Born and raised in Aesthetic Realism
by Ann Stamler, MA, MPhil • 2011-14
There are four versions of this article:- The original
that appeared in the magazine of ICSA (the Intl. Cultic
Studies Assoc.), 2011.
- The revised version that appeared in ICSA in 2014.
- A version combining the above, and edited for chronology and clarity (the page you're reading now).
- An abbreviated
version of #3 above, since this piece is pretty long.
My purpose in this paper is twofold: first, to tell how elements of this environment impacted my life (particularly the demand for conformity to one man's beliefs and the insistence that people devote their lives to praising him); and second, to explain how I was finally able to break free. I hope my story will help others better understand people who have been victims of mentally abusive movements, especially those who, like me, were born and raised in them.
Timeline
1920s. Eli Siegel gains notoriety for one of his poems.
1940s. Siegel starts teaching his ideas to artists and writers, calling his philosophy "Aesthetic Realism". My parents were among his students. I was born around this time.
1955. My mother helps start an art gallery to promote Siegel's work.
1974. My mother helps start the Aesthetic Realism Foundation, and she and I are among the first people authorized by Siegel to teach his philosophy.
1978. Siegel commits suicide.
1985. I leave the group at age 41, and my parents cease contact with me.
2009. My father dies at age 89, still firmly committed to the group. My mother, at age 92, is still there at the time of this writing in 2014.
How Aesthetic Realism started
Aesthetic
Realism revolved around founder Eli Siegel (1902-1978), a figure
at the heart of the Greenwich Village scene in the mid-twentieth
century. Siegel stirred controversy in the literary
world in the 1920s with a poem some called a masterpiece, others
illiterate nonsense, and with essays on socialism, evolution, art,
and mental health. In the 1940s, he taught artists and
writers in his Greenwich Village studio what he
thought made art successful and how art could help people in
their lives. He originally called his teaching Aesthetic
Analysis, which countered, as he saw it, the dominantly Freudian
psychoanalysis of that era. Later, he renamed his teaching
Aesthetic Realism, which he continued to teach in that same
Greenwich Village studio until 1978, when, following surgery
that left him unable to walk or write, he took his life.
The ideas
Siegel believed there was a war in each of us as individuals
between liking ourselves because we respect the outside world, or
feeling important by having contempt for the outside world.
He believed contempt was the source of war, poverty, racism, crime,
and mental illness.On its surface, Aesthetic Realism appears benign. Its teachings are humanistic, reflecting Siegel’s wide knowledge. For years after I left the movement, I thought that if only Siegel’s teachings were freed from the possessive adoration of his followers, then Aesthetic Realism might be recognized as useful knowledge.
I no longer believe the philosophy is benign. There is a fundamentalism, a black/white thinking, in Aesthetic Realism that promotes distortion. I believe the seeds of cultic behavior are in the philosophy. During the years I was there, Aesthetic Realism was an outwardly benign, culturally dressed group that inwardly could mangle people’s minds.
My family gets involved
My parents became Siegel's students in the 1940s. While I was still an infant, my mother would bring me with her to sessions with Siegel. The day I was born, my father was on a troop carrier off the coast of Normandy. When he returned from Europe, I am told, he visited Siegel before he came home to see my mother and meet me.From my earliest years, Siegel was a dominant force in my family. My parents would take me out of nursery school to go to sessions. When they fought, they would call Siegel on the telephone to mediate. He advised them on their families, friendships, jobs, money, me, where to live, their dreams—literally, and their fears.
We lived with other adults who studied with Siegel. There were “study groups” in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens. There were a few other young children involved, but I was the first, and for years the only one born into the movement. Three of us from that time remained until adulthood. The other two are still there.
Siegel was a constant source of dissension with my parents’ families, who did not share my parents’ opinion of Siegel. We grew more and more distant from my parents’ relatives and by the time I was an adolescent had nothing to do with them at all. When my mother’s father was dying of cancer, she refused to visit him, and she did not attend his funeral. Siegel praised her for this approach, calling it “the new kindness.”
Eli Siegel's narcissism and need for praise
Siegel used his philosophy to serve a consuming need to be praised. Siegel said, and we agreed, that his philosophy was the most important truth, answering all the problems of mankind, and that he was completely honest and beautiful. Therefore, people's happiness in life depended on their attitude toward him. Aesthetic Realism was a high demand environment that tended to subordinate, at least in my case, the identity, goals, behavior, and autonomy of the individual to the vision and psychological needs of the leader.Siegel seemed to be two different people. One was charming, warm, and often quite funny. Even when I was quite young, he talked to me about scholarly topics as if he expected me to understand, and he criticized my parents when he felt they did not respect or understand me.
