Framingham Community Forum; Dr.Frederick Duhl: Communes: An Alternative

Our speaker this evening is Dr. Frederick J. Duhl, who presently has a part time practice of psychiatry in Brookline, is the director of education at Boston State Hospital, the assistant professor of psychiatry at Tufts University School of Medicine, President, co-founder and Board of Directors of the Boston Family Institute. Dr. Drew is married and has three children with Dr. Drew this evening. It's Kathleen with Mary and Constantine Keiko's who are members of a commune in Somerville. Dr. Duhl. When the thing that makes me most comfortable in being up here was the last of the impressive documentation that I've existed in the society for 40 years which is the fact that I'm married and have three kids and most of my learning has come out of my own family both the family that I grew up in and the family that I have played a part in trying to establish in some other manner sometimes in the family that I grew up in sometimes

very similar and sometimes quite different. For me family roots and family relationships are very basic values that I was educated into in a very specific way by my family. I remember being the child who kept track of who's birthday took place and which day. I remember being concerned that certain people would come and go within our extended family and so it was a part of the value system of my own family. When you start to talk about communes you start to talk about the possibility of people living together who do not come together because of blood relations but because of other reasons than those you start to talk about alternatives to marriage. Clearly you start to talk about a whole host of possibilities none of which are new because they've all been well labeled characterize put out in front of you for years. Anyway I consider I suppose extramarital affair as an alternative to a standard marriage.

I consider that their communes are an alternative I would consider that a variety of single parent families are an alternative to the standard form of normal marriages that people talk about. What I'm saying in other words is that there are a whole range of varieties that are already existent and the real issue gets to be which ones can be sanction which ones can be accepted as to exist in our midst and which ones will those of us in this crowd that's come to visit here want to try without too much risk. One of the questions that Constantine asked me was Why are these people coming here? And I said I didn't really know but I had a guess that there might be a few who were thinking about joining a commune. I would add to that add to that I think there might be a few whose children or relatives have statred to talk about it, and they're wondering you know they're getting into something that will

destroy their relationships with them. I would guess that there are some who are just curious and there are some who are wondering are there any viable alternatives to the kind of stress and strains that that they have had in their family as I guess I've had in my family in the last 15 years that I've been married. So I don't know that that we're going to answer all the questions here until we find out what the questions are. I think I'd like to turn the program around a little bit. I'd like to in a very short time get some sense of where you're at in terms of your concerns. And then within the context of your concerns and wishes and interests try to see if we can't see that that the kind of experience that Constantine and Cathi could present as having been theirs has some value. And if we can perhaps take a look at some of the things that are possible alternatives.

The problem I always have is I don't like to talk to you and I'm really very resentful each time I get on a podium I feel so distant from my daily work, from my daily kind of teaching, my daily kind of learning. You know when they when I see a familiar face in here as I do, somebody who knows the way I go about my business trying to help people learn. I'm sure she knows that I'm itchy to the seat of my pants and the top of my head because this is not the way I figure that people really find out about the things they want to find out. You basically find out by experiencing you basically find out by trying out and then thinking about what you've experienced and seeing if it makes sense. Kathy has also done some work in T groups and Constantine has been in T groups at times and I would all share the same position, that we're not sure that you can learn a damn thing tonight but we're going to try. Let me be... a little bit of structure to what I'm trying to get at. The whole idea of communal living

is not a new situation at all. Constantine for example talked about his past which he will elaborate for himself and I won't usurp except for one moment of, in which he had an extended family that was by blood ties a family of multiple adults of multiple children without the same-- any necessarily having more than one parent, in actuality but, having many parents available to them. So that might be considered a kind of communal life if you look at it from the vantage point of today. There are communes that have been tried out in the United States not only the utopian kind of communes that are well-known, Brook Farm here in West Roxbury was a type of commune that the Transcendentalists tried. The Salt Lake City communes with their multiple wives started out as the Mormons. It started out a whole series of communes and a very special structure of marriage and family which has persisted today although they had to

give up their wives in the social structure of the 1870s and 90s when the army was sent out to curb their bad habits. It seems to be an old trait of this country. There were communes in terms of very specific ideological groups like the Shakers or specific religious groups, all of whom established a pattern of living which had meaning to them, which was different from the patterns of many people around them but was always boundried very closely by the difference between themselves and others or by a physical distance, or by some kind of boundary phenomenon that cut them off in order to provide time and space in which to grow up and try out different things. So a very crucial aspect of any kind of communal issues is the capacity to have a very strong boundary about oneself which is often different from the kind of more loose-boundried phenomenon that you find in extended families. Now I want to get some concepts across. First of all if you look at what a

family is, it is defined certainly by blood relationships by its originality, but it's often defined by process and structure in the sense that it has at least two generations in it, that has the processes of taking care of economic issues, of taking care of protective issues, learning issues, personal loyalty development, and sexual issues and the like. Now in this day and age when the best position one can take is to doubt and to question, the family is as up for question as any other structure or institution of the present time. And partly it's because the necessities that are provided for a family structure to be the way they are no longer exist in the same way. Consequently the family doesn't have to be, perforce, forced to be in a certain structure. There are alternatives that start to develop, not out of the needs, but out of the alternatives that are around and alternative needs. Families have always been determined by the needs structure. Tribes, family structure, extended families often have a tremendous

economic base, a tremendous social need structure that was imposed upon it. If you look at the Indian culture you will find that in India, where there are arranged marriages there are very good reasons for that. The reasons for the arranged marriages have to do with the philosophical base that has to do with the idea that people don't always know what they're about, that they're living in a certain kind of life that is momentary at this time and that the elders are wiser than the youngers. Their arrangements that are made in terms of marriage that have to do with the economic conditions, whether you sell off your goods including your children things of this order. They are not always determined by the personal needs of the people. In fact, the family structure is never determined up until this time by the personal need base alone. It's been determined in large measure by the social needs and economic ones. And what's happened in our society, of course, is that the social and economic needs have changed the structure of the family. The mobility, the demand for nuclear families or smaller or otherwise in order to meet an industrial society, the whole change in the

elaboration of individuality and democracy which I think is the push of consciousness three of the [?] people are into at the present time, and I direct your attention to Charles Reich's book on The Greening of America, for good statement about this, in which people are concerned with, with the aspects of their personal needs and growth and not just the social ones. All of these have taken place in the context of the social changes and not out of the fact that any one of two or three people happen to get together some good ideology. So in a sense what we have now is a society in which the institutions have taken over the tasks of the family in large measure. Institutions teach your kids, the Institute-- of mine too. They protect you when they get sick, mine too. They pay for your unemployment when the war contracts are ended around here. [?] They take care of a whole host of bits and pieces that family structure over generations and ages have always been responsible for. After you've done given away so

many rights as that to institutions for a mass society, the question is who needs a family all the time. Fact of the matter is that out of personal needs we all do. The fact of the matter is that there is some very basic personal issues that come up that demand that we huddle together in some kind of closeness with some kind of caring and some kind of framework in order to raise our kids. Now at this point when you'd start to look at anything like a commune, the easiest thing to ask is, of course, don't these people really not give a damn about families? And the easiest thing to find out is whether or not they do and I'm not going to answer that for you, I'm gonna let them. A simple thing to say is that a commune is a threatening thing. It threatens my version of how I grow up my kids in my world. I'll leave it open to them to see whether they threaten you. There's a lot of question as to the kind of sexuality that can go on in the commune. Clearly if you have communal living maybe like Robert Rimmer's book of Proposition 31 there should be

