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The Problem of Psychological Health

“I’m trying to shake the ground beneath clinical psychology. It’s too confident, too technological, too proud. But all its concepts are moot. What is ‘cure’? ‘Illness’? ‘Health’? There should be more humility, more fear and trembling.”

ABRAHAM MASLOW1

On December 6, 1967, psychologist Abraham Maslow doubled over in pain. He was having a massive coronary.

Maslow had been at the peak of his powers. One of the founders of a revolutionary movement called humanistic psychology, his writings had spoken to members of a culture in crisis, offering hope and direction. With their political, economic, and spiritual relevance, his insights had extended psychologists’ already significant social role. He had theorized a more humane approach to managing workers, which had been adopted widely by corporate advocates of progressive management. He had advanced a utopian vision of a healed culture, of people at their best, that had informed clinical practice and academic research.

While in recovery in the ICU of a Cambridge-area hospital, Maslow was told that a mysterious malady he had experienced twenty years earlier had likely been a prior coronary. As a result, his heart was badly scarred. It would take years to recover from this most recent episode. If he lived “carefully,” there was a small chance he could avoid another, likely fatal, heart attack.2

As he gazed out the window at the forbidding December sky, Maslow contemplated his prospects. In many ways, his life was complete. By his side was his wife, Bertha, whom he had loved, and loved well, since he was sixteen. Also beside him were his daughters, Ann and Ellen, whose very existences had propelled him to the height of his own. He had made many good friends who treasured his insights. With his extensive publications (four books and countless articles), he had reached millions. He was tenured at Brandeis and esteemed by his colleagues. In fact, he had just been nominated to serve as president of the American Psychological Association (APA).

He didn’t feel finished, though. He imagined starting a new journal, Assent, which would encompass “the Utopian, the self-growth, the hope, the optimum.”3 He planned to complete an anthology of his work. He hoped to improve the lives of American workers by further disseminating his ideas for humane management throughout the corporate world. And when he looked at the gap between the influence he’d had and the transformative changes in the culture and politics of America that he’d dreamed his theories would bring about, he was disappointed.

America in 1967 was about as damaged as Maslow’s heart. The day of his coronary alone was arguably the bloodiest in the history of the Vietnam War.4 Protesters had set up permanent camps in Washington, DC, and engaged in frequent demonstrations across the country. Thirteen years after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, racial tensions were still appallingly high. Angry students, guided by Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), demonstrated for civil rights. At the same time, their rebellion had disrupted the hierarchy of universities across the country and, to Maslow’s lights, undermined important structures of knowledge and respect. Meanwhile, American women were growing impatient with the government’s inadequate attempts to raise their status. And, just five years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, citizens still quaked at the threat of nuclear war.

Rather than viewing the social problems of the 1960s as indicative of a negative cultural ethos, however, Maslow saw them as a mark of a healthy “clash of cultures.”

“On one hand,” he explained, “is the culture of courage and coping and fighting back and striving, which all imply hopefulness of a certain kind, or at least possibility, if not probability. Then, on the other hand, is a culture of despair, of hopelessness, of a theory of evil which has pervaded certain groups in our population.”5 Each conflict had arisen out of hope as much as out of despair.

Maslow himself rode the crest of the culture clash. His “humanistic psychology” promised an antidote to the sense of personal and cultural hopelessness that often seemed pervasive. It brought to the surface a latent optimism, premised on more than just material success and economic prosperity. His theory of self-actualization had earned him, in some sectors, the status of a guru and, in others, distinction as a supreme expert.

But the esteem he had gained by the late 1960s was predicated on more than just the congeniality of his theory with the cultural ethos. He had fulfilled the academy’s expectations of him: plodding methodically through a PhD program at the University of Wisconsin in the early 1930s, through decades of experimental research and years of thankless teaching. He had published widely and systematically on topics like animal behavior, sexual dominance, and motivation. It wasn’t until the 1950s that he began to write on the more unconventional topics of human fulfillment and self-actualization.

The Maslow who lay on the hospital bed recovering on that dreary day in 1967 was the Maslow who had been made in the 1950s. With the encouragement of a small coterie of like-minded scholars and well-funded businessmen, Maslow had tunneled to the core of his psychological passion—the achievement of human peaks, transcendent moments, well-lived lives. He had laid the foundation for the theory of self, and the psychological worldview, that would define American interests into the twenty-first century.

More than a little luck had come his way. Maslow’s interests had ripened at a historical moment wide open to psychologists. In the 1950s, the field of psychology had earned a new kind of fame. Americans had agreed to let psychologists into nearly every facet of their lives.

In 1957, Life magazine’s five-part series “The Age of Psychology in the U.S.” bore the tagline: “Less than a Century Old, the Science of Human Behavior Permeates Our Whole Way of Life—At Work, in Love, in Sickness and in Health.” Its opening paragraph enumerates the daily contacts Americans had with psychology: in advertising, popular media, industry, politics, warfare, education, and entertainment. This all-pervasiveness, argued author Ernest Havemann, was a unique product of the 1950s and “strictly American.”

