Alcoholics were at the front of the line. “Among all the predisposing causes of nervousness, the first place must be assigned to drunkenness,” Worcester wrote. “No other source of mental and nervous disease can be pointed to with anything like the same certainty.” Twenty-two of the 178 patients treated during the first year of the program were drunks. The goal of the therapists in the church clinic was ambitious. “The desire for drink should be totally destroyed, the will power strengthened, and new associations built up,” Dr. Isador H. Coriat explained.13
Psychology was still a new science when Worcester launched his experiment at Emmanuel Church, but interest in it was not limited to PhDs. A clock maker, Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, had launched a thriving popular movement when he opened a clinic in Portland, Maine, back in 1859. “The trouble is in the mind, for the body is only the house for the mind to dwell in. . . . Therefore, if your mind had been deceived by some invisible enemy into a belief, you have put it into the form of a disease, with or without your knowledge . . .,” he wrote. “I correct the wrong impression and establish the Truth, and the Truth is the cure.” Quimby used the power of suggestion to counter the false belief that his patients were sick. During therapy sessions, he told them that they possessed the power to feel better and that power would eventually cure them completely.14
Quimby often hypnotized his patients before making his suggestions, but this wasn’t always necessary. “Instead of telling me that I was not sick, he sat beside me, and explained what my sickness was, how I got into that condition,” one patient explained. “The general effect of these quiet sittings with him was to lighten up the mind, so that one came in time to understand the troublesome experiences and problems of the past in the light of his clear and convincing explanations.” Suggestion was not going to cure cancer, but Quimby was successful in allaying depression and other mental problems in many people. He claimed that he had treated twelve thousand men, women, and children during his first six years of practice. His ideas were even more successful, launching a mental healing boom that saw the establishments of schools to prepare therapists for a public clamoring for relief.15
Soon people were discussing the possibility that “mental therapeutics” might be an effective treatment for alcoholism. One was Henry Wood, a successful businessman who had overcome a severe depression by practicing the precepts of what its followers began to call “New Thought.” New Thought was similar to Christian Science in declaring that people could be cured of illness without medical assistance, although it was not as doctrinaire or as hostile to doctors as the religion founded by Mary Baker Eddy in 1879. Wood was just beginning a successful career as an author and advocate of New Thought when Keeleyism took off. In a magazine article, he revealed what he believed to be the real secret of the Keeley Institute. “It is that the so-called bi-chloride of gold cure is in reality unconscious MIND CURE,” he wrote.16
Wood argued that alcoholics were neither evil nor diseased. They were people who had lost their way. He said that the drunk believed his “illusive and sensuous lower personality” was his true self. He did not recognize that the “sensual claimant, which has held him in thraldom, is a falsity and a counterfeit.” The Keeley Institute was successful because it made it possible for drunks to recognize the “divine image” in themselves. The gold cure was the key to the process but not because it actually cured. “It is the belief in the gold—with other accompanying factors—which produces the result,” Wood wrote. The alcoholic “comes full of hope, faith and positive expectation of being healed by the mysterious infusion.” It was reinforced by the new relationships he forged at the institute:
He is trusted, and his self-respect is not only preserved, but greatly confirmed. New ideals flash vividly before him. He is a man, and no longer a slave. Visions of future usefulness and happiness dawn upon and gradually overspread his mental horizon. The divine “image” in him begins to assert its prerogative, and at length he discovers this as his intrinsic ego.
Gold, he said, was a placebo, but its effect was profound because it made possible a change in the thinking of the alcoholic. “The most radical mental readjustments are below the surface of consciousness, and they are powerful and lasting,” Wood said.17
Wood observed that there was another type of mental therapeutics that was being used to treat alcoholics. In France and in some places in the United States, doctors and other healers were using hypnosis to curb the appetite for alcohol and other drugs. “Many interesting accounts are given of cases in which, after the use of hypnotic suggestion for a few weeks, the subject acquires a strong aversion to alcoholic liquors so that he not only will not but cannot take them,” he wrote. Wood believed that the Keeley Cure was vastly superior to hypnosis. “[H]ypnotism implies mental servitude on the part of the subject, and in a deep sense it does not set him free,” he wrote. Recovery must be achieved from the inside out: the drunk must want to be sober. “The true mind healer must have an overflowing love for his weaker brother, and instead of crowding him up and putting artificial props underneath, must put him upon his own feet,” Wood said.18
Quimby, Wood, and other advocates of the New Thought were pioneers in developing what Wood described as a “psychological or spiritual science.” They were not alone. Sigmund Freud was also frustrated by the efforts of medical men to reduce all forms of illness to physical causes, attributing hysteria and other aberrant behavior to brain lesions and other “somatic” origins. When Wood’s article on Keeley appeared, the thirty-six-year-old Freud was establishing himself as a psychoanalyst in Vienna. Like Wood, he recognized the limits of hypnosis. It could be useful to help patients recover memories that might offer a clue to the origin of their problems, from stuttering and facial tics to loss of language, paralyzing fears, and uncontrollable compulsions. But some people couldn’t be hypnotized, and Freud had discovered that letting his patients talk freely was more productive. He was already well on his way to developing the theory that would become the basis of modern psychology. He would publish his masterwork, The Interpretation of Dreams, in 1900.
