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When there is a proliferation of groups whose aim it is to get their participants to express feelings, it is necessary to stress that, after feelings have been expressed, they must be dealt with, i.e., inappropriate feelings must be identified and changed; just expressing feelings is not enough. One therefore welcomes a book that corroborates this. In Search for Community: Encounter Groups and Social Change is such a book.
It is a collection of seven essays presented at two symposia of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1971 and 1977. The search for community is shown by the mechanisms devised for group interaction and self-expression, such as encounter groups, T-groups, sensory awareness groups, etc. The papers look at these groups from the perspectives of various disciplines.
The editor is to be congratulated on his concise introduction, which summarizes the essays and ties them together.
In a fascinating paper, James W. Fernandez, an anthropologist, traces the roots of encounter groups to rituals. It is known in anthropology that the need for relatedness to others is not satisfied in the contacts of everyday occupations. Rituals and ceremonies similar to encounter groups fill this need. They separate the participants from the larger society, allow them to interact with a significant other, a deity, ancestor, or group, and then reintegrate them into the larger society. Modern encounter groups, by contrast, omit the reintegration because they consider the larger society dishonest, oppressive, and constrictive, therefore meaningless. This omission is the anthropological explanation why “for most participants the [encounter group] experience seems to be transitory or negative.”
Richard Sennett, a social psychologist, defines Gemeinschaft, or community, as a group of people who are open with one another and expose their feelings to one another. An encounter group is an example. He attempts to show that Gemeinschaft, with its idea of self-disclosure