“Human freedom involves our capacity to pause between the stimulus and response and, in that pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight.”
ROLLO MAY1
Poised between the atomistic extremes of behaviorism and psychoanalysis, Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers entered the world of psychology. In the course of their training they were nourished by both theories and came to value the scientific claims of each. They prized the representative theorists’ systematic approaches, their attempts to forge repeatable techniques, their interest in uncovering the common features of human experience. But when they were professionally sophisticated enough to forge their own theories, charting courses distinct from those of their teachers, they independently concluded that a central premise of both Freud and the behaviorists—the idea that atomism equals science, while holism is thoroughly unscientific—was misguided. Ultimately, it was the reductive nature of both theories, rather than the specific content of either, that Rogers and Maslow came to reject in favor of what they perceived to be a fuller, though still scientific, treatment of the individual.
As a psychologist who viewed himself foremost as a scientist, Rogers had much in common with Freud. His training in psychometrics, however, spurred him to evaluate more systematically the varied constituents of individual experience and made him suspicious of Freud’s explication of unmeasurable concepts (the id, superego, ego, defense mechanisms, and various childhood complexes). He rejected outright his sharp division of the psyche and his reduction of individual experience to the childhood fixations that arose at preset stages of development. At the same time, though, Rogers came to value Freud, and to count him as an influence on his own later theory. The nondirective method of psychotherapy he was to develop would borrow from Freud “in its concepts of repression and release, in its stress on catharsis and insight.” The psychotherapy he came to practice, too, benefited as a response to what he deemed to be Freud’s successes (patient-guided sessions, his therapeutic interview procedure, and his interest in internal psychological dynamics) and failures (intractable therapist-patient hierarchies, policies of emotional nondisclosure, and an overemphasis on the past).2
Maslow, too, related to Freud as a fellow scientist, though not the kind he wished to emulate. He rejected the structure of Freud’s work, but at the same time he valued its products.3 He was drawn to the concepts of repression, defense, resistance, and dream analysis as frames for understanding the psychical barriers to self-actualization.4 He borrowed generously from psychoanalysis, but acknowledged a more specific debt to the theories of the neo-Freudians he encountered in New York City, most of whom had discarded Freud’s atomistic approach. From Karen Horney, he took the synthesis of cultural values with the individual aspects of character, self-esteem, and emotional well-being. Because of Erich Fromm, he deepened his humanitarian commitments, passion for social justice, and sense of utopian possibility. And from Alfred Adler, whom he sought out as a postdoctoral mentor, he derived the interest in superiority strivings that informed much of his work on dominance, at the same time that he gleaned ideas about human holism and social context, and enhanced his innate optimism and appetite for reform.5
While both Maslow and Rogers drew inspiration from psychoanalysts, as academic psychologists they had more direct contact with behaviorists. And though they were temperamentally inclined toward a more holistic psychology that opposed adjustment-driven models, they found behaviorism—as embodied in mentors like Thorndike and Harlow—at least initially more appealing. It aligned better with the scientific bases upon which they were trained. Its laboratory procedures were utterly scientific, quantifiable, repeatable. And it seemed to have launched psychology to a new height of respectability, effectively raising it from pseudo-scientific status to that of an actual science. What’s more, behaviorism’s potential to affect behavioral change through experimentation opened up endless possibilities for larger social reforms.
Although Rogers never subscribed to behaviorism per se, he considered one of its founding fathers, E. L. Thorndike, an influential mentor. As a doctoral student at Columbia University’s Teachers College, he took a stimulating class with Thorndike and drew inspiration from his impeccable experimental methods and aptitude for quantification and measurement. As a young father, he incorporated elements of Watsonian behaviorism into his parenting, adhering to strict schedules and withholding, at times, emotional and physical support. And as a scientific researcher, he emulated the careful, experimental methods he saw behaviorists practice.6
In contrast to Rogers’s piecemeal absorption of behavioristic emphases, Maslow became (for a time) a full-fledged convert. As a budding young psychologist in the 1920s, who viewed behaviorism as “an explosion of excitement,” he wasn’t initially bothered by its inherent atomism.
“Bertha [Maslow’s new bride] came to pick me up at New York’s 42nd Street library,” he recalled, “and I was dancing down Fifth Avenue with exuberance. I embarrassed her, but I was so excited about Watson’s behaviorist program. It was beautiful.”
