THE PROTAGONIST IN HUMAN RELATIONS TRAINING

Abstract

A most significant and highly visible phenomenon in the group movement has been the rapid proliferation of here-and-now, feeling-oriented, action groups. Described by such combinations of adjectives as "sensitivity," "encounter," and "growth" these activities seem, to many observers, to have mushroomed spontaneously and ahistorically. J. L. Moreno ( 1969) has shown that this specious view is not valid, for authentic encounter groups model themselves after his classic pre-World War I definition of the encounter. The growth of the National Training Laboratory (NTL) (and its, in many instances unwanted, offsprings, the extensive growth center network) was facilitated in infancy by the creative ideas and methods of the Sociometric- Psychodramatic Institutes. In addition to outlining the history of the NTL, Moreno has listed the assets and liabilities of both Bethel and Beacon as a pioneering effort "to establish valid standards of teaching and training" and thus prevent a further "hippiephrenic . . . disintegration of our American culture" (Moreno, 1969).