Encounter Group

Right on, gang … but what about Freud?

John Howe at the Conference on the Politics of Psychotherapy

Saturday 27 November, 10 a.m. Conference on the Politics of Psychotherapy opens at the LSE. The shock troops of the psychotherapeutic revolution warm up with an encounter session organised by Quaesitor, taking place appropriately enough in the gym.

You’ve seen it on the movies or TV: the gently masterful leader: ‘… try to show your partners how you feel about them without words … try to feel what your partner’s feeling, are they soft and relaxed or rigid and hostile? … Say goodbye without words … change partners.’ Rapt, twitching faces, an obedient shuffling and stroking; beatific smiles, the occasional daring hug. ‘… Try to pair off with someone you feel is a threat to you … decide who’s going to say Yes and who’s going to say No … Stick your lower jaw out, really show aggression … Ready?’ FREAK-OUT! Bedlam. Eyes shine, fists clench, back presses against back. Afterwards, the animation persists for a while.

The present state of psychology

At 11 a.m. the real business of the day begins in a large basement classroom. More people arrive and the room is packed with maybe 200 of them. The conference has been convened to discuss the present state of psychology – confused, dominated by the tendentious creeds of Behaviourism (the Pavlovian school which holds human beings to consist of a neutral matrix on which ‘behaviour patterns’ are ‘imprinted’ by ‘conditioning’ rather than free beings possessing minds and gifted with free will) and therefore lending itself to the exploitation and oppression of one class by another – and to formulate an alternative system or the seeds of one. Seminars with promising titles are advertised on the blackboard: Alternative Psychology, Alternative Psychiatry, Radical Alternatives to Prison. There is an air of militant optimism, which we share. Time for the first two (simultaneous) sessions. The GLF [Gay Liberation Front] and their audience leave for another room and the discussion on Alternative Psychiatry rambles into existence. Someone wants to discuss ECT (electro-convulsive therapy). He emphasises that he knows nothing about it but before starting his rap asks, for the record, whether anyone present has either administered or received it. A girl says she has received it as treatment for ‘aggression’. ‘It made me more aggressive,’ she says. ‘I knew I didn’t need treatment in the first place.’ Conversation founders. Someone on the platform wants to take things in hand: ‘Look, is any one involved in any way?’ ‘What in?’ asks a voice from the floor. The man on the platform seems a bit flummoxed: ‘Well … people and their problems … that sort of thing.’

We leave for a coffee.

Little Albert and the white rat

The next two sessions advertised are Alternative Psychology and Social Work. Alternative Psychology starts with a film: ‘Conditioning of a Fear Response’, a PR effort made in the twenties by an American behaviourist called J. B. Watson. The film is a record of an extremely crude experiment to condition a child to be afraid of white rats and furry objects by banging a crowbar with a hammer every time he touches the white rat he enjoys playing with. At the end of the experiment the infant is crying and refusing to play with anything.

After the film the girl in charge of the session announces that the original ‘Little Albert’ (the name of the child) is present and has agreed to answer questions. A long-haired man in a suit, who could just be old enough to be the person in question, rises and shuffles to the front of the classroom. His eyes are veiled, he moves like a catatonic, he sinks down on the floor. The girl running the session seizes his arm bossily: ‘Try to stand up.’ He pulls away, his eyes downcast. The room is getting restive: ‘Let him sit down.’ The girl says: ‘Can you answer some questions? What can you remember about the experiment?’ He stands up, obviously in agony. He looks as if he would like to suck his thumb. He lurches around, trying to escape from the girl. The sickened audience is growling: ‘This is disgusting.’ ‘Why don’t you leave him alone?’ The girl says that all will be explained when the session has moved to another room (the first one is overcrowded).

All is explained

The whole seminar moves off angrily to another room, nearly 100 people. ‘Little Albert’ is seen explaining this piece of theatre on the stairs: ‘Hours of theorising can leave you unconvinced, an emotional experience has immediate impact.’ In the larger room most people want to hear what the platform has to say but a large minority is up in arms: ‘We’ve been manipulated,’ they shout. An elderly man called John Lewis is waiting to give a paper but the angry element wants to discuss Little Albert and demand explanations. The issue is put to the vote twice in rapid succession. The manipulated ones lose decisively at the second show of hands and sweep out to another room.