shared sexuality and shared sexual relationships with sanction as well as with happenstance, as still as does occur today. An awful lot of shared sexual relationships occur today unsanctioned. So these are questions I think people in the audience might have I know I've had these questions some of which have been answered. [Laughs] You see the whole issue in terms of the alternatives to marriage comes up that people are feeling the sense of losing touch with other people. They're feeling the sense, the sense of being out of touch with the networks of their relationships and isolated, and the commune has developed in large measure because people do not like the isolation anymore, they want to find some find some other viable way to be in touch, and I don't see if I can-- that it makes any sense for me to have an out of touch conversation with you in order to talk about it in-touch solution to it Come on up and Join us. My wife and I and some friends of ours had occasion to be in touch with at least three

different communes in various parts of the state, and it occurs to us, before we can ask any questions at all, we have to know what reference we're asking them of. So could you describe your communal situation so we have something to reference to. I don't know what kind of questions you'd want to ask. Well we've seen you know-- [crosstalk]--he just wants to know generally we've seen I mean we've seen a commune for instance which is an agriculturally based commune. We've seen a commune which is an economically based commune. We've seen a commune which is a mystically based commune, and these are the types of things we like to know, you know, where are you in your commune and then we'd know where to start to ask questions. Those are things that I'd like to tell you about because I'm feeling distant too, and that'll make me feel more comfortable that you'll know more about me and, and Constantine. Well, I think you raise a very important issue which is the ideologies that that are part and parcel of each commune that has been established

and the, and a certain kind of a base, which I think I can talk about some other [unintelligible] that I know about, too. OK, I'll talk for a while, and when you've had enough of me talking, then... He says that to me a lot, that he's had enough of me talking. For me, we're not agriculturally connected, or mystically, for me it's mostly a family, that I'm interested in having a family around me of people that I love. I'll tell you a little bit about me in that I'm divorced and I have a 3 year old son and I found myself plunked into a whole new world where I didn't exactly want to turn around and go back and just deal with the people, the friends that I had in my marriage. I needed to break away enough from that that I could get myself together, and I was lonely and I felt the burden a lot of, then, 9 month old, 9 month old baby and I moved and I was shaky. I found myself in a T group. Happily I

met Constantine there. After that I got into a community making workshop that Constantine was also in. And we're the, in our particular commune, I would-- I guess we're the two that connected first as friends and when if I'm-- building and finding new friendships. The first-- we didn't plunk into getting into a commune. We were in this workshop where we dealt sort of intellectually with what would it be like to be in a commune and guessed at the problems and tried to deal with them in a T group encounter way. We got very frustrated and we felt we were really screwing ourselves up by just talking all the time and, but it was scary to go and find something. Finally one of the men in our group found an old unused girls camp in New Hampshire that we could rent for the summer for $800. So we needed to get just enough people to put up enough money so that we could rent it and we would use it on weekends; that was how we began, we wanted to--

We didn't want to live together, you know, we wanted a vacation spot, we wanted to be together, we wanted to do a lot of T grouping and encounter work, getting to know each other on that level. We found people more at that point based on whether or not they had $75 or so to put up for the money. We weren't at all selective, you know. If they were committed to relating that way with other people and they had the $75 we were sort of in a rush. And what happened was very exciting. An offshoot of that, I guess, that doesn't have much to do with living in a commune, maybe it does, is that I learned I could live with almost anybody. I could accept almost anybody and their differences and my differences, since that wasn't selective. The house we're in now is selective. We choose who we want to live with. There were people I didn't like, people I loved, people I sort of generally liked. We went

up every weekend, we were committed to T grouping and we did it every Saturday night we had an encounter. We played a lot. We had lots of kids. We swam. We just shared our life in general. And some of us became close friends. From there we sort of all came back to our apartments in Cambridge and Newton and Brookline or wherever, Boston, and we found ourselves spending all our time going to visit each other. A group of about nine or ten of us. We'd found a lifestyle of sharing intimately our fears and our hang ups and our joys and the things that make us sad and the things that make us happy. We wanted something more than just to visit each other, but we were scared to death of the idea of living together. We looked for, am I [?; sic] talk long enough? [laughter]

We looked, we looked at houses, we were going to rent a house. We found a house in South Boston and we, five of us were gonna do it and two of them chickened out at the last minute. We were really scared that was too small a group we didn't-- none of us had really done it before. We sort of fooled around with the idea and looked at more and more houses and finally Constantine came to my house my apartment and said, "Oh I found this house in Somerville, let's buy it." It's a big twenty-six room house, and, it was in horrendous shape just really crummy, and he's very demanding and I'm sometimes rash and so I said OK. [laughter] And I used to have a business of my own in Harvard Square which I sold when I had my son, and so I happened to have the $6000 in the bank that I'd set aside you know for Ricky's education or something and I let him convince me this was a marvelous investment for Ricky's

education. There we all of a sudden we had this house and I put down the down payment money which was $6000. And he agreed to meet it with work done in the house. He's an architect and is sort of frustrated with being an architect in the profession, and prefers being what he is is the most fantastic carpenter in the world. So he's he's putting in the equivalent of 6000 dollars worth of labor. All of a sudden because it was a big house and we were a biggish group and with lots of dynamic personalities, that was a big enough house for us you know to move around each other, to-- if we're in a conflict with one person to find resources, you know softer places, places that will comfort us. It was easier than being five people to be twelve; it was easier than having a nine-room house to have a twenty-six room house. It was scary to all of us that we would

be the owners of the house, Constantine and I. That scared us and it scared them and we didn't know how that would work out. So far it's worked out fantastically. I forget I own the house you know every once in a while. Don't you want to say something, handsome Pete? I've almost told the whole story. You know what you finish OK. OK, so our friends joined us. We had originally-- we were going to move into one of the eight room apartments it's a four family house. We were going to move into one of the eight-room apartments. Constantine and I are not boyfriend and girlfriend or, you know, we're friends, we're business partners. Speaker 1: You just shut down a fantasy today. Speaker 2: No, wait a minute. Yeah, I'm thinking who shot down whose fantasy a healer [?] OK, let me get out of that for a minute. Oh, we were going to live in one of the eight-room apartments and fix that up. I mean we want to live really

nicely. We're all-- I'm going to be 30 the day after tomorrow and Constantine's close on my heels although he doesn't like to think about it And all of us, our median age is like 28, you know. Well we're worried about that. Well I'm trying to distinguish us from being 18 and just looking for a place to crash. We're really into a different thing we're really into substantial close relationships around us, making a family. Half of-- there are a lot of us, about half of us are professional, about half of us are working at their professional jobs.The other half are trying to find a new life lifestyle for themselves and this is safer to have support around you than to just go off into the wilderness. Am I off the track? Let's see. Oh, we were going to move into this eight-room apartment and we'd fix that up to be super and then we'd move into the next one and rent that out to friends or whatever. Man, everybody was so excited. They all bunched in at once and so now we're living, the

