The Illinois Issues Humanities Essays (second series)

By RICHARD SHEREIKIS

The Therapeutic Classroom: Mona's Case

This second series of humanities essays is made possible in part by a grant from the Illinois Humanities Council, in cooperation with the National Endowment for the Humanities.

This is the last of five original essays by distinguished humanists to be published in Illinois Issues in this second series. No restrictions in regard to style, form or perspective have been placed on the authors. They have been encouraged to use any one of a number of approaches including exposition, analysis, satire and parody.

Reprints of these essays are available at no cost from the Illinois Humanities Council, 201 W. Springfield, Champaign, Ill. 61820.

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The Therapeutic Classroom: Mona's Case

EDITOR'S NOTE: These excerpts were edited to eliminate some distracting stylistic excesses, and selected, to bring them into conformity with space limitations required for this publication. "Mona" and her journal, of course, are fictional. But Franz Kafka, Anton Chekhov, D. H. Lawrence and Carl Rogers are real. The author is Richard Shereikis.

Wednesday, September 1, 1982: I just thought it was so neat the way you started out our class in HUPO 101 today that I almost ran back to my room to start in on this journal you told us we should keep for the course. Really, I think the fact that I'm doing this right now, right after the class, is important. If this had been some horrible dry assignment like a theme or something like that, I know I would have put it off and put it off until probably around midnight on the night before it was due, and then I would have stayed up all night trying to write 500 words or something, and here I've already written like 100 words and it hardly feels like I've had to work at all. And that's pretty good, believe me, for somebody like me who just really hates to write in any kind of stiff, formal way.

Part of what got me going were those things you read to us from Carl Rogers — was the book called A Way of Being? I haven't been to the book store yet, but I'm going to get over there right after lunch and get the book so I can start in reading. If those things you read to us were typical, I really know I'm going to love the course. I found that concept of "unconditional positive regard" just fascinating. Of course, I know I would love the class anyway, after what Dr. Mallow, my freshman English instructor, had told me about you and your course. He told me that you were just a great teacher, warm and kind and supportive. And when I came up to your office last spring, to ask you about this course, I remember I was really impressed, even by the neat way you had your office fixed up with all those bright colors and the plants and all. And that great poster you had on your door. The kid sitting there on a stool, and the words underneath: "I will not should on myself today." I thought about that for a long time. And then it dawned on me how deep and meaningful it was. No shoulds. No telling yourself no. No feeling bad or guilty about things that others say you shouldn't do! I hope this course will help me be like that and develop "unconditional positive regard" for myself.

Right now, I can't believe it. I bet I've written 400 words here and that's more than I've ever written at one time before, and it seems like I just sat down. I better buy another blank journal when I go get the Carl Rogers book. I'm going to have lots to say. More later.

*       *       *       *       *

Wednesday, September 8, 1982: Well, it's been a really important week for me. Going to your class three more times, and reading Carl Rogers, and now trying to put down all I feel so I can share my learnings with you, as you asked us to do in these journals. I should say, too, that I'm reading more than just A Way of Being. I thought I should get to know Dr. Rogers' — I think he'd like to be called Carl, so I'll just do that from now on after this — career a little better, so I checked out On Becoming a Person and Freedom to Learn, too. I know you've read them and a lot more, too, and know them inside out, but I hope you can remember the joy and excitement you felt when you first read them so you can understand how impactful his works have been on me. (See how it works? "Impactful" is a word I saw in A Way of Being for the first time only yesterday and already it's become part of my vocabulary. I think I'll keep track of all the new ways I learn to express myself and share those with you, too. I hope you won't mind.)

Anyway, some things Carl wrote in the first chapter of On Becoming a Person really hit home to me and I thought they were a wonderful way to get into this course. It was in the first chapter, called "This is Me," and it was a combination of two talks that Carl had given in earlier years and it kind of laid out his background and his values and beliefs and feelings. He was writing about the learnings he had come to over the years. So much of it was so deep and profound that I don't know where to begin. But right now, I guess the part that hit me most was where he says, "Experience is, for me, the highest authority." And he goes on to say even more: "Neither the Bible nor the prophets — neither Freud nor research — neither the revelations of God nor man — can take precedence over my own direct experience." That's something I've always felt, but I never had the words to express it.