This was one Eli Siegel. The other became enraged because people were not sufficiently grateful to him and didn't tell the rest of the world how important he was. He believed he represented beauty and ethics, and so our attitude to him was our attitude to beauty. I grew up believing Siegel’s explanation that the reason for whatever problem I had—in life, at school, with friends, was that I did not like myself because I was ungrateful to him.
Siegel published a manifesto called “Is Beauty the Making One of Opposites?”. Siegel believed he had discovered the role of opposites in beauty and their connection to life. The art world was not receptive. The New York Times and Art News either disparaged Siegel or ignored him. Siegel said that was because he knew more about art than the critics, and the critics did not want to learn from him.
He believed that what he taught could solve the world’s most urgent problems, and that his philosophy was the culmination of all philosophy throughout time. He thought it could end war, racism, poverty, and crime, and was bitter that the world didn't recognize his greatness. He thought he was singled out for hatred because he knew more than the authorities in every field. He stopped going out because he said he did not want to meet people who reminded him of how unfairly he was seen. He stopped buying the New York Times because it wouldn't write about him, because, he said, the reporters and editors didn't want to learn from him. He believed the art world boycotted him because he explained beauty and they could not.
We would sit, thirty or so people, listening to him tell us how much good he had done in our lives, and how we would never be happy until we acknowledged to the entire world our debt of gratitude to him. I would sit as far to the back of the room as possible, tears of shame running down my face, bending my head down behind the person in front of me so I wouldn't be called on to speak, and vowing inwardly to be "honest" from now on. But even when I used the right words, I did not convince myself; so I was in constant expectation of the criticism, which always came.
In fact, in these meetings, a new procedure began: People began to tell on each other. Siegel would talk to person A, and person B would pass him a written note about something person A had done. There was no such thing as privacy; husband would tell on wife, mother on child, friend on friend. And no subject was exempt. Notes were written and tales told about every aspect of a person’s life—dreams, sex, career, eating habits, casual conversations.
One night when I was a teenager, Siegel entered the room to give a lecture, and a new student stood and began to applaud. Others quickly followed; this response became a regular routine. At the end of lectures, this same new student would deliver eloquent speeches of praise for Siegel. We followed this action too, each of us trying to top the praise of the person before. Siegel would look a little bemused, put his chin on his hand, and smile. As he left the room, we all stood and clapped again.
My teenage years
My mother started an art gallery to promote Siegel's work in 1955. On the day it was to open, my father was rushed to the hospital in agony. As the gallery program began, we didn’t know whether he would live or die. My mother went to the gallery opening anyway. I was too young to attend, but I sat on the brick steps outside the gallery looking through the window. Later that night, we learned that my father had survived.When the gallery had a major exhibition of my mother’s paintings, the Times reviewer praised her work but pointedly did not even mention Eli Siegel or Aesthetic Realism. She knew that she was going to have to make a choice between having a successful career as an artist or being faithful to Eli Siegel. I watched her struggle over this dilemma as the art world’s animosity to Aesthetic Realism quickly hardened, and Siegel’s demand for loyalty became ever more intense. Ultimately, she made her choice. Siegel had helped her be a better artist; she would be loyal to him.
Yet Siegel continually berated her for not being “proud” of her gratitude to him. She would hear his criticism and sink into a deep depression, going off by herself for hours or even days. She had given up her life for him. I couldn’t understand why he wasn’t satisfied.
Since I was born, we lived in various group homes with other Aesthetic Realists. At one point we started having house meetings to criticize each other’s ingratitude to Eli Siegel. Not everyone agreed. I was shocked when one man said outright that Siegel was a devil. These dissenters soon moved out. I would sit on the floor in our living room, watching the faces of the grown-ups as they criticized each other and telling myself I should do more to “have Eli Siegel known.”
As an adolescent, I turned to food to deal with the pressure and confusion I was subjected to constantly in my family and the cult. I had been thin as a child, but by the time I started Hunter College Junior High School, I had become pudgy, given to eating serving-sized bowls of butterscotch pudding. I hid packages of Oreo cookies in a piano bench to enjoy while I watched movies on television. By the time I was 14, I weighed 192 pounds. That year, I lost more than seventy pounds, and then kept losing. Now, instead of eating secretly, I secretly stopped eating. I would monitor my falling weight and pin my skirt tighter around my waist. Pretty soon, I lost the use of my right leg. My mother took me to our family doctor, who said he wanted me to gain 10 pounds before he saw me again. I did gain some weight, and my leg recovered. However, I didn’t change my eating habits to be balanced. I was still obsessed with my weight, eating alone and differently than other people.
