A History of the Relating Arts
Compiling this timeline has been a bit of an effort. Many dates (and stories) are contested and a lot of the material is based on stories from practitioners or reading up on various websites. I have used Claude Sonnet 4.6 to research and develop the timeline which has been a great help, but likely also have led to some mistakes. If you find mistakes or have something that should be added please let me know.
2024-
Transformational Connection — originally founded as Circling Europe in 2012 by Sean Wilkinson and John Thompson — rebranded under this name after stepping away from the Circling trademark, continuing to operate out of the Netherlands. The rebrand reflected a genuine evolution of the practice rather than merely a name change: the team had developed what they called Surrendered Leadership, an approach to facilitation and group work centered on releasing control and trusting what emerges collectively from a group field, going beyond the individual focus of classic Circling. Their flagship offering remains a six-month facilitator training, and they run an annual international festival that draws practitioners from across Europe and beyond.
2022-
The Field Facilitator Training was launched in 2022 by Rachel Rickards, an international facilitator and co-founder of Embodied Intimacy, who had previously led the Belly2Belly Facilitator Training after inheriting it from her mentor David Cates. The Field takes as its central premise that every group generates an invisible but palpable collective energy — the group body or group field — and that the most important skill a facilitator can develop is the ability to perceive, attune to, and work with that field in real time. Rather than following a fixed method or curriculum, the training cultivates in participants a capacity to listen from the nervous system, surrender to what is emergent in the collective moment, and facilitate from a place beyond ego and personality.
2020-
The Real LIFE Facilitator Program is a seven-month immersive training founded by Diane Musho Hamilton, developed after her earlier work co-founding the Integral Facilitator program. Where Integral Facilitator focused primarily on applying the integral framework to group work, Real LIFE goes deeper into the embodied and relational dimensions of facilitation — integrating leadership development, Zen meditation, conflict resolution, somatic awareness, and integral theory into a single developmental arc. Its organizing premise is that a facilitator’s effectiveness is inseparable from their own development as a person — that the quality of presence, inner alignment, and capacity to hold difficulty are the primary instruments of the work, more fundamental than any technique. The program includes attention to conflict and polarities, group shadow, energetic coherence, movement and body awareness, and what Hamilton calls the art of working with what is real in the room.
2018-
We-Flow is a relational and collective intelligence practice developed by Stéphane Segatori and his collaborators at the We-Flow Lab in Amsterdam. Segatori describes it not as something he created but as something that emerged through collective practice — crystallizing out of his immersion in integral theory, authentic relating, circling, and Zen state training, and his background in business intelligence and organizational development.
2017-
ART International — Authentic Relating Training — was founded in 2017 by Ryel Kestano and Jason Digges, both of whom had trained and taught at Boulder Integral before setting out to bring authentic relating to a much broader audience. Where earlier organizations had served primarily personal development communities through expensive, time-intensive workshops, ART’s explicit mission from the start was to remove barriers to entry — making the practice affordable, accessible, and applicable to everyday life at work, at home, and in ordinary social settings.
2016-
Compassionate Inquiry was developed by physician and author Gabor Maté, drawing on his clinical work with addiction, trauma, and chronic illness. Its central premise is that present-day relational patterns — particularly the ones that cause suffering — are adaptations to early experiences of pain, abandonment, or threat, and that healing requires following the thread of current experience back to its developmental roots with curiosity rather than judgment. The practice uses a combination of somatic awareness, direct questioning, and deep listening to help people contact the beliefs and feelings that are driving their behavior, often below conscious awareness.
2015-
The Relateful Company was founded in 2015 in Austin, Texas by Jordan Myska Allen, growing out of the Austin Circling Studio community that had been built by Allen, Sara Ness, and others. It began as CircleAnywhere — an online platform for Circling and authentic relating practice — and became the largest online Circling community in the world, running over thirty sessions per week with skilled facilitators and deliberately small group sizes. In 2023 Allen rebranded the platform as The Relateful Company and renamed the practice “relatefulness” — mindfulness in relationship — stepping away from the Circling trademark and evolving the work in a direction more deeply influenced by Integral Theory, contemplative practice, and rational inquiry.