Carl also says something I've always felt but never had the courage to say, and I wish Dr. More, my Intro. to Lit. instructor, could read it too, and understand it: ". . . evaluation by others is not a guide for me." I found that so moving that I typed it on a slip of paper and put it on the border of my mirror so it's the first thing I see when I get up in the morning and the last thing I see at night. In fact I've decided to type up little slips like that whenever I find an especially moving quote. I might have to get another mirror, though, if I keep reading too many more of Carl's books (ha, ha)!

And then, the last learning he mentions in "This is Me" was really lovely and true, I thought: "Life at its best, is a flowing, changing process in which nothing is fixed." And he goes even further and shows even more why he is the great facilitator that he is: "I trust

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it is clear now why there is no philosophy or belief or set of principles which I could encourage or persuade others to have or hold. I can only try to live by my interpretation of the current meaning of my experience, and try to give others the permission and freedom to develop their own inward freedom and thus their own meaningful interpretation of their own experience." Wow! There goes another corner of my mirror. Time flies. Have to go to my workshop on "Learning without Pain" now. More later.

*       *       *       *       *

Wednesday, September 29: In an earlier part of this, I mentioned some other teachers I've had and what they were like. You asked us to try to share how it was we enrolled in HUPO 101, and I should explain that and to do that I have to mention Dr. Mallow again, and also Dr. More. I really can't say enough good about Dr. Mallow, as you may have guessed by now. In fact, I think I've mentioned that he's the main reason I'm in your class right now. I had him for Freshman Comp. last year, and he really had a big influence on me. He didn't run the class like most of the other sections. He was more of like just a facilitator, and he was just so wonderful and warm and supportive. And he didn't make the kind of boring assignments the other comp teachers make. You know, describe this or that, or compare this with that or write some kind of stuffy intellectual paper where you have to tell what you think about something and why. None of that stuff! He just felt we should express ourselves as freely as possible, so he had us just keep journals. (Did you borrow the idea from him? Or vice versa?) And in class, he'd just come in and kind of wait til somebody had something to say, and we'd talk about it and sometimes somebody would feel like reading from their journals and they would and then all of us would discuss which parts of what they read we could like identify with, and before we knew it, the period would be over. It was fascinating. And there were never any grades or any of that kind of thing. Dr. Mallow just said he didn't feel like he should be a judge or some kind of critic, but that he should just create some space where we felt free to write about whatever we thought was important. (I guess I see now that he'd read Carl and knew that evaluation should not be a guide for anyone, so why should he put himself in that position.)

Naturally there were some students who weren't mature enough to handle all that freedom. There were a couple early on who got very angry and hostile. They said — this was in the second week, actually, before we'd really got to know each other — that they felt they were being cheated. That the catalog said this was supposed to be a course in expository writing and that there were supposed to be essays to read as models and that students would write a lot of themes. Dr. Mallow (Charles, he wanted us to call him, so I'll do that from now on) handled it so beautifully. He just sat there calmly, and listened to all this abuse and these terrible charges. And then he just said, and I'll never forget the words, "I hear you Tom, and it's really beautiful to see you self-actualizing like this. I can see you reaching inside, finding your real feelings, and it's wonderful to see you revealing yourself like this." And he just nodded and smiled and was just so wonderful and calm. It was just fascinating.

Tom and a couple of others dropped the class after that, but I'm sure they were sorry after they thought about it. I know I wrote pages and pages in my journal, and a lot of it personal stuff about my boyfriend Bill and just a lot of other stuff that I would never have dreamed I would ever tell anyone else about. And Charles was just so facilitative and supportive.

I had a big fight with Bill that semester and we almost broke up, but I went to talk to Charles about it and he told me all about this messy divorce he had just been through and I just felt so much better. And he said not to worry about my grade or anything because he knew how hard it was to be going to school when you were having personal problems.

