Learning: School for the Senses

The instructor dangled a sheet of paper between his fingers, asked the student to imagine that he was that paper. The student, concentrating, felt thin, flexible, fragile. Crunch!A—the instructor crumpled the paper into a wad. The student winced. Then both smiled—the student had become “sensitized.”

The curious lesson in feeling took place at California’s Esalen Institute, 35 miles south of Carmel in the Big Sur country, where a staff of uninhibited social scientists are engaged in the new technique of “sensitivity training.” Their aim is to make business executives, doctors, lawyers, Peace Corpsmen and assorted self-searching women more aware of themselves and of their “authentic” relations with others through sensual and physical rather than verbal experience. Such sensitivity training is suddenly in vogue across the nation to help community leaders, clergymen and businessmen in their dealings with people. Some 350 officials of the State Department, including ambassadors, have taken sensitivity classes at Washington’s NTL Institute for Applied Behavioral Science. About 150 trainees at the federal Job Corps Center in Clearfield, Utah, hope to improve their “interpersonal relations” with the same technique.

Listen to the Body. As practiced at Esalen (named after an extinct Indian tribe), sensitivity training draws upon elements of the inner-directed meditation of Eastern religions and the interaction emphasis of Gestalt psychology. On the theory that modern urban man smothers his feelings under layers of intellectual abstractions and thus loses his sense of wholeness, Esalen President Michael Murphy, 37, a Stanford psychology graduate, also accents emotional release and an awareness of the body. “We have to learn to listen to our bodies if we are ever to enrich and expand our life of feeling,” he says. No far-out cultist, Murphy has attracted such top academic psychologists as Harvard’s B. F. Skinner and Abraham H. Maslow of Brandeis, who is also president of the American Psychological Association.

Classes on body awareness are run by Bernard Gunther, a sometime weight lifter and yoga student, in order to “get people to let go of an excessively verbal image of themselves.” After having his students stand barefoot on a sheet and feel the grass under it, he pairs them off, asks them to “converse” by slapping each other’s arms and shoulders. In “the Gunther sandwich,” one student lies face-down on a sheet; two others kneel beside him, pound his legs, buttocks and back with their hands. Then the three stretch out and cling to each other. Gunther’s “hero sandwich” has the entire class of 35 people cuddle in one tight row, regardless of sex.

Off with the Girdle. Social Psychologist William Schutz holds workshops on “joy” aimed at “the realization of one’s potential.” He asks students in these “encounter groups” to act out their inner feelings rather than talk about them. A man who feels psychically “up tight” may be put inside a circle of classmates and asked to break through this human barrier. The University of California’s George I. Brown, an associate professor of education, employs charades in his creativity workshops: he gets a woman to go through the motions of taking her girdle off, a man to pretend to release a balloon.

A group of 20 business executives recently attended a two-day workshop at Esalen in which they played “blindman’s buff,” one man with eyes open leading another who shut his eyes and contacted his surroundings through touch and smell. At one session, an apparel manufacturer hinted that he really resented his business, wanted to leave it. An Esalen girl staffer then sat opposite him, coaxed him into pretending that she was his business, finally got him to tell her “Go to hell!” He smiled broadly, conceded that he was “proud I could say it.” “I am proud of you too,” said the girl, who gave him an affectionate hug. Although the man returned to his factory, he felt less enslaved by it.

Now five years old, Esalen’s appeal is so broad that a Jesuit moral theologian from Loyola University of Los Angeles and a curriculum expert for the State University of New York are among its 21 resident fellows, who pay $3,000 for nine months of study. Most Esalen students attend short-term workshops and seminars. More than 1,000 people heard a lecture this month by Maslow at the First Unitarian Society Church in San Francisco, where Esalen has just started a branch program. Also intrigued by the institute is the Ford Foundation’s Fund for the Advancement of Education, which recently gave Esalen a $21,000 grant to train five public school teachers, who will then try some of its techniques in their home classrooms.