THE SPACE WE HOLD INVIOLATE

The need for personal space and the resistance to the invasion of personal space is so strong a thing that even in a crowd each member will demand a given amount of space. This very fact led a journalist named Herbert Jacobs to attempt to apply it to crowd size. Since estimation of crowd size tends to vary according to whether the observer is for the crowd or against it, the size of political rallies, peace rallies and demonstrations are inflated by the marchers and deflated by the authorities. Jacobs, by studying aerial photographs of crowds where he could actually count heads, concluded that people in dense crowds need six to eight square feet each, while people in loose crowds require an average of ten square feet. Crowd size, Jacobs finally concluded, could be gauged by the formula, length times width divided by a correction factor that took density of the crowd into account. This gave the actual number of people in any gathering. On the subject of crowds, it is important to realize that  the personal territory of the people in a crowd is destroyed by the very act of crowding. The reaction to this destruction can, in some cases, change the temper of the crowd. Men react very strongly when their personal space or territory is invaded. As a crowd gets larger and tighter and more compact, it may also get uglier. A loose crowd may be easier to handle. This need for personal space was known to Freud, who always arranged his sessions so that the patient would lie on the couch while he sat in a chair out of the patient's sight. In this way there was no intrusion upon the patient's personal space. The police are also well aware of this fact, and they take advantage of it in their interrogation of prisoners. A text-book on criminal interrogation and confessions

suggests that the questioner sit close to the suspect and that there be no table or other obstacle between them.

Any kind of obstacle, the book warns, gives the man being questioned a certain degree of relief and confidence. The book also suggests that the questioner, though he may start with his chair two or three feet away, should move in closer as the questioning proceeds, so that 'ultimately one of the subject's knees is just about in between the interrogator's two knees'. This physical invasion of the man's territory by the

police officer, the crowding in as he is questioned, has been found in practice to be extremely useful in breaking down a prisoner's resistance. When a man's territorial defences are weakened or intruded upon, his self-assurance tends to grow weaker. In a working situation the boss who is aware of this can strengthen his own position of leadership by intruding spatially on the man under him. The higher-up who leans over the subordinate's desk throws the subordinate off balance. The department head who crowds next to the worker while inspecting his work makes the worker uneasy and insecure. In fact, the parent who scolds the child by leaning over him is compounding the relationship between them, proving and reinforcing his own dominance. Can we use this intrusion of personal space to arouse defensive measures in others, or can we, by avoiding it, also avoid the sometimes dangerous consequences of an intrusion? We know that tailgating a car is dangerous from a purely physical point of view. If the car ahead stops short we can smack into it, but no one talks about what the act of tailgating can do to the nerves of the driver ahead.

A man driving a car often loses an essential part of his own humanity and is, by virtue of the machine around him, once removed from a human being. The body language communication that works so well for him outside the car often will not work at all when he is driving. We have all been annoyed by drivers who cut in front of us, and we all know the completely irrational rage that can sometimes fill the driver who has thus had his space invaded. The police will cite statistics to show that dozens of accidents are caused by this cutting in, by the dangerous reaction of the man who has been cut off. In a social situation few men would dream of acting or reacting in this fashion. Stripped of the machine we adopt a civilized attitude and allow people to cut in front of us, indeed we step aside quite often to permit people to board a bus or elevator ahead of us.

A car, however, seems to act much like a dangerous weapon in the hands of many drivers. It can become a weapon that destroys many of our controls and inhibitions. The reason for this is obscure, but some psychologists have theorized that at least a part of it is due to the extension of our personal territories when we are in a car. Our own zones of privacy expand and the zone of privacy of the car becomes much greater and our reaction to any intrusion on that zone is greater still.

THE SMILE THAT HIDES THE SOUL

There are many methods with which we defend our personal zones of space, and one of these is masking. The face we present to the outer world is rarely our real face. It is considered exceptional, almost peculiar behaviour to show what we really feel in our facial expressions or in our actions. Instead we practise a careful discipline when it comes to the expression of our facies and bodies. Dr Erving Goffman, in his book, Behavior in Public Places, states that one of the most obvious evidences of this discipline is the way we manage our personal appearance, the clothes we select and the hairdos we affect. These carry a body-language message to our friends and associates. Dr Goffman believes that in public places the standard man of our society is expected to be neatly dressed and clean-shaven, with his hair combed and his hands and face clean. His study, written six years ago, didn't take into account the long hair, unshaven and careless or freer look of today's young people, a look that is slowly gaining acceptance. But this look, too, is one that is expected or formalized. It conforms to a general ideal. Dr Goffman makes the point that there are times, such as during the subway rush hour, when the careful masks we wear slip a bit, and 'in a kind of temporary, uncaring, righteous exhaustion', we show ourselves as we really are. We let the defences down and out of weariness or exasperation we forget to discipline our faces. Play the game of looking about a crowded bus, subway, or train during the rush hour after a day's work. See how much of the bare human being is allowed to show in all the faces. Day after day we cover up this bare human being. We hold ourselves in careful control lest our bodies cry out messages our minds are too careless to hide. We smile constantly, for a smile is a sign not only of humour or pleasure but it is also an apology, a sign of defence or even an excuse.

I sit down next to you in a crowded restaurant. A weak smile says, 'I don't mean to intrude, but this is the only vacant place.' I brush against you in a packed elevator and my smile says, 'I am not really being aggressive, but forgive me anyway.' I am thrown against someone in a bus by a sudden stop, and my smile says, 'I did not intend to hurt you. I beg your pardon.' And so we smile our way through the day, though in fact we may feel angry and annoyed beneath the smile. In business we smile at customers, at our bosses, at our employees; we smile at our children, at our neighbours, at our husbands and wives and relatives, and very few of our smiles have any real significance. They are simply the masks we wear. The masking process goes beyond the facial muscles. We mask with our entire body. Women learn to sit in a certain way to conceal their sexuality, especially when their skirts are short. Men wear underwear that often binds their sexual organs. Women wear brassieres to keep their breasts in place and mask too much sexuality. We hold ourselves upright and button our shirts, zip up our flies, hold in our stomachs with muscle and girdle, and practice a variety of facial maskings. We have our party faces, our campus faces, our funeral faces and even in prison we have particular faces to wear. In a book called Prison Etiquette, Dr B. Phillips notes that new prisoners learn to 'dogface', to wear an expression that is apathetic and characterless. When the prisoners  are alone, however, in a reaction to the protective dog facing of the day, they overreact and exaggerate their smiles, their laughter and the hate they feel towards their guards. With advancing age the masks we use often become

more difficult to wear. Certain women, who have relied on facial beauty all their lives, find it hard in the mornings of their old age to 'get their faces together'. The old man tends to forget himself and drools or lets his face go lax. With advancing age come tics, sagging jowls, frowns that won't relax and deep wrinkles that won't go away