house is identical. We're living all on one side, sort of gypsy-like. It's just not clean enough for us, it's not perfect. While Constantine's going around being the most fantastic carpenter in the world fixing the other side up to be perfect. And then we'll all move into our own bedrooms. We all have a private space, our own room that we can go to when we just want to be alone and there isn't one of us in the house that wants to be with people all the time. It's a big important issue how much privacy can you have for yourself. And I just feel like I'm just talking so much. I think what you're talking to, and the thing that that is so striking, is that you're not talking out of the base of the 18-year-old kid, you're not talking out of the mysticism, you're not talking out of the agricultural background. You're talking out of a background of people I suspect may be very similar to the group here. And, therefore, perhaps in its own style is a kind of easier thing to to identify

with than it is to think about them kind of folks that have agricultural communes like New Buffalo out in New Mexico, who have mystic ones like Drop City had for a while or dealt with the drug culture and things like that. I'd like to say one thing about it, which is that I do feel very close to when I look at the women in the audience, you know, I lived in the suburbs and I had a child and a family and I expected to be married for the rest of my life. I didn't expect to have something go wrong with my marriage. I, you know, my whole-- that's exactly five years ago. If you'd asked me anything about a commune I would have thought you were bananas, you know, to even be mentioning it to me. I knew exactly what I wanted and I knew I what was ahead of for me. I had a terrific jolt, you know, that that wasn't it. I feel very, you know, I did-- I lived what seems like a different life to me now although I know I'm the same person. I was very active politically. I was very active in the McCarthy campaign and went with the delegates from Massachusetts to the convention. I was

completely, sort of, I still feel political. I don't choose to go and deal with the world politically. I choose to do it this way, you know, by making myself as happy and comfortable as I can so that I'm just happier and when I go out that's political to me you know to go out and to like somebody and to be free to say that they like you you know to be clear that way. I just find enormous support in this house, in my friendships, that I wouldn't have, I'd be more scared. Constantine said in the car, and I really dug what you said, it reduced my paranoia about the world to have this around me. Now I'm really through talking; somebody else is going to have to talk. She's asking if you feel secure with the people around you, What happens if the people around you have to leave and how do you handle it. I haven't had the experience that Constantine has in that his the girl that he was going with left the commune and you know so I sort of think that you

probably... [Constantine]: We don't like to think of that, and we all fantasize that we're all going to be together forever and ever, like when you get married. [Speaker 1:] That's not forever and ever. [laughter] [Constantine]: There is a feeling we're together enough now as a group that if one of us or two of us the three of us were to leave, because of whatever reason that they had, the house would be able to go on. I'm not fearful of being committed to 12 people, therefore increasing the chances that I'm going to lose somebody. I'm less fearful of that than being committed to one woman who might leave me. And considering that that's happening a lot these days I'd much rather trust myself with 12. [laughter]

And if one or two leave I still have ten. [laughter] [Speaker 1]: Women? Yeah. So you know it's not a-- That's not the major fear. I'm just kind of intrigued that you should ask, as if he's going to be any different from anybody else in this room. I can't stand losses and ia uncomfortable about losing people that are important to you, and hates to think about it, and when it finally happens, hurts like hell. And I don't think it makes any difference whether you're in a commune or not, as long as you're another human being you're going to feel the same way. But you've got a point about making, decreasing your risk a little bit. [laughter] [Speaker 1]: Plus you share, you share the loss. When one person leaves you're sharing then it's buffered by, you have 11 people feeling bad about it, sharing the same thing You're not just all by yourself feeling bad. Would you please try to define the terms you use as you use them which might be foreign to some of us

such as T-group. OK, that's fair enough. The T group is a generic word right now. An awful lot of things started out as the word 'training group' from the National Training Laboratories as a particular kind of sensitivity group in which people became aware, in the present, about their feelings for one another as they experience them at the time of the group. It then became extended to have a whole range of meanings of group experiences which now includes such a range that, it's no longer, has the same specificity. It can mean marathon experiences so that the issue of time Is different. It can mean the kind of intensities that take place. It can be almost anything that you want in terms of group experience. And if you really wanted, you could just call a group session rather than a T group. The simplest way to let it roll off your tongue is call it a T group and it becomes a part of the lingo of anybody who's been in one. I don't know if that makes you any clearer about it. It

stands for an awful lot of things at the present time. But I think central to it is something here that I hear in the statements that Cathy has made, that the development of this group started around the kind of experiences that group process and the T groups have fostered, namely the capacity to be more in touch with other people in a very personal way. Both being in touch with one's own feelings and the experience of others in the light of those feelings. Now, this is not the same as an economically based commune. In a sense it's like an ideologically based commune in the sense it has a particular kind of ideology, which is a very humanist group ideology of a certain kind. I don't know if he likes to hear me say that but I think it is a kind of ideology. It's not the same ideology as a Shaker group. It's not the same ideology as a group that is out to foster an economically-based group, to survive in certain kinds of ways. But it is-- does have a strong impact for those people who have been committed to this kind of thing. I think it's a very logical

kind of thing to have occurred that the people who started out in a group process would begin to develop into. But what does this mean in terms of the kind of living arrangements that one can make if one uses this core group transaction and honesty as the basis for the relationships? I'd like to elaborate, perhaps explain how we use T group; in that way you might understand what a T group is. We started in T groups, or "encounter groups" as we call them, where they're a bit more structured. Somebody will suggest an exercise, a verbal or a nonverbal exercise to generate some data, feeling-wise, for people. OK, that's how we got together, that's how we had good feelings for one another, and the bad feelings. Now we use these techniques as a way of airing out the problems as well as letting out the good feelings that come from close contact. So we set aside Wednesday night as the meeting night.

And usually it will start out somebody complaining about the fact that the dishes are always dirty and the kitchen is a mess, which is true [laughter] but one of the things about T groups that allows you to get, you start to hear other things that people are saying, that more often than not, when somebody's complaining about the dirty dishes and the fact that they've had to do them for the past week, more often than not their saying they're feeling not loved by the group, not appreciated by the group, and you start to listen as to what has happened to them in the past week that the other people just weren't sensitive to. So, it allows you to just get past the things that people normally bitch about and hope to sort of alleviate some of the anxieties that come with it. So it's a very, very important part of what we're doing in Somerville, what we do in Somerville. Otherwise, I don't think we could stand to live with one another. Yeah I'm almost certain of that. [laughter] [Speaker 2] I'd like to add another thing [inaudible].

I just wanted to add to some of the things that Constantine said. I wanted to add a little bit to what Constantine said in that, but now I'm forgetting what it was I wanted to add. I was-- someone asked earlier whether we were agriculturally based or mystically based or whatever. If we have any base, other than just the fact that we're friends and chose to live together, it's that we believe in this way of communicating with each other. And there are certain principles like staying in the here and now and not re-hassling something that happened two days ago or a week ago. And paying attention to what's behind someone else is saying they're, they're-- Their very big in the way that we relate. When I met Constantine to inject a little personal issue in here -- I, we absolutely hated each other, absolutely left the first time that we met. I walked out swearing at him at the top of my lungs, screaming. I

just thought he was awful and he didn't think I was so hot, but what happened was that the old way that I was used to relating, I would have really been uptight about him; I wouldn't have wanted to be around him, and when I went back to the group I probably would have ignored him. I would have skirted the whole thing; you know, I wouldn't known what to do with my feelings. In a, in a program where I can just be direct with my negative feelings and my uptightness, I could just say how mad he made me and it was a, it was a long process to become close friends. But I fully think that we would have never been in touch with each other. We certainly wouldn't be in the place we're in now, for us, unless we'd had this way of communicating. You know the piece, the piece that I'm struck by is that it doesn't take a commune to have this kind of communication. The problem comes to be that if you start it in your own marriages, when you start it in your own families, they're of a different order.