2015-
Honesty Europe was founded in 2015 by Finnish therapist and certified Radical Honesty trainer Tuulia Syvänen and her husband Pete Jordan, an American writer based in Amsterdam, making it the primary vehicle for bringing Brad Blanton’s Radical Honesty practice to European audiences. Syvänen first encountered Radical Honesty in 2012 through a training with Blanton himself, and the organization she and Jordan built has since led over 150 multi-day retreats and workshops across Finland, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Spain, and the UK.
2014-2024
Embodied Intimacy was co-founded in 2014 by Rachel Rickards and Buster Rådvik, running for ten years before closing in 2024 when the two founders went their separate ways professionally. The organization offered workshops, retreats, and longer training programs focused on intimacy, somatic awareness, trauma, and conscious relating, operating primarily in Europe and drawing participants from the broader personal development and conscious sexuality communities. Its work sat at the intersection of body-based practice, nervous system regulation, and relational depth, with a particular openness to sexuality and intimate relationship as part of the relational field rather than a separate domain. After closing, Rådvik continued the work through Path of Relating and Rickards through The Field Facilitator Training and Intimacy Camp.
2013-2019
Integral Circling
Boulder Integral emerged in 2011 when Decker Cunov and Robert MacNaughton took over the ailing Integral Center in Boulder, Colorado — a community space that had been built around Ken Wilber’s integral philosophy — and transformed it into a school of Circling. Together they developed what became known as Integral Circling — a flavor of the practice framed explicitly within Wilber’s four-quadrant model of consciousness, emphasizing Circling as a “we-space” practice for evolving collective awareness. They created the Aletheia weekend intensive, a three-day immersive following the original Arete model, and a Train the Trainer program that seeded Circling communities across the world.
2013-
The Circling Institute was founded in 2013 in the Bay Area by Guy Sengstock and Alexis Shepperd, bringing together the original creator of Circling and one of its most influential early practitioners and teachers. After the Arete Experience wound down in 2008 and a period of relative quiet, Sengstock and Shepperd designed a new training format — the Art of Circling — that systematized the practice into what they called the seven stages of Circling, giving students a progressively deeper map of the relational territory.
2012-2024
Circling Europe was founded in 2012 in the Netherlands by Sean Wilkinson and John Thompson, two British practitioners who had independently discovered relational presence work in 2002 and later trained with Decker Cunov and Guy Sengstock in the United States. They brought the practice to Europe and developed their own distinct flavor, which emphasized surrendered leadership and the collective field of presence as much as the individual being circled.
2012-
Authentic Revolution was founded in 2012 by Sara Ness, Authentic Revolution is one of the largest and longest-running authentic relating communities in the world, training over 350 leaders and seeding more than thirty communities globally. The Authentic Relating Games Manual, containing over two hundred structured exercises, became the source text for the field and is widely used by facilitators worldwide.
2012-
NARM
NARM (Neuro Affective Relational Model) was developed by Dr. Laurence Heller over the course of a forty-five year clinical career and formally introduced in 2012. It is a psychotherapeutic approach specifically designed for complex and developmental trauma — the kind of early relational wounding that shapes not just what happened to someone but who they believe themselves to be. Drawing on psychodynamic theory, attachment research, Gestalt therapy, somatic psychotherapy, and affective neuroscience, NARM works simultaneously with the psychology and physiology of disconnection, attending to both the survival styles a person has developed and the nervous system states that maintain them. Its central and distinctive insight is that it is not the traumatic events of the past that create ongoing suffering but the persistence of survival adaptations that were once necessary and are now obsolete — patterns of disconnection from self, body, and others that were formed in childhood and continue to shape adult relational life. Rather than working regressively or cathartically with the past, NARM works in the present moment with what is alive now, using the therapeutic relationship itself as the primary vehicle for healing.
2012-
Ritual Play
Ritual Play was created in 2012 by Finnish practitioner Marina Kronkvist, who is also co-founder of the Solbacka eco-village in Finland. It is a structured, non-verbal, two-way relational practice in which two or more people meet in a limited shared space — typically two yoga mats — and interact through movement, sound, and breath, following a simple timed framework with a small set of guiding principles. The practice draws on participatory arts, sensorimotor psychotherapy, somatic movement practices, tantra, and deep ecology, and was developed in part through Kronkvist’s research into sexuality as art. Its central quality is that it is genuinely interactive and non-predetermined — participants are invited to meet each other in real time without a script, following only what feels meaningful in the moment.
