Human Potential: The Revolution in FeelingTime article Monday, Nov. 09, 1970IN an Evanston, Ill., high school, students of English Teacher Thomas Klein shrouded themselves in bed sheets and crawled blindly around the floor. At a body-movement session in Beverly Hills, Calif., participants took turns pummeling a sofa pillow with feral ferocity. From a four-story midtown Manhattan brownstone, the sound of screaming can be heard all day long. It comes from patients of Psychiatrist Daniel Casriel, who believes that such release is therapeutic. In Escondido, Calif., a group of naked men and women, utter strangers, step into what their leader, Beverly Hills Psychologist Paul Bindrim, calls a "womb pool"—a warm Jacuzzi bath. They are permitted to hug and kiss each other, but intercourse is out.
To many Americans, these activities typify a leaderless, formless and wildly eclectic movement that is variously called sensitivity training, encounter, "therapy for normals," the bod biz, or the acidless trip. Such terms merely describe the more sensational parts of a whole that is coming to be known as the human potentials movement —a quest conducted in hundreds of ways and places, to redefine and enrich the spirit of social man.
To reach man's unawakened resources, the movement focuses on the actions and interactions of individuals in a group. In this, it has borrowed freely from psychology's past, from such extenders of Freudian theory as Karen Horney and Harry Stack Sullivan, who realized that no individual can be defined, and no emotional disorder healed, without an examination of the interchange between one man and all the others in his life. Society itself is defined by the group. The movement's exponents argue that by expanding the individual's self-awareness and sense of well-being within the group, a new feeling of community develops that strengthens both the individual and the group.
Weekend Marathon. The human potentials movement has already touched the major social institutions: church, factory, school and state. In a study for the Carnegie Corporation, Donald H. Clark, associate professor of education at New York's City University, reports that the movement has permeated every level of education, from kindergarten to graduate school and beyond. Encounter sessions or T (for training) groups have been held, sometimes as parts of the curriculum, in dozens of colleges and universities, among them Harvard, Columbia, Boston University and the New School for Social Research. Big business has enlisted its employees in human potentials centers in ever increasing numbers, and many companies now operate programs of their own. In some, white employees don blackface, black employees whiteface, presumably to encourage the feeling that the difference in the races is, after all, only skin-deep.
Aided by widespread publicity, including the movie Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice and Jane Howard's bestseller, Please Touch, the movement is spreading explosively. Two years ago, when California's Esalen Institute first sought to export its own brand of the new gospel east, 90 curious New Yorkers showed up for a five-day encounter group in Manhattan. A similar event last year drew 850; last April, 6,000. Since January 1969, when Donald Clark counted 37 "growth centers"—established sites for the development of human or group potentials—the census has risen past 100. ….
At its Maine retreat, opened in 1947, the N.T.L. began applying the feedback process to what has become an entirely new educational approach: the T group. Uninstructed and agendaless, the group begins to coalesce in a highly charged emotional atmosphere. At first, group members are reserved, but eventually they remove their social masks. Says Bradford: "People come as lonely people —we're all lonely people—and find they can finally share with somebody. One statement I've heard 300 or 400 times from T-group members is, 'You know, I know you people better than people I've worked with for 30 years.' "
Intense Encounter. T groups are now conducted internationally by 600 N.T.L.-trained leaders and are designed to improve corporations, government agencies, churches and other institutions. They differ from encounter groups in that they tend to be less emotional, place more reliance on verbal than on nonverbal communication, and are less concerned with the individuals' growth per se than with his development within his group. T groups improve relationships within organizations by trading what the late Douglas McGregor of M.I.T. called management's "X" approach (do as I say) for the "Y" approach (join with me so that we can work things out together). Obviously, that does not and cannot make equals of the boss and the factory hand; if that is the unrealistic goal, the "Y" approach will fail. But by making the president and the factory hand more aware of each other it can vastly improve the employee's sense of his own value and place.
The pervasiveness of the human potentials movement is demonstrated by the inroads it has made even in relatively conservative cities like Cincinnati, where T groups and encounter groups have become an integral part of business and civic activities. Procter & Gamble and Federated Stores, for example, both use human potentials groups to increase the effectiveness and morale of their staffs. After hours, some of the employees, inspired by their office training, conduct private encounter groups of their own. Methodist and. Episcopal church leaders regularly schedule group training sessions for their laity, and the University of Cincinnati sponsors sensitivity groups both to improve the workings of its own departments and to aid the community at large. Even the police department is involved. Next month new recruits will be given 40 hours of group sensitivity training to give them a better understanding of the problems and ways of the city's minorities. N.T.L.'s approach represents what might be called the conservative end of the human potentials movement. At the other, or liberal end are Esalen and all its imitators and derivatives. Somewhere in between lies the Center for Studies of the Person in La Jolla, Calif., a loose confederation of 53 psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, philosophers, educators, clergymen and journalists.
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