You usually come at it with different sets of expectations and different sets of demands that are made because of the formalized quality of the marriage, so the people don't get into the next stage of saying, "But wait, we ought to discuss the here and now between you and me, George, or between you and me, Ruth." Somehow, people start ignoring that and getting into other kinds of communications that are full of the past histories of their families and they don't get into it. But thus far the the issue of being open about what's going on is probably no different than what most conventional marriages ought to have. Yeah, that's a really, really great question [subtle laugh]. I mean I haven't thought about it before, you know; I mean I'm-- I haven't thought about it that way. And you make me wonder a little bit about myself. When I was married I was very committed to the marriage and was happily married, and

expected that to last. Right now I'm in a commune and I'm committed to that and expect that to last. It may well change and that says to me I don't want to start going around telling people what they ought to do. It's just what's right for me right now. In my-- but what, what's changed and what I notice most is that the way I'm relating now with my family of my-- the people that live in the house with me. I have a lot of difficulty relating in the same way to my ex-husband, so I, who I still love and care about. I don't reach out to him as much as I would reach out to Constantine or another friend because I'm not as committed to being fully open and available to him, because of the hurt and whatever of the past. I'm committed to having a good relationship with him because of my son and because I've spent seven years of my life with him, but I don't take the same risks with him in terms of extending myself, of giving completely my energy that I would with one of these

people. I'd like to answer that somewhat, too. I entered the commune with a relationship, with a girl named Bonnie. And about two months after, or into the communal thing, I started feeling like Bonnie was getting in the way of my dealing with everyone equally as a family. I started to resent the intimacy of our relationship, and I started to withdraw. Well, it got to the point where Bonnie went off to Europe to sort of get away from the bad feelings that we were generating towards one another, so that we could separate and I could try out whether I really would prefer the communal way as opposed to just having an intimate relationship within the community. About four weeks later I find myself walking around the house, feeling very very alone, even though there are a whole mess of people in that house that I like very, very much and I enjoy living with. And it became evident

that, OK I want to live in a community for as far in the future as I see it. But I've come to realize that I also want to have someone that I can be especially intimate with within the community, so I don't see it as an either/ or situation. You have marriage and one person or community. I think it's possible to have both. Slightly different, I agree, but still essentially both. [Question from audience] Can a married couple with children join the commune? [Speaker 1] Sure. [Host]: Can a married couple with children join the commune? We have two married couples in the commune. There are a lot of half-time kids in the sense that a lot of of the men are divorced and their children spend weekends or part of the time, along with Ricky. The question was one directed to how the mechanics of the commune work. How do you divvy up the money, the day-to-day workings, who does the dishes and things of this order.

Who wants that one? We have a fixed cooking rotation. Everybody does it, the cooking, except me. [laughter] He does the dishes. Well, what, it felt-- I guess as soon as the house is finished, I'll have no excuse and I'll have to do some some cooking, but I'm working so much on the House that it was decided that, better that the house be finished faster than my having to pay the cooking dues, so everyone takes turns cooking. Everyone is supposed to help with the dishes after dinner. It happens, you know, 75 percent of the time they get cleaned. Perhaps, because we're living in a gypsy-like fashion that the kitchen that we have now is just temporary. Things are very easily disorganized. I'm hoping that's the reason why things aren't as clean as I would like to see them, and when we get the new kitchen

that will be better. That's a hope, although I wonder about it. [laughter] But enough group pressure goes on to everybody, is placed on everyone, that things do get done. It's not as dirty as it sounds. We pay $75 a month per person for for singles -- well, that's for singles -- and a hundred for couples. Out of that comes everything but food, all the utilities, telephone, heat, electricity, the rent, which goes to pay the mortgage and the home improvement loan that we're floating. So, I mean, we're just as heavily in debt as anybody in a suburb is. We only put down 20 percent on the house, so the bulk of the $30,000 we still have to pay. We've borrowed $5000; we're going to borrow, hopefully, five more as a group. So, when you talk in terms of commitment, nobody can afford

to leave this group because there's so much money going in. [laughter] All right, that sounds like a conventional marriage, right. I want to just say one more thing, because you said you know I think that when I when I read about communes, frequently I read people write that they're dirty or unkempt and so I just want to clean up the word dirty, which is that my mother came, and admittedly, two hours before my mother came we picked up magazines and put them in the magazine racks and put the records in the jackets in a way and swept the floor but you know that would have gotten swept within the next day or so. But my mother was just amazed, you know, she thought it was terrific that it was so clean, all the toilets were clean, the bathtubs were clean, she couldn't get over it and I figure if my mother thought it was clean enough, [laughter] you people ought to think it's clean enough. How would you-- there are things about it, nothing really is new, you know. The question really gets to be which things are participated in and sanctioned back there.

How does a commune differ from a network of friends and staying in the suburbs, as in, especially in relation to the issue of intimacy? It's not easy to verbalize. I guess I would have to explain somewhat where I am or where I came from in order to want to be in a community. I'm fearful I was and still am fearful of of being married and being alone with my wife in our own house with one or two kids. It's less threatening for me to be living with my wife in close, intimate contact with people. I guess I have trust in the group that if we start getting-- going in a bad direction, hassle-wise, that the group would use its resources to

pull us out. I know that as much as I'm in love with Bonnie, there are times that I'm bored by her company, and it's... it takes the pressure off of our relationship to be continually good, because there are other people that I can relate with on an intimate level. And when I remember I use the word intimacy I'm not suggesting that I'm going to bed with every with everyone I feel intimate with, but it just feels good being together with people that you like and OK, how does that differentiate, how is that different from the suburbs? You have to get in a car and go to someone when you're feeling good or if when you want to be with somebody. Boy, but you know, waking up and going down to the breakfast table and having 10 people there that you like a lot. Fantastic. [laughter] Yeah. You don't believe that.

I wanted to add one thing to what you asked which is that if it feels good for you, this is feeling good for me, and if that's feeling good for you then they're equal. You know, I mean there's no good or bad or better; if it's feeling right, what's happening for you when you have close friends and you're happy with that. [inaudible question from audience] [inaudible question continues] For me, the only difference in friends is the thing that Constantine said, which is that they're more readily accessible. We tend to frequently make plans as a group to do some, something together and we don't have to call each other on the phone, but it's another thing which is, at least from my own personal experience, when I was when I was married and lived in the suburbs my friends didn't see me with-- at my worst, usually.

