Okay, it is time to bring out the white men and jackets. I have said that I have a morbid curiosity with insanity, and I think that my latest find takes the top prize for "The Weirdest and Most Insane" award. Yup...I am giving the award to this next rabbit hole I just fell into.
I have been taking a look at Ron Lapin, the "pioneer of bloodless surgery". I first encountered Lapin when I read the book Bad Blood by George Dalgleish, the JW handyman and minor tv celebrity. I have researched Dr. Lapin fairly extensively, and had a lot of material about him before I finally read No Man's Blood, Gene Church's biography of Ron Lapin, the bloodless surgeon.
I then decided to find out what I could about Gene Church. He had published No Man's Blood in 1983, after spending 7 months with Ron Lapin in California. So here is what I found out about Gene Church - the "nonJW" who wrote No Man's Blood.
The movie Circle of Power was also released in 1983. (...bear with me, this get good...):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circle_of_Power
Circle of Power, also known as Mystique, Brainwash and The Naked Weekend, is a 1983 film, co-produced by Gary Mehlman, Anthony Quinn and Jeffrey White, and based on the non-fiction book The Pit: A Group Encounter Defiled. It stars Yvette Mimieux in her final film performance to date.
Plot synopsis:
Yvette Mimieux plays the chief executive of a giant corporation called "Mystique",[1] but the organization is also known as "Executive Development Training", or EDT.[2] Christopher Allport plays Jack Nilsson, a decent all-American young executive.[3]
Top management executives are required to spend a weekend with Bianca Ray at a hotel, where they are put under psychological pressure.[1] As a prerequisite to the training course, participants must sign a waiver giving the company the release to physically and psychologically abuse the individuals in the course.[3] The participants struggle with their shortcomings, such as obesity and alcoholism.[3] Another individual is a closet homosexual, and a fourth is a transvestite.[2] At one point in the film, the obese trainee is forced to eat trash and discarded food in front of the other seminar participants.[2] Eventually, the seminar executives and their wives lose their inhibitions later on in the "consciousness-raising" coursework.[4]
How the film was received:
The film won a Dramatic Films Award at the 1982 Sundance Film Festival.[5] Circle of Power played under the title Mystique at the 1981 Chicago International Film Festival.[1]
A review in The New York Times described Circle of Power as an "attack on monolithic belief systems," and referred to it as "a worthwhile movie."[3] Allmovie compared the psychological nature of the techniques utilized by Executive Development Training to Erhard Seminars Training, calling them "EST-like excesses."[2] Roger Ebert gave the film three stars, writing that "...it's an entertaining film with serious intentions."[1] Ebert compared it to events reported in Boston newspapers about a man who died during a Werner Erhard and Associates seminar, commenting: "Art anticipates life."[1] Ebert questioned the conceit of the film, asking the question: "Could a major corporation get away with this brainwashing?"[1] The authors of the book upon which the film was based concluded their preface by stating: "And please remember as you read -- it's true."[6]
The authors of the book the film was based on? Gene Church and Conrad D, Carnes. The book? The Pit: A Group Encounter Defiled.