“By now,” he wrote, “the U.S. has more psychologists and psychoanalysts, engaged in more types of inquiry and activity, than all the rest of the world put together. It certainly provides the biggest and most eager audience for psychology.”6

American psychology had grown at an exorbitant rate in the years after World War II. This was, in part, because of the government’s interest in assuaging cultural fears over the prevalence of “psychoneurotic” illness in returning servicemen.7 As thousands of functionally impaired soldiers filtered back into the United States, psychological treatment programs reassured them (and an anxious population) that their problems were imminently fixable. The newly medicalized approach to diagnosis and treatment psychologists offered was a product of their success in aligning themselves with natural scientists. Through a (sometimes tenuous or superficial) connection to experimental research and empirical evidence, the psychologist had become a new kind of scientific expert—one who appeared to be uniquely qualified to address individual and cultural suffering.

In the late forties, the American need for psychologists, and psychotherapists in particular, outpaced the supply of professionals within the field. The New York Times estimated a demand for as many as 27,000 new clinical psychologists in 1949.8 Prior to the war a “tiny handful” of psychologists had considered themselves “clinical,” but after the war the APA made clinical training a mandatory component of graduate education in psychology.9

The perceived need for new therapists perpetuated the expansion of the field. The Rockefeller Foundation and other charitable trusts endowed university departments and research centers with monies for training new clinicians. In 1946, Congress passed the National Mental Health Act, appropriating greater funding for psychological research and education and creating the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), the soon-to-be center of American psychological research, which would receive considerably more government support in the years to come.10

In the years after 1945, psychotherapy entered the domain of functional people. “Psychotherapy for the normal,” wrote historian Ellen Herman, “gained momentum not only because of the formal expansion of government services but because it meshed easily with cultural trends that made therapeutic help appear acceptable, even inviting, to ordinary people at midcentury.” These trends included the continued breakdown of a sense of community, and heightened feelings of alienation derived from the growth of corporations and mass institutions. More people, and specifically more middle-class, educated people, participated directly in psychotherapy, as they began to view it as a means for finding personal and interpersonal meaning.11

Culturally, the psychological practitioner came to occupy an almost mythical status in the American imagination during the 1950s. As if they possessed a psychological X-ray vision, clinicians seemed able to unlock deep unconscious secrets, map and correct the insidious effects of childhood experiences, and eradicate destructive current behaviors. This conception was perpetuated by depictions of psychologists in film, theater, and popular media. According to Havemann, in the mid-1950s one movie out of every ten depicted a psychiatrist or psychiatric problem.

“Practitioners of psychology are too intriguing for their own good,” he wrote. “Every scrap of information about them is eagerly gobbled up, whether authentic or not, so that a good deal of what the public has come to believe is utterly wrong.”12

Much of the psychological theory that reached average Americans was a distortion of the theorist’s original intentions. Lay popularizers of psychoanalysis, for example, tended to depict Freudian psychology as an individualized solution to loneliness, emptiness, and hopelessness in a society that in basic ways was sane. Although Freud himself had intended to oppose oppressive standards of morality and intrusive forms of governmental control, Freudian theory was often deployed in America to shore up the status quo and to pathologize individuals who departed from it.13

Popular articles about psychoanalysis focused almost exclusively on treatment, rarely dealing with theory in any meaningful way.14 Even rarer was any mention of elements of psychoanalysis that undermined dominant cultural values. For example, although Freudian analysis was areligious, more than one mainstream article suggested that analysis could provide a more “rational basis” for religious beliefs.15

“Popularization crystallized a socially conservative image of psychoanalysis,” wrote historian Nathan Hale, “from its identification of practitioners with dentists and businessmen to its vision of therapy as a tough, painful exercise that resulted as a rule in marital harmony, personal equilibrium, and vocational success.”16 Hale notes that the depictions of Freudianism in popular sources (ranging from Life magazine to Scientific American) reinforced and perpetuated stereotypes of analysts, patients, and treatment. Grossly simplified accounts of psychoanalysis consistently relied on the notion of catharsis. “In all these dramatic human interest stories,” states Hale, “someone hears a forgotten memory that is dredged up, and suddenly somebody can walk, or talk if they are a hysterical mute.”17 With “monotonous regularity,” treatment results in normalcy, happiness, success.18

American psychoanalysts were often complicit in this distortion. For one, they elevated the self over all other units of concern.19 In the case of the ego psychologists, Freudian theory was revised to deemphasize intrapsychic conflict and instead construct the ego as “masterful and adaptive.”20 “The neo-Freudians exemplified Americanization,” wrote one historian. “They watered down a radical depth psychology that hinted of liberation into a tepid doctrine of social meliorism.”21