2010s-
The Wheel of Consent
The Wheel of Consent was developed by Dr. Betty Martin, a retired chiropractor and somatic sex educator who spent decades working hands-on with clients and noticed a recurring pattern: most people struggled to know what they wanted from touch, let alone communicate it, and many would silently endure contact they were not enjoying rather than speak up. Out of this observation she developed a framework built around two questions — who is doing, and who is it for — which generate four distinct quadrants: giving, receiving, taking, and allowing. The insight at the heart of the model is that these two axes are often confused or collapsed, creating the conditions for resentment, people-pleasing, and non-consensual dynamics even in well-intentioned interactions. The practice is learned experientially through a structured touch exercise that gives participants a direct somatic experience of each quadrant. Martin co-founded the School of Consent in 2018 and published her book in 2021.
2007-
Holacracy was developed by software entrepreneur Brian Robertson, who spent the early 2000s using his own technology company as a laboratory for new ways of organizing collective work, and formalized the system when he co-founded HolacracyOne in 2007. Where sociocracy emphasizes consent and human equivalence, Holacracy goes further in distributing authority to roles rather than people — every function in the organization is defined as a role with explicit accountabilities, and anyone can hold multiple roles simultaneously. Governance happens through structured meetings in which tensions are processed and roles updated, and the entire system is codified in a written constitution that sits above any individual’s authority, including the founders’.
2006-
Heart iQ was developed by British facilitator Christian Pankhurst, who spent roughly two decades refining a body of work centered on what he calls heart-centered group dynamics and circle facilitation. The practice draws on somatic awareness, conscious communication, and the concept of the amplified field — the idea that when people gather with genuine openness and presence, something becomes possible collectively that could not happen individually. Heart iQ circle work combines elements of breathwork, movement, sound, and direct relational encounter, guided by a facilitator who tracks and works with the emotional and energetic field of the group in real time.
2005-
Zen Coaching was founded in 2005 by Norwegian philosopher and diplomat Kåre Landfald, who launched the first workshop at a retreat centre in Sweden. The practice weaves together Zen Buddhist principles, Nonviolent Communication, the Diamond Approach of A.H. Almaas, and modern coaching methodology into a single coherent framework. Its central premise is that all human suffering arises from disconnection with one’s true nature, and that the role of the coach is not to fix or advise but to hold a quality of presence that allows the client to reconnect with their own inherent wholeness, clarity, and resources. Rather than working toward external goals, Zen Coaching works from the inside out — first restoring inner connection, then allowing skillful action to arise naturally from that ground.
2004-
Transparent Communication
Transparent Communication is a relational and contemplative practice developed by Austrian spiritual teacher Thomas Hübl, who has been teaching and refining it since the early 2000s. Hübl describes it as a social mysticism — the practice of bringing the same quality of presence and attunement to everyday conversation and relationship that a meditator brings to sitting practice. Its premise is that every human being radiates multiple streams of information simultaneously — cognitive, emotional, and somatic — and that most of our communication is impoverished because we attend only to the surface layer of words while remaining unaware of the deeper relational field.
1998-
Art of Hosting
The Art of Hosting is not a single practice but a community of practitioners and a philosophy of facilitation that emerged in the late 1990s from the convergence of several participatory methods — World Café, Open Space, Appreciative Inquiry, and Council among them. Its central proposition is that the quality of a conversation depends on the quality of the container in which it is held, and that hosting — the art of creating conditions for good thinking and genuine meeting — is itself a skill that can be learned and developed. Art of Hosting practitioners speak of hosting as an inner as well as outer practice: you cannot create conditions for authentic conversation unless you yourself are grounded, present, and genuinely curious.
1996-
Radical Honesty
Radical Honesty was developed by psychotherapist Brad Blanton, who trained in gestalt therapy and became convinced that the primary source of human suffering is the gap between what people think and feel and what they actually say. His practice calls for speaking truth without the social filtering that normally governs conversation — including sharing thoughts and feelings that are normally withheld as impolite, embarrassing, or hurtful. Blanton distinguishes between the past tense of stored resentments and appreciations, which need to be expressed and released, and the present tense of immediate experience, which should be shared as it arises.
1995-
Insight Dialogue was developed by meditation teacher Gregory Kramer in the 1990s as a way of bringing the depth and stillness of Buddhist meditation practice into interpersonal encounter. Traditional meditation develops awareness in solitude, but Kramer observed that many of our most powerful triggers, patterns, and opportunities for liberation arise in relationship — and that we need a practice specifically designed for the relational field. Insight Dialogue uses six guidelines — pause, relax, open, trust emergence, listen deeply, speak the truth — that function as a kind of interpersonal meditation instruction, slowing conversation down into something closer to contemplative inquiry.
