Gropeshrink

By Brad Darrach

PLEASE TOUCH by Jane Howard. 271 pages. McGraw-Hill. $6.95.

The Human Potential Movement is a loose chain of several hundred psychological supermarkets in which a customer can buy almost anything his little hurt desires: Sensitivity Training, Interracial Encounters, Creative Divorce Workshops, Heterosexual Body Sandwiches, Nude Psychodrama, Attack Therapy, Vomit Training. The movement is already something of a force, and many psychologists would agree with Dr. Carl Rogers, one of its leading prophets, that "intensive group experiences are perhaps the most significant social invention of this century." H.P.M. is growing so fast, moreover, that the professionals can't police it and the public can't really tell if it is being turned on or put on. What the movement obviously needs is some tough but friendly critics. In Please Touch it has found one--a casual amateur who turns out to be surprisingly shrewd and delightfully witty.

In this first-person account of gropeshrink, Jane Howard presents herself frankly as a rather too prim Midwestern miss who became a busy New York bachelor-girl reporter and found herself starved for what the movement promised to provide: emotional closeness. Assigned by LIFE to do a piece on Esalen Institute, a sort of Harvard of the emotions, she got so involved in the movement that she decided to do the whole sensitivity circuit. The result is Please Touch.

Touch and Tell. In the first groups she entered, Jane felt dismissed as an "uptight Easterner" and got off some bitchy backchat: "You don't interest me as much as I seem to interest you." Loosening a little, she began to make Freudian howlers that commonly afflict the beginner in therapy--as when, pretending to be a mailbox, she blithely announced: "I'm hoping for a lot of good long letters." But soon her antennae told her that she was not the only one out of step. All was not well in the land of touch and tell.

The professionals, she found, were a ludicrously earnest lot. "I come across as a human being," one of them soberly assured her. Their jargon was tiresome--they were always "resonating," "actualizing," "peaking," or having "gut reactions"--and their cult of the body seemed prejudicial to a girl who had always been more at home in her head.

The movement, she found, was also infested with "glib touchers," "sensual pedants" and "sensitivity heads," people who pretended to be growing but were actually addicts who had to have "a maintenance dose of intimacy." Physical contact, she decided, could be a very effective way of avoiding emotional contact. Did Dr. William Schutz, author of Joy, really think he was increasing intimacy in a group by issuing each man a gynecological speculum and inviting him to examine his partner's vagina? And what was really in the mind of Paul Bindrim, an advocate of nude marathons, when he spread a young woman's legs wide apart and commanded her to tell Katy all the four-letter functions that take place in that part of her body? Jane reports with some satisfaction the young woman's reply. "I think," she said weakly, "that Katy already knows that."

Fossil Fears. As encounters multiplied and perspective deepened, Jane found herself kicking pillows and hurling finger paint with the worst of them--and feeling, as a result, relieved of some fossil fears. On the whole, she recommends the treatment (at least to those who think they need it), but she also warns that successful therapy, in the Each-One, Touch-One tradition, can be almost more trouble than it's worth. Having learned with some difficulty to relax her lower face and let her mouth hang just a little open, she went to visit her family. "What's the matter with your mouth?" her mother asked sharply. "Can't you breathe through your nose?"

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