change-pressed person needs most is one-to-one counseling during the crisis of adaptation. In psychiatric jargon a 'crisis' is any significant transition. It is roughly synonymous with 'major life change.'
Today persons in transitional crisis turn to a variety of experts – doctors, marriage counselors, psychiatrists, vocational specialists and others – for individualized advice. Yet for many kinds of crisis there are no appropriate experts. Who helps the family or individual faced with the need to move to a new city for the third time in five years? Who is available to counsel a leader who is up– or down-graded by a reorganization of his or her club or community organization? Who is there to help the secretary just bounced back to the typing pool?
People like these are not sick. They neither need nor should receive psychiatric attention, yet there is, by and large, no counseling machinery available to them.
Not only are there many kinds of present-day life transitions for which no counseling help is provided, but the invasion of novelty will slam individuals up against wholly new kinds of personal crises in the future. And as the society races toward heterogeneity, the variety of problems will increase. In slowly changing societies the types of crises faced by individuals are more uniform and the sources of specialized advice more easily identifiable. The crisis-caught person went to his priest, his witch doctor or his local chief. Today personalized counseling services in the high technology countries have become so specialized that we have developed, in effect, second-layer advice- givers who do nothing but counsel the individual about where to seek advice.
These referral services interpose additional red tape and delay between the individual and the assistance he needs. By the time help reaches him, he may already have made the crucial decision – and done so badly. So long as we assume that advice is something that must come from evermore specialized professionals, we can anticipate ever greater difficulty. Moreover, so long as we base specialties on what people 'are' instead of what they are 'becoming' we miss many of the real adaptive problems altogether. Conventional social service systems will never be able to keep up.
The answer is a counterpart to the situational grouping system – a counseling set-up that not only draws on full-time professional advice givers, but on multitudes of lay experts as well. We must recognize that what makes a person an expert in one type of crisis is not necessarily formal education, but the very experience of having undergone a similar crisis himself.
To help tide millions of people over the difficult transitions they are likely to face, we shall be forced to 'deputize' large numbers of non-professional people in the community – businessmen, students, teachers, workers, and others – to serve as 'crisis counselors.' Tomorrow's crisis counselors will be experts not in such conventional disciplines as psychology or health, but in specific transitions such as relocation, job promotion, divorce, or subcult-hopping. Armed with their own recent experience, working on a volunteer basis or for minimal pay, they will set aside some small part of their time for listening to other lay people talk out their problems, apprehensions and plans. In return, they will have access toothers for similar assistance in the course of their own adaptive development.
Once again, there is nothing new about people seeking advice from one another. What is new is our ability, through the use of computerized systems, to assemble situational groups swiftly, to match up individuals with counselors, and to do both with considerable respect for privacy and anonymity.
We can already see evidence of a move in this direction in the spread of 'listening' and 'caring' services. In Davenport, Iowa, lonely people can dial a telephone number and be connected with a 'listener' – one of a rotating staff of volunteers who man the telephone twenty-four hours a day. The program, initiated by a local commission on the aging, is similar to, but not the same as, the Care-Ring service in New York. Care-Ring charges its subscribers a fee, in return for which they receive two check-in calls each day at designated times. Subscribers provide the service with the names of their doctor, a neighbor, their building superintendent, and a close relative. In the event they fail to respond to a call, the service tries again half an hour later. If they still do not respond, the doctor is notified and a nurse dispatched to the scene. Care-Ring services are now being franchised in other cities. In both these services we see forerunners of the crisis-counseling system of the future.
Under that system, the giving and getting of advice becomes not a 'social service' in the usual bureaucratic, impersonal sense, but a highly personalized process that not only helps individuals crest the currents of change in their own lives, but helps cement the entire society together in a kind of 'love network' – an integrative system based on the principle of 'I need you as much as you need me.' Situational grouping and person-to-person crisis counseling are likely to become a significant part of everyone's life as we all move together into the uncertainties of the future.
A 'future shock absorber' of a quite different type is the 'half-way house' idea already employed by progressive prison authorities to ease the convict's way back into normal life. According to criminologist Daniel Glaser, the distinctive feature of the correctional institutions of the future will be the idea of 'gradual release.'
Instead of taking a man out of the under-stimulating, tightly regimented life of the prison and plunging him violently and without preparation into open society, he is moved first to an intermediate institution which permits him to work in the community by day, while continuing to return to the institution at night. Gradually, restrictions are lifted until he is fully adjusted to the outside world. The same principle has been explored by various mental institutions.
Similarly it has been suggested that the problems of rural populations suddenly shifted to urban centers might be sharply reduced if something like this half-way house principle were employed to ease their entry into the new way of life. What cities need, according to this theory, are reception facilities where newcomers live for a time under conditions halfway between those of the rural society they are leaving behind and the urban society they are seeking to penetrate. If instead of treating city-bound migrants with contempt and leaving them to find their own way, they were first acclimatized, they would adapt far more successfully.
A similar idea is filtering through the specialists who concern themselves with 'squatter housing' in major cities in the technologically underdeveloped world. Outside Khartoum in the Sudan, thousands of former nomads have created a concentric ring of settlements. Those furthest from the city live in tents, much like the ones they occupied before migration. The next-closer group lives in mud-walled huts with tent roofs. Those still closer to the city occupy huts with mud walls and tin roofs.
When police set out to tear down the tents, urban planner Constantinos Doxiadis recommended that they not only
The application of this principle, however, need not be limited to the poor, the insane or the criminal. The basic idea of providing change in controlled, graduated stages, rather than abrupt transitions, is crucial to any society that wishes to cope with rapid social or technological upheaval. The veteran, for example, could be released from service more gradually. The student from a rural community could spend a few weeks at a college in a medium-size city before entering the large urban university. The long-term hospital patient might be encouraged to go home on a trial basis, once or twice, before being discharged.
We are already experimenting with these strategies, but others are possible. Retirement, for example, should not be the abrupt, all-or-nothing, ego-crushing change that it now is for most men. There is no reason why it cannot be gradualized. Military induction, which typically separates a young man from his family in a sudden and almost violent fashion, could be done by stages. Legal separation, which is supposed to serve as a kind of half-way house on the way to divorce, could be made less legally complicated and psychologically costly. Trial marriage could be encouraged, instead of denigrated. In short, wherever a change of status is contemplated, the possibility of gradualizing it should be considered.
No society racing through the turbulence of the next several decades will be able to do without specialized centers in which the rate of change is artificially depressed. To phrase it differently, we shall need enclaves of the past – communities in which turnover, novelty and choice are deliberately limited.
These may be communities in which history is partially frozen, like the Amish villages of Pennsylvania, or places in which the past is artfully simulated, like Williamsburg, Virginia or Mystic, Connecticut.
Unlike Williamsburg or Mystic, however, through which visitors stream at a steady and rapid clip, tomorrow's enclaves of the past must be places where people faced with future shock can escape the pressures of overstimulation for weeks, months, even years, if they choose.
