Word: carmell
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...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...
Their chance of recovery almost irrevocably gone, these patients are doomed to years of lonely rotting under custodial care unless a volunteer or social worker takes an interest in them. Jean Carmel describes with pride one such woman who spent her days lying on the floor. During her first month at Wellmet she refused to leave her room except for meals, and then only after great coaxing. Eight months later she got a job and not long afterwards moved...
Such a metamorphosis is no more dramatic than the change patients face in leaving the hospital behind to enter the "total environment" of Wellmet. Some are terrified. As Mrs. Carmel says, "They've been out of this world for years." All social contacts are nerve-wracking, and there is the constant threat of regression into old problems. The residents, mostly in their 30's and beyond (but lately younger), usually receive no real therapy, the reasoning being that it's best to leave capped what they have capped. But the house has a psychiatrist and a psychologist as consultants. They...
...bring him to the point where he's ready for a job. The theory is that a patient must have a job to survive in the outside world; he must avoid becoming too dependent on the students, and he must learn to fend for himself. Mrs. Carmel says that the most sensitive problem is matching the person to the right job. Some residents are afraid to exercise their full potentiality, taking a dishwasher's position when they are suited to a responsible and creative job, while others develop impossible aspirations from associating with the students. Usually a compromise is worked...
...students speak of escaping the alienation they feel elsewhere, of negating the impersonalization. But these are big words for an accumulation of small satisfactions. Jean Carmel thinks that because the students spend their semester at Wellmet in an atmosphere of real tragedy they are forced to draw upon their own deepest experiences to respond to and exercise judgment on residents. The responsibility is similar to that of determining the fate of a family member. "Certainly they possess idealism and altruism," she says, "but their most striking characteristic is a belief that they can find answers themselves. They do. They...