He never judged me or anything, just put an A on my journal when he read it at mid-term and at the end, and said something like "Excellent work, Mona. I can resonate to what you're saying." Resonate. That's another word I've seen in Carl's books that I never knew the real meaning of before. What a fascinating concept. Even Bill picked it up after I told him about it. We started going together again right after I talked to Charles, and it's been beautiful ever since. He keeps asking me to come over and resonate with him! He's got this great sense of humor, you know?

Well, I guess you get the idea of what I think of Charles by now. But Dr. More is something else again. I really feel sorry for her, actually. But I have to run to my workshop on "Affective Sharing." More about More later (ha, ha!)

*       *       *       *       *

Wednesday, October 6: First a quick quote from Carl, in A Way of Being, just to get the writing juices flowing: "In my own two-way communication with others there have been experiences that have made me feel pleased and warm and good and satisfied." That's just so beautiful! (Pretty soon I'll be needing that other mirror! Ha, Ha.)

Well, I said I would explain about Dr. More — God forbid she would ever invite us to use her first name! As I said, I'd feel kind of sorry for her if she weren't so unpleasant and — I don't know — kind of hard or something. You see, after I took Charles' freshman comp class I even thought I might major in English because I thought maybe Charles was typical, and it would just be so neat to just keep on working on my journals, sharing with others and all. So I enrolled in Dr.

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More's Intro to Lit class to kind of get the feel of what somebody else in the department was like. Well, did I ever find out! More than I wanted to know!

We had to use this book of stories and poems and plays and she also had us buy about three extra novels, too. But that seemed OK. I thought it would be fun to kind of share our feelings about the stories and talk about how we resonated to them and all. But those stories! Most of them were so gross! We read this thing by Franz Kafka called "The Metamorphosis," and it was just awful. I mean, in the first paragraph the main character wakes up and finds he's turned into a cockroach over night! Now that's gagging me with a spoon, if you know what I mean, although I'm not really into Valspeak, actually. So here's this guy, a salesman, and he wakes up and he's on his back in bed and he's got this hard shell and all these little legs wiggling in the air, and really, about all I could stand was about three or four pages. I mean, I'm sorry, but I just can't relate to people turning into bugs. It was disgusting. So I just quit reading on that one.

Well, naturally, Dr. More called on me in class on the day we were supposed to have it read. She asked me something about Kafka's technique or how the insect image worked to say something about the human condition in the story or something like that. Well, I tried to be real and honest about it. I didn't know then that she didn't want us to really be ourselves on these, that she wanted us to act like some kind of nit-picking critic or something. So I just told her I thought the story was too far-fetched and disgusting, and that it had grossed me out and that I had only read about three or four pages.

Well, it was early in the course and I think she was trying to be patient or something, so she just sort of stared at me for a while. Then she cleared her throat and asked me some other questions, which I don't remember all of. But they kind of hinted around about whether I had ever felt, you know, like a bug on my back, kind of helpless and confused, not understanding how I got where I was or maybe even who I was. I told her yes, once after the prom my senior year in high school, when Bill and I had stayed out all night with these other kids at the beach, you know, and had some wine. It was my first time, and I was underaged. She kind of stared at me again, and then looked down at the class roster in her hand, and asked me if I was planning on being an English major, and I said maybe, but that I knew I wanted to teach for sure, maybe on the grade school level, and she kind of slumped into her chair and sort of waved her hand, and just mumbled that class was over for the day.

As I said, I kind of felt sorry for her. She probably never even went to her high school prom. Well, as you can see, we didn't get off to a very good start. And that wasn't even the worst of it. But I have to go to my workshop on "Assertive Sublimation" now. I'll have more about More later — sorry about that, ha, ha. But I won't do it any more. Oops!