Even if its methods were narrow, he saw behaviorism’s implications as potentially transcendent. “I was confident,” he explained, “that here was a real road to travel: solving one problem after another and changing the world.”7
In evoking this utopian vision, Maslow was referring, in part, to Watson’s claim that science could offer a degree of control suited to remaking the world. If nature didn’t matter, and nurture was king, things like criminality and violence could be eliminated from a culture committed to producing healthier, more successful individuals. Evil, Maslow came to believe, didn’t arise from people, but from the negative effects of pathological environments on people. Far from viewing the psychological laboratory as a hopelessly miniaturized version of the real world, Maslow saw it as an incubator for the seeds of real social change.8
Maslow’s exuberance landed him, in the early 1930s, in Harry Harlow’s laboratory at the University of Wisconsin, where he studied learning in primates. Harlow’s research was both experimental and observational. It was also comparative; he attempted to make generalizations about humans based on evolutionary deductions about related primates.9 Maslow’s first article, coauthored with Harlow in 1932, appeared in the Journal of Comparative Psychology and was titled “Delayed Reaction Test on Primates from the Lemur to the Orangutan.”10 It jump-started his career. He published four others that same year alone—three in the esteemed Journal of Comparative Psychology and one in the well-known Journal of Social Psychology.
Continuing to study with Harlow, and intent on basing his career on monkey research, Maslow performed further observational studies on Harlow’s primates related to food preferences. He ultimately wrote a dissertation on sexual behavior and social dominance in monkeys.11 Although Maslow hesitated to apply his findings to humans, the dissertation had been inspired, in part, by his discovery (in 1933) of Freudian and Adlerian theories of sex and dominance. His research, in turn, sparked his interest in exploring the idea that sexual behavior in humans was directly related to social power.12
How he intended to change the world with his monkey research is a bit unclear. Perhaps it was unclear to him, as well, as his passion for this work was soon eroded by a swath of holistic influences. Maslow continued reading deeply in areas other than experimental psychology. He studied embryology, read Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s articulation of systems theory, immersed himself in Bertrand Russell and English philosophy in general, and then fell in love with Alfred North Whitehead’s vitalism and Henri Bergson’s process philosophy. According to Maslow, “Their writings destroyed behaviorism for me without my recognizing it.”13
Still unaware of the ideological change overtaking him, and of the ways his newly complexified understanding of human psychology would undermine the reductive orientation of his behavioristic program, Maslow decided to study at Columbia under Thorndike, focusing on human sexuality. Coincidentally, he settled in New York at the same time that many impressive European theorists, including Erich Fromm, Karen Horney, and Alfred Adler, were illuminating the New York intellectual scene with their expansive cultural and social theories.14
In these theorists, Maslow found abundant fuel for the fire his reading had ignited. He later credited Gestalt psychologist Max Wertheimer, in particular, with catalyzing his shift toward a more holistic, humanistic form of psychology. In a 1962 discussion with students at the New School for Social Research in New York, Maslow explained that his true education “began when I came from the Midwest, as an experimental psychologist, to the seminars of Max Wertheimer, who all alone [at the New School] formed the best psychology department in the world.”15 In 1942, Maslow had attended Wertheimer’s course “Being and Doing,” where he began to rethink the methodology of his comparative research, which failed to consider personal values, and didn’t recognize the importance of subjective experience, individual freedom, and autonomous choice.16
In seizing on Gestalt psychology, Maslow broke from the atomistic approaches that had defined his career to that point and tied himself instead to a long tradition of holistic European theory. Gestalt had derived from romanticism, which, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, had attuned philosophers, artists, and writers to the primacy of the individual will and the importance of subjectivity. But Gestalt (or holistic) concerns reached far beyond the humanities or the arts, appearing as well in the natural sciences. In the field of biology, for example, scientist Hans Driesch sought to reanimate vitalism (the doctrine that life has an immaterial component that cannot be explained scientifically) in 1905. And embryologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy focused on the holistic consideration of living processes from the 1920s onward.17
Gestalt methods offered psychologists a paradigm that was liberating. It allowed them to enter realms of inquiry that behaviorists had declared off-limits and freed them to consider the kinds of qualitative data that served as the cornerstones of human existence.18 Psychologist Wolfgang Köhler later described Gestalt theory, in his presidential address to the APA, as a “great wave of relief—as though we were escaping from a prison. The prison was psychology as taught in the universities when we were still students.”19
Köhler and others made plain that the choice between holism and atomism was not synonymous with the choice between science and philosophy. Gestalt was inclusive of both. It was a philosophical approach that informed the collection and evaluation of data, and deepened human analyses, directing researchers and therapists to look at contextual factors in evaluating a subject or a patient. According to the Gestaltists concerned with psychotherapy, for example, an understanding of individuals’ depression could not be gained without information about their behavioral appearance, prior history (History of abuse? Happy childhood?), current circumstances (Had they recently lost a job? Were they grieving?), and subjective experience (Did they experience their current state as markedly different from prior states? Just how sad did they actually feel?).
