Continuing a bit more on the theme of
how and
why Joe Gauld may have rationalized categorizing the "Hyde Process" under the heading of "Education," here's some more from that
APA Task Force Report No. 1 - Encounter Groups and Psychiatry (1970), excerpted from the section titled "
Encounter Groups: Description and Epidemiology," emphases added:
...The term "encounter group", originally suggested by Carl Rogers, is far more prevalent in the west; in the east, "sensitivity" group or 'T-group" is more often used.
A longitudinal view of the small group movement adds perspective to a cross-sectional study. The first formally recorded encounter group occurred in 1946 during a short summer workshop in which community leaders were being trained to increase their effectiveness in implementing the Connecticut Fair Employment Practices Act. Through an act of serendipity, the group discovered that the
immediate inspection and analysis of the members' in-group behavior was a powerful and effective technique of education. Interpersonal feedback about one's here-and-now behavior galvanized the members' interest and offered more opportunities to change attitudes and behavior than previous techniques of analysis of "back-home" work situations. The staff, including such prominent social psychologists as Kurt Lewin, Leland Bradford, Kenneth Benne and Ronald Lippit, fully understood the enormous potential of their discovery; subsequently, heavily researched laboratories were conducted at Bethel, Maine, under the auspices of the newly formed National Training Laboratories (NTL). In the past twenty years the NTL has grown from the fledgling part-time institute which sponsored the 1947 laboratory for sixty-seven participants to the present mammoth organization which, in 1967, held laboratories for over 2500 participants. The NTL currently employs over sixty-five full time professional and administrative staff and has a network of six hundred NTL trained group leaders. The laboratory participants come from many fields, but primarily from business, organized religion and mental health disciplines.
An NTL human relations laboratory consists of several exercises including theory sessions, small group, large group, and inter-group exercises. The small group (human relations training group or sensitivity training group or T-group) which has always been the core of the laboratory is the prototype of almost all the various new groups flourishing today. It was not by design, however, that the NTL spawned the encounter group.
The T-group has always been considered by the NTL as a technique of education, not a technique of therapy; the executive head of NTL has, on many occasions, made his position clear on this issue.(2) Many T-group leaders, however, especially a California contingent, gradually
altered their definition of education. Human relations education became not only the acquisition of interpersonal skills but the total enhancement of the individual. The shift in emphasis is most clearly signalled by an influential article(21) written in 1962, which introduced the paradigm of the T-group as "group therapy for normals." Juxtapose the concept of "group therapy for normals" with the blurred, often arbitrary definitions of normality and the subsequent course of events becomes evident. Some additional social factors which contribute to the present form and structure of encounter groups are the revolt against the establishment, the decrying of the need for training, the focus on the "now", the "doing of your own thing", and the emphasis on authenticity, meditation and total transparency. (A detailed description of the development of the new groups and their relationship to therapy groups is presented in a recent text.(22))[/list][/size]
