Lineage

Synanon, founded in Santa Monica in 1958 by Charles Dederich, gave the model its engine: the Game. Members sat in a room and went at each other — no therapists, no privacy, no appeal — until the defences came down. Dederich had found Alcoholics Anonymous insufficiently confrontational; the Game was the correction.

The Seed, opened in South Florida in 1970 by Art Barker, was the Game pointed at teenagers. Its participants were called Seedlings, its sessions were marathons of confrontation and public shaming, and it was paid for, for a time, with federal money — until a 1974 Senate investigation compared its techniques to the brainwashing of prisoners of war.

Straight, Inc. was founded in Orlando in 1976 by parents whose children had been through The Seed. They kept the structure, kept the confrontational sessions and renamed them raps, and kept the peer-enforcement model in which the newest and lowest-ranked clients did the policing of each other. By the time Straight opened in Springfield in 1982, the method was already two generations old.

What travelled was not a philosophy but a set of mechanics: a chair in the middle of a room, a group seated in a ring around it, a confession extracted in public, and a rank structure that rewarded the people who extracted it. The names changed with each organisation — the Game, the rap, the motivating — and the mechanics stayed. The mark above is Synanon's; the chair on the Tactics page is Straight's; it is the same chair.