Experimentally, Gestalt psychology signified an approach to scientific inquiry that began with data collection attained from the direct report of experience. It then moved to the collection of qualitative data gathered through observation and, finally, to the acquisition of quantitative data derived from demonstration and experiment. When Max Wertheimer studied visual perception, for example, he first presented individuals with a visual picture on a stroboscope, and then noted not only their subjective visual perceptions, but also their “subjective behaviors,” including eye movement and “posture of attention.”20 From there, he went on to manipulate the input from the stroboscope and to chart their reactions. The aim of these methods was to include the contextually relevant factors that were consistently omitted from other forms of scientific inquiry.21
When Maslow encountered Gestalt psychologists like Koffka, Wertheimer, and Köhler at the New School in the 1930s and 1940s, he felt an instant connection and esteemed them as “the center of the psychological universe.”22 He was a bit ahead of his time, in this regard. As Kurt Koffka wrote in the foundational text of Gestalt psychology: “In America the climate is chiefly practical; the here and now, the immediate present with its needs, holds the centre of the state, thereby relegating the problems essential to German mentality to the realm of the useless and non-existing. In science this attitude makes for positivism, an overvaluation of mere facts and devaluation of very abstract speculations, a high regard for science, accurate and earthbound, and an aversion, sometimes bordering on contempt for metaphysics that tries to escape from the welter of mere facts into a loftier realm of ideas and ideals.”23 Gestalt was not at home in this climate.
For Maslow, personal and historical circumstances intervened to cement his break from behaviorism and to deepen his openness to holistic theories like Gestalt—most seminally the birth of his first child, and the full realization of his horror at the Holocaust.
Throughout his studies and research pursuits, Maslow had maintained a passionate investment in his family, prioritizing them above his work. It was through his family, in fact, that he experienced his first peak experience (defined in his own theory as a life-changing moment of self-transcendence). He explained, “When my first baby was born, that was the thunderclap that settled things. I looked at this tiny, mysterious thing and felt so stupid. I felt small, weak, and feeble. I’d say that anyone who’s had a baby couldn’t be a behaviorist.”24 Maslow’s baby, Ann, humbled him because of the purity of her goodness. She had not a mean bone in her body, not a single ill intention. And her goodness had not been conditioned; it sprung forth at the moment of her birth in a way that transcended any learning, good or bad, that would take place in the course of her life.
Ann destroyed Maslow’s illusions about behaviorism from one direction, while Hitler dismantled them from another. From 1939 to 1941, as newspapers began to cover more fully the German shooting operations in Poland and the Soviet Union, it became increasingly difficult to avoid wrestling, in some form, with painful moral questions about the nature of evil. One could choose only to look at the problem “from below” or “from above.” To look from above, for Malsow, meant to be realistic about the existence of evil, but to place it in context. A compassionate man, Maslow argued, would see evil as an ignorant, thoughtless, and fearful fumbling toward otherwise good ends (in Adler’s words, toward mistaken goals). To view evil from below, he said, meant to pathologize it, externalize it, dehumanize it.