At the Emmanuel clinic, there was hope that the use of therapeutic suggestion would be especially effective with alcoholics. A therapist described the steps he took to prepare a patient for his suggestions:
[T]he patient is seated in the comfortable morris chair before the fire, which I take care by this time to have burning low—is taught by rhythmic breathing and by visual imagery to relax the muscles, and is led into the silence of the mind by tranquilizing suggestion.
Once the patient had been made receptive, the therapist delivered his message. In a 1909 article in Ladies’ Home Journal, Worcester presented an example of the kind of suggestion he gave alcoholics:
The habit that has enslaved you so long is beginning to yield and in a short time it will cease to trouble you. The desire for whisky and for every kind of liquor is fading out of your consciousness and soon that appetite will die within you. You do not need liquor and you do not desire it. You do not wish to live a drunkard’s life nor to die a drunkard’s death. The thought is horrible to you. Henceforth, the sight, smell and taste of whisky will be very disagreeable to you. It will be associated in your mind with sickness, with shame and infirmity, with every sad and miserable experience of your life. . . . You desire now to be the man God wishes you to be, a man your family can love and respect, and on whom your friends can look with satisfaction. . . . You are not fighting this battle alone. God is with you. He will support you and strengthen you and will not let you fail.
The suggestion, delivered in a low, reassuring voice by a trusted minister, must have been enormously encouraging to a shaky and discouraged alcoholic.19
Worcester did not depend on words alone. Experience taught him that he could succeed only with drunks who wanted help and were willing to seek total abstinence for life. He also learned that he could only make progress with sober alcoholics, so he made his patients promise not to drink during the first week of treat
ment. At first, alcoholics were treated like other patients. After their session with the minister, which lasted between fifteen minutes and an hour, the drunks had to get by until their next appointment with the support they received from a weekly health class. The health classes were important: the doctors and ministers gave encouraging lectures on mental, physical, and spiritual health; later, there was a reception for the 250 to 500 members of the audience where people were encouraged to share positive news about themselves and their illnesses.
But the ministers soon realized the drunks needed more support. They began to meet with newcomers on a daily basis, and the length of treatment was extended to one year. They also sat down with members of the drunk’s family in an effort to help them understand that alcoholism was an illness that could be cured. The church’s social service department helped jobless alcoholics find new employment. By the end of 1908, Worcester and his colleagues had helped forty-four alcoholics get sober. The number of those who remained abstinent is unknown, but “our successes have been far more frequent than our failures,” Worcester wrote, looking back over more than twenty years of treating drunks.20
One of the most important sources of support for the recovering alcoholics was a new church organization. In the spring of 1910, Worcester announced in the parish newsletter that Ernest Jacoby, a church member who was a successful rubber merchant, had started a club “for men and women who are struggling to escape from the slavery of drunkenness.” The goal of the club was to “remind men of their good resolutions” and “to surround them with good influences and to supply them with good motives.” The club provided a variety of services to help the drunk get back on his feet. Jacoby explained:
We go to his home, his friends, his environment. Perhaps his case is one which requires a doctor. His work may be unsuited to him or he may be out of work. We try to get him a new position, or secure work for him.21
The Jacoby Club resembled a settlement house by providing the services that helped its members find their place in society. The Jacoby Club also put alcoholics to work helping other drunks. At one level, this was an expression of the Emmanuel movement’s spiritual goal. “‘Saved thyself, save others,’” Worcester wrote, quoting Buddha. There was also a belief that the sober alcoholic could communicate with a fellow drunk better than others because he had experienced addiction and had overcome it. Most important, however, was the fact that working with drunks helped keep men sober. The Jacoby Club advertised itself as “A Club for Men to Help Themselves by Helping Others.” It required every member to take personal responsibility for at least one other person. A newcomer was given a small booklet with the club constitution and a place for his name and the name of his “Special Brother.” The Special Brother or “stepbrother” was expected to “win the confidence of his new charge, be his friend in everything, look after him in man to man fashion, and without any air of patronage, in a word be his chum and his helper.” The club membership was not limited to alcoholics and included men like Jacoby who were motivated by their desire to help. As a result, a stepbrother wasn’t necessarily an alcoholic. However, all the recovering drunks became Special Brothers.22
Beginning with six members in 1909, the Jacoby Club enrolled over five hundred by the end of 1913, a solid majority of whom were alcoholics. The club met at the church on Saturdays, but members were welcome to gather on other nights. In September 1913, the club established a new headquarters in “cozy rooms” with a “cheery” atmosphere. It was furnished with “reading tables, comfortable chairs, books, magazines and musical instruments.” During the summer, the group met at a spot on the Charles River that offered “all kinds of sports and games.” Club membership nearly doubled over the next several years, partly as a result of newspaper stories and paid advertising. After it incorporated, the club used its annual report as a promotional tool by releasing it as a pamphlet. The 1913–1914 report was titled The Story of the Lonesome Man; the next year, it was called Men Who Have Won. By the end of 1916, the club claimed to have enrolled fourteen hundred; at least seven hundred were identified as problem drinkers.23
