Ritual Opening and Individual Transformation: Rites of Passage at Esalen

Abstract

Ritual manipulation o f emotion can result in "psychic opening," a state in which the individual's defenses are suddenly lowered. A n individual in this state is vulnerable and suggestible, and major shifts in h i psychic configurations can occur. When ritualized psychic opening exists as a part of a cultural event-pattern f o r the purpose o f inducing psychobehavioral transformation in individuals, the process can be considered as a t y p e o f rite o f passage. A n encounter/Gestalt workshop at E d e n Institute is discussed as an example o f this process. The data show that the group setting itself has many liminal characteristics.I am attempting to describe a few ways in which the imagination of history affects society. . . . But my position is closer to that of the anthropologist, who works at the edge, and for whom the description of another culture is also the search for an alternative civilization [W. I. Thompson 1971:xil. IN HIS PREFACE to The Ritual Process (1969) Victor Turner states that his book has two sections, the first dealing "mainly with the symbolic structure of Ndembu ritual and the semantics of that structure," and the second exploring "some of the social . . . properties of the liminal phase of ritual " (1969:vii). Submerged in this structuralist statement but evident throughout the book itself is Turner's sensitivity t o and concern with the affective aspects of ritual participation. For example, in discussing "communitas" as an aspect of liminality, the concept is handled in evocative prose: communitas is the "quick" of human interrelatedness (1969:127); its bioemotional aspects are acknowledged within a limiting statement, "Instinctual energies are surely liberated by these processes, but 1 am now inclined to think that communitas is not solely the product of biologically inherited drives released from cultural constraints" (1969:128, italics mine). Yet, although the words "affect," "emotion," and Buber's "I-Thou" relationship occur fairly frequently in Turner's text, they do not appear in the key word index. I take this as recognition on Turner's part that anthropological theory (apart from the work of a few, like Chapple [ 19701 in ethology) has not yet come to terms with the relationships among symboling, human emotion and ritual organization, in a manner comparable t o our present ways of dealing with the interrelatedness of symbolic structure and social organization. This paper attempts t o deal with an aspect of that theoretical gap. It presents an analysis of data dealing with a hypothesized relationship between ritual process as a group level phenomenon, the mobilization of individual affect in what Maslow (1970: Chapter 3) terms "peak" (ecstatic) and "nadir" experiences, and the induction of major shifts in the psychic configurations of individuals (change in worldview). The ethnographic account is based on data collected during five days' participation in an encounter/Gestalt workshop at Esalen Institute in California during the summer of 1972. CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORKBy a "...

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