*       *       *       *       *

Friday, October 15: Another learning from A Way of Being first: "I can testify that when you are in psychological distress and someone really hears you, it feels damn good! At these times it has relaxed the tension in me." I've had that learning, too, and I know what Carl means. I know that in your class and in Charles' I always feel heard, and that just reduces the tension so much. Knowing that neither of you are judging me or trying to make me think in any certain way is just so relaxing and nice. And to be able to reveal myself and to hear the others in the class reveal themselves is so good, too, because it validates my experiences and makes me know that my experience is just as good as everyone else's and, as Carl says, "I can only try to live by my interpretation of the current meaning of my experience, etc."

But of course in Dr. More's class it's a different story. She made us read this one story by this Russian writer Checkoff or something like that, called "The Lady with a Dog." At first I thought it might be kind of interesting and, you know, relevant, because it was about this married guy who goes for a vacation by himself to some resort, sort of a Communist Las Vegas or something and he meets this married woman (with a dog) who is also on vacation alone, and they have this kind of affair, I guess, although Checkoff never really says for sure. The guy goes back to Moscow after the vacation and forgets about the Lady for a while, then for some reason gets all excited about her again and tracks her down in her town, and then she starts to make visits to Moscow where they meet in this hotel and have this kind of off and on relationship. See, it sounds like it would be interesting, doesn't it? So I read the whole thing. But it's really kind of dull and disappointing. They're both getting older, and they can't really have a public affair or get a divorce, the laws were so backward back then, and nothing really happens at the end. They say they're going to find a way to break free and really relate to each other, but the story just sort of ends, and you don't really know what's going to happen. It was really disappointing.

Well, this was early in the course, and I hadn't figured out what Dr. More wanted yet, on tests and discussions and all, so I was just as real and honest as I felt. I almost started a free-for-all. I just said I thought it was a potentially good story but that it had been kind of trite. Dr. More asked me what I meant. Well, I just said I thought the situation was interesting but that the characters hadn't been assertive enough and that I just couldn't relate to people who wouldn't just do what they thought was right and just sat around talking about what they might do and all that sort of thing. I said I

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thought Checkoff didn't know how to create really self-actualizing characters, and that if this thing had been a soap opera episode, no one would have watched the next installment because the characters were so common and ordinary.

This guy Phil in the class (he was a HUPO major, taking the class as an elective) spoke up then and he said he shared my feelings about the story and that the characters were so unassertive that he wondered why the story was still assigned after all these years. He said they should either have been faithful to their spouses and children, in the guy's case, or break up for sure and make real commitments to each other. He felt Checkoff was really second-rate, creating characters like that who couldn't actualize their feelings. Dr. More looked kind of upset. She kind of bit her lips and paced up and down. "So you feel that this is an inferior story because you don't like the characters? Is that what you're saying, Phil?" She kind of muttered it because she seemed to have her teeth clenched all the while she spoke.

"Yeah, I guess that's what I'm saying," Phil said. He seemed a little nervous about the way she was reacting. "I mean, I'm just trying to be real here, to reveal myself and how I responded to these people." Dr. More hissed at him. "Reveal yourself? Reveal yourself?" I remember she said it twice, the second time a little louder. Then she said, "This course isn't called Techniques of Flashing, for God's sake." About half the class laughed, for some reason. She said it was really irrelevant whether Phil liked the characters or agreed with how they behaved. She said the question was whether Checkoff was saying anything important about the human condition, or something like that. She said we couldn't get any meaning out of these stories if our only standard for judgment was our own experience and our own opinions of good and bad. She said we couldn't just put ourselves at the center of everything. Obviously, she hadn't read Carl, and I hadn't either then, but I knew better, thanks to Charles' class. Her voice kind of cracked then. Lucky for her, the period was over by then, so people kind of gathered up their books and walked out quietly. As I said, I really feel kind of sorry for her, even though she ended up almost ruining my semester. I'll explain more of that later. I have to run now. There's that lecture on "Affective Dieting" that I really want to hear after the fascinating introduction you gave it today.

*       *       *       *       *

Wednesday, October 27: Another learning from Carl: "I speak as a person, from a context of personal experience and personal learnings." (That just about covers up the whole mirror.)

