{"id":2038,"date":"2015-06-24T16:16:00","date_gmt":"2015-06-25T00:16:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/?p=2038"},"modified":"2015-06-25T16:18:19","modified_gmt":"2015-06-26T00:18:19","slug":"that-old-time-throng","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/?p=2038","title":{"rendered":"That Old Time Throng"},"content":{"rendered":"

A theme came up on one of the list-serves I subscribe to: Where were the past meetings of our professional association? Part of me thought, \u201cWho cares?\u201d Another part said, \u201cSome people: It serves a function.\u201d After some musing, it occurred to me that it\u2019s in a gut way pleasant to recall: There is a line from the George M. Cohan song, \u201cGive My Regards to Broadway<\/em>\u201d: \u201cWhisper of how I\u2019m yearning<\/em> to mingle with the old time throng!\u201d That\u2019s it! That yearning! Celebrating togetherness. <\/p>\n

There\u2019s a peculiar category of not just group dynamics, but the subset where one has met the same faces of the group over years, and a certain minimum number of times to strike up a sense of acquaintance bordering on friendship. You\u2019ve put together names and faces. You\u2019ve bothered to remember. Perhaps there have been exchanges of holiday cards or emails. Extended family, old neighborhoods, school class reunions, professional or trade organization annual conferences. These folks are more familiar than some cousins.<\/p>\n

There is a field I call \u201csocial depth psychology\u201d that speaks to the many ways that we are tribal, we are \u201cherd\u201d animals, a collective species. We didn\u2019t evolve as Adam & Eve, but as a tribe that evolved from tribes that evolved from tribes, over hundreds of thousands of years! Social belonging-ness is built in to our instincts!<\/p>\n

The psychiatrist Jacob L. Moreno was a social scientist as well as pursuing many other roles. He sensed this invisible web of attractions and repulsions around each person. He sought to map them using \u201csociometry\u201d and thus opened up the study of what I call \u201csocial depth psychology.\u201d It\u2019s a bridge to social psychology and sociology, but it notes how very deep and poignant feelings of inclusion or exclusion can be. <\/p>\n

He called the category of connection \u201ctele,\u201d (though I prefer the term \u201crapport\u201d as it has a far wider recognition). A certain amount of rapport arises just from repeated encounters at some meeting. There may be in time fifty people whom one recognizes by name, and these are among 200 people one recognizes by face. \u201cHello again, your face is familiar: Remind me of your name. What are some of your interests in this that we share? There is a sense of connection, however mild, just because you\u2019ve come to this non-genetically connected \u201cfamily.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then we talk, gossip, recall friends or relatives we have in common, catch up: Oh she did? No, he didn\u2019t! He did?? When? Of course there are ups and downs to all this, as it is an expression not only of the vicissitudes of one mind but of the collective. We can\u2019t measure it exactly, but group spirit does rise and fall. Being reminded of our roots jacks it up a bit, perhaps, for some people. <\/p>\n

A fair amount of conversation really is more like ants sharing pheromones: On the surface is information exchange, reviewing collective history. \u201cRemember when Uncle Louie dated that hussy?\u201d \u201cYeah, ha ha! That \u201chussy\u201d turned out to be our Aunt Sally.\u201d \u201cShe seems so straight now.\u201d Gossip is glue: We know him and her and have a story about them that\u2019s just spicy enough that it lubricates our gluing together: For some reason, since we both know \u201cthem,\u201d you might find this news non-boring. If you didn\u2019t know them, really, who cares? But it\u2019s not a matter of fact, it\u2019s a matter of this story applying to OUR mutual friends or family, and we are thus all interested. Because it\u2019s our family. This convoluted reasoning works as a lubricating and intensifying glue for our feeling that we know a secret that \u201cthey\u201d don\u2019t know (tee hee) and so we are special and more deeply involved.<\/p>\n

More neutral is just catching up to who belongs to who: Mary? That\u2019s Sam\u2019s daughter. Or is it his wife? (It does matter, as glue.) When did we vacation in Yosemite? That was when I was seven. Oh yeah. Fix the time, the place, the memory. Scrapbook. Album. Photograph. Keep it along with the memoirs and the mementos of this or that event or trip. Glue, folks, sociometric glue. <\/p>\n

We hunger to feel our collectivity. Our we-ness. We\u2019re bigger, and more coherent. Alone we\u2019re so small, and because we intuitively feel all our weaknesses, we feel weak. Oh, maybe in this or that way we\u2019re strong, we feel ourselves strong, we ourselves admire our talent or muscle, endurance or courage. But we also know (shhh! Don\u2019t tell!) our weaknesses, and there are many. We may be better than x or all the x\u2019s when it comes to y quality, but we keep hidden our awareness that we\u2019re not all that good at quality \u201cz\u201d, and now that you mention it, we vary at our abilities \u201ca\u201d through \u201cw\u201d too!<\/p>\n

This, too, then, is part of social depth psychology, the lure, the draw of together-ness. Alfred Adler called it \u201csocial interest\u201d and, properly channeled, it serves as a very pro-social force. Negatively channeled (towards scapegoating, for instance, or hating, or gossip) it becomes pro-social for the in-group but in a larger, historical sense, unethical or anti-social.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A theme came up on one of the list-serves I subscribe to: Where were the past meetings of our professional association? Part of me thought, \u201cWho cares?\u201d Another part said, \u201cSome people: It serves a function.\u201d After some musing, it occurred to me that it\u2019s in a gut way pleasant to recall: There is a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,32,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2038","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-psychodrama","category-social-depth-psychology-sociometry","category-wisdom-ing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2038"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2038"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2038\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2039,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2038\/revisions\/2039"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2038"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2038"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2038"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}