At Hunter, we were told that we were intellectually gifted children. I never saw myself as especially gifted, but I had been exposed to the arts and literature from an early age, and I enjoyed the demands Hunter made on me. I also made friends. My best friend Claire and I would talk on the telephone every night, letting the receiver hang while we each went to supper, then returning afterward to pick up where we had left off. After exams, we rode the carousel in Central Park and played at FAO Schwartz on Fifth Avenue. Siegel said I was a snob, using my intellectual Hunter girlfriends to feel superior to him. If I was honest, he said, I would be telling my friends about him.
While I was in high school, Siegel started a poetry group for young people. My friend Claire loved words, so I invited her. She enjoyed the group at first, and Siegel wrote her a note of praise. I began pressuring her to expand her involvement in Aesthetic Realism. She resisted and explained that she just could not devote herself to Siegel or his ideas. Claire and I had ridden the subway to and from school together for years. We advised each other on boys. We got drunk for the first time together and shared secret cigarettes. We slept at each other's houses. Now, I told her that if she could not agree with Aesthetic Realism, I could not ride the subway with her. We broke up. She was the last real friend I had outside the movement until I left—about twenty-five years later.
College years
By the time I started college, I had become zealous on behalf of Eli Siegel. I was an honor student, and I used my straight-A average as an advertisement for what Aesthetic Realism could do. I talked about Aesthetic Realism in classes and wove it into all my papers. Teachers wrote me flattering notes, and I was interviewed by newspapers. At the same time, I was also in a constant tension with my teachers. No essay I wrote was just about history, or Galileo, or Moliere; the upshot of my papers was always Eli Siegel explains this, and therefore his work is most important of all. When my Latin professor told me I was accepted into Phi Beta Kappa, she also said the committee was concerned about my involvement in Aesthetic Realism. I felt a hint of worry when I heard this, but I quickly pushed it away. Siegel held me up as an example, saying I had compared him to my professors and he came out ahead. Secretly, I envied the life of other students, even the pain they experienced dating, smoking pot, leaving their homes—at least they were free.
I graduated near the top of a class of several thousand, with a full major in French and another in Latin, summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, with prizes in classics and French. But just after I graduated, I was mortified when Siegel said he was disappointed in me. “I taught you how to use your mind,” he said, “and you didn’t say a word about me at your graduation.”Although I received offers from graduate programs out of state, I needed to stay near Aesthetic Realism, so I applied for and received a fellowship in classics at Columbia University. That summer, I felt growing excitement at the prospect of graduate school. I envisioned myself in those grand, old buildings, talking with people about ancient literature, studying the Latin poetry I loved.
That summer, too, I became somewhat obsessed about an artist I had dated through most of college, also one of Siegel's students, James. When James wanted to join the civil rights march in Selma, Alabama, Siegel said that James wanted to go to escape Aesthetic Realism criticism. James went anyway, so I broke up with him.
Siegel became increasingly obsessed with how unfairly he was treated. He said people resented him because he was such a force for beauty, and completely honest and incorruptible, and because he was a threat to our desire for contempt. There was no room for criticism, no ethical ambiguity; either you wanted to respect him, or you were a slave to contempt.
Several months later, James returned to Aesthetic Realism and began dating another woman. I wanted him. I was distraught. I wrote a letter about my feelings to Siegel. He told me my distress was not about this man at all—it was shame because I was using Columbia University to feel superior to Aesthetic Realism. He said I had “architectural snobbishness,” that I was using the impressive buildings at Columbia against his small room in Greenwich Village. I became terribly anxious and took to my bed. I pulled the blanket over my head and cried for hours. I would not talk to anyone. Only my mother’s coaxing and finally a telephone call from Siegel got me back in circulation. I went to graduate school, but my grades fell; I was ill at ease on campus, and ultimately, although I had earned a master’s degree and completed all the exams for a PhD, I gave up academics to teach Aesthetic Realism.