By temperament, Maslow looked from above, with an orientation toward understanding. A day after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Maslow encountered a small pro-war parade and responded with what he would come to view as a seminal insight: “I was driving home and my car was stopped by a poor, pathetic parade. Boy Scouts and old uniforms and a flag and someone playing a flute off-key. As I watched, the tears began to run down my face. I felt we didn’t understand—not Hitler, nor the Germans, nor Stalin, nor the Communists. We didn’t understand any of them. I felt that if we could understand, then we could make progress. [ . . . ] That moment changed my whole life. Since then, I’ve devoted myself to developing a theory of human nature that could be tested by experiment and research. I wanted to prove that humans are capable of something grander than war, prejudice, and hatred. I wanted to make science consider all the people: the best specimen of mankind I could find.”25
Seeing people as fully human, Maslow concluded, required psychologists to embrace the full range of human emotion and behavior, and to stop replacing “human” with average or normal. People were sad and hurt and mean and destructive and joyful and creative and kind. The only way to study them was to study them holistically—acknowledging and accepting this multiplicity, and thinking meaningfully about the values we would call upon in elevating the best in us without pretending the worst didn’t exist.
The Gestalt approach did gain wider acceptance in America, though not until the 1950s, when the tangible, external threats of the Germans and Japanese subsided and much of our fear turned inward. Just as many intellectuals in war-ravaged and politically polarized post–World War I Germany had been drawn to a restorative science to help make sense of the ruin and resurrect for them a fraction of the culture’s former grandeur, many Americans found consolation in a holistic approach after the Second World War.26
Gestalt theory had much to offer Americans. It opposed adjustment psychologies (and the mandate of social conformity) by emphasizing the significance of personal context and experience and affirming the value of the unique individual. It assuaged pragmatists by invoking the experimental method in the pursuit of basic philosophical questions.27 And it contributed to the emergence of theories of health, premised on a positive view of human nature.
The work of German émigré Kurt Goldstein, in particular, resonated on all three counts. The humanistic concept of self-actualization came directly from his experience in the 1920s, when he worked as a neurologist at the Institute for Research into the Consequences of Brain Injuries in Frankfurt, treating soldiers who had incurred neurological injury during World War I. Goldstein had been impressed by the resiliency of the soldiers he treated. He concluded from his observations and inquiries that the manner in which they reorganized their functioning, compensating for deficits by developing strengths in other areas, was indicative of an intrinsic tendency toward wholeness in humans. Their continual striving, which entailed a certain amount of anxiety and vulnerability, demonstrated what he perceived as their inherent actualizing tendencies.28
Goldstein’s work was part of a small but persistent current in psychology, one toward which Maslow increasingly turned, that pushed back against the taboos that positivists in general, and behaviorists in particular, had tried to establish against considering subjective reports and relying on personal deductions.
“The fallacy of the behaviorist’s formula,” wrote one early one critic of behaviorism, “lies in the omitted terms with the result that, were he consistent, his cupboard would be as bare as Mother Hubbard’s; he smuggles in his provender from stores which he ignores.”29 The “folly of behaviorism,” he argued, was the denial of “large areas of compelling fact.”30
The main problem with behaviorism, as critics saw it, was that it distilled human experience to only the most quantifiable components. But the most interesting elements of individuals were also the most difficult to quantify. While it may have been easy to study visual perception or reaction time in a laboratory, it was next to impossible to look at an individual’s dreams, desires, or emotional reality. Thus the more elusive, complicated, or multifaceted aspects of human experience were the first to be excluded from study.
By the 1950s, Maslow’s divorce from behaviorism was final. He became one of these critics. “It was the beautiful program of Watson that brought me into psychology,” he wrote in his journal. “But its fatal flaw is that it’s good for the lab & in the lab, but you put it on & take it off like a lab coat. It’s useless at home with your kids & wife & friends. It does not generate an image of man, a philosophy of life, a conception of human nature. It’s not a guide to living, to values, to choices.”31
Humanistic psychology was born out of dissatisfaction—with an academic climate dominated by scientism and behaviorism, and with a psychotherapeutic realm ruled by Freudian hierarchies, negative definitions of health, and medicalized notions of human suffering. At the same time, though, it grew from dogged optimism and uninhibited hopefulness.