In addition to encouraging social adjustment, many American psychoanalysts sought to align Freudian theory with the general American insistence on individual satisfaction, fulfillment, and happiness. They emphasized Freud’s concept of “optimal psychological functioning” at the expense of more central (and more disturbing) aspects of his theory. The theory of optimal functioning boiled down to the idea that an equilibrium between the individual psyche and the social environment, obtained through adaptation, was imperative for superior functioning. The achievement of this kind of psychic equilibrium marked the successful substitution of “hysterical misery” with “common unhappiness” (the goal of psychoanalysis), and the yielding of the chaotic and sometimes dangerous impulses of the id to the real demands of the social and cultural environment.22 In this respect, adjustment was akin to health, and maladjustment was synonymous with neurosis.23

The popular preference for the doctrine of adjustment fueled the cycle of theoretical distortion and further implicated psychologists in the illusion of cultural harmony. Although he framed himself as a debunker of psychological myth, Ernest Havemann betrayed himself as a popularizer. He was overly rosy: he saw the omnipresence of psychology as a net social gain. “Even those of us who never took a course in psychology,” he wrote in the conclusion of his five-part Life series, “and never saw a psychoanalyst in the flesh are probably a little happier—a little more understanding of our wives and children, a little kinder to our associates, a little less given to superstition and prejudice about human nature. All of us, even myriads among us who have emotional problems ranging from the light to the serious, have far more hope for the future.”24 For Havemann, as for others, the story of psychology’s victory, the “psychoanalyzation” of American life, thought, and institutions had a happy ending, which was itself premised on a pretense of American happiness.25

To Abe Maslow, this narrative of psychology had it exactly backwards. Whatever glimmers of promise and progress there were to be found in America in the 1950s—and the ever-optimistic Maslow identified many—American psychologists seemed constitutionally incapable of recognizing them as anything other than disturbances to tamp down. They were too negatively oriented, sickness-focused, problem-centered. They lacked, he argued, an imagination for people at their best, and for the ways they could aid in the amelioration of social problems. Their highest ambition, it seemed, was to rehabilitate fallen individuals to better conform to social expectations.

Maslow stood out in this dreary landscape. Though he had been reared in the tradition of “classical laboratory research” that tended to reduce humans to a set of stimuli and responses, he was irrepressibly compelled, by nature, to view people as resplendent.26 He had begun to diverge from dominant theory under E. L. Thorndike’s tutelage in the 1930s, but his original approach bloomed in the 1950s, when he began to forge a psychology of people at their best. His first article representing his new interests, “Self-Actualizing People: A Study of Psychological Health,” was published in 1950 and responded to the pressing need to consider the “problem of psychological health.”27

In this study, he attempted to identify the qualities of healthy, or “self-actualized,” people, whom he defined as those making full use of their potentialities, talents, and capacities while opposing the social norms that got in their way.28 He took as his subjects his own contemporaries (including anthropologist Ruth Benedict and Gestalt psychologist Max Wertheimer) and historical figures (including Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, Albert Einstein, Eleanor Roosevelt, Jane Addams, William James, and Spinoza). Instead of using rigorous empirical methods to identify them (as he had in the culling of appropriate subjects for past research), he identified his cases largely through hunches, dividing them into categories of highly probable, probable, partial, and potential subjects. He obtained data on the subjects using comparably fuzzy methods: namely, holistic analysis and composite impressions derived from whatever exposure he had to the individuals (in person, secondhand, or in their written works).

Maslow’s unconventional methods, he felt, had been born of necessity. Because of their underrepresentation in the general population, attempts to select his subjects more systematically had failed. Of the three thousand undergraduates he evaluated, only one was usable as a “possible” or “potential” case. More systematic data collection seemed impractical.

He met the inevitable scrutiny of his fellow researchers head-on, arguing for the validity of his study as a form of “pre-science.” “I consider the problem of psychological health to be so pressing,” he wrote, “that any leads, any suggestions, any bits of data, however moot, are endowed with a certain temporary value.”29 If nothing else, his impressions would provide a valuable starting point for future research in a field that was wide open.

Maslow’s analysis led him to propose a list of fourteen “whole-characteristics” of self-actualizing people. He noticed that his subjects seemed to have more efficient perceptions of reality than others. In contrast to neurotics, self-actualizers seemed able to view reality effectively without the filter of their own fears, theories, hopes, anxieties, and expectations. They also seemed better at accepting themselves and others, without the burden of unnecessary guilt or defensiveness. This quality extended from a relative lack of aversions to specific foods to a high tolerance for the weaknesses of others.

Behaviorally, he wrote, self-actualizers tend to be spontaneous and able to move facilely from conventional to unconventional behavior in response to the demands of a situation. Their humor is unhostile, non-damaging to others. They are universally creative and generative.30

Maslow deemed self-actualizers, in their general approach to life, to be problem-centered rather than ego-centered, meaning outwardly directed toward a problem bigger than themselves. Their appreciation of the “basic goods of life” is continually fresh, thrilling, exciting.31 Their attitude toward mankind is one of fellow feeling, characterized by deep sympathy, affection, and identification. They can both teach and learn from anyone.

Interpersonally, self-actualizers tend to have a small number of profound relationships, characterized by “more fusion, greater love, more perfect identification, more obliteration of the ego boundaries” than others would find possible.32 This is a complement to their capacity for fusion with experience, as in the case of orgasm or mystical states.