Courtenay Baylor joined the Jacoby Club soon after he sought help for his drinking problem. He went on to become one of Emmanuel Church’s greatest successes. After working with Worcester for a couple of years, he quit his job as an insurance salesman and became a counselor in the church’s social service department. He worked with hundreds of alcoholics and is generally considered the first recovered alcoholic to be paid for it. Baylor did not have a college degree, but he had the benefit of Worcester’s education and his own experience. He also possessed a great physical attribute. “He had a soothing, beautiful voice that lulled you but at the same time gave you confidence. It was a voice you could trust,” an admirer, Dwight Anderson, recalled. In a photo, Baylor sits confidently with legs crossed, wearing a well-tailored suit. He was far more than a salesman with a golden voice. “[H]e was one of the most illuminating and persuasive personalities I have ever met,” Anderson said.24
Baylor’s confidence grew from his success as a therapist. In 1919, he published a short book, Remaking a Man: One Successful Method of Mental Retrofitting. One of his goals was to establish that “the man who has acquired a knowledge of psychology in a practical way has a proper place in the field of psychological work.” In the chapters that followed, he proved that he knew more about the alcoholic than most doctors.25
Baylor believed that alcoholics were mentally ill. He thought almost everyone who drank exhibited an “alcoholic neurosis” because they felt a need to make excuses for their drinking. In Remaking a Man, he wrote:
[I]t is because the weather is hot or cold, or he is wet or fatigued or depressed or excited, or his foot-ball team has won, or because some one has died. It is almost never that he realizes and frankly states that he wants a drink because it is a drink and that drinking has such a hold on him that he cannot get along without it.
For the alcoholic, this tendency to deny the desire for alcohol became a “philosophy of excuse” that caused him to blame his troubles on external forces:
He rarely realizes that business, family, friends, and politics seem all wrong largely because of his own fear, depression, irritability, or distorted imagination. He conscientiously believes that he is fearful, depressed or irritable entirely because of negative circumstances or because of the attitudes of other people.
It was not a love for alcohol but a false perception of his problem that drove the compulsion to drink. “[T]he neurotic condition which follows from that drink brings distorted values and as a result false reasoning and wrong impulses,” Baylor wrote. Drinking only made his problem worse. “[A]nd so he goes around the circle again and again with ever increasing momentum—fear creating new conditions, and conditions creating new fears.”26
Baylor did not have an explanation for why drunks were different from other people. He believed they suffered from a temporary but recurrent condition of the brain that he compared to physical tension. He did not speculate why. The important thing was that it was curable. “I have found that with the release of this ‘tenseness’ a normal coordination does come about, bringing proper impulses and rational thinking,” he said. The first step in therapy was to get the patient’s attention. This was accomplished by a number of calming exercises that slowed the alcoholic’s fevered thought process, allowing him to escape the circular thinking that kept him reaching for a bottle as his only solution.
Baylor was masterful in his use of suggestion, often asking his patients to imagine themselves in a sailboat traveling toward a tree-covered island on a beautiful summer day. The boat was flying over the waves, overtaking other boats, and finally arrived alone at the island:
We lower the sail, and the boat is coming slowly in under its own momentum—slower—and slower—and slower—and—now—it—is—barely—moving. We throw over the anchor—the boat slowly comes about, and we are at anchor—and at rest—and at peace—and—we—take—a—long—sigh�
��of—mental contentment.
Later, Baylor would teach the drunks to use relaxation techniques whenever they felt tenseness returning. “The patient must eventually be re-educated in his whole mental process so as to know how to recognize and to dissolve certain tendencies at their very inception and before they get under way,” he explained.27
Suggestions were only the beginning. Once the patient was listening, the hard work of reeducation began. “The re-education work is done through logical analysis and explanation and definite instruction,” Baylor wrote. “As soon as possible, sometimes at the beginning of treatment, I begin to combine with the personal interviews a line of simple reading which is so chosen that the ‘man of the street’ may understand and benefit from it.” Treatment generally lasted a year, although meetings became less frequent over time. Much of the counseling involved helping the alcoholics think through the situations that would normally drive them to drink.28
He discussed the case of one patient with a wife and two children who were almost destitute. The private charity that had supported them for several years was ready to reject them because the husband couldn’t stop drinking. The drunk had agreed to work with Baylor, but the landlord was coming for a showdown. “I showed him how it was possible not only to relax the body and the mind but also to relax a tense situation,” Baylor explained. He told his patient not to listen to the details of the landlord’s complaint but to think of the relaxation he was beginning to achieve through therapy. The drunk’s calmness angered the landlord at first, but it allowed the drunk to absorb the anger without becoming angry himself. They were able to discuss the facts of the situation objectively and to come to an agreement. Later, the alcoholic was able to apply the lessons he had learned to his job and was rewarded with a big raise. By 1919, he had been sober for six years.29
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