Moving Beyond Esalen
MARX, PAUL
Moving Beyond Esalen Please Touch: A Guided Tour of the Human Potential Movement By Jane Howard McGraw-Hill. 271 pp. $6.95. Reviewed by Paul Marx Department of English, New Haven College In...
...Miss Howard likes her privacy and enjoys solitary avocations, so she went out to California with some apprehension...
...You discover that the feelings you thought were uniquely yours are really universal...
...Reviewed by Paul Marx Department of English, New Haven College In January 1968 Jane Howard, a former Midwesterner in her 30s, was assigned by Life magazine to participate in and write a story on a five-day Advanced Encounter Workshop at the Esalen Institute...
...The wisdom of the past is heavily weighted in favor of an established moral code...
...Usually, though, if you seem reluctant to be at least verbally intimate, you invite the label "repressed...
...The idea is to let yourself go, to let yourself feel good about what feels good, to let yourself dislike what and whom you do not like...
...Thus, a frequent exhortation is simply, "Flow...
...In an encounter group it does not make sense to wait for a relationship to reach the stage of trust...
...While the evaluations she offers in this book are completely impressionistic--and despite the fact that one sometimes wearies of both the author and the people she forced herself to associate with--one is able to feel confidence in her powers of judgment...
...to loosen up she was to shout, shed tears, give and receive backrubs, and bathe naked in groups...
...Or they may find you objectionable for a variety of other superficial reasons...
...And to say it when you feel it...
...But if encounter groups are to attain emotional freedom through cant, or at the price of disturbing an individual's carefully wrought balance of values, the unshackling they effect will be to no purpose...
...For 25 years all sorts of institutions and corporations had been sponsoring sensitivity training groups for purposes ranging from the identification and reduction of racial prejudice to the improvement of organizational and bureaucratic communication...
...The very act of enrolling in a group is taken to mean that you really want to do some confessing, and the leaders earn their pay by catalyzing probes that invariably result in an acknowledgment that perhaps you really are repressed...
...That would kill joy...
...If you are attacked it is only because you tried to hold back...
...Still, she ran into a number of charlatans and questionable techniques, and the endorsement she offers at the end of her "tour" is sensibly qualified...
...Certainly there is no reason why freedom and joy cannot coexist with morality...
...But since the Puritan tradition has left its mark on the national psyche, and since increasing specialization and urbanization have made life more and more impersonal, the "circuit riders" who conduct encounters assume that everyone's emotions are to some extent dammed up and in need of release...
...She finds that, on the whole, the movement and most of the people engaged in spreading it are performing very valuable services...
...only in modern times have internal as well as external freedom and the experience of joy been thought to be requisites of the truly good life...
...At Esalen she was told she was uptight...
...the assumption is that everyone in the group is basically good and worthy of sharing in your innermost secrets...
...The encounter groups' clientele are neither physically ill nor emotionally unstable...
...Once the beans are spilled, love also follows...
...It is not very likely that anyone in the group will say your guilt or shame was justified and deserved...
...Delayed by an encounter between her car and another automobile, Miss Howard's article appeared some six months later under the headline, "Inhibitions Thrown to Gentle Winds...
...In an encounter group you stand an excellent chance of being told to your face by new acquaintances that you are not liked...
...The most interesting chapters in Please Touch are those dealing with encounter groups, because their goals are so universally desirable and because their methods so closely approach pretension and exploitation...
...The latest development, though, is the personal encounter group, with its more ambitious and less measurable goal of stimulating awareness and emotional growth in the individual...
...During her convalescence from a foot injury suffered in the accident, Miss Howard did a lot of reading and discovered there was much more to the human potential movement than Esalen...
...When you tell what it is you feel guilty or ashamed about, good things happen...
...They may think, for example, you are being snobbish for not welcoming the opportunity to touch and be touched...
...Encounter leaders generally feel that holding back is a manifestation of guilt or shame, not of principle...
...Deciding to assess the whole human potential movement, Miss Howard went on to enroll herself in as many different kinds of groups as she could find...
...they are basically healthy...
Vol. 53 • November 1970 • No. 21
