"I have always depended on the kindness of strangers."

Abstract

The rise and decline of the encounter movement is the history of a technological innovation. Some followers of this movement may even call it the most important invention of the century. In 1947 two events of cultural significance occurred. One was the production of Tennessee Williams' play, A Street car Named Desire, which started a postwar development in American drama. The other was the first session of the National Training Laboratory at Bethel, Maine which inagura-ted the successful rise of the movement of T-groups, sensitivity training and encounters. The National Training Laboratory, and the movement which sprang out of it, tries to teach people how to act with strangers, how to live in a world of high mobility and new events, how to deal successfully with these by modifying or even rejecting the interaction patterns of social convention. The original philosopher of the sensitivity training movement, Kenneth Benne, discussed the relationship of the individual and the group in contemporary literature.