Why ‘Communitas’ ?
“I can only hope to qualify as a leader (or constructively intervene as a group member or consultant), if I can get beyond myself enough as an individual to enter the perspective of the group or organisation as a whole, if I can identify with the emergent process of the whole.
I can only hope to see the wholeness of the system, if I can appreciate its complex diversity, its tensions, conflicts and synergies, its multiple view points from within. I can only hope to appreciate the diversity of the whole system, if I am capable of entering the inner reality of its constituent parts.
I can only hope to see and experience the organisation through the multiple diverse realities constituting the whole, if I can get inside myself enough to identify with the psychological depth of the individuals that make up the organisation.
The simultaneous appreciation of BOTH the diverse depth of individuals AND of communal belonging within the wholeness of the social system is the foundation of COMMUNITAS. This requires a new psychological paradigm that stretches across the full spectrum of consciousness, from internal to external, from subjective depth to collective breadth, from personal through interpersonal to trans-personal.
In terms of the evolution of human consciousness, it is now becoming a possibility that we may find ways of organising social organisms which do not elevate the individual at the expense of the collective; nor lose the individual for the sake of the community.”
Michael Soth August 2008
“Communitas”, the book
The name for our project was inspired by Paul Goodman, one of the founders of Gestalt Therapy, who co-wrote (with Percival Goodman) a book with the title “Communitas” in 1947
“Communitas stands in a class by itself: a fresh and original theoretic contribution to the art of building cities. Such a book does not appear often… a witty, penetrating, provocative and, above all, ... a wise book; for it deals with the underlying values and purposes, political and moral, on which planning of any sort must be based ...”
Lewis Mumford