1990s-
Open Space Technology was developed by organizational consultant Harrison Owen in the mid-1980s, inspired by his observation that the most valuable conversations at conferences always happened in the hallways and coffee breaks rather than in the formal sessions. He designed a large-group format that simply institutionalized the conditions of the coffee break — self-organization, passion, and responsibility — and removed everything else. Participants arrive with a theme but no agenda; anyone can convene a session on anything they care about, and anyone can attend any session or move between sessions freely, following what Owen called the law of two feet. The result is typically a rich, emergent program that no planning committee could have designed.
1990s-
The Work that Reconnects
The Work That Reconnects was developed by environmental activist and Buddhist scholar Joanna Macy from the late 1970s onward, reaching its mature form in the 1990s. Macy observed that people working on social and ecological issues often carried a heavy burden of grief, fear, and despair that they felt unable to express — a numbness that paradoxically made effective action harder rather than easier. She developed a group practice, originally called Despair and Empowerment Work, that created containers for people to feel and express their pain for the world, and then move through it toward renewed agency and connection. The practice draws on systems thinking, Buddhist philosophy, and deep ecology, and uses ritual, movement, storytelling, and structured dialogue.
1988-
Internal Family Systems
Internal Family Systems was developed by family therapist Richard Schwartz in the late 1980s, initially through his work with clients who described their inner experience in terms of distinct parts or voices. Schwartz developed a model in which the psyche is understood as a system of sub-personalities — exiles carrying old wounds, managers trying to maintain control, and firefighters who act out impulsively when exiles are triggered — all organized around a core Self that is naturally characterized by curiosity, compassion, and calm. The therapeutic work involves building a relationship between the Self and these parts, allowing them to be heard and gradually unburdened of the roles they have taken on.
1986-
The Work of Byron Katie
Byron Katie developed The Work in 1986 following a period of severe depression, when she experienced what she described as a sudden insight that her suffering came not from the world but from her beliefs about the world. The practice she developed centers on four questions applied to any stressful thought: Is it true? Can you absolutely know it’s true? How do you react when you believe that thought? Who would you be without that thought? These are followed by a turnaround — an exploration of the opposite of the original belief.
1980s-
Bohmian Dialogue
David Bohm was a theoretical physicist who became deeply concerned about the fragmentation he saw in human thought and society, and who came to believe that the root of this fragmentation was in the structure of thought itself — particularly the tendency to treat our assumptions as fixed facts rather than provisional interpretations. He proposed a form of group conversation he called dialogue — distinct from discussion or debate — in which participants would suspend their assumptions rather than defend them, making the flow of thought itself visible and open to inquiry. Bohm’s dialogue groups had no agenda, no facilitator in the conventional sense, and no goal other than to think together. The book about the practice “On Dialogue” was published in 1996, four years after his death.
1980s-
Process-Oriented Psychology
Process-Oriented Psychology — or Process Work — was developed by Amy and Arnold Mindell. They were interested in the signals that the body sends in dreams, symptoms, and movement, and how these signals reveal unconscious material that wants to be expressed. Their work focused on relationships, groups, and large-scale social conflicts, developing what they called worldwork — a method for facilitating groups through deep conflict by following the process rather than managing it. Process Work holds that conflict contains within it the seeds of its own resolution, and that the facilitator’s job is to help all voices in a system — including the most disturbing and marginalized — be heard and expressed fully.
1980-
Sacred Clowning
Philippe Gaulier founded his clown school in Paris in 1980, having trained with the great movement teacher Jacques Lecoq, and in doing so brought one of humanity’s oldest relational technologies into a contemporary pedagogical form. Gaulier taught that the clown is not a character or a costume but a state of being — a willingness to be fully present, to fail visibly, and to find genuine delight in that failure in front of others. His central insight was that the clown’s power lies in their exposure: the moment a performer stops hiding their vulnerability and inadequacy and instead offers it openly, something dissolves in the audience and a quality of contact becomes possible that ordinary social life rarely permits.