John Lewis takes the stand and delivers his paper for an hour. He is attacking behaviourism and its allies; his analysis (or as much as he can put over in the time available) is meticulously scientific, his orientation humanistic and progressive. He argues that the behaviourists are often ‘unscientific’ in their own terms, and that allies against their doctrines can be found wherever people are seeking truth by rigorous and disciplined scientific investigation – in the fields, for example, of genetics, biology, anthropology and psychology itself.

The psychotherapy of politics

John Lewis talks subtle sense, but his pace is wrong. During his lecture – for that is what it is – the audience dwindles from about 80 to about 15. He is heckled constantly: ‘What d’you mean, objective?’ ‘Criteria acceptable to whom?’ John Rowan of Red Rat stands up to ask how long Lewis intends to go on. Lewis ignores him. He leaves, but returns ten minutes later and delivers an attack: ‘… fucking bullshit. You could have said it in 20 minutes and kept your audience …’ When he stops the questions continue as if he had not spoken. A man representing mysticism interjects: ‘There isn’t time … while we sit and theorise the world’s being buried under a mountain of garbage …’ There’s a militant in the audience too: ‘Theory takes for ever. We need to act now …’ Do these cats think Rome was built in a day? Without bricklayers?

By now we have missed Social Work, Counterindustrial Psychology, Radical Alternatives to Prison and Education and Race. Alternative Psychiatry goes on all day in various rooms. It is time for Sexism (2.30 in the lounge) and we wander in. On the whole it’s a quiet discussion, dominated of course by representatives of GLF and Women’s Liberation. Even here there’s a tendency for confusion to pass unnoticed by the majority.

Someone suggests that liberating individuals from sexual repression need not affect their sexist, exploitative attitude to the opposite sex – that it might simply enable them to be sexually exploiting without feeling guilt. It’s an interesting idea but not one that should pass unchallenged. Similarly, there seems to be little awareness that the so-called ‘straight male’ is in fact nothing of the sort, that aggressively ‘heterosexual’ behaviour and beliefs always mask a frantic denial of the individual’s homosexual parts, while women can express affection for each other in a physical way without being labelled perverts.

The conference, or what we were able to see of it, was reassuring in one way. It became clear that there is a substantial population of psychologists and psychology students who abhor the behaviourist approach to their subject, and all its implications in the fields of psychotherapy, psychiatry, education, social work and the prison system, where it bolsters up the fascist assumptions about human beings that underlie bourgeois ideology – e.g. that people are animals, organic computers, social units to be manipulated and readjusted. It was also clear that these dissident elements are, in the main, politically ‘progressive’ and anxious to do something about the state of psychology.

But what about psychoanalysis?

In another way the conference was extremely depressing. Nobody – nobody at all in the sessions we attended – mentioned the psychoanalytic tradition even once. It is not very difficult to see the rotten areas in the work of Eysenck, Skinner, Jensen; how easy is it to see the truth in Freud? The answer is that it is both difficult and painful: perhaps it is even more painful to realise that outside psychoanalysis there is no psychology worth mentioning. Listen, gang: if you want an alternative to behaviourism, how about studying a bit of psychology just for a start? And get ready for a rough ride: understanding begins at home.

The closing session of the conference was devoted to communication. The alternative psychology magazine Red Rat was appointed the official medium for information exchange and individuals wrote their names and addresses down for future contacts: the mystic, a woman who wanted to hear from ‘other clinical psychologists working for the NHS’, academic groups, student groups from other towns, and so on. It is likely that one of the aims of the conference (though it was not expressed in so many words) was to form the nucleus of a movement which will gather force and direction as it grows in size.

If this is not to prove a pious hope – and the task is as difficult as it is important – someone is going to have to start the work, to formulate an ‘alternative’ theory and practice. Nobody we heard at the conference was doing this although we are eager to believe that some of the sessions we missed were more constructive. If any of our readers can help or want to know more, contact Red Rat at 42 Essendine Mansions, Essendine Road, London, W9, 01-289 2097.

7 Days, 8 December 1971