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Excerpted Inspirations #163

Writer: Linda Odhner, with photos by Liz KufsLinda Odhner, with photos by Liz Kufs
Jan 270 min read

Updated: Feb 10


[It’s amazing what can happen in a sensitivity group.] Midway through my three years of psychiatry training at the army’s Letterman General Hospital in San Francisco, a senior career army psychiatrist, Mac Badgely, joined the faculty. [...] In December of that year [1966] Mac offered to run three marathon groups for those thirty-six of us on the staff [….] Mac, we knew, had spent some time at the Tavistock Institute in England, where the theories of the British psychiatrist Wilfred Bion about the behavior of groups were taught and promoted. These groups, Mac announced, would be led according to “the Tavistock Model.” Each would be limited to twelve participants. It was all voluntary. […] We first twelve – all relatively young male psychiatrists, psychologists, or social workers – began our weekend meeting with Mac at eight-thirty on a Friday evening in February in an empty barracks at an air base in nearby Marin County. Each of us had worked all day and was already tired to begin with. We were told that the group would end early Sunday afternoon. It was not specified how much we would sleep, if at all. Nor was it specified what we would do. Yet three incidents occurred in the course of that weekend which made an indelible impression upon my very life. The first was the most profound mystical experience I have ever had. Seated next to me in the group was a drafted young faculty psychiatrist from Iowa, who quickly made no bones about the fact that he disliked my East Coast mannerisms and “effete” clothes. I countered that I wasn’t particularly keen either about his Midwestern boorishness and the big smelly cigars he smoked. About two o’clock Saturday morning he fell asleep and began to snore loudly. At first it seemed a bit funny, but within a few minutes his guttural noises were repulsive to me. He was totally interfering with my concentration. Why couldn’t he stay awake like the rest of us, I wondered. If he had wanted to volunteer for this experience, you’d think he’d at least have the grace and discipline not to fall asleep and disturb our work with his ugly snores. Wave upon wave of fury built up in me. The waves intensified as I looked at the ashtray next to him with its four stale-smelling dead cigars, their chewed ends still wet with his saliva. My hatred became pure white hot, utterly unforgiving and righteous. But then a most odd thing happened. Just as I was looking at him with such disgust, he turned into me. Or did I turn into him? In any case, I suddenly saw myself sitting in his chair, my head rolling back, the snores coming out of my mouth. Sensing my own fatigue, I realized that he was the sleeping part of me and I the waking part of him. He was doing my sleeping for me, and I was doing his waking for him. And I was overcome with love for him. The waves of fury, disgust and hatred turned instantly into waves of affection and caring. And stayed that way. Within a few seconds he looked to me like his old self again, but it was never again the same. My affection for him continued after he awoke. Although we never became the very closest of friends, we deeply enjoyed playing tennis together the next six months until I was reassigned. I do not know what creates a mystical experience. I know that fatigue can loosen “ego boundaries.” I also know that I am able voluntarily to do what happened to me then involuntarily: to see, whenever I remember to choose to do so, that all my enemies are my relatives and that all of us play roles for each other in the order of things. Perhaps I have not had so dramatic a mystical experience since because I no longer need one. But I needed that one eighteen years ago. There is no other way I could have loved the psychiatrist from Iowa. I had to be hit figuratively over the head with something, had to have my egocentric barriers broken by some force the like of which I could never have dreamed up by myself. -M. Scott Peck, The Different Drum (1987), pp. 33-35

 
 
 

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