Crossroads of Crisis: I. Therapeutic Sources and Quasi-Therapeutic Functions of Post-Industrial Communes

The convergence of a number of distinct intellectual and therapeutic traditions in the mental health field has produced a conception of non-professional, quasi-therapeutic communities that profoundly influences contemparary communes. One of these traditions started with Freudian psychoanalytic theory and the dynamic, individually-oriented psychotherapies built upon it. A second, initially-independent tradition that influences the contemporary situation is the social-community psychiatric tradition, particularly the concept of "therapeutic communities." Another tradition that impinges on contemporary communalism stems from the sensitivity training-encounter movement. This tradition has given rise to numerous quasi-communal Growth Centers and further accelerated the national trend toward mass "psychotherapeutic populism," currently reflected in the popularity of "leaderless encounter groups" and "marathon groups." A final, more derivative influence can be found in the Rogerian-Existential-Humanistic psychology associated with writers such as Rogers, May, and Maslow. The central working hypothesis of this paper is that these therapeutic traditions began to converge during the Post-World War II era. By the early 1960s the various originally independent traditions were increasingly indistinguishable and had, in effect, blended around certain common themes. A crucial common strand underlying the convergence of these various traditions was an emphasis on non-professional, on-going and continuous, multi-functional, quasi-therapeutic experiences for "normals"--for "relatively healthy" affluent upper-middle class Americans. From this perspective, present-day American communes are seen as transient, age-graded, quasi-therapeutic sheltered workshops. By providing a temporary psycho-social moratorium from competitive conventional society, contemporary communes facilitate individual-psychological re-orientation, growth, and re-integration into non-communal contexts. This latent function is fulfilled by encouraging interpersonal experimentation in the context of an intimate, permissive, supportive, non-hierarchical (non-professional) collectivity of socio-logically-homogeneous peers. A second article next month will explore the organizational and ideological models for contemporary communes.