In California and in many other parts of the country during the mid-1960s and early 1970s, the encounter group movement exploded. Encounter groups were everywhere—and some of them so closely resembled therapy groups that they interested me enormously. The Free University in Menlo Park, a community adjoining Stanford University, posted advertisements for dozens of personal growth groups. The living rooms of Stanford dorms hosted a variety of encounter groups: twenty-four-hour marathon groups, psychodrama groups, T-groups, human potential groups. Moreover, many Stanford students sought group experiences in nearby growth centers like Esalen, or, like hundreds of thousands across the country, joined EST or lifespring, which both had large meetings that often broke out into smaller encounter-type groups.
I was as puzzled as anyone. Were these groups, as many feared, a menace, a harbinger of social disintegration? Or were they just the opposite? Was it possible that they effectively enhanced personal growth? The more extravagant the claims, the more raucous the zealots and the more shrill the conservative response. I observed T-groups led by well-trained leaders, and it seemed to me that many members profited. I also attended rather wild drop-in psychodrama groups that concerned me, causing me to wonder whether members might have been psychologically damaged. I attended a twenty-four-hour nude marathon group at Esalen, but had no follow-up on the effects of the experience on the group. It seemed to me that some of the fifteen members of the group profited, but I had no way of knowing the effects on less vocal members. Many praised these new experimental groups; many others damned them. The situation begged for some empirical evaluation.
I heard a talk by Mort Lieberman, a University of Chicago professor, at a group therapy conference in Chicago and was much impressed with his work. We spoke for hours well into the night and agreed to undertake an ambitious inquiry into the effects of encounter groups. Our interests overlapped: not only was he an esteemed social science researcher, but he had also been trained as a T-group leader and as a group therapist. He made plans to spend a full year at Stanford, and we soon enlisted Matt Miles, a professor of education and psychology at Columbia University as well as a researcher and expert statistician, to join our team. The three of us designed an ambitious study of the effectiveness of encounter groups. Encounter groups were much in evidence on the Stanford campus, and many faculty members were concerned that students might suffer harm from the forceful confrontations, the uncensored feedback, and the antiestablishment posture of the groups. In fact, the university administration was so concerned about these groups on campus that they immediately granted us permission to conduct research on them. To ensure a large sample, the university even permitted us to offer college credit for encounter group participation.
Our final research design called for a sample of 210 students who were randomly assigned to a control sample or to one of twenty groups, each group meeting for a total of thirty hours. The students would receive three credits for the course. We selected ten currently popular methodologies and offered two groups from each methodology:
Traditional NTL T-groups
Encounter (or personal growth) groups
Gestalt therapy groups
Esalen (sensory awareness groups)
TA (transactional analytic) groups
Psychodrama groups
Synanon (confrontational “hot seat”) groups
Psychoanalytically oriented groups
Marathon groups
Leaderless, tape-led groups
Next we recruited two well-known expert group leaders from each of these modalities. Mort Lieberman developed a large battery of instruments to measure changes in the members and to assess the leaders’ behavior, and we enlisted and trained a team of observers to study members and leaders during each meeting. Once the university human research panel approved our research plan, we embarked on this memorable project—it would be the largest and most rigorous study of such groups ever conducted.
At the end of the study we wrote a five-hundred-page monograph published by Basic Books, Encounter Groups: First Facts. The overall findings were impressive: about 40 percent of students taking a one-quarter college course underwent significant positive personal change that endured for at least six months. However, there were also sixteen “casualties”—students who reported feeling worse six months after their group experience.
I wrote the chapters describing the clinical development and evolution of each group, the behavior of the leaders, and the effects on the “high-learners” and the “casualties.” The casualty chapter received enormous attention from opponents of the encounter group movement and was cited in hundreds of newspapers across the country. It provided the conservative right exactly the ammunition they wanted. On the other hand, my chapter on high-learners, the large number of students who reported substantial personal change as a result of twelve group meetings, received no attention whatsoever. This was most unfortunate, for I’ve always felt keenly that such groups, properly led, have much to offer.
Ten years later, the encounter group movement had faded away—it had been replaced by Bible groups in many of the Stanford dorms. And, with the demise of encounter groups, our book Encounter Groups: First Facts lost its readership, aside from scholars, who found many of the research instruments useful. Of all my books, it alone has gone out of print. My wife was never a friend of this project because it demanded so much of my time, and because a crucial staff meeting prevented me from driving her home from the Stanford Hospital after she delivered our fourth child, Benjamin Blake. She recalls that one of the reviewers of the book commented, “These authors must have worked very hard because the prose was so tired.”
I continued working on my group textbook (The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy) for two more years, and when I finished the final draft I flew to New York to meet publishers whom David Hamburg had contacted on my behalf. I lunched with Arthur Rosenthal, the impressive founder of Basic Books, and chose to publish with him despite offers from other presses. Reviewing my life in these pages reminds me of the extent to which David Hamburg not only supported my research but also facilitated my publishing career.
The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy was immediately successful, and within a year or two it was adopted as a textbook by most of the psychotherapy training programs in the country; later, it was adopted in many other countries as well. Instrumental in the training of group therapists, the textbook has gone through five revised editions and sold over 1 million copies, which, over time, gave Marilyn and me a new degree of financial security. Like most of the young psychiatry faculty, I had augmented my income by consulting on weekends at various psychiatric hospitals, but once the textbook was published, I stopped my weekend consulting and instead accepted invitations to lecture on group therapy.
My entire approach to remuneration was radically altered one day about five years after publication of my textbook, when I addressed a large audience at Fordham University in New York City. As usual, I brought with me a videotape of a group therapy meeting I had held the previous week, which I intended to use in my teaching. However, the Fordham videotape player malfunctioned and the technicians finally threw up their hands, leaving me with the daunting and stressful task of improvising for the entire morning. I gave my two prepared lectures in the afternoon and had a lengthy Q-and-A session with the audience, and by the end of the day I was entirely exhausted. As the audience was filing out, I happened to peruse the printed program and took note that the fee for the workshop was $40 (this was in 1980). I looked around the auditorium and estimated that there were upward of six hundred attendees. A quick calculation indicated that the sponsors of the talk had made over $20,000, and they were paying me $400! From that time on I contracted for a fair share of the funds raised at each conference, and my speaking income soon dwarfed my university salary.