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Tonight I wish to present to you a particular experience which is nevertheless marked by its commonplaceness. I want to demonstrate how the group situation reveals the emotional cross currents in which are occurring the distortions of communication and of relationship to self and to others. I wish to demonstrate further the doctor's task in selecting from the data conveyed, by both explicit and implicit means, that which is potentially the most fruitful for elaborating the growth process. Grossly defined, growth is the deepening sense of freedom to become more available to life's influences, both from within and from without. This freedom of availability is, for this writer, the single most potent factor in the human being's realization of his own self.
Impairing this freedom of availability are all those feelings which undergo a peculiar juxtapositioning. Common examples of this phenomenon may be found in the patient who shows tears when he is angry, or who laughs when he is sad, or shows contempt when he feels regretful, or feels hilarious when he has suffered a loss. As a consequence, he insults when he wants to show appreciation, or he hurts when he wants to show affection. The male comes to use his genital apparatus as a club rather than as a means for obtaining mutual pleasure with a partner. The female comes to use her sexual organs as a trap rather than as a vehicle where a mutually satisfying engagement can take place. In all these instances, the feeling of being on a common ground with the other, as well as the feeling of inward integrity and of assurance, are being corroded. Eventually, these feelings are displaced by feelings of detachment, bewilderment, and possibly by more complex configurations of response such as hostility or “pseudo-involvement.” In man, all of these processes might collectively be said to cause the generation of a sense of emotional isolation and sterility—a no man's land of being. There can be much exchanged over this ever-deepenin