I'm almost finished with A Way of Being now, and I'm into the part toward the end where Carl has a chapter called "Can Learning Encompass Both Ideas and Feelings?" It's really a fascinating chapter, and I wish everybody would read it so they could realize what Carl is about and how his beliefs and methods are so much more effective, and affective, too, I can say, now that I know what the word means, than the old, dry and formal methods of old-fashioned teachers like Dr. More.

In the chapter he quotes examples of people who have experienced learnings that did include both ideas and feelings. There was a student at Columbia University, for example, whose mind had been "blown" because Columbia had said it was supposed to develop the "whole man," but it didn't deliver because all the faculty cared about was thinking. After only a single weekend of encounter sessions on the campus between students and faculty and trustees and administrators, the student said he had a whole new idea about the problems at Columbia:

I think I have succeeded, not just in becoming a whole man, but more importantly, in understanding what one is. What I discovered was that a whole man is comprised of mind, heart, soul, muscle, and balls. What I discovered about the faculty, for the most part, is that it is men comprised of mind. It was an unfortunate discovery, difficultly tolerated in an age in which so much understanding, strength and action are essential.

How true! And he came to that learning in just one weekend.

And as another example of someone who had benefited from weekend encounters and a seminar where Carl's techniques were used, Carl quoted the beginning of a paper written by a middle-aged high school principal whose life had been profoundly changed:

As I sit at my desk to begin this paper, I have a real feeling of inner excitement. This is an experience that I have never had. For as I write I have no format to follow and I will put my thoughts down as they occur. It's almost a feeling of floating, for to me it doesn't seem to really matter how you, or anyone, for that matter, will react to my thoughts. Nevertheless, at the same time I feel that you will accept them as mine regardless of the lack of style, format or academic expression. . . . My real concern is to try to communicate with myself so that I might better understand myself.

I guess what I am really saying is that I am writing not for you, nor for a grade, nor for a class, but for me. And I feel especially good about that, for this is something that I wouldn't have dared to do or even consider in the past. . . .

And that man is a principal! I just thought it was so beautifully expressed and so meaningful. (It's up on the wall next to my mirror, which is already covered). I wish Dr. More and all those others who don't believe that personal feelings are part of education would read it.

I remember when I took my midterm in Dr. More's class last spring. We had read all these stories and a few plays, but she mostly asked us about a story we had never even talked about because she said she wanted us to "come to terms" with it on our own and show that we could think and analyze independently after our experiences with the things we talked about in class. (You see, there it is. "Think" and "analyze." I mean how cognitive can you get?) The story was called "The Man Who Died," by D.H. Lawrence, and it was about this man who was supposed to be Christ and how after he had been entombed he got out of the tomb. It told about how people who had been his followers before he was crucified weren't too comfortable

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around him after he got out and how he didn't feel comfortable around them any more either. So he sets out on this kind of journey, and he comes to this temple where this priestess is keeping some kind of watch over some statue or something, and — can you believe it? — he has this kind of passionate affair with the priestess! I mean Christ having an affair! It was too much, really, and I just wrote what I felt about it on my paper. I just said I thought it was terrible to write about Christ that way and that He would never have done anything like that, and that I thought Lawrence sure had some perverted ideas about Christianity and life.

Well, I assume the middle-aged principal was validated when he wrote what he honestly felt for Carl in that paper I quoted before. But Dr. More, of course, couldn't tolerate any ideas that were different from hers. She wrote me this long note about how it was OK for me to disagree with Lawrence's views if I wanted, but that I first had to show that I really understood them and understood the deeper meanings of the story. She as much as said I didn't have a right to my opinions because I hadn't shown that I understood what Lawrence was trying to say about religion and life. And on top of that Dr. More said that my paper "lacked focus and coherence" and that it was basically a "series of assertations" rather than a "reasoned argument" (I've dug the paper out to make sure I got her words right), and that I should be more specific in supporting my arguments. Well, I can say for sure that I felt close to that Columbia student who felt that professors only worked from the neck up.

