ABSTRACT
In the late 1960s, psychiatrist Ross Speck made a remarkable discovery. He was training during the day at a notable psychoanalytic institute, learning how to conduct classical psychoanalysis. His background was impressive; his analytic training lineage went back to Freud himself. But in the evenings, without telling anyone at the institute, he started to hold large and startlingly dynamic therapeutic meetings in the homes of families in which a member had been diagnosed as schizophrenic. Speck was not alone in drawing attention to the inherent healing capacity of cultures, although his dramatization of the essentially anthropological insight was unique. The Peckham Experiment was born of the visionary thinking of two unusual physicians, G. Scott Williamson and Innes Pearse. The intervening years since the Peckham Experiment have witnessed, if anything, greater sterilization of the soil in which human culture might take root.
