Learning: School for the Senses

The instructor dangled a sheet of paper between his fingers, asked the student to imagine that he was that paper. The student, concentrating, felt thin, flexible, fragile. Crunch!A—the instructor crumpled the paper into a wad. The student winced. Then both smiled— the student had become "sensitized."

The curious lesson in feeling took place at California's Esalen Institute, 35 miles south of Carmel in the Big Sur country, where a staff of uninhibited social scientists are engaged in the new technique of "sensitivity training." Their aim is to make business executives, doctors, lawyers, Peace Corpsmen and assorted self-searching women more aware of themselves and of their "authentic" relations with others through sensual and physical rather than verbal experience. Such sensitivity training is suddenly in vogue across the nation to help community leaders, clergymen and businessmen in their dealings with people. Some 350 officials of the State Department, including ambassadors, have taken sensitivity classes at Washington's NTL Institute for Applied Behavioral Science. About 150 trainees at the federal Job Corps Center in Clearfield, Utah, hope to improve their "interpersonal relations" with the same technique.

Listen to the Body. As practiced at Esalen (named after an extinct Indian tribe), sensitivity training draws upon elements of the inner-directed meditation of Eastern religions and the interaction emphasis of Gestalt psychology. On the theory that modern urban man smothers his feelings under layers of intellectual abstractions and thus loses his sense of wholeness, Esalen President Michael Murphy, 37, a Stanford psychology graduate, also accents emotional release and an awareness of the body. "We have to learn to listen to our bodies if we are ever to enrich and expand our life of feeling," he says. No far-out cultist, Murphy has attracted such top academic psychologists as Harvard's B. F. Skinner and Abraham H. Maslow of Brandeis, who is also president of the American Psychological Association.

Classes on body awareness are run by Bernard Gunther, a sometime weight lifter and yoga student, in order to "get people to let go of an excessively verbal image of themselves." After having his students stand barefoot on a sheet and feel the grass under it, he pairs them off, asks them to "converse" by slapping each other's arms and shoulders. In "the Gunther sandwich," one student lies face-down on a sheet; two others kneel beside him, pound his legs, buttocks and back with their hands. Then the three stretch out and cling to each other. Gunther's "hero sandwich" has the entire class of 35 people cuddle in one tight row, regardless of sex.