Although the founders of humanistic psychology were more different than they were similar, they shared several things in common. They were born in the aughts (Rogers in 1902, Maslow in 1908, and May in 1909), sharing their infancy with psychology itself and inheriting its uneasiness with larger questions of meaning and values, while feeding on the culture’s new lust for all things scientific. They were educated, in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, at major research universities where the practice of psychotherapy was crowded out by experimental research and a singular interest in people’s quantifiable behaviors. And their theories crystallized in the 1950s, in a culture that was agitated by Cold War fears and (the other side of the coin) insistent upon adjustment as a solution to individual woes.
They stood out, against these backdrops, like sore thumbs. They tended to question—in faculty meetings, in presentations, and in their own writing—principles and methods that earned almost unanimous agreement in departmental circles. Surprisingly, though, they didn’t seem too grumpy about it. In fact, their peers consistently described them as sunnier, kinder, gentler, more flexible, and more original than other colleagues.32
Maslow’s peers tended to praise him for his childlike enthusiasm, his unflagging curiosity, his ever-calm voice, his endearing smile. They saw in him something pure, something preserved from the taint of the chaotic world into which he’d been thrust, something childlike and wondrous.33
As the son of Russian immigrants who were sometimes hard to live with and harder still to please, and as a Jew growing up in Brooklyn in a neighborhood conducive to the flinging of rocks and ethnic slurs, Maslow learned to channel his passions into books. He practically lived in the library until high school, when he melded his intellectual interests with his latent leadership abilities as the officer of several academic clubs and the editor of his school’s Latin magazine and physics newspaper. His proclivities, which included intellectual openness and a tenacious drive for self-betterment, ensured his resilience; he rebounded gracefully from failed studies at City College and Cornell, as well as from his disillusionment with behaviorism.34
In all his endeavors, Maslow’s ambitions were capacious. When he courted behaviorism, he did so with all the ardor that would later infuse his humanistic psychology. And when he abandoned behaviorism, he rejected it with all the force that he had once used to support it. His colleague James Klee later remarked on the impressive nature of his change of heart, likening him to William James, who ultimately renounced the whole of psychology, calling it a “dirty little science.” Klee saw parallels between their stature in the psychological world and the intellectual and emotional strength they had displayed in entirely overhauling their theoretical perspectives.35
After leaving Thorndike’s laboratory in 1937, Maslow set out on his own course. As a young instructor at Brooklyn College, he opened himself up to other disciplines. Guided by his peers in anthropology, he tested his theories of dominance and sexuality across cultures. He adopted new theoretical frameworks, replacing a comparative orientation (that generalized from animals to man) with a paradigm of cultural relativism (that recognized the more subtle differences between men). “I realized,” wrote Maslow in the late thirties, “that my test of dominance was a test of dominance-in-an-insecure-society.”36 Gradually his blind spots were revealed to him. With the press of World War II, Maslow abandoned his earlier commitments more cleanly, devoting himself instead to forging a more positive, and unconventional, theory of human motivation.
Within the wider world of psychology, Maslow’s new orientation was an apostasy. It posed several immediate challenges. While he had grown accustomed to publishing easily in prestigious journals, he now found few journals willing to print his unorthodox new theories. His publication record remained strong; he published twenty-eight articles in the first decade, twenty-three in the second. But the reputation of the journals that would accept his articles declined sharply. His first study of healthy people, “Self-Actualizing People: A Study of Psychological Health,” for example, was published in 1950 in a small journal that soon folded.37
Another challenge was the sense of professional isolation Maslow experienced. His colleagues at Brooklyn College favored experimental studies of learning, perception, and animal behavior, and didn’t identify with his work.38 In fact they all but blocked his application for tenure, delaying it several years.39 His experience with his students mitigated his detachment somewhat. He loved teaching. At the same time, the demands at Brooklyn College were overly rigorous; he taught five courses each semester, with no hope of his course load ever being reduced.40
Being in New York, though, softened the blow. Maslow found the city full of intellectual excitement and drew inspiration from academics outside his department and college, most notably those he had met at the New School of Social Research in the 1930s. In 1951, when Maslow was offered a position at Brandeis University, in pastoral Waltham, Massachusetts, he was reluctant to leave.41
