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A group gathers in seclusion under the guidance of a leader who refuses to give leadership in the expected sense. There are no rules of procedure, no agenda. In this planned vacuum, minus labels, titles and props, each member demonstrates his "life style" simply by talking. The authoritarian sounds bossy, the abdicator yields in arguments, the critic criticizes, and it is all supposedly plain—often painfully plain to the subject himself—when the others' observations of him begin to "feed back." If things go well, a kind of agape results. If not, the practice can be dangerous: nervous breakdowns have occasionally resulted from the intense personal exposure. These sensitivity sessions have developed a vocabulary that is fairly typical of today's popular psychology, some of its leading terms being "meaningful relationships," "openness," "interface situations," "shared feelings," "involvement."
Sensitivity training is in the same mode as group therapy, which is probably the most important U.S. contribution to psychotherapy so far. On a TV program called Therapy, carried by Los Angeles station KHJ, groups have been airing their neuroses since mid-July before an estimated 110,000 viewers. Each 45-minute installment is entirely authentic, culled from a video-taped therapy session two to three hours long, complete with real tears, confessions and accusations (obscenities are blipped out). These sessions, of course, are professionally guided, but their exposure on television contributes mightily to do-it-yourself analysis.
Group therapy is in the tradition of American psychiatry, which has stressed the positive values in the individual's interaction with society—often in contrast with Founder Freud's profoundly pessimistic view that society demands repression as the price of its cultural fruits and that repression produces a basic human neurosis for which there is no cure. Psychoanalysis, he once said, could only relieve a patient of his misery, leaving him with the ordinary unhappiness that is common to mankind.
Sexy Computer
To the young, today, the teachings of Freud and his heirs are old-fashioned parts of the intellectual scenery. And most pop-psych strikes them as ludicrous. Even as interpreted by the expert, Freud's vision was never one of scientific "fact," but a fascinating mythology. The mythology can work successfully as part of treatment. But in the hands of amateurs, only a grotesquely distorted version remains, with its talk about stamp collecting as anal and piano playing as masturbatory. "That belongs to an earlier period," says Critic Alfred Kazin. "By now, people know that the passions are real but not that readily symbolized. There is very little philosophy per se in this country, and Americans have been left high and dry by the evaporation of religion, but in talk about psychoanalysis there is a kind of authentic quest. It's an attempt to get back into philosophy in a roundabout way."