However, Maslow observed that in spite of their deep and fundamental connection to mankind, self-actualizers also possess a capacity for detachment. They seem to appreciate solitude and appear not to depend upon the evaluations of others. In fact, their autonomy seems to place them “above the battle,” independent in valuable ways from the wider culture and environment.33

In the conclusion of his study, Maslow noted that self-actualizers aren’t perfect. In fact, they can be irritating, stubborn, alienating, and even ruthless. Their independence often makes them difficult to get along with. But this inherent lack of perfection is also what makes self-actualization a possibility rather than an unattainable ideal.34

Maslow’s success in setting the bar of psychological health high, but not unrealistically so, was a key accomplishment of his study. He was attempting, admittedly imperfectly, to begin a long-in-coming conversation on the constituents of psychological health. He was opposing decades of illness-oriented theory that provided only a default definition of wellness as the absence of symptoms. And, through his questionably scientific methods, he was going out on an empirical limb to do so.

Throughout Maslow’s study, he focused on the issue of nonconformity in self-actualizers. The ability to buck convention, to resist acculturation, to think independently, and to act autonomously were observations no doubt primed by the cultural context in which he generated them.

In advancing his description of self-actualizers, and in focusing on their independence from cultural expectations, Maslow was implicitly critical of the mandate for conformity that seemed to be descending upon the nation, and of the adjustment-oriented model of psychology that was structurally supporting it. He worried that by urging domestic solidarity in the face of the Cold War, American leaders were also calling for the erasure of important individual differences. But he wasn’t alone in advancing this concern. In fact, his was one of many voices urging Americans to resist the hypnotic power of the herd mentality.

In the 1950s, several widely read cultural critics wrote in opposition to the idea that conformity represented a form of social harmony. Sociologist David Riesman, for example, argued in his 1950 book The Lonely Crowd that morality and autonomy were degraded when conformity commanded the preferences and expectations of individuals. By directing their gaze toward others, Riesman warned, average Americans (parents, teachers, and other leaders) sacrificed much of their generative influence to become enforcers of middle-class conformity.35

William H. Whyte also took on the idea of the damaging nature of conformity in his 1956 bestseller The Organization Man. Looking specifically at mass organization, Whyte charged corporations with promising a better life through time-saving devices (affordable cars, space travel, and fast food), that were actually premised on the degradation of the individual.36

While Riesman’s book was intended as a descriptive sociological analysis, Whyte’s was more polemical, indicting the organization and urging readers to fight it. By the end of the decade, social criticism was even less cautious. In Growing Up Absurd (1960), Paul Goodman attacked what he saw as the ugly imperative for conformity that had eclipsed America socially and politically. Criticizing even social scientists for their lack of interest in social change, Goodman argued that they were more concerned with societal adjustment—they sought only to “mop up the corners and iron out the kinks.”37

Unlike typical social scientists, Goodman, Whyte, and Riesman found their work to be suddenly and unexpectedly popular.38 Their success suggested the heightened interest of many Americans in the problem of conformity, but also more broadly in social and cultural problems, during the decade. It also hinted at the sense of urgency many Americans felt for putting their problems into words. As a New York Times journalist later noted of The Lonely Crowd, even those who hadn’t read the book “were soon tossing around phrases like ‘inner-directed’ and ‘other-directed.’ ”39 The adoption of this language may have also served as a bulwark against insidious fear and anxiety, allowing individuals a means to externalize some of their struggles.

But if readers were looking to these books for a way to feel better, this kind of cultural criticism would only take them so far. It was, by nature, negatively oriented. It offered readers new paradigms for articulating their distress, or blaming someone for it, but rarely provided constructive directions for change, or for identifying individual or cultural strengths. This kind of writing, in fact, replicated the mistakes of psychologists; it was a form of diagnosis, aimed at naming pathology and identifying deficits.

Instead of mimicking these social scientists, who were acting as psychologists to the culture, a small group mainly comprised of actual psychologists took a different approach. In 1956, Clark Moustakas, a psychologist engaged in child development research at the Merrill-Palmer Institute, published a more positively oriented collection of essays on the topic of the self.40

Moustakas’s collection, The Self, combined the positive insights of thinkers in a range of disciplines and aimed at providing a framework for investigating health.41 By exploring positive attributes like creativity, expression, and self-actualization, and investigating human drives for growth, autonomy, and wholeness, the collection served two ends. First, the articles focused on inherent human strengths that could naturally oppose the influence of a sick society. Second, they offered a challenge to the pathology-oriented values of the human sciences, whose attention to individual problems had only reinforced notions of deviance and normality, allowing corporate and government interests to prevail.

In the spirit of Riesman, Whyte, and Goodman, the stated intention of the book was to question the aggrandized goal of adjustment that had saturated the culture and percolated into social science and psychiatry. Adjustment to and within society was certainly a reasonable goal, conceded Moustakas and his coauthors, and perhaps an unavoidable concern of psychology, but psychologists couldn’t conscionably advocate adjustment in the absence of a consideration of the norms and standards to which one was being asked to adjust. Mental health couldn’t be defined as default adjustment.