1978-
Focusing
Focusing was developed by philosopher and psychotherapist Eugene Gendlin, who had worked closely with Carl Rogers and became interested in why some therapy clients made progress and others didn’t, regardless of the approach used. His research suggested that what distinguished successful clients was their ability to attend to a vague, bodily sense of a problem — what he called the felt sense — and to allow meaning to emerge from it slowly rather than thinking their way to understanding. He formalized this into a six-step practice that anyone could learn, and his 1978 book brought it to a wide audience.
1977-
Integral Theory
Integral Theory is a comprehensive philosophical framework developed by American philosopher Ken Wilber, who began the project in the early 1970s and has been elaborating it ever since. Its central tool is the AQAL model — All Quadrants, All Levels — which maps any phenomenon across four irreducible dimensions: the interior individual, the exterior individual, the interior collective, and the exterior collective. For the relating arts this is significant because it insists that the shared interior space between people — culture, intersubjectivity, mutual understanding — is as real as any objective fact, and cannot be reduced to behavior or brain states. Wilber also drew extensively on developmental models showing that human consciousness unfolds through stages, and that different stages bring radically different ways of relating. The framework became enormously influential in the relating arts through Boulder Integral and the Circling community, who framed relational practice explicitly as we-space work for evolving collective consciousness.
1975-
Voice Dialogue
Voice Dialogue was developed by psychologists Hal and Sidra Stone in the mid-1970s as a method for working with what they called the psychology of selves — the idea that the psyche is not a unified entity but a community of distinct sub-personalities or voices, each with its own perspective, history, and way of relating. In a Voice Dialogue session, a facilitator invites different selves to speak directly, moving the client physically to different positions in the room to embody each voice. The practice reveals the inner cast of characters — the inner critic, the pusher, the pleaser, the vulnerable child — whose conflicts and alliances shape how we relate to others. Hal and Sidra Stone also developed the concept of the aware ego — a center of consciousness that can hold these voices without being identified with any of them.
1974-
Naropa University was founded in Boulder, Colorado in 1974 by Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, a Tibetan Buddhist teacher who had fled Tibet and arrived in the United States in 1970. His vision was to create an institution that integrated Eastern contemplative wisdom with Western academic and artistic traditions — what he called contemplative education, a pedagogy in which meditation and self-inquiry are not extracurricular but central to the learning process itself. The first summer session drew an extraordinary gathering of countercultural figures including Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, John Cage, and Diane di Prima, and the university became a crucible for the meeting of Buddhist practice, experimental poetry, somatic psychology, and humanistic thought. Its programs in contemplative psychotherapy, transpersonal psychology, and somatic counseling made it a formative institution for generations of therapists, educators, and practitioners working at the intersection of inner development and relational life.
1972-
Contact Improvisation
Contact Improvisation was initiated in 1972 by American dancer and choreographer Steve Paxton, emerging from the experimental ferment of the Judson Dance Theater and the improvisation collective Grand Union in New York. The practice is built on physical dialogue between two or more bodies in continuous touch, attending to the shared point of contact and allowing gravity, momentum, and inertia to determine movement rather than conscious choreography. Paxton described it as a game that takes two people to win — one that ignores gender, size, and hierarchy, and operates faster than words or conscious thought. Its deliberate openness — Paxton chose never to trademark or certify the form, so that anyone could teach and develop it — allowed it to spread organically across the world, generating a global community of jams, festivals, and practice groups that persists today.
1971-
est — Erhard Seminars Training — was founded by Werner Erhard in 1971 and became one of the most controversial and influential large-group intensive formats of the twentieth century. Over two weekends, several hundred participants were confronted with the ways their unexamined stories, rackets, and self-concepts were running — and ruining — their lives, using a combination of lecture, confrontation, and experiential exercises. The method was deliberately uncomfortable, and critics charged that it used coercive group dynamics and sleep deprivation to produce compliance rather than genuine insight. Supporters reported lasting transformation. est closed in 1984 and was reborn as the Landmark Forum, which stripped away some of the more aggressive elements while retaining the core technology of distinguishing between what happened and the meaning we make of it.
1967-
Bioenergetics
Bioenergetics was developed by Alexander Lowen, a student of Wilhelm Reich, who took Reich’s idea that psychological character is expressed in physical structure and muscular tension and developed it into a systematic body-based therapy. Lowen mapped what he called character types — oral, masochistic, rigid, psychopathic, schizoid — each with a distinct physical posture, breathing pattern, and relational style, arguing that you cannot change a person’s way of relating without also working with their body. Bioenergetic exercises — including stress positions, grounding work, and expressive movement — are designed to release chronic muscular armor and restore the free flow of energy and feeling.
