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We are living in times of conceptual revolution, but the words are spoken quietly and have not reached to far places. Contemporary frames of reference in the fields of psychoanalysis and clinical psychology have lost much current relevance, but practitioners cannot leave the soil which is native to their own thinking roots. It is far easier to match and classify words than to drop into the jungle of unknown relationships. Still, there are courageous people who are more interested in understanding than in the safety of conformity. These people face the wrath, indignation and honest lack of comprehension of their colleagues; they must be tactful even to survive.
The Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation is a paradox among sponsors of intellectual growth within the community of science. One would expect such foundations to foster points of view which have already found prevalent professional and academic acceptance rather than movements which are away from the mainstream of current development. However, since the publications of the Foundation have been consistently meaningful and well in advance of the conceptual thinking of the overall field of mental science, one must assume that an unusually happy choice of administration must somehow have occurred.
The transactions of the Third Conference (1956) on Group Processes are outstanding in the originality of thinking of the presenting speakers and in their daring penetration of current obfuscations in the field of mental science. The transcriptions convey a spirit of spontaneous adventure, as the discussants face the impact of intellectual revelation.
Consider the following quotations of speaker John P. Spiegel:
(In this kind of interview) the doctor takes the boy's behavior with the cues as to how the doctor is to behave, as if it were natural. That is to say, he accepts the role that has been assigned him and falsifies the situation of incongruity. This masking is one way of being supportive. Another term for it is tact. That is one