1970s
There were culture shifts. Following the historic 1969 riot at the Stonewall Inn, for the first time, gay men and women took to the streets to protest police brutality. Two years later, students of Aesthetic Realism appeared on prime-time TV, saying that through studying with Siegel, they were no longer homosexual. Hundreds of people called the gallery to learn more about Aesthetic Realism. Siegel named three of the (supposedly) formerly-gay men to teach as a trio in what he called "consultations". My parents were in a trio teaching artists. I was in a trio teaching professional women. We gave individual consultations and public seminars about how Siegel’s work had changed our lives, and now was changing the lives of people learning from us.As Aesthetic Realism became marginally better known, Siegel’s demand for confirmation grew. We picketed in front of The New York Times building and publisher Arthur Sulzberger’s home to demand that the paper write about Siegel. We wrote letters, visited critics, and jammed telephone switchboards at popular magazines.
SoHo was now a cultural center, and my mother told Siegel we should buy a building there for an Aesthetic Realism school. Siegel said buying a building was a substitute for gratitude. By this time, being "fair" to Eli Siegel and Aesthetic Realism was a holy grail, always sought, never attained. Somehow my mother prevailed, and in 1974, when I was 30 years old, the Aesthetic Realism Foundation in SoHo began.
My mother was director; I was treasurer and registrar. Consultants gave classes in marriage, art, music, all showing the truth and beauty of Aesthetic Realism. Along with others, I directed public programs, wrote papers, helped others write or wrote for them, and helped prepare the application for the Foundation to become a nonprofit organization. I was admired because I had studied so many years with Eli Siegel. Siegel continued to teach in his West Village studio. At the Foundation, a new leadership formed, composed of people Siegel had praised for their ethics and honesty.
At Monday night “opinion meetings” of 30 or 40 students at the Foundation, we confessed our failures and endured searing public criticism. Leaders measured every aspect of life, every activity, by the yardstick of gratitude. One woman my age—mid-30s—wanted to start a family. Wanting a baby, the leaders told her, was a way of avoiding gratitude. One day I arrived to give a seminar with my face swollen from an abscessed tooth; if I wanted to be honest, I was told, my face would not be swollen that way.
Things get even crazier
Around 1977, Siegel developed a prostate condition. He refused medical treatment. When he finally went for surgery, it was too late to restore the use of his feet, and he could not use his hands to write. He entered a profound depression that culminated in his taking sleeping pills to end his life—twice, since he was unsuccessful the first time.Before he died, Siegel told the students who had recommended he have surgery that they had killed him. They reported this to the rest of us. We were all supposed to feel responsible. Some members, including many of those who cared for him at the end, soon left the movement. But those who remained drew renewed energy from his accusation, vowing to weed out the ethically impaired and, with the remaining stalwarts, to achieve the recognition for Siegel after his death that had been denied him in his lifetime.
After the surgery and before his death, Siegel stayed at the home of one of the new leaders. I was among the students who helped her care for him. We worked in shifts, two people at a time, sleeping in a guest bedroom to be available at a moment’s notice. One night, the first time Siegel tried to take his life with sleeping pills and was taken to the hospital, I heard his wife talking with him over the telephone. He was saying he wanted to die. She said, “What about Aesthetic Realism?” He said, “I don’t care about Aesthetic Realism.”
To my shock and bewilderment, I heard the woman in whose home Siegel stayed make fun of his weakness and confusion; of his wife, who was dying of emphysema; and of other students. This was someone who functioned as the supreme ethical monitor of other people, and I heard her be hypocritical and cruel.
Then, as Siegel was dying, a woman I taught with revealed to me with great pride that for years, with the full knowledge of her own husband, she had had what she called a “personal emotion” about Siegel, “organic gratitude”. This meant, she told me in a telephone call, that her gratitude took a physical form. She said Siegel had now given her permission to talk about their relationship. However clear this was to anyone else, I couldn’t take in the meaning of the words. Her husband talked to me cheerfully about staying in a room with Siegel’s wife while his own wife was in another room with Siegel “in various states of undress.” Other young women said they, too, had been “initiated.”
In the years just before and after Siegel’s death, the new leaders began to do things Siegel had never done, such as take children away from their parents, tell students whom which other students they should marry, or separate them, regardless of what the individuals felt. They hired and fired people at a moment’s notice from jobs at the Foundation. They enjoyed managing people’s lives.
Siegel had chosen a woman I grew up with, a poet like himself, to continue his teaching. He called her “the class chairman.” She began a campaign called “Do you want to be completely fair to Eli Siegel and Aesthetic Realism?” She said either we wanted to be completely fair, or we wanted to kill Aesthetic Realism. The campaign consisted of students standing in a class at the Foundation and trying to convince the rest of us that they were sincere. The few who were believed became the new aristocracy. The rest of us cowered and braced ourselves to try again.
