"Pychopaths Dream in Black and White"

In "Psychopaths Dream in Black and White" John Rohnson explores the psychotherapy methods of Elliot Becker to examine whether or not his naked therapy sessions were affective in curing psychopaths. John interviewed several people who Oak Ridge hospital, where most of the research an therapy sessions took place. The therapy sessions were extremely long and sometimes even days. They consisted of nudity, screaming and crying while the patients expressed feelings, LSD use, sleep depravation, and eating through tubes on the walls. While Elliot was conducting his therapy sessions, some of the patients seemed to have positive results and appeared to be cured. They even released a few patients after they were considered mentally same. But the patients that were released actually had become worse during their sessions. The committed crimes including murder and child molestation. 80% of the patients that had undergone Elliot's psychotherapy had actually becomes worse. Ron Johnson's researched proved that psychotherapy was not an affective method to cure psychopaths.

This chapter was extremely interesting to me. Besides the fact that I had to read about Mary's feces obsession, I felt as if I learned a lot about psychopaths and techniques used to help them. Although I knew some before I read this book, I never knew anything about therapy that they would under go to try and 'cure' them of their illness. It also scared me to think that psychopaths were released after undergoing this extremely obscure therapy. It proved one of the points made in the second chapter, that psychopaths truly are manipulative and can pretend to be normal.