Encountering America by Jessica Grogan

Author:Jessica Grogan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2012-11-15T05:00:00+00:00

10

Such Beauty and Such Ugliness

“Like a bird on a wire, like a drunk in a midnight choir, I have tried in my way to be free.”

LEONARD COHEN1

After their taped psychotherapy session, Gloria reached out to shake hands with Perls. He extended his cigarette and ashed on her palm. Gloria was humiliated.2 Still, when she was confronted with the choice of which psychotherapist to work with on a regular basis, she chose Perls.

The choice seemed to be between the therapist who would gently teach her to accept and trust herself, the therapist who would pragmatically guide her toward constructive behavioral change, and the therapist who would brutally tear down her defenses, leaving her exposed, vulnerable, and scrambling to regain her dignity.

Gloria’s decision, while somewhat unexpected, was the choice of thousands of Americans in the mid to late 1960s who flocked to encounter groups, to Esalen, and to many of the other, more intensity-seeking pockets of the counterculture.

Perls’s groups, like his individual therapy sessions, were modeled on his devotion to the ideal of utter self-reliance, individualism, and freedom. He denigrated dependence and vulnerability in all their forms, dismissing these qualities as immature and linked to interpersonal manipulation.3 Rather than offering a supportive model of empowerment, though, Perls offered a hostile approach that bordered on sadism.

“If I get myself in a corner,” Gloria told Perls during the session, “you’re going to just let me drown.” He seemed to enjoy her struggle, repeatedly mocking her and calling her a phony. Indeed, the only emotion he seemed to accept from her was anger. Gloria justifiably accused him of acknowledging as genuine only her brave, independent statements, and of dismissing as phony her earnest expressions of fear and anxiety.

Perls’s tough love seemed to spur Gloria to action, flooding her with adrenaline, and making her more proactive than she would have been in a less charged interaction. But his contempt bias—against the qualities that make people existentially fragile, interpersonally accountable, complicatedly human—was dehumanizing, as well. This element, characteristic both of Perls’s sessions and of other encounter groups, was what made certain manifestations of the encounter group craze in the late 1960s particularly toxic.

Over the course of the 1960s, Schutz and Perls threw down in a pound-for-pound contest of escalating extremes designed to evoke catharsis. John Heider likened the process to an addiction in which leaders sought “ever more potent blowouts,” with the illusion that they would yield ever more dramatic highs.4 A more common outcome, however, was an increase in the depressions that followed. Peaks were often followed by exaggerations of the original discomforts. For this reason, both leaders and participants became like junkies chasing a high.

Many were literal junkies, as well. In the summer of 1967, in particular, hundreds of LSD heads, and as many stoners, gathered at Esalen.

Heider described this time at Esalen as wonderful and awful, compelling and repulsive. The flip side of the extravagant beauty of Esalen, the utter sense of freedom, the promise of illumination and awakening, was pain and darkness that ran deep.

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