1962-
Encounter Groups
The encounter group emerged in the early 1960s from the convergence of several streams — the T-group tradition at NTL, the humanistic psychology movement, and the particular creative ferment gathering around Esalen in Big Sur. Unlike the T-group, which maintained a relatively cognitive focus on group dynamics, the encounter group was explicitly emotional, personal, and embodied — participants were encouraged to express feelings directly, make physical contact, and risk real vulnerability with strangers. The encounter group became the defining relational practice of the 1960s and 1970s, attracting millions of participants across America and Europe and generating intense controversy about its methods and effects. Will Schutz, Carl Rogers, and Fritz Perls each brought their own distinct flavor to the form, and Esalen became its spiritual home.
1962-
Esalen Institute
Esalen became the central crucible of the human potential movement — a place where gestalt therapy, encounter groups, bodywork, Eastern philosophy, psychedelics research, and experimental education all cross-pollinated in ways that shaped American culture for decades. Fritz Perls lived there in his final years, Carl Rogers ran workshops there, Will Schutz developed his open encounter there, and an extraordinary range of thinkers and practitioners passed through.
1960s-
Nonviolent Communication
Nonviolent Communication was developed by Marshall Rosenberg, a clinical psychologist who had trained with Carl Rogers and was working in the American civil rights movement in the early 1960s. He became interested in the question of what enables some people to remain compassionate even under great pressure, and what causes others to become violent or dehumanizing. The practice he developed centers on a four-part process — observations, feelings, needs, and requests — designed to help people express themselves honestly without blame or evaluation, and to hear others with empathy rather than defensiveness. NVC makes a sharp distinction between feelings and thoughts, and between universal human needs and the strategies we use to meet them, and these distinctions have proven widely useful. His book Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life wasn’t published until 1999, which is when it reached a wide audience
1960s-
Carl Rogers – Basic Encounter Group
Carl Rogers brought principles from his individual therapy — unconditional positive regard, empathic listening, and the belief that people move naturally toward health when given the right conditions — into an intensive group format he called the encounter group. Rogers believed that when people felt genuinely safe and heard, they would risk increasing levels of honesty and vulnerability, and that this process was itself therapeutic.
1951-
Gestalt Therapy
Gestalt therapy was developed by Fritz Perls, Laura Perls, and Paul Goodman, and formalized in their 1951 book. It drew on gestalt psychology, existential philosophy, and psychoanalysis to create a practice centered on present-moment awareness, direct contact between therapist and client, and the unfinished emotional business — the incomplete gestalts — that drain energy and distort relationship. Rather than interpreting the past, Gestalt therapists work with what is happening right now in the room, including posture, breath, tone of voice, and the quality of contact between people.
1947-
The Tavistock Institute
The roots of Tavistock work go back to the period after World War I. A group of medical professionals called the Tavistock Group worked with the British Army to help soldiers who had been prisoners during the War to return to civilian life and – equally as importantly – to help their families and communities adjust to having them back.
From connecting with the lives of returning soldiers in the aftermath of war, the work developed to address rapid changes in business management, workplace demographics, and the adoption (or rejection) of new technologies throughout the 20th century.
From 1957 the Tavistock institute has been teaching the practice of Group relations which is a method of studying and understanding group dynamics, leadership, authority and organisational behaviour through experiential learning.
1947-
NTL Institute for Applied Behavioral Science
The NTL was originally called the National Training Laboratory for Group Development. The National Training Laboratory was founded in Bethel, Maine in 1947 by colleagues of Kurt Lewin, including Leland Bradford, Ronald Lippitt, and Kenneth Benne, to develop and spread the T-group method. Bethel became a kind of summer laboratory where educators, managers, and social scientists would gather to study group dynamics through direct experience. At its height in the 1960s the NTL was enormously influential in American organizational life, shaping how corporations, government agencies, and schools thought about leadership, communication, and human relations. It remains active today, making it one of the longest-running institutions in the history of experiential group work.
