Is ACIM a CIA Misinformation Device? In the 1990's, a myth full of deliberate misinformation began to circulate that the CIA had promoted the Course as an experiment in behavior modification. Two fundamental questions thus challenged a few students of the Course. Before or after Doctors Thetford and Schucman began to scribe the Course in October 1965, did they work for the CIA? If so, did their work for CIA have any relationship to the Course? The purpose of this article is to explore those questions. From 1951 to 1954, including a brief assignment to the Mid-East for three months in 1953, Bill served as a Senior Psychologist at CIA in Washington, D.C. During that period and thereafter, Bill worked almost exclusively with John Gittinger, a CIA psychologist, to help refine the Personality Assessment System (PAS). The PAS was a test that sought to describe personality traits and predict behavior. Between1955 and 1958, Bill served as a research psychologist for the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology. Organized by the Cornell Medical Center in New York City, the Human Ecology Fund employed Bill's sophistication with the PAS to direct a cross-cultural study of Chinese in New York City. From 1958 to 1965, Bill was a Professor of Medical Psychology at the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University. He hired Helen Schucman to assist him and serve as the Senior Psychologist for the Neurological Institute at Columbia University. In addition to their heavy teaching load, Bill and Helen fulfilled Columbia University's contract with the Human Ecology Fund or Psychological Assessments Associates, to help John Gittinger improve the psychometric and intellectual rigor of the PAS. ~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~ The operative theme is "intellectual," not "behavior modification." Indeed, John Gittinger testified in an interview with the author in 1997 that, in the CIA culture of stringent "need to know" and functional compartmentalization, neither Bill nor Helen was ever associated with CIA operations such as Project BLUEBIRD or MK-ULTRA. Instead, their aim was to help create perhaps the most sophisticated personality test in the world. The final version of the PAS was completed before October 1965, when Bill and Helen started to work on A Course in Miracles. For the next decade, they feared that public knowledge of their work on the Course might imperil their professional academic standing. For that personal reason, they therefore considered their work on the Course even more confidential than the PAS.
No one at CIA knew about or cared about the Course. In fact, in the late 1990's, when a friend described the broad principles of the Course to John Gittinger, he expressed surprise and said that, besides a few papers for the Human Ecology Fund, disbanded in 1964, and a final paper for Psychological Assessments Associates in 1968, he had wondered what Bill and Helen had been doing. Those conclusions notwithstanding, it would be hard to appreciate their work with the CIA without some understanding of the growing importance of personality assessment in the political, social and professional environment of intelligence between 1938 and 1962.
Conclusion A review of the careers of Bill Thetford and Helen Schucman confirms the fact that they worked (unknowingly in Helen's case) for the CIA at different times between 1951 and 1965. With the exception of Bill's brief assignment to the Mid-East for three months in 1953, between 1951 and 1965 he worked almost exclusively with John Gittinger to help refine the Personality Assessment System (PAS). For seven years (1958-1965), when she was not engaged in her increasingly time-consuming academic duties, Helen also devoted her skills to the intellectual and psychometric improvement of the PAS. The operative word is "intellectual." Their aim was to help create perhaps the most sophisticated personality test in the world. How, where and when that test might be employed by CIA was not their concern. It is not a stretch to say that the development of such a test had been an intellectual purpose of the entire history of psychology. The evolving success of the PAS in describing and predicting the probable behavior of foreign leaders brought John Gittinger to the apex of the American policy process: personal advisory contact with several Presidents. Several of his colleagues thought that the sophistication of his Personality Assessment System was equal to the achievements of Freud and Jung. Armed by the PAS with a deeper understanding of Krushchev's personality and his likely behavior under stress in 1962, President Kennedy dared to deal with the Cuban missile crisis on a personal basis. From 1965, until Gittinger and Gottlieb retired in 1972, Bill and Helen continued to write about the PAS, but there is no evidence that the CIA took any interest in the Course. Neither of them ever participated in experiments on behavior modification while they both were scribing the Course. From 1972 until they retired in 1977, Heyman was Chief of the Behavioral Activities Branch at CIA and Senior Psychologist at Psychological Assessments Associates (PAA). He told the author that Bill and Helen had no role with the CIA during that period. The question remains. Did their work with the PAS before 1965 have any impact on A Course in Miracles? CIA funding over a period of fourteen years (1951-1965) made it possible for Bill and Helen to gain a profound understanding of the process by which a human being creates his own ego and personality in the first twenty years of life. Did the PAS finally satisfy his yearning for a cohesive theory? Despite his fourteen years of work with the PAS to describe how the human ego, the "differentiated self," evolves and dictates perceptions of personal reality, by 1965 Bill had to face the gnawing conclusion that some other dimension transcends the power of ego in human choice. Could the Oriental, if unscientific, vision of pioneers like Carl Jung and Harry Stack Sullivan be a basis for a coherent theory? After all his years of work on personality assessment, Bill concluded that there must be a better way. Could the egocentric "differentiated self" of the PAS coexist with the "undifferentiated Self" of spirit? From the spring of 1965 onwards, he and Helen gradually drifted away from the dynamic, structured PAS definition of personality. Out of their search for a better way came A Course in Miracles, a mind discipline and system of thought whose conceptual roots could be traced across six thousand years to the Vedanta. Bill must have been challenged and finally deeply satisfied some time in the late 1960s when he read for the first time a section of the Text of the Course entitled "Self-Concept Versus Self."
Thus did the Course tell Bill that even though the PAS could explain the process by which each person makes his own "self," it must be perceived as an illusory "self," suitable only for successive performances on the world's stage. The Course offered a process by which Bill and Helen might release themselves personally from their self-illusions and find inner peace. Unknowingly, they offered to the world a path to redemption from what Helen saw as a social and a metaphysical crisis. It is curious that Helen Schucman and Bill Thetford retired at about the same time. They had done their best. |
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