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Jenny James has written quite a few books... 'we are the screamers' covers the peroid of setting up the commune and the first few years...
in her words
It's September 1979. I found this place in September 1974. I was looking for a country retreat, a place to hide away with my small tribe and rest from years of running an open-house anti-psychiatry centre in London; a house of our own where we couldn't be harrassed by jealous landlords. A large house we wanted, tucked away in the wilds of the Irish countryside, away from the mainstream of life, without neighbours; an anonymous sort of a place where we could do our thing without being disturbed: grow our food, bring our kids up without schools, walk naked in our gardens, carry on with our own development through therapy; perhaps offer therapeutic help quietly and privately to a select few who would not live with us.
Five years, three television programmes, three books and umpteen dozen newspaper reports later, Atlantis is famous throughout Ireland. 'The Screamers' they call us. And I'm supposed to sit here and tell you how it happened. What happened to my quiet private little nudist colony? How did we end up the most feared and famed growth centre, enlightenment centre, energy centre this side of the Atlantic? How did a bunch of atheists end up contacting extraordinary psychic abilities?.... (she goes on in this vein for several more sentences, but u get the point...)
potted history, from memory- may contains nuts, sorry, I mean slight inaccuracies. In 1974, inspired by the book, "the Primal Scream", but disillusioned with the amount it would cost to fly over there and fund therapy, Jenny James bought an old farmhouse in northern ireland, and moved their with a handful of friends, to do their own therapy.
the sessions were based on total honesty, no bullshit at all allowed. this gradually became more and more abusive, with members of the house (who were constantly leaving and being replaced by others) being exposed to ever more abusive situations, ostensibly as a trigger to help them get in touch with anger or grief. screaming at people to break them down was common. (a friend of a friend stayed there, and was apparantly awoken one night by someone pouring cold water over his head, as part of the 'therapy')
the situation rubbed up the troubled north of Ireland the wrong way, as Jenny James was given to make pronouncements on the troubles... and there were many campaigns to evict them... and so on...
the latest news I read was that an elite group of them moved out to somewhere in South America, to a war-torn rebel zone, to start a new community. when two of the commune's teenagers were shot dead by rebel fighters, the commune started an international online campaign to get the rebel killers brought to justice... that was around 2002...
I think it's interesting, how they really went for it, and it managed to fuck-up in such a spectacular way... |
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