PARTISAN REVIEW
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representing so many things. But this is a recent development. While
encounter practices and rhetoric now permeate every aspect of our
cultural and political life, the aims of the first encounter groups in the
1950s - to study interaction, leadership solidarity, and coalitions in
small groups and to heighten sensitivity to co-workers and racial minor–
ities - have for the most part been forgotten. Ironically, as encounter
competed more and more with psychotherapy in its claim to mental
healing, the distinctions between mental health and illness became in–
creasingly blurred - in step with the
Zeitgeist.
Initially these groups purported to "make healthy people develop
their human potentials," in contrast to psychoanalysis which perceives
mental illness as the manifestation of inner conflict, and hence of conflict
with society. The conflict between the instinctual life and the pressures of
civilization, which according to Marcuse was toned down by the revi–
sionists, was now not only ignored but was declared irrelevant. Obviously
the psychoanalysts' sheer existence, their developing body of knowledge
based on introspection and psychoanalytic techniques, in itself was a
challenge to all T-groups, "humanistic psychology," and group therapy.
With the establishment of Esalen, its flamboyantly-advertised emphasis
on "feeling" through confrontations, confessions, catharsis in the present,
body-cult, role-playing, and the development of strategies and games, all
resemblance between psychotherapy and T -groups or encounter groups
disappeared. Personal "conversion" by the "charismatic" psychoanalyst
Fritz Perls, the founder of Gestalt therapy, who counseled that you
lose your mind and follow your senses, act out feelings and forget
the intellect, put the movement beyond the pale of classical analysis.
Thus since the early 1960s encounter protagonists not only created an
army of disciples, but frequently sold the new movement to the public
by knocking psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. And each new variation
on the original theme, in order to establish itself, invariably constructed
its own ideology - an ideology, however, that is linked to the antitradi–
tionalism of the counterculture; indeed the foolishness of both lends
each other legitimation, support, and numerical strength. And their
"wedding" has prepared the soil for all sorts of experimental groups,
with all kinds of maverick group leaders out to "do their thing."
Lieberman, Yalom, and Miles conducted a mammoth inquiry into
encounter groups in order to sort facts from fiction, results from failures,
good leaders from bad, and positive personality changes from negative
ones or from no changes at all. They discarded reporting by encounter
"graduates" as too unreliable, too subjective and decided to start from
