Word: ryther
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Resistance. Ryther was the natural place to turn for help. Founded in 1935 and developed into a treatment center by Lillian Johnson, a career social worker who is now executive director, it has scorned stuffy precedents, snatched many a "hopeless" case from the door of a state school or mental institution by entering difficult areas of child therapy. Its formula : a combination of dedicated social workers, psychoanalysts and house staffers giving treatment in an informal but disciplined family atmosphere (there are no bars or locks at Ryther). The center has become the model for 20 other residential-type child treatment...
...Ryther accepted Jim. (Jim accepted Ryther only after he and his parents reluctantly decided that the center was better than a state institution.) The boy began a series of weekly consultations with William Gleason, a social worker and former (1938) halfback for the University of Washington, who regularly consulted with Dr. Edith Buxbaum, a psychoanalyst attached to the center. At first the interviews were unproductive; Jim missed many, or showed up hostile and taciturn for others. But the counselors steadily broke down his resistance over a six-month period by treating him as an adult and convincing him that they...
Controls. Ryther's psychiatrists were convinced that Jim was not essentially effeminate; they believed that his exhibitionism was, in fact, a rebellion against the part that his mother had encouraged him to play. While therapy and interviews were uncovering significant material, he underwent no overnight transformation. But firm controls at the center helped him improve his own self-control, and the counselors' patently impartial concern for his welfare brought him slowly to understand his problem and its causes. He began to exert himself, gruffly ordering younger children to obey the center staff...
After eight months, Jim was permitted to go home for several holidays. Carefully coached by his counselors at Ryther, he rebuffed his mother when she tried to resume their wrestling. When she began to reject him in his new role, he faced a real, personal crisis: whether to please her and thus win back her love, or exert his latent masculinity...
...mother (who carefully kept him at arm's length), he got a crew cut, and he acquired a girl friend and took her home to show Mama. When, after two years of interviews and treatment, he was discharged, he landed a good job (making more money than his Ryther therapist), continued going with his girl. He is reported to be in excellent mental health, has applied for a branch of the armed forces...