The authors seemed to agree that health was not likability, popularity, or belonging; rather, it was defined by independence, flexibility, and self-direction. Safe choices were actually sick choices, while healthy choices entailed taking creative risks. “While adjustment and stabilization are perhaps good because they cut pain,” wrote the book’s editor, “they are bad because development toward higher ideals, ordering, and creation ceases.”42

Featured in the collection was a reprint of Maslow’s breakthrough article “Self-Actualizing People: A Study of Psychological Health.” Offering an alternative to the societal ideal Riesman had identified as the “other-directed” individual, Maslow’s findings located the healthy individual somewhat apart from society, or at least from the norms that most people uncritically adopted as their own. He reminded those who had read him, and informed those unfamiliar with his theory, that self-actualizers were unique in their ability to remain dignified even in undignified surroundings, to repel the taint of what surrounded them. They succeeded because they stayed true to their intuitions, rather than depending on those around them to inform their interpretations.43

Maslow was the only author to publish two articles in The Self. His second, “Personality Problems and Personality Growth,” identified the healthy individual as the potential redemption of the sick society. “Sick people are made by a sick culture; healthy people are made possible by a healthy culture,” he wrote. “But it is just as true that sick individuals make their culture more sick and that healthy individuals make their culture more healthy. Improving individual health is one approach to making a better world.”44

Health, however, argued Maslow, wasn’t what most people seemed to think it was. It wasn’t synonymous with happiness, popularity, and adjustment. Indeed, in a society that was off balance, health would manifest more in symptoms of unhappiness, alienation, and disrepute. Such symptoms could be healthy reactions to unhealthy situations.

“Which of the Nazis at Auschwitz or Dachau were healthy?” Maslow asked. “Those with the stricken conscience or those with a nice, clear happy conscience. [ . . . ] It seems quite clear that personality problems may sometimes be loud protests against the crushing of one’s psychological bones, of one’s true inner nature. What is sick then is not to protest while this crime is being committed.”45

A key feature of the model of health psychologists like Maslow had begun to formulate was the notion that a healthy individual must stand apart from her culture. That she must transcend social expectations, and forge a path through the wilderness. Looking around at America in the 1950s, Maslow saw a virtual absence of true heroes and ideals from which to draw inspiration. “About all we have left,” he wrote,” is the well-adjusted man without any problems, a very pale and doubtful substitute.”46

Maslow reflected the popular critique that the American entrepreneur, the innovator, the maverick had been replaced with “the man in the gray flannel suit.” In 1955, Sloan Wilson’s bestseller by that name had depicted this degradation of the American man’s ideals, and explored the contrast they represented with the standards of bravery and valor that had characterized wartime. “The trick,” antihero Thomas Rath tries to convince himself, “is to learn to believe that it’s a disconnected world, a lunatic world, where what is true now was not true then; where Thou Shalt Not Kill and the fact that one has killed a great many men mean nothing, absolutely nothing, for now is the time to raise legitimate children, and make money, and dress properly, and be kind to one’s wife, and admire one’s boss, and learn not to worry, and think of oneself as what? That makes no difference, he thought—I’m just a man in a gray flannel suit. I must keep my suit neatly pressed like anyone else, for I am a very respectable young man.”47

But Maslow—like Moustakas, who had assembled The Self with fervor—was unwilling to accept the man in the gray flannel suit as any kind of model, or as representative of the inevitable future. Maslow was optimistic about changes he perceived on the horizon. The publication of a rash of books like The Self, The Organization Man, and The Lonely Crowd was one clue that things were going to get better.

There were other hints that cultural change was dawning. In 1956 Elvis Presley appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, defying conventional forms with his rock and roll and his swinging hips; Rebel Without a Cause played in local theaters, challenging the staid values of prior generations; and Allen Ginsberg published “Howl,” rejecting literary convention and traditional sexual mores. Observing these moments, Maslow saw an opening for individuals to begin to think more autonomously, to question dominant values.

“Perhaps we shall soon be able to use as our guide and model the fully growing and self-fulfilling human being,” Maslow suggested with his characteristic optimism. This new guide would be a man in the process of self-actualizing, of tapping into his capabilities, of expressing his inner nature freely, rather than allowing it to be “warped, suppressed, or denied.”48

With his exceptionally bright eyes fixed on the future, Maslow stood out, even among The Self’s illustrious contributors—a group that included Carl Jung and Jean-Paul Sartre. His passion was reflected in his prose, which was confident bordering on grandiose. He ended his second article by stating: “What is within our power in principle is the improvement of personality, the turn toward honesty, affection, self-respect, intellectual and aesthetic growth, acceptance of our own nature, and turning away from hypocrisy, from meanness, prejudice, cruelty, cowardice, and smallness.”

This boldness sprang, in part, from his awareness of a swelling interest in his concerns, both among his academic and professional peers and in the culture at large. Maslow, a shameless promoter of his own ideas, was constantly scouring professional meetings for sympathetic souls, charming them not only with the power of his argumentation, but with his paternal smile and expressive eyes. In these early years, at least, Maslow relied as much or more on networking than on publishing to disseminate his ideas and to join them with other significant work for cross-pollination.

Maslow’s determination and ardor was partially responsible for the fact that a movement based on this positively oriented cultural criticism found its home in psychology, rather than in sociology (Riesman’s institutional home), education (Goodman and others), or philosophy. Psychologists seemed to flock to the topic in greater numbers—perhaps because their field had played such a central role in the problem of pathologizing the individual and acquitting the culture in the first place. Of the nineteen contributors to The Self, thirteen were psychologists, psychiatrists, or psychoanalysts.

Psychologists also comprised the majority of the mailing list that Maslow assembled in the late fifties. Intended to facilitate communication between like-minded individuals in different fields who hadn’t been exposed to each other’s work, the list served as a channel for the exchange of reprints and mimeographed materials.49 The group, which Maslow deemed the “Creativeness, Autonomy, Self-Actualization, Love, Self, Being, Growth and Organismic People,” was comprised of geographically dispersed intellectuals and professionals who shared a common frustration with the negative orientation of much of the work in the social and human sciences. Even more diverse than the list of contributors to The Self, Maslow’s group included one or more mechanical engineers, biologists, chemists, economists, theologians, writers, and artists, as well as several education professors, anthropologists, and philosophers. Among the 175 individuals on the original list were cultural critics like David Riesman, Paul Goodman, and Lewis Mumford.50

Other noteworthy figures were psychoanalysts and psychologists who had been, in the decades that preceded, slowly chipping away at the narrow institutional commitments that dominated psychology and dictated cultural perceptions. Erich Fromm, Gordon Allport, Rollo May, Sidney Jourard, and Carl Rogers had all, by the late fifties, contributed books and articles that challenged the practice of isolating the individual from the culture, of constructing human nature in a negative light, and of overemphasizing pathology at the expense of a clear articulation of health.

Proposing the idea of the “pathology of normalcy” in his 1955 book The Sane Society, psychoanalyst Erich Fromm arraigned Western culture for locating adjustment problems in individuals rather than considering the “possible unadjustment of the culture itself.”51 A sane society, Fromm argued, corresponds to the needs of man.52 Rather than being bound by culture, these needs are universal, “valid for all men.”53 They relate to man’s primary drive to answer the problem of his own existence, rather than to his need to act out his libidinal urges. Fromm’s model of mental health was the “productive orientation,” in which an individual chose relatedness and love over narcissism, creativeness over destructiveness, individuality over herd conformity, and reason over irrationality.54 At the core of his theory was a generative view of human nature, in which man was comprised of positive and negative passions and drives, the expression of which was encouraged or limited by cultural conditions. But even in this context, Fromm contended that “man is his own creation.”55

The Sane Society was representative of Fromm’s work, which, in the forties and fifties, had begun to forge a union between psychological and sociocultural interests. Unlike most psychoanalytic theory, his writing was explicitly political, attacking directly the structures of both Soviet communism and Western capitalism. Beginning with Escape from Freedom in 1941, Fromm analyzed mental health in the context of a modern democratic system that offered individuals freedom from negative strictures, like fascism and dictatorship, but didn’t provide them with a positively formulated notion of freedom for something. In Man for Himself (1947), he suggested that human reason is powerful enough to combat these “irrational value systems.”56 The humanistic ethics and value judgments of the mature and integrated personality (the ideal leader and model), Fromm felt, could restore a degree of “freedom for” that had been largely absent from Western democratic systems.57

Throughout his work, Fromm contended that capitalism is dehumanizing and alienating and that legal definitions of freedom often obscure a lack of existential and emotional freedom. His approach to these problems was an optimistic and humanistic one, in which individual possibility and potential are forced to contend with social and cultural limits, but need not be extinguished by them.58

Fromm’s “productive orientation” resonated with Gordon Allport’s notion of the “tolerant” or “mature” personality, which he explored throughout the fifties in his work on racial prejudice and religion, and which he described as constituting a blend of cultural adjustment and cultural transcendence. Allport characterized the tolerant personality as flexible and politically liberal, empathic, and accepting of ambiguity. It was a fundamentally “democratic” personality.59

Allport’s conceptions of tolerance and maturity had emerged in the context of a postwar nation struggling, in new ways, with racial and religious prejudice. In 1946, he published Controlling Group Prejudice, covering a topic he again took up in 1948 in the pamphlet ABC’s of Scapegoating and in 1954 with The Nature of Prejudice. Exploring American prejudice against Jews, and later against blacks and Roman Catholics, Allport theorized the polar concepts of prejudice and tolerance.60