After that kind of experience, it's not hard to see why I decided to forget English as a major and why I went to Charles for advice, and why I was so happy to meet you last spring to talk about this course I'm taking now. Your ability at what Carl calls "prizing" — making me feel OK about myself — has been a wonderful experience after all of Dr. More's put-downs. She even said that "impactful" wasn't a word and that she didn't know what I meant when I said I couldn't resonate to the story. I just really feel sorry for her.

*       *       *       *       *

Thursday, November 11: Quote for the day: "I find, both in therapeutic interviews and in the intensive group experiences which have meant a great deal to me, that hearing has consequences." What more could anyone say?

I'm really almost sorry that I'm coming to the end of A Way of Being. There are just so many fascinating things in there that I'm going to feel frustrated not having it to look forward to when I want to get ideas and feelings.

One of the most impressive parts was one of the last chapters, called "Learnings in Large Groups," that was written by Carl and some other people who had gone with him to Brazil to have these large group sessions of 500-800 people where Carl's methods would be tried out.

The chapter tells how Carl and his staff would just come on stage during these sessions and kind of wait for things to happen. Some people would get impatient, because Carl and his staff refused to spoon-feed them anything, and the chapter quotes reports that talked about how people would yell at them and tell them they had paid to get in and that they deserved more than just a bunch of people sitting on the stage. It reminded me of Tom and those other students who had got angry in Charles' class and dropped out because they felt "cheated" because Charles refused to spoon-feed them.

And one report tells how in the middle of all this shouting and asking for structure or for Carl to speak, one young woman put it all into perspective. There seemed to be nothing happening, she said, "But we can learn a lot from what is going on right now. Some of you call yourselves Rogerians, but you seem to be upset with learning through experiencing."

And then at the end, the report told how Carl kind of summed it all up and made it all worthwhile:

Toward the end of the meeting, Rogers rises and says: "I have no idea of what will happen as a result of this session, but I would like you to know that I'm open to whatever will happen. I feel very close to the woman who said that we could learn much from what is happening here."

I mean, that just seemed so wise and open, and he could respond like that under all that pressure, too.

The chapter went on to talk about how an "energy concentrate" was created by all the frustration and anger the people felt, and how the staff contributed by being real and hearing and prizing people. The best example was when one young woman got very hostile toward the staff and said nasty things. A staff member named John saved the day this time: He grabbed a microphone and said, "Sonia, I have no excuses or answers to offer, but I am not ignoring you. I do hear your disappointment, and it matters to me. And I hear your anger and it reached me." And it goes on to say that Sonia quieted down after that because "She felt heard and respected as a person." I can't think of a better way to show how effective Carl's methods are, even with a huge crowd like that. I can't help but think how even more effective it might be in small groups like classes, and of course I've seen it myself in this class and in Charles' class a year ago.

Well, I have to go to that talk on "Validating and Prizing the Despicable" that you recommended to us today. I'll have more later.

*       *       *       *       *

Monday, December 6: Quote for the day: "I feel a sense of satisfaction when I can dare to communicate the realness in me to another.

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There were a couple of other really bad experiences I remember in Dr. More's class that I wanted to share with you so you could get a better sense of where I'm coming from. One was a kind of lecture she gave once about humanity's role in the scheme of things and how the big scientific findings of the ages had always had the effect of making people seem less and less important. She said how people had used to believe that the earth was the center of the universe and that man, of course, being the highest form of life at the center of it all was very special. But then, she said, this Copernicus came along and said we weren't at the center and maybe we weren't even alone as a system. We were just little specks spinning around on what was really a little larger speck. And then Darwin said in a way that we weren't even a special creation but only a link in a chain and that we had a lot in common with animals. I think this all came up when we were talking about Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser for some reason. And then she said how all of this should give us a sense of humility, knowing how insignificant we are in the great scheme of things that's been happening over these millions of years, and how we could learn a lot by seeing how other people had coped with their situations in the past. I mean, she was actually trying to make us feel small! She said only infants feel they're the center of everything and that part of maturing meant that you had to find out that the world doesn't revolve around you. Something like that, anyway.