I began to feel there was something crazy going on, although I could not say this to anyone except my mother, who confessed she agreed with me. As we sought each other’s company, we were increasingly shunned. We were accused of being in a team against Eli Siegel and Aesthetic Realism. As the first person born into Aesthetic Realism and one of the first people to teach, my failure to convince anyone I wanted to be completely fair was worse than other people’s failures. I was in constant despair. I had never known any other life. What these people wanted felt like my soul, and I couldn’t give it to them. I felt as if I were in a dark tunnel, with no light at the end. I would lie on my bed, waiting for the next barrage of criticism, crawl through it, and lie down again. I never wanted to take my life; but I couldn’t see any life ahead.
The new leaders maneuvered to have my mother fired as Director of the Foundation. They accused her of (fabricated) financial and ethical improprieties. I watched her as she took a telephone call in which they fired her as an editor of Siegel’s books. She was devastated. She had sacrificed her painting career because the critics who praised her would not accept her praise of Siegel. I had watched her all the years I grew up trying to measure up to Siegel’s ethical criteria and internalizing his criticism to the point that she felt she was responsible for his suffering. Now she was accused of sabotaging his work.
Enough was enough
These things began to drive me away from Aesthetic Realism. I resigned as an officer of the Foundation, though I still continued with AR classes. On the outside, I took a temporary typing job at a nonprofit Jewish agency. For the first time as a mature adult, I was functioning in the outside world. I met people who seemed to value me, not because I spread the world about Aesthetic Realism at Brooklyn College and Columbia University, or because I was one of the first people to teach the philosophy, but just because I was me.I began to lead a double life. By day, at my job, I advanced rapidly in position and salary. By night, in a class full of people at the Foundation, I heard excoriating criticism: I was a bad seed; I wanted to murder Aesthetic Realism. Outside, I began having adult relationships with men. Inside, people cautioned men to stay away from me because I was unethical.
I became increasingly uncomfortable with the inside-versus-outside mentality, the worshipful praise of Siegel, and the uncritical agreement with his ideas. People who never read Hegel or Aristotle called Aesthetic Realism the greatest thought of all time. Although I opposed anyone who called Aesthetic Realism a cult, I had to agree inwardly that much of our behavior justified the word.
A senior executive where I worked, born in Germany, had fought against Hitler’s army and in Israel’s War of Independence. He said he could not stand to see anyone brainwashed and made it his mission to pry me loose. I was ready to be pried. For years, no matter how I tried, I could not become the person Siegel and now his followers insisted was the real me; but I could not imagine myself outside Aesthetic Realism. Now I was living with one foot in, one foot out, and I didn’t disintegrate. In fact, for the first time, I saw a future for myself.
On Christmas Eve, 1985, after a Tuesday class at the Foundation, I had planned to go with my parents as we had gone for many years to hear a midnight performance of the Messiah at Carnegie Hall. My father said, “You can come with us if you agree to go out and talk with other students afterward.”
I refused and went home.
That Friday, I left a note at the reception desk in the Foundation, addressed to the class chairman, saying I wanted a leave of absence—which I knew would never be granted. I walked out of the building. I never went there again.
My parents had told me that, if I left, it would be the end of our relationship. They remained true to their word, and ceased all communication with me. The exception was in 1998 when critical statements I made about Aesthetic Realism were quoted in an article in The New York Post, and I received a five-page vitriolic letter, most likely written in committee, but over my parents' signatures. The letter compared me to Brutus assassinating Julius Caesar, and to Benedict Arnold. Today, if I pass former colleagues on the street, they look past me as if I do not exist.
My father remained in the group until his death. I do not believe my mother, after 70 years, can leave.
Coincidentally, the very same day I left, a man I had briefly dated in AR, but who had been told to stay away from me because I was a bad influence, also left. A few days later, he called me; we began dating again and soon married. We have remained happily married since 1987.
The path to recovery
I was lucky. I escaped because somehow my critical voice wouldn’t die. The inner critic of that insanity, the self I once thought was evil, was in fact my sanity. When people say I was courageous to leave, I say it wasn’t courage. It was desperation. It was either leave or die.Leaving, however, was only the first challenge. The mental damage done by a dogma whose manipulations are so well disguised can be especially difficult to understand and undo. I still struggle with garbage imposed on my mind over 41 years, with inherited views and limitations. I will turn myself almost inside out to avoid confrontation; I am terrified of seeming to offend; it took me many years to even recognize the concept of boundaries. I still cannot watch painful movies, or movies set in World War II. I still sometimes war with food.