Prejudice, he explained, is often a product of unreflective conformity, but it sometimes has a functional significance in the psychic economy of the individual, providing a shortcut to self-identification and a defense against social vulnerability.61 In contrast, tolerance can occur neither by default nor by defense. A tolerant person’s approval of his fellow men necessarily springs from a healthy orientation in many spheres—family, school, community, temperament. In its character, Allport’s concept of tolerance was akin to Maslow’s notion of self-actualization, defined by a comfort with ambiguity, an openness to new experience, a flexible style of categorization, and a high threshold for frustration.62

Maturity, for Allport, was characterized by an attitude of tolerance. It was most easily seen in the form of mature religious sentiment, which he described in his 1950 volume The Individual and His Religion. Mature religious sentiment, he explained, is characteristic of the person whose approach to religion is dynamic, open-minded, and able to encompass contradiction.63

Just as Maslow’s description of the self-actualized individual assumed a certain amount of struggle, Allport and Fromm tempered their visions of the generative powers of a healthy personality with the necessity of realistically perceiving cultural and personal problems. That meant, for all three theorists, that a certain level of detachment from social and cultural circumstances was natural, as were appropriate shame, anxiety, sadness, and defensiveness. A healthy person would be disturbed by what he saw in the world that was sick, but he would be strong enough to separate himself sufficiently from the sickness to see it and imagine ways to remedy it. “The normal human being,” Fromm argued, “is capable of relating himself to the world simultaneously by perceiving it as it is and by conceiving it enlivened and enriched by his own powers.”64

Realism and insanity, according to these theorists, were actually closer to health than was passive adjustment, in part because of the active engagement of the self in the struggle with personal and cultural meaning and values. To experience psychological symptoms was to be fully human, engaged in active psychic struggles against the restrictions of a dysfunctional environment, rather than a passive vessel for repressive cultural norms. According to this logic, the ability to experience anxious and depressive symptoms, even twinges of insanity, might actually suggest the capacity to experience meaning—because of the intensity with which an individual suffered from a lack of it.

This sort of anxiety was like a fever, argued psychologist Rollo May, another member of Maslow’s mailing list. From this perspective, people whose systems were not struggling with “infecting germs” were the ones without hope, the ones whose immune systems weren’t reacting to the “age of anxiety.”65 Ironically, those with the strongest natural drive toward optimism were also the “hollow people,” plagued by the problems of emptiness and loneliness, and struggling with the experience of neither knowing what they wanted nor what they felt.66 In his 1953 book Man’s Search for Himself, May contended that these “healthier” individuals were more likely to seek psychotherapy and psychoanalysis.

“By and large,” he wrote, “they are the ones for whom the conventional pretenses and defenses of the society no longer work. Very often they are the more sensitive and gifted members of the society; they need to get help, broadly speaking, because they are less successful at rationalizing than the ‘well-adjusted’ citizen who is able for the time being to cover up his underlying conflicts.”67

At the root of May’s drive to explain why otherwise healthy individuals were struggling to thrive was his experience as a psychotherapist. Many of his patients had presented a pattern of repeatedly frustrated attempts to generate meaning and express themselves creatively in a culture that seemed more committed to conformity.

“The great danger of this situation of vacuity and powerlessness,” May wrote, “is that it leads sooner or later to painful anxiety and despair, and ultimately, if it is not corrected, to futility and the blocking off of the most precious qualities of the human being. Its end results are the dwarfing and impoverishment of persons psychologically, or else surrender to some destructive authoritarianism.”68

Rather than identifying qualities that healthy people should strive for, May noted that adaptation to the norm, and by extension emptiness, had itself become a goal.69

When the more politically minded critics in Maslow’s network tried to step past their critiques and imagine what personal development might look like in a less damaged culture, they tended to run up against a wall. With acute perception they described the vacuum of American desire—in which those struggling for meaning didn’t know what they wanted and felt, in which advertisers and corporations were left by default to fill the void with market-oriented drives—but their perspective was perhaps too broad, or too political, to construct in detail any plausible path toward a new way of being.

In his ten-year-retrospective foreword to The Lonely Crowd, Riesman wrote, “We sought in writing the last chapter on ‘Autonomy and Utopia’ to modify the emphasis on ‘freedom from’ and to give a picture of human relatedness that would be visionary without being too formal or sentimental. Our imaginations proved unequal to the task.”70

Fromm, in weighing the relative significance of the sociological and the psychological, came to the conclusion that the task of transforming the world simply couldn’t begin with the individual psyche. The only real solution was to discard capitalism in favor of “Humanistic Communitarian Socialism,” and a new way of being would, presumably, follow from that. His utopia was nothing short of a society in which greed, exploitativeness, and narcissism find no reward, one that stimulates “its members to relate themselves to each other lovingly,” one that “permits man to operate within manageable and observable dimensions,” and one that encourages the “unfolding of reason.”71 He ultimately concluded, however, that atomic war and the destruction of industrial civilization seemed more likely.72

Psychologists (particularly those without commitments to other disciplines) had a more manageable task. Rather than remaking society from the top down, they would begin by reforming the individual. Both Allport and Maslow approached the problem from the perspective of individual modeling. Their formulations of the tolerant personality and the self-actualized person were attempts to articulate a realistic vision of health that could supplant both unattainable ideals and the default goal of adjustment. They would offer more vigorous alternatives to the “pale and doubtful” models to which Americans had been limited.