More likely they saw me when I had made plans to see them. I might be having a fight with Mike or something but, you know, they saw me a particular times and the difference, the quality difference for me is that now I see these people and I can't limit when they're going to see me. You know, if I'm walking along the hall they say me and if I'm down and tears are rolling down my face they see that. I'm more exposed to those people. I trust that they care about that exposure. I think there's a very important piece here that I want you to keep in mind about physical space, that friendship is not the same in terms of continuous physical space and connections as it is over the over distance because of these kind of things you just talked about, and I think the clue there is a qualitative jump. Once you begin to bring somebody in close, to where you can't control the time-space elements in the way that we automatically do with our best of friends, and I think it is probably

as important a statement as I've heard made of the difference between commune community and suburb community or friendship community networks in which there is the great capacity for isolation between times, and it's spotty. Yeah, and that's a good question. [laughter] It's a possibility, you know, maybe that some of the things that I think to myself are, am I avoiding the commitment that was involved in being married by this type of arrangement? Constantine said something that to me really rang true which is that I don't think there are any two people who spending 100 percent or nearly 100 percent of their time together are 100 percent happy. There's always compromises that have to be made; someone wants to be doing something different. It's an advantage, as he was saying, I think to a dyadic

relationship, meaning two people, that they can have their interests elsewhere without estranging themselves from the relationship. But, I'm going with someone who lives in the house who I feel that I'm in love with, who I know I would be scared to say right now, yes I'll get married and live with him in a house, and it's a buffer for me that I have two things going on, and it's a problem for me in the people in the house say to me, I resent it when you spend a lot of time with him and he says to me I resent it when you spend time with the group. And, but I'm choosing that right now. I'm choosing that buffer situation. Too much-- I would not even-- At the point when we moved into our commune in June, I would not have chosen to live with Don in an apartment. I would have been too scared about the commitment. This was easier. So that's a that's a possibility in my head, that I might marry at some point, I

might stay in the community, the community or commune. We sometimes say community instead. I might stay there and and be married and conceivably have another child, or I might want to go away for a while and spend some time together. I don't expect I'm ever going to go permanently away from this group of people. I feel that those ties will continue one way or another. I might decide I don't want to close my life off and say man this is it I got it you know. I mean I am still interested in trying other things. I'm also impressed with the sense of your question which says to them aren't you hedging against something else? You know, very few actions that we take that doesn't include something we're hedging against something else. For example would be very easy for me to say how come you got married, couldn't you stand the loneliness, you know? I know a lot of people have gotten married because they couldn't. I know a lot of people have gotten into a whole host of things to avoid. I think avoidance is a piece of

everything. So I think it would be a mistake to allow the question to stand in isolation. The question is not only what do you avoid, it's also what else do you gain at the same time, and my sense of your question, if I can step out of, or step into the situation here, is that I think there's a genuinely important piece for trying to sort out for each individual the way in which they will allow for the process of intimacy to take place for themselves in relation to any one person or and whether it's possible to have that kind of intimacy with a larger group. Sometimes, some people hedge their bets of intimacy with a number of people by only sticking with one person all the time. I think what I hear you saying, Kathy, is the kind of potential for flexibility of dealing with the issues of intimacy in a wider group than just the the marital couple, which is the one that we've all been educated to have along with some intimacies left over from the past with our parents and

relatives and, and with our children, most of whom we fail to have really reasonable intimacies with. Let me stay in the back of the group for a while. Go ahead, gentleman with glasses. You brought up two important questions, one which has to do with the formal and informal rules of the commune, that is making it successful, if this is the feeling you have about it now. Second is really relating to parenting and what happens with children, and may I just make one comment before you answer that. I have a funny deja vu, which is that if all the questions you're now asking of these two people in a commune, you're also asking of yourselves in your own marriage then we're into something very important, OK? What are the formal and informal rules by which you're, you and your marriage and family take place, and while they answer that, for those of you who are not listening, think about your family the same way. [?] Their are actually very, very few rules; we'd like to think that there are.

I imagine there a lot of unspoken rules that I'm not even aware of but they we're all following. Certainly, rule number one, perhaps the biggest rule is, you're not allowed to gunnysack grievances. If you're angry or hostile, you're encouraged to bring it out. You're almost pressured to bring it out and deal with it almost immediately, rather than it allowing it to grow and be disruptive for the group. That's the standard advice by Bach for the intimate enemy too, you know, between a man and a woman, and that's extremely important for us in that there are so many of us who, if they gunnysack everything it would go very quickly. That's about the only thing that I can grapple with. It's a safeguard. Gunnysacking we said okay at least once a week we all have to get together to make sure that we deal with last week's angers.

But it's encouraged to, you know, do it at the time that it occurs, so that that informal thing came out of you know this thing of you know wanting to get things out immediately. The other informal rules of trying to keep the house clean, things like that that's that really is so secondary. I mean that's not the reason why we're together I feel that we're together because we're trying very hard to to always be in touch with the feelings, the good feelings and the bad feelings that we have for one another. I think, I guess I have a feeling that we have more norms than that, but that they're so embedded in our life that it's hard for us to think what they are. Like, I was really trying hard, you know, to think there aren't, they don't seem to be rules. I mean if you call it a rule that you have to cook and you're expected to clean up that's a rule. But there are norms that are really infused into the way that we're living.

Like, trying to listen is one that I thought of. To feel, to be vulnerable to pressure put upon you. Like, with Ricky, my son, you know, I mean he can put people uptight, you know. And I've just gotta, because of the way I'm living I've got to listen to that. How it puts them uptight and talk to them as well as talk to Ricky about it. That's a sort of a human norm though and I'm not sure that distinguishes us from what people do generally. Sexually, there are norms although I suspect they're changing. You know, when you called last night, we were in sitting around the table, 14 of us talking about it, and you said well, one of the questions they might ask about is how people relate to each other sexually at the moment. You, know I mean, you know it was just a balloon in the middle of the table.

Up until now there's been no what would you call it. Screwing around [laughter] [laughter continues] There have been, like, there are people who have been intimate with one another in the house prior to moving into the house. But in the house, that seemed to be a norm for a while that you didn't deal with other you didn't deal with you didn't screw around. [laughter] But, something has, had been happening and this has to do, I want to just drop back for a minute to when someone said successful. I wouldn't say this is successful. I'd say right now we're all still committed, and pretty happy about where we're at but I don't know when it becomes successful, you know, I think it keeps changing. I don't know if you ever get

successful at living, but something's been happening, which is that I feel has been getting closer and closer to people in the house and to, not everyone; it's not unilateral, a feeling isn't unilateral and we don't have good feelings about everybody in the house, you know you might be feeling uptight about somebody. But there are, say, three or four people that I've been getting closer and closer and closer to. There are, and I don't know what to do exactly with it. I feel very close, you know, when I feel that close and that loving to someone, I would prefer to make love with that person and share that vulnerable and exciting and touching thing with them, but I mean wow, you know, that really scared me to death to think of that, but I'm-- and there's no solution; I haven't worked out a solution for myself. I feel I'm very fond of Constantine. I love Constantine. Sometimes I'd like to just hug him and kiss him. Sometimes I like to do no more. You know I'm

very fond of women in the house which is another thing how, you know, I don't know how to relate to a woman that I love. I'd like to hug her and I feel really uptight about it, you know. I'd like to hold her hand or I'm, I'm scared of the intimacy, you know, I'm scared that we're getting closer. I don't know what to do with that, you know, we're just a young family, we're six months old. Other people solve it one way; I think we're much too in society to solve it easily by just saying everybody does what they want to. You know, we're pretty straight in a sense, you know, I mean we bring a lot of where we've been at into it, you know, where it's not an easy solution for us to say well we'll all share everything including intimate relationships; that's a very diff-- it seems to me at least a very difficult solution. But it's a problem you know that's probably one of the biggest problems that we're going to have is what to do with that. And it's hurting us, it's not one we

can ignore. That's another norm that we have which is not to ignore problems, not to just go on living it out, even though we all know there's a problem in the air. We, you know, we're fond of each other so we might walk by and touch each other on the shoulder or squeeze somebody's hand or kiss somebody you know on the cheek but we had sort of a party Saturday night and we sat around and listened to music and people became very passive and weren't relating, you know, to each other at all. And everybody knew something was wrong. It's that in the freedom of a party momentum nobody knew what to do. You know I mean it's a problem. Have I convinced you that the problem. It was interesting one of the key in the history of recent communes. It's clear that the issue for privacy in private relationships is a crucial one, that any kind of commune that operates in a rather--

