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I didn't even know this eye-opening book was still listed on Amazon until someone pointed it out to me. What a shame that it's out of print.

In it, the courageous Ellen Plasil details her horrifying experiences with "Objectivist psychotherapist" Lonnie Leonard, a manipulative sexual predator who nevertheless somehow managed to pass muster among the ranks of Ayn Rand's "Objectivist" movement (with the blessing even of the movement's "official" psychotherapists).

Plasil's upsetting account of Leonard's monstrous behavior should be read not only by those interested in the misuses and abuses of "psychotherapy," but also -- and especially -- by those who still think Rand's "Objectivism" might somehow be philosophically respectable if only it were purged of some of its personal elements.

On the contrary, those "personal elements" infect very nearly the entirety of Objectivism, and Leonard's behavior (particularly his manipulative technique) is demonstrably connected to Rand's own "philosophical" premises.

And the Objectivist _movement_ (for the propagandistic support of which most of Rand's nonfiction writings were expressly developed) was never anything more "respectable" than a psychologically totalitarian personality cult that allowed Rand and her protege Nathaniel Branden to exercise personal power over their unwitting victims in the official name of "reason." Objectivists won't like being reminded of this book's existence and will undoubtedly claim that Leonard wasn't an exemplar of Rand's principles. And it is true that Rand would have been horrified by Leonard's behavior.

Nevertheless that behavior was merely a physical implementation of the mindrape Rand and Branden had been committing all along, as described in the posthumous Rand biographies written by the two Brandens. Readers familiar with Objectivist history will also see parallels with Rand's manipulative treatment of her own unemployed and dependent husband in securing his "permission" for an adulterous sexual affair with Nathaniel Branden -- and with her self-serving contention that any _real_ man should have found her sexually irresistible even if she were eighty years old and in a wheelchair.

This interesting approach to romantic love was, of course, offered in the name of "reason," and that is just how Leonard presented it to his own victims. Nor is it an accident that the movement tended to attract the sort of "true believer" who would fall for such stuff. Objectivists may say that Plasil herself (and Leonard's other victims) should have known better, but they will merely be calling attention to their movement's callous and utterly irresponsible treatment of those whom Rand would (and did) dismiss as, quite literally, subhuman.

And the fact that the morally corrupt Leonard was able to pass for so long as "one of them" says something crucially important about the movement's standards and purposes: namely, that it _is_ awfully hard to tell a devout Objectivist from a narcissistic, manipulative sociopath. I wonder why. (Hint: it was hard to tell Rand from one too.)

At the very least, "Objectivism" has a tremendous (some of us would say impossible) burden of proof to meet. Anyone who still sees any merit in "Objectivism" should try to scare up a copy of this forgotten book -- and reconsider.

This was an important book in my regrouping after harmful therapy.

It illuminates the dangers of the paternalistic model which the psychotherapists call healing. Power corrupts.

Blaming Ayn Rand or her philosophy, Objectivism, for the misdeeds of Dr. Lonnie Leonard, is like blaming Jesus, or his philosophy, Christianity, for the misdeeds of Christian serial killer Robert Yates (which, by the way, were a lot worse than those of Leonard).

The other reviewers claim that adherence to Objectivism MUST lead to the behavior exhibited by Lonnie Leonard, but they fail to explain why most Objectivists (including many mental healthcare professionals) DON'T behave that way. The fact is that Lonnie Leonard pretended to be an Objectivist, and he fooled a lot of people (including some real Objectivists) into thinking that he was. Being an Objectivist (or practicing any other philosophy) is no guarantor against being fooled by a clever fraud.

Plasil's account of how her therapist, Dr. Lonnie Leonard, took advantage of her emotionally fragile state to turn her into his own private sexual plaything is not for the squeamish.  But the book is important nonetheless for the light it sheds on what can happen when individuals turn away from traditional sources of social support like religion and instead try to follow some sort of rationalist ideology.  Dr. Leonard had no trouble passing himself off as an important follower of Ayn Rand's Objectivist philosophy.  Allan Blumenthal, the leading Objectivist psychotherapist of the time, described Leonard as "the only psychiatrist I would recommend."  Plasil herself was an Objectivist--as were all her friends and acquaintances.  She would learn from brutal experience what happens when all one's friends are true-believing ideologues.

Normal people--that is, people who are not adherents of some rationalist ideology--look for emotional support in the social and moral bonds of traditional social groups, such as the family or church.  But when these social and moral bonds are destroyed through rationalist criticism, human beings are left without any support whatsoever.  This is what happened to Plasil.  At the time of her therapy with Dr. Leonard, all her friends and acquaintances were Objectivists.  They were, as Plasil herself put it, her "entire support system."  If they abandoned her, she would have nobody.  So what happened when Plasil finally stood up to her therapist and accused him of shamelessly exploiting her?  Did her Objectivist friends stand by her and give her the support she needed?  No, of course not.  In keeping with the heartless rationalism which is at the center of Rand's ideological philosophy, Plasil's Objectivist all sided with Dr. Leonard.   "I received innumerable phone calls, from men and women alike," she later recalled, "who condemned me for terminating my own therapy and for the reason they had learned was behind my doing so.  In one call, I was accused of 'destroying the closest thing Man has ever had to a god.'  In another, I was threatened with retaliation for causing the closing of Dr. Leonard's practice."

Here we have an eloquent example of the subversive effects of rationalist ideology.  Rand's morality of "enlightened selfishness" and excessive individualism had, like a corrosive acid, eaten away the tradition-based social bonds that are suppose to hold a community of friends and acquaintances together.  In the absence of these social bonds, the individual is forced to rely entirely on his own private judgment in dealing with the immense complexities of social reality.  Because this is not in fact possible, what happens instead is that the individual attaches himself to any charismatic figure who is willing to fill the void left by the absence of all those uncritically accepted traditions that give people the sense of community they need.

Once this is understood, we can begin to understand why all of Plasil's Objectivist friends abandoned her and sided with Dr. Leonard.  They sided with Dr. Leonard because he gave them the emotional support they desperately needed and could not get in any other way.  Bereft of any sort of religious or communitarian support system, they had no choice but to become abject followers of a common charlatan and sexual malefactor.  This is always what happens when some ideologue or philosopher attempts to replace the common sense ethics of traditional morality with a "rational" ethics of intellectualist speculation or "reason."  Instead of liberty and independence, we find blind loyalty to some sort of self-appointed messiah.

This book is important because it gives us an idea what an Objectivist society would be really like.  If it were possible for Objectivism ever to become the dominant ideology of society, what we would find is not an individualist paradise of rational, independent thinking men and women, but a dysfunctional society made up of clueless true-believers finding themselves inexplicably exploited by ruthless predators like Dr. Lonnie Leonard.  Such are the fruits of any rationalist ideology, regardless of the intentions of its creators.