I wish I had read Carl then. Especialy the parts about how your own experience is the only really valid thing and how the judgment of others is really totally meaningless. I mean she even admitted that most of history is a record of mistakes, so why should we worry about what people thought a thousand or even fifty years ago? As Carl says in On Becoming a Person, "The touch-stone of validity is my own experience. No other person's ideas, and none of my own ideas, are as authoritative as my experience. It is to experience that I must return again and again, to discover a closer approximation to truth as it is in process of becoming in me."

But hardly anyone around here seems to understand that. Even Charles, I think, lost track of that once in his Comp. class. One day we were sitting around talking, you know, about people we really admired, people we found fascinating. I mean, we hit the whole range, from Mick Jagger to Donohue. Anyway, Charles suggested that maybe if we wanted to, we could write in our journals about who, of all the people in the world, living or dead, we would most like to be with if we were stranded alone on a desert island for a long time. That was the only time Charles seemed a little disappointed in us. I mean, some girls picked John Lennon and some wrote about Richard Gere and Chris Reeves. The guys picked people like Suzanne Sommers, Loni Anderson and Brooke Shields. Good choices, I thought. Well, I picked my boyfriend Bill.

Charles seemed kind of negative about that, for about the only time in the course. He said he had expected we might pick people like Shakespeare or Betty Freidan or Lincoln or maybe Carl. On my paper he wrote (the only time he ever wrote anything critical in the margin), "Bill must really be something, when you've got the whole world and thousands of years to pick from." Well, he obviously doesn't know Bill. He's got that great sense of humor that I mentioned, and he and I really do resonate. But Charles apologized later for trying to impose his values on us, and everything was alright after that. I'll finish about the other bad experience with Dr. More later. Right now I have to go to that talk on "Transcending the Cognitive" that you recommended to us today.

*       *       *       *       *

December 15, 1982: Quick quote from Carl from an introduction to a chapter: "There is no such thing as a free lunch. This profound truth was the motivation for this chapter." And also for this entry, I guess, in a way.

Coming to the end of this semester, I thought back to the end of that horrible semester with Dr. More. I remember in the last part of the course we had read this one novel by Thomas Hardy called The Return of the Native, and another novel called Winesburg, Ohio by this Sherwood Anderson. It was typical of all the literature we read that semester, morbid and depressing. That's partly why I pity Dr. More. She spends her whole life reading all these neurotic, unhappy, misfit writers who never have anything good to say about the world or other people. They must never have been prized or validated much, to have such negative views toward everything.

Anyway, Return of the Native is about this guy Clym who was from this kind of backward part of England, but who had gone off to Paris and had what seemed like a pretty cushy job as a jeweler. As the story opens, though, he's returning to his home neighborhood because he's decided that being a jeweler is just too feminine or something, and he just wants to return and live this simple life with the natives (get it?). But he can't because he just doesn't feel comfortable there anymore, and he's forgotten how to act, and the natives don't feel comfortable around him, either, and besides this kind of pushy girl gets hold of him and makes him marry her and none of it turns out too well.

And Winesburg is just as depressing, only this time the guy escapes. It's just a collection of stories about these awful people in this town. The author even says they're "grotesques" in his intro! None of them can get along with the others, but this one guy George Willard, who works for the newspaper, finally escapes and goes off on a train. Really sounds exciting, doesn't it?

Anyway, I had those two just about memorized. I could tell you what every character did and when they did it, and I could do that for all the other stories that were on the final too. I was really ready! And then she sprang this totally of-the-wall test on us. She gave us just this one quotation, from a book called The Triumph of the Therapeutic, by somebody named Phillip Reiff, who we had never even read all semester. We were supposed to discuss how the works we had read related to this quote. I dug it out so I could get it right now:

It is to control their disease as individuals that men have always acted culturally,

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in good faith. Books and parading, prayers and the sciences, music and piety toward parents — these are a few of the many instruments by which a culture may produce the saving larger self, for the control of panic and filling up of emptiness. . . .Culture is another name for a design of motives directing the self outward, toward those communal purposes in which alone the self can be realized and satisfied.