relatively anarchal [i.e. anarchical] style in which anybody can do anything that they want to anybody with anybody depending upon everybody's freedom doesn't exist for very long; the commune generally breaks up and busts up without the rules. And I think the issue of rules a very crucial one. Sexuality is an issue that always demands some kind of rule system in terms of the privacy of certain kinds of intimate relationships. And I think the history of communes thus far, despite Robert Gruber [?], has shown to be one of that the shared sexual relationship does not remain as a simple comfortable force in any kind of a of a setting, and in large measure the communes that have been quote successful, meaning survive three to five years, have been ones in which intimate space and intimate relationships, especially sexual ones, have been separated off from those communal activities of a larger nature, and I think this is an important issue. The other question that was raised I think it really is represented by so many things for you, is what happens to parenting in a commune? What are the advantages and

disadvantages? You mention one piece about Ricky who can make others uptight. But there's a whole issue of multiple adults who will ensure that anyone time one of the what is the impact of that. There was a point I was going to say something about Ricky earlier. Oh I know. When I was talking about when someone asked why did I get into this sort of thing. I felt inadequate as a single parent dealing with Ricky. I think when I felt most inadequate was when I was toilet training him I, you know, whenever I had a date I asked them it would they take him in to show him how they go to the bathroom. You know I mean I feel very inadequate to that situation but that's just symbolic of the whole thing. I, I'm as committed as any mother I've ever met to my child, and he stands equal to me in my commitment to myself and making myself happy I think of

what will make him happy. My role as I see it as a parent and as his mother is very supportive and very loving and more or less reinforcing. And I feel Ricky living with me just me that would be a bad situation. He has men around and he has women around who choose one, or they seem to fall into one or the other category more authoritative and more demanding and caring, and people who are more like me who are reinforcing and caring. And then there are a few people who are just sort of turned off, who don't really deal with Ricky. The only demand I make on anybody who deals with him is that they be dealing with him because they care about him. That's a strong demand to me I don't care for somebody to be bossing Ricky around or telling him what to do or scolding him if they don't care about him. I'm really grateful for the people like to come here tonight, I said to Mary,

one of the girls in the house, would you put Ricky to bed for me. And so I left. Ricky was making, she happened to be cooking dinner and Ricky was stuffing his Halloween candy into bananas to bake in the oven for dessert for everybody, you know. You know, I mean that's so comforting to me I don't have to get a babysitter. You know my husband, who comes over a lot to pick up Ricky, came came into the kitchen one time and said do you want to kiss mommy goodbye and Ricki came in and he went by Barbara, one of the girls in the in the commune, and he said I want to kiss my first mommy. You know he he's closest to her second. And she keeps saying I'm I like a second mommy and he keeps telling her yeah, you know that's good for her. She's in law school, she's married, she'd like to have a child. It's not right for their relationship now; her husband isn't ready for that. So it's good for her, and that love is really good for Ricky. I sometimes think back to when I was in college, and we used to talk about our families, and I think what's going to happen to Ricky when he goes to college and

he's got this experience, you know. It really is freaky to think about. We have fantasies of like going, when we can join in a school and there's a PTA meeting, we would send a different mother every time. [laughter] I think, I can't be sure, just as no parent, I don't believe that any one of you is sure that you're raising your child right. I'm not sure what I feel as I'm doing my best to be happy myself and that that's good for my child. I feel that the people that I'm living with are good for my child. I feel that Ricky is happy. He loves it, he calls it my house. He loves the people. I worry, you know, one of the worries I had was would he be with too many adults, and I had been eager to have more children in the house. But their children come around and he turns out there are lots of kids in the neighborhood that he plays with.

I feel-- sometimes I feel sad. I visited my brother and his wife in St. Johnbury, Vermont, and when I walked in and the tears started coming down my face at how perfect their house is and perfect they are and their kids, you know, are all clean and neat and everything is just perfect you know and I think oh I really wish I were giving that to Ricky, you know. But that's momentary, that's like the little doubts that creep in. I feel that when I'm in a bad mood I can be honest with Ricky and say Boy I'm in a bad mood, I don't feel like reading a story. Why don't you ask Barbara or Mary or Bonnie or Constantine and he does, you know. Sometimes he won't he says no it's got to be you and that's right too. I'm not sure about it. Write me a letter in about 25 years and I'll tell you if he's going to a psychiatrist, you know. [laughter] [inaudible question from audience] I am just his mother.

Yeah, there are problems and that's a problem. Sometimes I feel people set up too many rules for him and I get very resentful. Yeah, I feel that I'm the final authority and I don't feel anybody else can spank Ricky other than me. I feel they can tell me their complaint if they can't just work it out with Ricky themselves [inaudible] Me. I put him to bed, you know, except for when I'm not there or when I'm feeling really depressed once in a while some say you want me to put Ricky to bed for you. But generally I go up and kiss him good night. You know, I think that [inaudible] The question is is this [?] the real situation for the for the child, won't he be confused? You can tell that I have some very strong thoughts about this. First of all, I don't know that we can take the nuclear family

experience as the norm for kids, and I think we've all been living in a nuclear family for a long time, at least the last generation. The families that live in extended families, as Constantine did when he grew up, or have lived in extended families in some areas of our situation even in Boston, there's a large number of them still who grew up this way in the North End, Little Italy in which the extended family is very strong there. For those who've lived in extended families several generations ago or in other cultures turned out some pretty good kids you know. So I don't know what the hell is the right kind of way to bring up a kid. I think there are advantages and disadvantages, seems to me. A kid who has multiple adults and potentially multiple kids, finds an awful lot of alternatives and ways of going about his business in finding role models and finding people to identify with, to share with, all kinds of people that he can get along with, and in large measure the experience of adaptability certainly comes about in such

settings as they do in kibbutzes, as they do in other kinds of communes. The capacity for the child never to be isolated from some kind of loving or caring at any one point. A negative piece about it, perhaps they don't learn to adapt to living in a situation in which you can't escape from a negative circumstance, in which your mother is a grouch and has nobody else to deal with, although I find that in our family which is, which is a family with no extended adults outside of the two of us and and a Danish girl that's living with us is one in which the kids also learn how to shut up when mother's feeling so uptight. And what happens is they do gunnysack, and the kids do learn how to, how to pull back in and put on the facade and hide and not to run to the next one because there's no other next one to go to. I'm not sure which is a better method, but I'm liable to believe that if the child has alternatives for expression that it may pay off more than we've done with our entirely constricted families that we've had these days. [Audience]: What I mean by a real situation, is that [UNCLEAR], for the other children aren't involved in this, it seems like Ricky's the only child in such a minority situation, I mean, what's, there are thousands of children that are involved in this other, doesn't he wonder, well, he's young yet, but in another couple of years, won't it be hard? [Speaker]: Let me

try to say a couple more things. [Different Speaker]: Here is the question so that everybody in the back can hear it. Is it a real situation when he's the only child with so many adults around? Doesn't he wonder, isn't he concerned, there are other circumstances that I've talked about like the commune or Little Italy and so forth, the kibbutz, where there are more than one child; there's a real peer culture in a sense. [Speaker]: Well, I want to try to respond specifically to what you're saying because I want to say again, I'm not sure that I'm doing-- I'm not sure that there isn't something else I could be doing that would be better. I don't know that. I feel I'm doing what's the right for, for me. I grew up in a nuclear family and I wound up seeing a psychiatrist, so is it--

