A Purple Heart recipient discharged two months before his twenty-first birthday read this excerpt to an
encounter group session in Austin, Texas:
"Dialogue Groups: TRT's Guidelines for Working through Intractable Conflicts by Personal Storytelling in
Encounter Groups." Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology, Vol.
A 1973 study of
encounter groups by the Stanford psychiatrist Irvin Yalom and his colleague Morton Lieberman found that 9 percent of participants experienced lasting psychological damage and that Synanon groups were among those with the highest numbers of casualties.
Critics of Rogers's work have argued that client-centered therapy is superficial (De Mott, 1979; Friedenberg, 1971), unworkable with some populations, and unmindful of multicultural and feminist issues (Usher, 1989; Waterhouse, 1993), the social context, and recent advances in behavioral, drug, and alternative therapies; that Rogers's views on human nature are unrealistically optimistic and underestimate human evil (May, 1982); that
encounter groups and humanistic psychology have fostered widespread selfishness, narcissism, and moral permissiveness (Coulson, 1988, 1989; Lasch, 1979); and that Rogers's experiments with organizational change were naive (Kirschenbaum, 1979) and counterproductive (Coulson, 1988).
In the 1950s, she began a career in behavioral psychology that, over the next four decades, would take her through incarnations as psychiatric patient, hospital technician, graduate student and researcher,
encounter group "circuit rider," therapist and author of such notable self-help guides as Permanent Partners: Building Gay and Lesbian Relationships that last (1988) and Positively Gay: New Approaches in Gay and Lesbian Life (1979).
Garth Prison, Preston, is to provide spelling games, debates and
encounter groups "for expression of negative feelings".
"Apartheid," Gordimer once wrote, "is above all a habit." But somehow it doesn't seem the occasion for
encounter groups, twelve-step programs or nicotine gum.
In a very different setting, that is for students taking part in
encounter groups, Lieberman, Yalom & Miles (1972) found that to predict with participants would suffer negative long-term effects of the group experience, peer judgements were the most accurate predictor available and trainer judgements one of the least accurate.
* Sixties-type
encounter groups. We had hired some consultants who were far more into group therapy than we felt was appropriate for our corporate culture.
Do the answers to our problems lie in socialist humanism, deep ecology, kundalini yoga,
encounter groups, neuromuscular therapy, or the 99 names of Allah?
Gary Cooper, "How Psychologically Dangerous are T-Groups and
Encounter Groups?" Human Relations, April 1975, pp.
In addition, school nurses can use the technique in small
encounter groups formed for students who have experienced the recent death of a friend or relative.