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These are also sometimes called sensitivity groups, and are not to be confused with more orthodox group therapy. Encounter groups are larger, up to say 18 members, and sometimes have no official leader, whilst there is always a qualified therapist running the more orthodox groups. Encounter groups focus on ‘personal difficulties’, and often specialize in specific problem areas, such as stress in a corporate situation or in a bad marriage.

These groups commenced in the United States in the 1960s, and have been described as treatment for people who are not sick but simply seeking fulfilment. Nevertheless, their aims are decidedly therapeutic. They seek to make the individual feel human again, at ease with his own emotions and those of the people around him; they seek to counter the depersonalizing effects of the industrial society in which many of us live. They consituto a kind of mass folk therapy, and it is estimated that some two million Americans have so far been moved to join them.

Within these groups, the veneer of politeness has to be lifted, masks must disappear. It is the opposite of the usual cocktail party situation. Physical routines may be used to get things started, such activities as closing one’s eyes and groping, letting oneself fall backwards into another’s arms, and hand wrestling. When doing psychodrama the group members are told to act out experiences that have given them distress in the past— perhaps, a family quarrel. Then the group rotates roles, and so each member may move from acting out his problems to getting to see himself from other angles. There are limits to what encounter groups can accomplish and, very occasionally, there are dangers involved. Psychotic breakdowns under group pressure, though rare, have happened. The grouper who returns alone into the everyday world can carry with him certain misconceptions of reality. He has changed, but the world has not. It is possible that Alcoholics Anonymous bears out what Dr Pratt discovered in Boston: that the greatest benefit from groups is gained by those people caught in the same specific stress problem, be it alcohol, skin disorders, or alienation.

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