Heritage
It is easier to see than to describe.
Much of the work here happens in small groups, some with other men and some with couples together. If you have never been in one, that can sound like the last thing you would sign up for. Most men picture something between a support meeting and a team offsite. It is neither.
In 1968, a handful of strangers met with the psychologists Carl Rogers and Richard Farson for sixteen hours, with cameras running. The film, Journey into Self, produced and directed by Bill McGaw, won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.
It opens with Stanley Kramer, the director of Judgment at Nuremberg, who took time away from a film shoot in Italy to introduce it.
Running time 1:20
And here is some of what he saw.
Running time 4:31
Intimacy isn't taught. In a person-centered group, couples discover it.
Strangers sit down together, keep their distance, and wait to see whether it's safe. Then one person says something true, and someone else recognizes himself in it. That is how groups worked in 1968, and it is how they work now.
Carl Rogers found that people change when three things are present: someone is genuine with them, they are accepted as they are, and they feel accurately understood. Those same three things are what real intimacy is made of. Most people rarely get all three at once, and many couples haven't offered them to each other in years.
In a person-centered group, nobody teaches them. The leader offers them, and over time the group begins offering them to each other. Partners discover, often to their surprise, what it feels like to be fully known and still wanted, and then how to give that back.
The film was drawn from sixteen hours with cameras rolling. The groups here are small and private, and nothing is recorded.
How the work is built →