1946-
T-Group
The T-group practice emerged from Lewin’s work and was developed at the National Training Laboratory in Bethel, Maine from 1947 onward, it is simply a group of strangers who meet repeatedly with a facilitator, with no task, no agenda, and no structured exercises — only the instruction to pay attention to what is happening between them right now. The discomfort this creates becomes the material: participants learn to notice how they affect others, how they are affected, and how group dynamics emerge from individual behavior.
1944-
Action Research and Group Dynamics
Kurt Lewin was a German-American social psychologist whose concept of action research — the idea that you learn about a system by trying to change it — became central to the development of group work practices. His core conviction was that a group is a living field of forces, and that participants examining their own behavior together in real time is itself the most powerful form of learning. Action research seeks transformative change through the simultaneous process of taking action and doing research, which are linked together by critical reflection.
1942-
Founded in 1942 by Dr. Jacob Levy Moreno, MD (1889–1974), the American Society of Group Psychotherapy and Psychodrama promotes a combination of traditional and new practices, supporting the best practices informed by current research in neurobiology and psychology.
1934-
Psychodrama
Jacob Moreno’s method of using theatrical enactment as a vehicle for psychological insight and healing. A participant — the protagonist — re-enacts scenes from their life on a stage, with other group members playing supporting roles. Rather than talking about an experience, the protagonist lives it again in the present tense, allowing feelings, perspectives, and unresolved dynamics to surface in action.
1933-
Wilhelm Reich
Wilhelm Reich was an Austrian psychoanalyst who trained under Freud and then broke decisively from him, developing ideas that would seed the entire somatic tradition in psychotherapy. His central contribution was the concept of character armor — the observation that psychological defenses do not exist only in the mind but are held in the body as chronic patterns of muscular tension, posture, and restricted breathing. Where Freud treated neurosis through talking and interpretation, Reich worked directly with the body, attending to how a person held themselves, how they breathed, and where they were rigid or blocked. He argued that emotional history is literally written into the flesh, and that genuine psychological liberation requires working with the body as much as with the mind.
1929-
Process Philosophy
Alfred North Whitehead was a British mathematician and philosopher who, late in his career at Harvard, developed one of the twentieth century’s most ambitious philosophical systems — process philosophy — published in its fullest form in 1929. His central argument was that reality is not made up of static substances but of events, processes, and relationships: the fundamental unit of existence is not a thing but an occasion of experience, a momentary coming-together of influences from the past into something new. Everything that exists does so by being in relation — by taking in, or prehending, the world around it and responding creatively.
1923
I and Thou
Martin Buber’s 1923 philosophical essay introduced a distinction that would quietly underpin almost every relating practice that followed. He argued that human existence moves between two modes: I-It, in which we relate to others as objects to be used or understood, and I-Thou, in which we meet another as a full presence — not a role, not a function, but a being encountered directly. The I-Thou moment cannot be forced or sustained indefinitely, but Buber believed it was the ground of all genuine human contact.
1912
Carl Gustav Jung
Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist who broke with Freud in 1912 to develop his own depth psychology, proposing that beneath the personal unconscious lay a deeper layer — the collective unconscious — containing the shared symbolic inheritance of humanity in the form of archetypes. For the relating arts his most significant contributions are the shadow — the disowned aspects of the self that we project onto others — and individuation, the lifelong process of becoming more fully oneself by integrating what has been split off or denied. Both ideas are foundational to relational practice: the shadow explains much of why we react so powerfully to certain people, and genuine encounter with another requires a willingness to see oneself in what disturbs us.
1910s-
Sociometry
Sociometry was Jacob Moreno’s method for mapping the invisible emotional geography of groups. Each person is asked who they’d choose to work or spend time with, and the results are drawn as a sociogram — a diagram of nodes and arrows revealing stars, isolates, cliques, and bridges. Moreno believed that once you could see a group’s relational structure, you could intervene to improve it.
1843
Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard was the first philosopher to place the existing individual — rather than reason, history, or system — at the center of philosophical inquiry. In Either/Or he described two modes of existence: the aesthetic, in which a person skims the surface of life managing appearances and avoiding commitment, and the ethical, in which a person chooses themselves fully and enters into genuine relationship with others. His concept of despair — the condition of not being oneself, of living as someone other than who one fundamentally is — remains one of the most penetrating descriptions of a distinctly modern form of suffering. And his insistence that truth is not an abstract proposition but something lived and appropriated by a particular person in a particular moment seeded the entire existentialist tradition that followed.
Other Sources
Some key sources for the timeline can be found below: