Crazy Therapies
1996 book by Margaret Singer and Janja Lalich
"Crazy" Therapies: What Are They? Do They Work? is a book by the psychologist Margaret Singer and the sociologist Janja Lalich. It was published by Jossey-Bass in 1996.
Content
Singer and Lalich's intended audience is psychiatric and psychotherapy patients. They discuss a list of severe warning signs that psychotherapy patients should pay attention to, regardless of the psychotherapist's credentials or reputation. They discuss these in detail and quantify them into ten classic behaviour patterns. These include potential sexual abuse; asking the patient to perform menial chores; discussing the psychotherapist's own problems in detail; asking the patient to cut off relations with friends and family; diagnosing the patient's condition before thoroughly discussing the issue; claiming the patient must be hypnotized in order to sort through past memories; treating patients as if they all have the same psychological root cause of illness; claiming to have a magical miracle technique; utilizing a checklist to find out if the patient has an illness that the psychotherapist specializes in; and finally, demanding that the patient accept certain religious, metaphysical or pseudoscientific beliefs in order to continue psychotherapy. Specific therapies include those that espouse beliefs in "possession by spirit entities, past-life regression, alien abduction, Primal therapy and other unverified cathartic therapies, reparenting, rebirthing, neurolinguistic programming (NLP), facilitated communication (FC), Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), Neural Organization Technique (NOT) and a host of other unscientific notions".
According to Singer and Lalich (1997:167), "crazy therapies" are promoted using several techniques.
“Crazy Therapies” enters the record as 1996 book by Margaret Singer and Janja Lalich. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Crazy, Therapies and book can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“Crazy Therapies” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Crazy, Therapies and book provides the most credible route into that argument.
The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5183254. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1996 and 1997.
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This entry incorporates text from “Crazy Therapies” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.