26
PARTISAN REVIEW
and the early translations. For example, and taking them in no
particular order, there is scream therapy, developed by Arthur Janov
from Freudian ideas about primal needs, which uses a method of
intensive emotional catharsis to reach a Primal Trauma and achieves
therapeutic results by contrived cataclysmic expression of the Primal
Scream. There is
est,
an authoritarian group encounter therapy; the
name, an acronym for Erhard Seminars Training, suggests intense
declarative being.
In
the therapy, two hundred or more people pay $250
each to spend two successive weekends locked up in large ballrooms,
where they meditate, speak, weep, are given talks and pep-talks by
trainers and leaders, and are permitted to eat and go to the bathroom
only once a day.
In
some profound way that few have been able to
articulate, the experience of encountering the self under those condi–
tions is revolutionizing. People speak of "going
through"
it or of
"having been
through"
it, and the very strangeness, the traumatic
quality-of a subway disaster or concentration camp or a
highjacking-in an undertaking chosen and paid for without coercion,
separates it from the more continuous quotidian experience of many
other therapies.
Psychodrama is an older therapeutic experience, more continuous
with other kinds of group therapy, and its technique of role-playing to
achieve psychological change has influenced even those remote from
the world of therapy. Transactional therapy isolates the "games" and
"scripts" of interpersonal confrontations and introduces a vocabulary
of psychological counters (such as "strokes," "hooks," "P-A-C
games-Parent, Adult, Child) which the members of a group use
to
analyze their own and each other's behavior. Variations of game
therapy abound in this new world. Another kind of group therapy
takes the family itself as the patient, and, whether based in Freudian
theory or some other theory, it treats the illness or disturbance of the
" presenting patient" not as an individual affliction but as a group
disease, the evidence of a malfunctioning social system in need of
correction. The individual who first seeks treatment may be merely the
most vulnerable part of the system whose illness by definition is of the
whole. Unlike the games of transactional therapy, or the roles of
psychodrama, or the emotional experiments of Primal Therapy, which
all use merely the shadows and images, family therapy as far as possible
brings in the actual figures of the family drama, parents and children
together for treatment, even uncles, aunts, brothers, sisters, or anyone
else who is in the family. Some family therapists also work with
individual members, others do not; some are active and intervene or