I figure the chances are about even; he'll probably see one anyway. The specific things, I think about it: are there too many adults for one child? So Ricky goes to school, you know where he plays with lots of kids. In fact I chose a school that was not liberal, not a liberal free wheeling type of school. I chose one that is more rigid, more scheduled, because I thought that would be a good balance for him. He spends, say, around supper time and he goes to bed shortly after supper and on weekends he spends say, one of the two days generally at the house. He's-- what you said really interested me in terms of that a child in a nuclear family does have to shut up and deal with negative feelings. And I guess I don't think Ricky's had to do that, or at least I think I think I've had a hidden expectation that people shouldn't put him in that position. I feel like that's something I've learned,

you know, that I've seen situations happen where nobody does want to deal with him and he has to go and play by himself. He's very good at finding things to do by himself, he's very good at playing with the kids. I guess, you know, am I missing one of the specific things you asked? [Audience]: No, I'm just trying to ... [Speaker]: Yeah. All I can do is look at him generally, and I think he's just about the greatest kid I know, so I think he's coming out all right, you know? I feel free to get mad at somebody when I feel they're doing something wrong, and I feel free to really appreciate them that they're giving me a break. [Audience]: Well, you say that for yourself, but for your child, you said that he... [Different Speaker]: Just start to extend a little further with other people's questions. You had one, Bob. [Bob]: One of the criticisms that we have of suburban families is that they're apathetic relative to the society, that they're in-grown, that they're concerned with their own well-being and their own happiness and not concerned with society. My question would be in terms of your family

how would you talk about a social conscience? [Different Speaker]: I joined the community for the specific reason of disengaging myself, in a way, from society, so I don't see the communal way of life as a as an alternative way of the suburban in that sense. I'm paranoid about what's happening in this country, and I guess rather than dealing with it by going out and using the most powerful four letter word, the vote, I say, hey that's not getting you anywhere and see no real recourse. Boy, no, it's very disturbing when I think about it but what society is out there, so I almost, you know, ran to this communal way of life as a way of insulating myself.

At one time I felt guilty about that. Somebody at another group, similar to this, got up and said yeah your community sounds all well and good but what about the poor guy, what about the blacks, what are you going to do to help them? It seems like you're not doing anything. And I felt guilty about it then. Since then I've decided hey no, no, no more laying guilt trips on me of wanting to make me feel responsible to save the world. If a group of us can live together happily that may be the start. I don't know. But certainly for me, certainly for me. [Different Speaker]: I'm impressed by the number of communes that have gotten started as an attempt for alternatives to dealing with the society which I would suspect Constantine is quite right at times to be paranoid about. As a psychiatrist I think there are times to be really paranoid based on reality, and part of the paranoia that I think people have is their sense of helplessness in terms of dealing with institutions that have been

set up, reasonably, to deal with things that families originally were set up to do. The problem gets to be one in which if you are well enough along the way you think that maybe you can still change the institutions which are not functioning very well to do the job. The reason they're not functioning very well is that as all institutions are after about three to five years they start to become much more inward and unless there's a renewal process they tend to be perpetuating. Being a director of education of an institution that's a hundred forty years old called Boston State Hospital, I'm very aware of the problems of old institutions, and I made a commitment to see if I couldn't try to make some changes in that old institution but I could also recognize the sense of hopelessness that a lot of people can have in saying, you can't change him [i.e. this?]. There's a certain recurrent theme that goes on and on and on about institutions that are hard. Let's reduce the size of our world to a manageable size. Let's reduce the size of the experiences with people to a manageable set of experiences, and cut out the feeling of hopelessness and

helplessness also. So communes in large measure across the country that I see, there were about 2000 of them in the West Coast and all the way through New Mexico and Arizona, places like that, have been established in large measure by people attempting to find a manageable set of existences in which there is some degree of closeness and some degree of attempts to handle some of these social concerns. When you go out, and this may be the place to bring in some of the facts other than your immediate community; when you go out and you see the communes, and there about five of them that I got to know a little bit about out in Colorado and New Mexico. There's Libre and Drop City and the Zoneworks and New Buffalo, about five of them in a small radius of about 150 miles, and they're all operating, as much as possible in an economic and self-contained operation. New Buffalo is known as one of the medieval communes; has no electricity, has no health services, in fact they can't

stand doctors. They have, however, they have the best fruit, vegetable, and other farming of any place around and they feed the other five communes, and they're really into that one. The Zoneworks are run by, in an operation where they are all structural engineers, the people developing a whole set of new architecture as you may know. So And for those who haven't read the New Bible of Communes, which is the Whole Earth Catalog, you better get yourselves over the Coop and pick up one. It will really give you the, the in to a whole host of the concerns and issues that go on in the communies at large, not just an urban commune like this one but the agriculture and other ones. But most of these have attempted to cut down the size of the world to a manageable one. So when you start talking about social responsibilities, social responsibilities always falter on the reefs of saying but are you capable of doing anything? People will not take on responsibility, really, unless they feel they can make it pay off.

That includes all the people in this room. That includes myself; even my fantasies can drop away if I don't get a payoff. And I know a good number of people now in psychiatry if I may put in this last thing, a few of them, in what we call the left wing of psychiatry, the people who've been in touch with the Laings, and Laing started a kind of communitee, Kingsley Hall, as an anti-psychiatry movement. People who are very concerned about where we can move next and are just as disillusioned about the institutions and they, at the age of 40 and 45, are talking about communes too, but it's a lot harder to do when you've got your networks all set up and tied in, and how many things you have to cut off at that time in order to come alive again in another way. It's a lot easier to do when you haven't got all your tentacles out and the tentacles of others attached to you at the same time because the loss isn't as great, nor as painful in order to do it. [Audience]: I have two questions. First, how do you relate to your immediate neighborhood and they in turn to you? Secondly, do societal norms in the community of ours have any effect on the commune? [Different Speaker]: Everybody hear that? How do you relate to your immediate neighborhood and they to you. And what about the societal

norms and its relation to the community. [Different Speaker]: I'd rather talk about the neighborhood than the norms. So, but I think Constantine would too, you'd rather -- you do it. OK, we moved in sort of paranoid that they weren't going to accept us and, and we were scared, and, you know, things started happening. We met-- we were lucky, there's one neighbor across the street, they're an Italian family with a big garden and we met their kids and they were so friendly to us. Boy, it was really a help. We then needed to, we-- and some people were nervous, there's a motorcycle, one of the guys has a motorcycle and another guy who was visiting a lot had a motorcycle and we have quite a few cars, seven cars to add to the street you know. So, um, it came down to this: that our house is three stories in front and two stories in back, and there's an area in between which Constantine wanted and

needed to fill in to make our house right to add on a little more space. We got turned down by the building commissioner so we had to go to the zoning board, and all the neighbors in our area were sent notices that we wanted to do this and blah blah blah, and some of them came and they were against it and they were curious and so we had to talk with them then, and it was sort of frustrating and scary. We then decided to send out an invitation and we took them to everyone on our street and up the next street, to come and see what we were doing, so that there wasn't-- to confront it, invite them in, so that-- to see what was happening so that the sort of gossipy rumors could be handled and it worked out so well. We met-- we found we have really nice neighbors and that they really were interested in what we were doing and we were interested in them. There was one neighbor who was very, was very annoyed at us and was very uptight about us but he actually came out and helped the girls who were working in that area last weekend,

