How Recovery came to be

NO HOPELESS CASES
An Introduction

It was drawing to the close of the spring term at the University of Strasbourg in Alsace that year of 1913, and a confident young medical student who had made his mark as an outstanding diagnostician during his four years at the school was preparing for his final examination.

One test required the student to diagnose a patient. Young Abraham Low rendered what he was sure was a masterly diagnosis, but to his chagrin he was informed that he had failed the test. In anger he went to see his professor.

“Your diagnosis was brilliant,” the professor told him, “but you will never make a good physician with your present attitude, for you said the case was hopeless in front of the patient. No good doctor ever makes such a statement in the hearing of his patients.
But I will let you repeat the examination.”

Out of this humiliating experience Abraham Low was later to evolve the dictum which ruled his professional life: “There are no hopeless cases—helpless perhaps, but not hopeless.”

Abraham Low passed the second examination and went on to Vienna, Austria, to complete his medical training, which included courses in psychoanalysis. He moved to the United States and took up residence in Chicago.

Here within a few short years he renounced psychoanalysis (a system of psychological theory and therapy that aims to treat mental disorders by investigating the interaction of conscious and unconscious elements in the mind and bringing repressed fears and conflicts into the conscious mind by techniques such as dream interpretation and free association.)  in favor of the socio-psychobiological  (the branch of biology that studies the interactions of body and mind, especially as exhibited in the nervoussystem.) approach to mental and emotional illness.

In 1925 he joined the staff of the University of Illinois Medical School. And in 1931 he also served as assistant state alienist and witnessed a sad parade of mentally and emotionally disturbed patients during his visits to state hospitals. Their suffering stirred
him with an intense pity, but he refused to view the patients’ fate as irrevocable, as long as there was no brain damage. Always there was the dictum from that long-ago diagnostic examination: “There are no hopeless cases.”

By working with the patients he gradually developed a Method employing simple techniques, which proved to him conclusively that the patient could restore himself to health without enduring protracted—and costly—psychoanalytic sessions. Doctor and patients together evolved an organization called Recovery, Inc., which proved to be a potent form of group psychotherapy—a novel experiment for the Thirties.

That was the era when psychoanalysis was in its heyday, the doctor-to-patient relationship forming a tight little world in which it was unbelievable that the patient could do anything for himself.

Upon this world Dr. Low’s Method and his organization of laymen practicing simple psychotherapy techniques for themselves burst like a bombshell.

Most of Dr. Low’s colleagues called his Method a crazy structure based on an impractical theory. And as so often happens to pioneers in any field, he had to pay for his audacity by suffering the persecution of those firmly entrenched powers with whom he took issue. They sealed him off in a vacuum of silence, refusing even to investigate his Method. Their antagonism was absolute and implacable.

Abraham Low was by nature no maverick. His years of training in European medical schools had given him a deep respect for medicine and psychiatry and for all his colleagues who were engaged with him in the work of healing minds and bodies. Over and over he tried the ways of reconciliation but to little effect.

What his enemies wanted was not reconciliation but capitulation.
He was given only one of two choices: a brilliant future as a conformist (his genius was widely recognized) or exile with his “unrealistic” dream, Recovery, Inc.

With his vision of the future as the dawning age of group psychotherapy, he chose Recovery, Inc. He was prepared to fight openly for it even though he knew that the penalty for such revolt might be the revocation of his license by his own profession. Yet for the sake of tens of thousands of sufferers in state hospitals who were being denied the benefits of the free group therapy service Recovery offered, he was prepared to make this ultimate sacrifice of his cherished career. But death closed the issue.

In the years that followed, few thought the vulnerable Recovery organization he left behind could survive. Certainly not his colleagues, most of whom believed that his charismatic personality, not his Method, was responsible for the high percentage of cures among his patients.

But Recovery did not die. Due to the heroic sacrifices of his widow, Mae Low, and his faithful lay lieutenants, all former patients, the little organization not only survived but began to spread.

By 1971 some twenty-four years later, it was boasting branches in forty-five states. And membership lists show that tens of thousands of sufferers have joined it through the years.

Many of them have been cured and gone on their way. Others have stayed to act as leaders, motivated by a desire to help others as they were helped