One of the most difficult problems I carry with me arises from a skill I developed to cope with the difference between the self I felt inside me and the self I felt compelled to show. Out of sheer self-preservation, I learned how to say exactly what someone wanted to hear, to understand the role someone wanted me to play, and to play it convincingly. This skill has served me well professionally. I have excelled as an assistant to a chief executive, knowing before I am asked what that person needs and being comfortable staying in the background, deflecting praise or recognition. I am so good at compliance that, at one agency, I became the director of compliance with grant guidelines and government regulations. I have been able to work well with some people others fear because I understand and can even empathize with them. As I work in local government, I am able to reach across party lines because I grasp other people’s perspectives.
But this very skill often leaves me bewildered about what I really feel. I can be persuaded in one direction, and then persuaded in the opposite direction. When I agreed to marry my husband, I asked him not to tell anyone because I was afraid as time went on I would not agree with myself, and I wanted the space to change my answer.
The fact that I was able to marry at all, and that I did so less than two years after leaving Aesthetic Realism, now seems almost a miracle to me. Siegel taught that criticism is love, and watching up close the pain my parents were encouraged to inflict on each other left me sure I would never be permanently connected with another human being. Today, I accept, love, and trust my husband even more than I did 25 years ago.
Once I was out, I began to learn that what I thought was a unique experience had parallels in other movements: a powerful leader playing on peoples’ fears and guilt; a common enemy—in our case, the press; a claim to sole possession of universal truth; lack of privacy; and a building of mental and sometimes physical walls against the outside world.
The first stage of my recovery, for 10 years or so, was shutting the door on anything that recalled my past. The second stage was when I approached my fiftieth birthday, and I felt something holding my life back. Ten years after leaving Aesthetic Realism, I started therapy at the Cult Clinic in New York City with a therapist trained in cult-recovery work, and I learned about the parallels between Aesthetic Realism and other high-demand groups. I began to understand what the dynamic of my upbringing had in common with all families, which was extremely beneficial. I previously thought everything about my experience was unique. Through therapy, I felt less different from other people. As profound and necessary as this stage was, in retrospect I realize I was hovering at the edges of what I might see.
The third stage began in 2006, when I was almost 62. I accepted an invitation to attend the first ICSA workshop for people born into cult groups, people known as "second-generation adults" (SGAs). That experience turned me 180 degrees. Until that workshop, I had not met anyone else born into a cult. I felt, as much as cult educators did understand, that there was something in my experience they could not grasp. I felt that even my husband, who had been in Aesthetic Realism for 14 years, could not understand.
When you choose to join a group, you have experience prior to your joining that is part of your mental and emotional makeup. There is something, no matter how deeply buried, to compare the group to, and there are usually friends and family in the “outside” world. When you are born into a group, there is no other experience. You are totally invaded and violated, without even an unconscious memory of being your own self.
Meeting others who shared the second generation experience was life-changing. When I walked into that workshop filled with people who shared that specific experience, being born to parents who already belonged to a movement, never knowing anything other than that environment from day one, I felt a connection I had not felt anywhere before, and a bond with those people I will never lose. Others may grasp intellectually what occurred, but there is an emotional level only one who has shared the experience understands. This workshop is where I first felt not entirely alone. A door opened. It was a beginning point for trust, for opening up inner areas of myself to myself, and also, however slowly, to the outside world.
My involvement with ICSA, attending conferences and workshops, and as an editor for ICSA Today, is a way to add to people's understanding of the dynamics of high demand groups, and to turn my painful experience into something of value to the world.
I hope my story will help others who have been victims of deceptively benign organizations.
About the author: Ann Stamler, MA, MPhil, graduated from Brooklyn College summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 1965, and earned graduate degrees in Latin from Columbia University. She was in the Aesthetic Realism movement from birth until she left at age 41, in 1985. In 1987 she married Joseph Stamler, whom she had first met in Aesthetic Realism. From 1985 to 2006 she was a senior executive of a nonprofit agency in New York that worked with the labor movements in the United States and Israel. She has served on the boards of various civic and cultural organizations. In 2007 she was elected to the legislative body of her town in Connecticut, a position she held until 2013. From 2008 to 2011 she served as founding administrator of a new Jewish high school in Connecticut. She has been on the editorial board of ICSA’s magazine ICSA Today since its inception and in 2012 was named Associate Editor.
Ann's story forms the basis of the final chapter in Nori Muster's Child of the Cult, a collection of studies of Second Generation Adults.