Psychologist Sidney Jourard, another member of Maslow’s mailing list, synthesized many of these early efforts to define realistic ideals in his 1958 volume Personal Adjustment. Attempting to provide a value-driven model of health independent of the negative values of illness, Jourard detailed the importance of reality-tested beliefs, rational emotional responses, appropriate and gratifying sexual behavior, flexible and expressive interpersonal behavior, and active rather than passive love.73

Although Jourard’s description had broad implications in terms of a cultural redefinition of health—what he termed an “alloplastic” adjustment of the environment—it was most concrete in its application to individuals. A rational cure, he argued, was not one in which symptoms were remediated, but one that involved a healthy “autoplastic” adjustment, an alteration of the entire self-structure, and the encouragement of personality development in the direction of optimum.74 Jourard felt strongly that a therapist’s values, and his point of view for regarding psychological suffering, would shape his attempts to treat it. Thus, the psychologist oriented toward health, rather than illness, was likely to have more success in helping individuals to transcend narrow cultural expectations.

Unlocking the capacity for self-actualization was the goal for humanistically oriented psychotherapists. Self-awareness, and a reality-based perception of one’s problems, was just the first step. “The task of the therapist,” wrote Jourard, “is to engage in those activities which will serve to thaw out the patient’s adaptive capacities and remove the barriers to further autonomous growth toward health.”75 Jourard felt these ends could be accomplished by either altering the patient’s environment (or encouraging him to move toward a “more health-provocative milieu”) or by changing the patient’s personality structure through the therapeutic relationship.76

Perhaps the most optimistic member of Maslow’s mailing list, in terms of facilitating such change, was psychologist Carl Rogers. Rogers had begun to develop a proto-humanistic theory of psychotherapy in the 1930s and had emerged from his experience as a psychologist during World War II more convinced than ever that there was immense, and largely unrealized, potential in the therapeutic relationship. During the war, he, like Gordon Allport and many others, had performed psychological testing of military recruits, matching personnel to positions best suited to their personalities.77 After the war, in 1946, he published Counseling with Returned Servicemen, in which he applied his notions of the saving power of a growth-producing therapeutic situation to the experience of shell-shocked war veterans.78

Intended, in part, to assist in the expedient training of counselors, the brief book advocated a form of counseling that demanded neither omniscience, expert status, nor extensive training on the part of the counselor. “The counselor’s basic responsibility,” wrote Rogers and his coauthor John Wallen, “is the establishment of an atmosphere or climate that frees the client from the forces hindering his growth, and that makes possible self-initiated development.”79 The emphasis in this form of therapy is on “the full use of the strength and capacity for growth within the client,” rather than on the analytical powers of the therapist.80

The application of the concepts Rogers laid out was not limited to counseling with “psychoneurotic” soldiers. By treating the psychotherapeutic situation as a microcosm of the culture, Rogers believed one could remake the individual’s environment, purging it of growth-inhibiting factors and infusing it with growth-producing elements. Rogers theorized in Client-Centered Therapy (1951) that, given an atmosphere of acceptance and respect, individuals would inherently strive for health.81 He referred to this process as organismic “valuing” or “sensing,” suggesting that individuals know what is good for them and innately endeavor to attain it.82

By framing his solution to the problems of war in psychotherapeutic terms, Rogers was benefiting from psychology’s newfound cultural power as much as he was reinforcing it. What was particularly striking about the expansion of psychology in the 1950s, beyond the sheer numbers of practitioners and patients in psychotherapy, was the increasing ability of those in the field to influence the cultural dialogue. As Allport noted, in his 1955 introduction to Becoming, Americans seemed to be relying increasingly on psychological theory to address the pressing questions of the time—including those related to race and gender relations, industry, and education. He noted that everyone seemed to be speaking the language of psychology, from the “common man” who “now talks in the language of Freud and reads an ever mounting output of books in popular psychology,” to the leaders of industry and the scholars in adjacent disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, and political science.83

Given the cultural power of psychology in the fifties, there may have been no better field from which to mount a “humanistic” critique of society’s role in defining and delimiting mental health and illness. Experts on the human psyche were being taken more seriously than ever before. At the same time, though, psychologists faced many obstacles in assembling a unified critique. It was a crowded field, where much energy was wasted on internal struggles. Psychologists, psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, and social workers all laid claim to, and fought with each over, the mantle of psychological expert. Within academic psychology, it was the behaviorists who reigned, and amongst therapists it was the Freudians who were dominant.

It was also the case, for humanistic psychologists trying to insert themselves into the debate, that one of their primary critiques was of precisely the scientism that had had so much to do with the rise in psychology’s popularity. As Allport observed in 1950, “psychology without a soul” was considered a “badge of distinction and pride,” and seemed to be growing too fashionable for its own good.”84 Many Americans expected psychologists to be experts who spoke with the authority of science.