The move to Brandeis, in general, was risky. The university was not yet accredited and had just barely avoided bankruptcy (under the name of Middlesex University) before getting a new name and an infusion of funds from a Jewish group in 1946. It was premised on the dream of a group of Jewish investors to build their own nonsectarian university—a cause in which Maslow had little interest. The offer they made him, though, was one he couldn’t refuse.42
Max Lerner, the head of social sciences, recognized Maslow’s distinctive value. Although Lerner knew little to nothing about psychology, he promised Maslow the opportunity to create a program in any way that suited him. He could construct the department from the ground up, recruiting his own faculty and training graduate students as he wished. Lerner also wooed him with the promise of a more integrated intellectual community; at the time, Brandeis was entirely interdisciplinary, and there were no discrete departments.43
Maslow accepted the position at Brandeis not out of a fantasy of personal power, but because of his desire to propel psychology toward greatness. His administrative duties were over-whelming, particularly in terms of hiring, but he remained highly principled. He refused to hire faculty who validated his perspective out of obligation or deference, attempting, instead, to hire only truly gifted scholars, without regard to their age or approach.44
Although he was spread thin with his new administrative duties and his course load, Maslow managed to solidify his theory of self-actualization and higher needs in his early years at Brandeis. He published several articles based on earlier work, including “Higher Needs and Personality,” “Love in Healthy People,” “The Instinctoid Nature of Basic Needs,” and “Deficiency Motivation and Growth Motivation.” More significantly, though, he assembled a collection of his work in a 1954 book called Motivation and Personality, which expanded on the ideas he had briefly outlined in his 1943 article “A Theory of Human Motivation.” At the heart of the book was his concept of the hierarchy of needs.45
The basic thrust of Maslow’s motivation theory was that people are innately driven to reach their fullest potential, but to do so they must ascend through a series of “prepotent” needs. One set of needs, said Maslow, must be fulfilled in order for an individual to focus on the next set of needs. The first four levels of Maslow’s hierarchy consisted of basic needs, beginning with the physiological: water, air, food, sleep, etc. “When our bellies are full and we are sheltered,” explained Maslow, we move to the second level, turning “toward the problems of safety and security in the world. We want a good police force and good doctors. Then, we think of education, and we want good schools.”46 The third level of the pyramid contained “love” and “belonging” needs, and the fourth “esteem” needs (for respect from others and for self-respect). At the fifth and highest level were “being” needs. If the attainment of any one of the four basic needs were thwarted, an individual would fixate on that particular level, and possibly never reach the very highest needs, being needs, and would never achieve “self-actualization.”
Maslow drew the term and concept of self-actualization from Kurt Goldstein, who had served as a mentor to him during his time in New York. Goldstein had been struck by the resiliency of the brain-injured soldiers with whom he worked, and he’d studied closely their ability to completely reorganize their functioning, compensating for deficits by developing strengths in other areas. He argued that self-actualization, the basic and singular drive for the organism to realize, to the maximal extent, its capabilities in the world, was the organism’s “affirmative answer to the shocks of existence.”47 Rather than acting in the interest of self-preservation or tension reduction, the healthy, self-actualizing individual would offer creative, generative responses to the difficulties of life.
Maslow chose to use Goldstein’s term in a more specific and limited fashion. “It refers,” he wrote of his own interpretation, “to the desire for self-fulfillment, namely, to the tendency for [man] to become actualized in what he is potentially. This tendency might be phrased as the desire to become more and more what one is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming.”48
Maslow described self-actualization in more depth in his chapters “Self-Actualizing People: A Study of Psychological Health” and “Love in Self-Actualizing People.” In them he outlined the ideals of health, the heights toward which we are intrinsically motivated. Self-actualizing individuals, he wrote, are accepting of self, others, and nature. “They can accept their own human nature in the stoic style, with all its shortcomings, with all its discrepancies from the ideal image, without feeling concern.” They are spontaneous and authentic; they focus on problems beyond their own; they savor privacy and solitude; and they appreciate the details of life with freshness and wonder. Their attributes are many; their liabilities are few. Still, Maslow did not wish to make them a caricature. On the negative side, he noted, they are capable of ruthlessness and coldness; they occasionally alienate others; they can be too kind; they often sacrifice social politeness to intense concentration; and they often feel shame, doubt, anxiety, and internal strife.49 They are, quite interestingly, the very picture of Maslow himself—of everything one can glean from his journal entries, his personal memos, and the reflections of his friends.
