Sensitivity Training: Touch and Grow?

The proliferation of groups devoted to sensitivity training is bringing the movement increasingly into the public eye. Some of the procedures involved are of such a nature as to call the entire bioenergetic method into question on ethical grounds, and we may expect an increasing amount of criticism of it. The Christian ought to familiarize himself with the issues involved, if only to understand the objections being raised.

The term sensitivity training covers a wide range of laboratory approaches to group therapy, some of them very far-out. The objective is to make people over on the basis of what is loosely called personal encounter. Involved are group dynamics, relations training, and various forms of experimental communication. Practitioners of sensitivity training accept many of the insights and procedures of more conventional group therapy, and add techniques of their own.

Much has been written in the sensational press concerning the way-out activities of such groups as the Esalen Institute at Big Sur, California, which not only has traveled across the land but is now operating abroad. The publicity has centered about the erotic forms that the sessions assume. This element may sometimes have been exaggerated, though such excesses are to be expected, given the background of some of those involved.

There is a place for evangelicals to take a look at sensitivity training and try to evaluate its fundamental techniques in terms of the Christian understanding of things. Something of the history of the movement may be helpful.

Twenty-three years ago Leland Bradford, Ronald Lippitt, and Kenneth Benne established the National Training Laboratories Institute for Applied Behavioral Science in Bethel, Maine. This institution, known as NTL, set the pattern for training groups (T-groups) that met under very informal conditions and for limited periods of time, guided by a trainer. The emphasis was upon emotional impact and exaggerated behavior, designed to assist participants in meeting the anxiety-arousing aspects of their environment.

Contemporary sensitivity training differs from the older T-group method in several respects. Its groups tend, ostensibly at least, to place less emphasis upon the role of the leader and more upon the encounter between or among participants. (The language, at least, is derived from the theory of Carl Rogers.) The newer forms emphasize “marathon laboratories” designed to break down inhibitions and reserve.

The training marathons use extreme informality and intensity of personal encounter in order to dissipate tensions and consequent aggression. There is a stress upon the non-uniqueness of personal problems—nothing is held to be private or idiosyncratic. The acceptance of any form of behavior, however erratic, is encouraged.

There is a great deal of stress upon emotional expression, particularly of aggression. Participants are encouraged to share their reactions to one another, however ruthless and negative they may be. The assumption is that expressing dislike, vindictiveness, or anger will serve to eliminate these feelings. One wonders what wounds may be inflicted in the process, and what latent feelings may surface later as a result of such therapy.

Large use is made of non-verbal techniques in the bioenergetic workshops. Forms of behavior that many regard as infantile are encouraged. Kicking and screaming, even tantrums, are considered therapeutic in that they help to give release to the authoritarian father figure that is held to create most of our hang-ups.

The rationale behind the non-verbal forms of therapy is that the body is the essential person. As one of the popularizes of the movement says, “You don’t have a body—you are a body.” This is strangely reminiscent of the materialism of Ludwig Feuerbach, and certainly embodies the romantic assumption that most of us are corrupted by our familial and societal environment.

In the bioenergetic workshops much emphasis is placed upon the group as constituting a miniature world. Now, since in real life aggressiveness, hostility, and neuroses are supposedly derived from groups, it is assumed that the therapeutic group will enable the participating person to get rid of these unlovely forms of mind and behavior. Aggressive behavior within the safety of the group, it is believed, will drain the poison from the neurotic mind.

It is assumed that the human person (i.e., the body) has an innate capability of shaping the personality into normal form. The problem is, it seems, to cause the body to stop saying, “No, No, No” as a result of its earlier repressions. It is at this point that the Esalen Institute has developed the motif of touching. Assuming that most adults grew up with too little of fondling (how have the neo-Freudians and Dr. Spock failed us here?) and too much of restraint, these practitioners feel that interpersonal physical intimacy, in varying degrees, will relax the body and release psychic anxieties.

Many have criticized the use of nudity-therapy in sensitivity training groups. This use is justified on several grounds: it is held that in nudity there is complete honesty; in nudity there is total acceptance; in nudity, artificialities are stripped away; and in nudity, status symbols are rejected. (One European critic has remarked, in response to the last claim, that wearing sweatshirts might serve the same purpose.)

It must be said that responsible therapists, especially those of NTL, feel that the technique of nudity has no value as a means to healing. Far from erasing the old life, it only serves to destroy the normal personal reserve that undergirds the individual’s self-respect.

Sensitivity training, as popularly practiced, is thus to be criticized on the following grounds: first, it is totally earth-bound and concerned exclusively with the here-and-now; second, it incorporates the worst features of romanticism, with its rejection of parental and societal values; and third, it incorporates the error that human nature can heal its own maladies. It assumes that all the disturbed need is an opening of the doors to the inner self. But what value can come from stripping bare an ego that is without dimensions if no new dimensions are added and no creative substitute is offered for the bleak wasteland that is the soulscape of men and women without God?

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