Psychiatry: The 300- Year Weekend

The techniques of talk-it-out psychotherapy have changed slowly but significantly since Sigmund Freud first stretched patients out on a couch. The Freudian “50-Minute Hour,” originally restricted to patient and analyst, has led to two-hour sessions of group therapy in which half a dozen or so patients, all with similar symptoms, get together with the same therapist. Now Los Angeles’ Dr. George R. Bach, 51, a Latvian-born Ph.D. psychologist, has pushed the trend —both in time and numbers—about as far as it can reasonably go. He has enlarged the cast to a dozen or more “participants,” and he keeps the group session going, marathon style, for 30 to 48 hours in what he calls “300-year weekends.” No one is allowed to leave the room except for bathroom needs or to get food and coffee from the dining-room buffet; the only sleep consists of naps taken in a corner.

Bait the Analyst. A typical group that met last month in Bach’s stylish sunken Hollywood living room included the doctor and his wife Peggy, the Negro manager of a nearby gas station, an industrial designer and his actress wife, a woman composer in her mid-20s and her boy friend, a young couple married only a year, a marriage counselor, a middle-aged couple, and two psychiatrists. All had been chosen because, although they had neurotic problems, they were not likely to flip under the rigors of their therapeutic talkathon.

The basic idea was to encourage all the participants to argue with each other, no holds barred, through the interminable weekend. The intensive intimacy forces them to recognize their real feelings and, as Dr. Bach describes it, helps them “bridge the split between their private and public lives.” Most people, he says, do not know how to handle “hostility within the context of love.” A fight, he insists, is a healthy and constructive thing, especially between husband and wife—provided the battlers understand each other.

Occasionally Dr. Bach had to step in and trigger the conversation. “John,” he said to the gas-station manager, “you’re not retreating into that phony shell of yours again, are you?” “I’ve said it all,” John complained. “I told you I’ve had no real education. The doctors here have more important things to say.” The industrial designer demurred: “What do they really know? You’ve given us more of your real feelings already than this psychiatrist. Take away his fancy vocabulary, and what have you left?” The actress chimed in: “Doctor, I feel you’ve been very pompous and aloof all the time.”

Occupational Hazard. Forced to take up his own defense, the psychiatrist wound up mumbling wearily about an unhappy marriage and conflict regarding his work. “I guess it’s an occupational hazard, being aloof all the time,” he said. “I’ve been trying to let more of me come alive, but it isn’t easy after 20 years.”

Bach has found that the patient-participants who find it hardest to drop their masks and profit from revealing their true natures are the professional people, especially the analysts. But a woman analyst wrote that “it was the best experience as a patient I ever had.” Like Bach, she had become a devotee of the long weekend of talk. “Later marathons with my own patients,” she added, “have been the most rewarding experiences of my career.”