybe, just possible -- that the world is too complex for us mere mortals, us human beings, to fully understand. Maybe there are things which we are never going to understand."

On a practical level, he says, it does no good to decide who's right and who's wrong, whether it's a feuding family or it's the Palestinians and Israelis. "What about the possibility of both the Palestinians and the Israelis being right?" he asks. From the back, an enthusiastic "OK" sounds out.

"Truth," he concludes, "is a dying concept. We're gonna have to figure out how to go forward without it. And to tell you the truth" -- much laughter -- "I think we'll do a lot better without it. I don't think we need it any longer. In fact, I think it's a hindrance. Can there be honesty in a world without truth? My answer -- in a word -- is 'Only.' Only in a world without truth can there be honesty."

A few more words, a promise that "I love you all," and he's done. The crowd applauds warmly and files out into the rain. Van Meir is chuckling. "Well," she asks, "what'd you think?"