that were digging a big hole out there for our sauna or something... It's working out, you know. [Different Speaker]: Yeah, we're going to have a sauna. Actually we're gonna have a-- that's it, we're very very middle class. [laughter] We made the mistake, when we first bought the house and moved in, not to be concerned with the neighbors. That was were one case of being paranoid of the society and the immediate community didn't pay off, because we didn't approach these people and say hey look, we have long hair, we have mustaches and beards. That may put you uptight, but here see us, touch us. We're not any different. We ignored these people and it worked against us because all the symbolic things that we had, the motorcycles and the mustaches and the long hair, because they

didn't know us, worked against us. They were, they were hostile towards us, which reinforced our paranoia, or mine, and we viewed them in a hostile fashion. In a way it was very good that the building department did give us a hard time because that was the way, out of necessity, because it was very important to, to do this addition work that we wanted to, out of necessity we had to deal with the neighbors. And in the process of doing so it really became a nice thing. I'm actually-- I actually like the people on the street. I'm from Somerville and I went through the school system there so I should be more in touch with it, but I spent the better part of my adult life trying to move away from Somerville, you know, like I wanted to be from Cambridge, you know, [laughter] and it's now a real turn-on to to be able to say yeah I'm from Somerville and I live on that street and feel good about living on that street; they are a

good bunch of people. But we did make the mistake at first, boy, that was really a mistake. [Different Speaker]: How do the people in the communal family feel about the closeness of relationships outside the communal family, and not just the ones inside? It's always a joy to have people over for dinner. I don't think many of us are threatened by the fact that somebody is coming in who is, say, a girlfriend or boyfriend of one of the people. Well actually, no that's not true. There aren't many girlfriends or boyfriends. The only people, the only only outsiders now are just friends and it's kind of nice to have people over. We're so turned on by what we're doing I guess, we'd like to turn on everybody else to what we're doing. So I guess the more people that come, it gives us a better chance to pat ourselves in the back and say hey, look, this is what we're doing and blah, blah, blah,

and, so it hasn't become a problem yet on the outside. I can see-- at times I'm uptight when-- I tend to view-- alright, I have this fantasy of our family being a close knit, in-grown group, which is not the fantasy of most other people in the family, so I'm the one that gets most uptight, usually, when I feel the group is not staying together but seeking to go outside for their entertainment, but it really hasn't been the case too much. Last Halloween, just the other day we were invited to go to a party and at first it seemed like a good thing, let's all go to another commune for a party. But in the last analysis we all chose to stay together because we were happy together. Not yet. It might be. I'm uptight about when Kathy spends a lot of time with Donna or when Mary spends a lot of time with Rich. These are two couples and I

kind of feel wow, you know like I want to be in there too. But that's something that just gets dealt with. [Different Speaker]: I want to add a little bit to that, which is that, you know, if you're going with somebody, or at least when I went with somebody, I always eventually brought them home to meet my family, you know. And it's a little more of an expectation in this situation than that. Julie, one of the girls, was going with a guy George and she was going to be moving into the house. And she was concerned with how she was going to-- how he would feel, you know. She wanted to be able to share where she was living. Certainly if you live at home, the person meets your family. I guess that's the closest comparison and we're living at home. So if, if I were to have a new relationship with another man, he would come to pick me up at my home and meet my family and it's his problem if he can't work it out with my family, and my family's if they can't work it out with him, just like a beau and my father or my

mother or something... a beau, something... [laughter] [Different Speaker]: You got only time for one last question, so... The question is to the, what is the life cycle of a commune as contrasted with the life cycle of a family and a marriage. Communes as far as the group that have taken place in the last 10, 15 years have had a range of life, uh, lifespans. The largest number being less than five years and either breaking up with developing into, budding into another commune out of the next group of people. I'm not sure that that is what the history will be or won't be, I think that's a hard thing to say. I think the important thing is to understand as far as my framework is concerned that marriages and communes and families are not just brought together and persist because of the internal relatedness

but also what is extant. And I think this is the very crucial issue that I mentioned earlier, in the sense that marriages lasted for long long lifetimes, if you remember, several generations ago because of the social constraints, not just because the people loved each other, notwithstanding that famous song from Fiddler on the Roof, you know, "do you love me, after 25 years why do you ask?" The fact of the matter is that the structure of marriage and family was promoted again not by internal centripetal forces but by the forces that were external, boundaries. So then you start to ask about, what is the-- what are the forces that will maintain a commune? In large measure, they will be maintained as long as there's a good reason for maintaining a strong boundary around them. Those communes that are made of people with ideologies, very strong ideologies, and I think not quite as humanist as this but much stronger, even perhaps to the mysticism, to the rituals, to the kind of experiences that are, that are,

are a number of people have been into, the very religious type. If they are very strong rituals, religious rituals you can keep them going for a long time. Those that are boundaried in space may well be able to do with a boundary out, really out in the commune, away from the urban world. I would suggest, and my prediction is really not meant to be worth very much, I think it's worth less than two cents, and I get paid much more by the hour, that this is a commune that's going to have a hard time maintaining itself over time. The sense that most of the work has to be done by the participants in keeping themselves together. They're-- they don't have too much of a hostile environment yet, you know. They don't have the Indians around the outside of the fort. They don't, they don't have-- they're getting along too well with the people out there, they still have connections all through the networks. So that the, the concerns that are raised by your question about what about the relationships

outside really say that this is a commune which the people are still very much related to networks of relationships around them, Constantine notwithstanding. And therefore they do not have to have the boundaried position of holding themselves together as tightly, and they may very well change membership easily over time. The economics of not having enough money to get the house together may keep them in there but there are other... [Different Speaker]: There's one, There's one more thing. When you-- it was compared between marriage and a commune, and marriage has something that a commune doesn't which is that it's a legal thing as well as the choice thing. It's a legal thing and that can be an advantage and a disadvantage; it can keep two people together who don't-- wouldn't choose to be together except for the legal hassle or it can be that extra thing that keeps them together, that makes them work through the problem and they get themselves more together afterwards. So we're in a situation where we don't have that external commitment that, that, that forces us to go

through another process before we can split up. It's a question of choice for us, and that's harder, you know. It's always going to be a choice to stay or to go. [Audience]: Don't you think that's fine as long as there are no children involved? [Different Speaker]: No, there are a lot of communes that are working with children and doing very well with children. The issue as I said gets to be, you know, what the boundary forces are; the kibbutzim that have lasted for a long time in Israel have lasted because of-- not because of the children issue but because of some of the stresses outside as well as inside. [Audience]: But when these things break up after so many years, [UNCLEAR], they never have that security. I think we're in an early stage of describing it and as I say I don't see there's enough hostility around them in order to maintain them long enough. Good enough reason for the society of the paranoid and you'll have a very strong set of communes lasting for a long long time. And I think just as the Israeli communes which you call kibbutzim and have lasted because there's always been danger right outside your door you stick together whether you love or not you work out the loving problems all the time outside your door. When you've got danger at the door, you stick together whether you

love or not you work out the loving problems over the phone.