(Dr. Mores's underlines, she told us). Can you imagine that! Well, I figured the course was lost anyway. So I just wrote on my final that none of the stories we had studied had had anything about books in them, or about parades; that only one or two people in Winesburg prayed, and that there wasn't much about science or music in any of the books and most of the children had problems with their parents and that I couldn't relate to the question.

I was surprised at how calm Dr. More was about it. I expected her to red-ink the thing like a madwoman. But all she wrote on it — above the F which I guess I'll have to take — were two other quotes from this guy Reiff. Maybe you can figure out what she meant by them. "It is characteristic of our culture that there is no longer an effective sense of communion, driving the individual out of himself, rendering the inner life serviceable to the outer," she wrote. "When so little can be taken for granted, and when the meaningfulness of social existence no longer grants an inner life at peace with itself, every man must become something of a genius about himself. But the imagination boggles at a culture made up mainly of virtuosi of the self. It is precisely the authority of culture that limits the need for such virtuosi." I mean we never had virtuosi on any vocabulary test I ever took!

And then she put this in, which I can't figure out either: "Compassionate communities, as distinct from welfare states, exist only where there is a rich symbolic life, shared, and demanding of the self a hard line limiting the range of desires." Can you give me any idea of how that's supposed to relate to a literature class?

You see why I could never figure out what it is she wanted on a test or a paper. And you can see why I changed over to HUPO as my major. If I read too much more of that kind of thing, I might turn out to be a misfit like Dr. More. I feel sorry for her. I really do.

*       *       *       *       *

Friday, December 17: Final quotes from Carl (on the Chinese poet Laotse): "Let me quote a few lines of his thoughts to which I resonate very deeply. . . . If one is seeking a definition of an effective group facilitator, one need look no further than Lao-Tse." That's what's so great about Carl. He can make connections even between poetry and counselling! Well, I can hardly believe this course is over now. I can't really express how impactful all this has been on me and how I feel more prized and accepted as a person. I and my experiences have been validated and I am looking forward to all the fascinating new learnings and experiences that lie ahead of me as a HUPO major. I'm looking forward especially to taking Intermediate Studies of the Self next semester, so I can qualify for Advanced SOS next fall. And I can hardly wait for your Senior Seminar in Guilt Management and the Hostility Absorption Workshop you said you were planning for this summer.

You said we should indicate in this last entry what kind of grade we thought we'd earned in the course. Well, I don't want to grub for grades, but I feel I've put an awful lot of myself into this journal, and you can tell I read Carl carefully. I think the record speaks for itself, and I'll let you decide. I can't put it any better than the student that Carl quotes on page 275 of A Way of Being, a student who, like me, has just had a really profound educational experience. He says it better than I could ever say it, and I'd just like to close with his thoughts, which are mine, too, now:

If anybody asks what the hell did you get out of that psych course? I'll say love. Love, man. Dig? I got a glimpse of the unity of all things. A moment of truth. How does it look on a transcript? Lovely. It's empty. I realized that which I have always tried to realize. I became motivated, and forever will allow the truth to soar through me.

Have a nice holiday! □

The Author

Richard Shereikis is professor of literature at Sangamon State University and associate editor of Illinois Issues. His doctoral dissertation was a study of the early novels of Charles Dickens, and he has published articles on Dickens, John R. Tunis, and sports and popular culture in America. He is a regular commentator on WSSR-FM in Springfield and a frequent contributor to Illinois Times.

Selected bibliography

□ Rieff, Philip. The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud (Harper & Row, 1966).
□ Rogers, Carl. Freedom to Learn: A View of What Education Might Become (C. E. Merrill, 1969).
□ ________. On Becoming a Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy (Houghton Mifflin, 1961).
□ ________. A Way of Being (Houghton Mifflin. 1980).

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