The Pit: A Group Encounter Defiled is a non-fiction book on Mind Dynamics, Leadership Dynamics, and Holiday Magic, written by Gene Church and Conrad D. Carnes. The book was published Outerbridge & Lazard, Inc., in 1972, and was republished in a paperback edition in 1973, by Pocket Books. The book was later the basis for the 1983 film, Circle of Power.[1] The title refers to the encounter group movement that was prevalent at the time, which evolved into what psychologists began to term Large Group Awareness Training.[2]
The Pit: A Group Encounter Defiled is listed in the 1987 edition of Best Sellers, at the University of Scranton archives.[3] The book was featured in The New York Review of Books, in 1973.[4]
Authors:
Gene Church had previously studied psychology at Ohio State University and Ohio University. He had enrolled in the Leadership Dynamics coursework as a requirement of his association with Holiday Magic.[5] At the time of the book's publication, Conrad D. Carnes was an attorney practicing law with the firm of Carnes & Hornbeck in Columbus, Ohio.[5]
The authors later wrote a follow-up book, Brainwash, in 1983.[6] Gene Church also gave a related lecture series at universities, entitled: "An encounter group horror story."[7]
Summary:
Events depicted in the book took place over four-days at the Hyatt House motel in Palo Alto, California, and included management executives from Holiday Magic.[5] The book revealed details of the events that went on during the coursework at Mind Dynamics and Leadership Dynamics. The book stated that Holiday Magic participants in the Leadership Dynamics sessions were required to register in the coursework, at a cost of USD$1,000, "..in order to get ahead in the company."[5] Golembiewski stated that the book described "illustrative chapter and verse" of the coursework, including such training aids as a cross, a coffin, oxygen bottles, and piano wire.[8] Participants that instructors deemed as "dead" to their lives, were told to stay in the coffin until they realized "..how much it means to be alive."[5] Leadership Dynamics instructors felt that by putting individuals in a cage, they would "..appreciate the value of the freedom that they already possess."[5] The cross was used to demonstrate what it felt like to be persecuted at work. There was also a "silver chalice", which was supposed to "..make each man face the truth honestly and so to understand himself and others better.."[5][9]
Cited by other works:
The Pit: A Group Encounter Defiled has been cited in academic journal articles which analyze encounter groups and large group awareness training, including the Journal of Humanistic Psychology,[10] and more recently in Human Resource Development Review, in 2005.[11] The book has also been cited as a reference in other works which discuss these subjects, including Organization Development,[8] Approaches to Planned Change,[12] The Regulation of Psychotherapists,[13] Handbook of Organizational Consultation,[14] Managing Diversity in Organizations,[15] and Self Realization.[16]
Remember Lorenz Reibling's Masters degree? "Organizational Management with focus on maximizing intellectual capital".
Reibling and Church also share another interest: Holocaust history. In 1986, Church published the book 80629 a Mengele Experiment.
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/619919.80629_a_Mengele_Experiment
This is the true story of Jack Oran, who survived the inhuman experimental surgeries of Dr. Josef Mengele, Auschwitz' infamous Doctor of Death. It was a cold December morning in 1942 when Jack, then known a Yakoff Skurnik, and his family were loaded onto a "resettlement train," in Mlawa, Poland. When the train stopped, Jack found himself at Auschwitz. For an interminable time, he survived the horrors of the camp. Using his wits, cunning, and inordinate will to live, he escaped from the Nazis during the Auschwitz death march in which the Nazis marched 58,000 prisoners from the camp before its liberation by the Russians on January 27, 1945. Overcoming incredible odds, Jack built himself a new life filled with success and accomplishment. This is the story of a man who is living proof that with persistence, determination, and belief in oneself, all things are possible.
A review of Church's book about the Holocaust:
http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-937875-00-1
""80629'' refers to the number tattooed on 18-year-old Yakoff Skurnik's arm upon his arrival in Auschwitz-Birkenau in December 1942. Church (The Pit, etc.) traces Skurnik's horrific ordeal, including disfiguring experimental surgery supervised by the infamous Josef Mengele, escape from the Auschwitz death march on the eve of the Allied invasion and adjustment to postwar life (Skurnik, who changed his name to Jack Oran, is now a Dallas businessman). Readers won't expect pretty reading from a concentration camp account, but this work's relentlessly graphic and detailed descriptions of castration, defecation and torture are notably gut-wrenching. The idyllic portrayal of Skurnik's prewar family life is unrealistic, and Church's unfortunate penchant for melodramatic, overwritten prose is a disservice to the heartfelt story.
And that is who wrote the book about the surgeon that all the JWs hail as their hero.
Dr, Ron Lapin, a pioneer of the bloodless medicine movement, had a guy who wrote about brainwashing write his biography. Strange people have strange bedfellows.