Motivation and Personality became the crowning work of Maslow’s career. It broadcast his concept of self-actualization, and his theory of the hierarchy of needs, to a wider audience than even the most prestigious academic journal could have. It earned him a national reputation that spread beyond psychology, penetrating business management, marketing, education, counseling, and psychotherapy. And it flooded him with offers for speaking engagements.50
He was pleased with the book’s success, remarking, in January 1961, on the royalties and the still-increasing sales.51 Though he had always had utter confidence in the book, counting it among the most significant works in psychology’s history, he displayed the “nonneurotic” doubt typical of the self-actualized and remained apprehensive about his colleagues’ view of it. The book was unconventional for an academic psychologist. In it, he argued against many of the assumptions that the field rested on: health as the absence of pathology, universal values, valid science as exclusively empirical science. Instead of offering original research, he appended an outline of more than a hundred prospects for future “humanistic” research—on topics like creativity, love, ecstasy, and mysticism.52
Like Maslow, Carl Rogers stood apart from the typical academic psychologist both personally and professionally. He listened better, was gentler, and was more soft-spoken. One of his colleagues described his amazing capacity for open communication: “He would sit forward and look you in the eyes.”53 Also like Maslow, he took professional risks, like the decision to publish full accounts of his therapy sessions, complete with very unscientific sounding “m-hms” and “uhs.”
In contrast to Maslow, though, who was known for his ability to tolerate conflict, and even productively initiate it, Rogers rarely stirred things up in person. When he faced down the profession, he did it in writing—in careful, methodical prose, with insights that were so simple as to be difficult to refute.
Rogers’s style was a product of his background. The son of Congregationalist Midwesterners, trained at the University of Wisconsin in agricultural science and Union Seminary in theology, he was pragmatic and thoughtful. When he turned to psychology in 1926, as a doctoral student at Columbia’s Teachers College and a fellow at New York City’s Institute for Child Guidance, he was guided by his own intuition to combine academic psychology’s interest in measurement and assessment with the clinical interests of personality and emotion, writing a dissertation titled “Measuring Personality Adjustment in Children Nine to Thirteen.”54
Instead of taking an academic post, Rogers worked from 1928 to 1939 at the Rochester Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. There, he became even more pragmatic: witnessing the struggles of suffering children, he was singularly concerned with outcome. “Will it work?” he repeatedly asked.55
He quickly grew disenchanted with the standard diagnostic process, which relied heavily on intelligence testing and achievement, and developed instead the “component factor method,” a multifaceted approach designed to consider a child’s development and behavior holistically. With this method, children were rated on seven-point scales for eight factors: self-insight, physical factors, family emotional tone, economic and cultural factors, social experience, heredity, mentality, and education and supervision. Published in 1931 as the “Personal Adjustment Inventory,” this assessment tool built on the insights of Freudians (who emphasized family factors and childhood development), sociologists (whose interests lay in schools and culture), psychiatrists (who were concerned with physical health and inherited traits), and of course psychologists (who insisted upon the repeatability and validity of measurement).56
Rogers’s therapeutic approach at Rochester was environmentally oriented, focused on schools, foster homes, camps, and institutions.57 But he gradually shifted to a model of intensive psychotherapy in which the therapeutic relationship itself acted as a growth-fostering home that could correct prior negative experiences and unleash the child’s inherent drive toward health. Although Rogers had little practical training in psychotherapy, and found disappointingly few systematic accounts of effective practice, he surveyed techniques, rejecting manipulative approaches like hypnosis and favoring interpretive and expressive therapies. He aimed at enabling children to achieve insight, either through discussion and analysis or, with younger children, through play therapy.
In 1940 Rogers left applied work to return to academia. Though he lacked academic experience, his extensive publication record and clinical background allowed him to enter Ohio State as a full professor. At this level, he could immediately diverge from mainstream psychological research without first having to prove his legitimacy to a tenure board.
In 1942, he introduced a new model of therapy in Counseling and Psychotherapy, one that reflected his own inclinations. It was systematic, replicable, and explicit. He laid out what he took to be the basics of a therapeutic relationship: warmth and responsiveness, permissiveness regarding emotional expression, clearly defined limits, and freedom from persuasion and pressure.58 He would later distill these characteristics down to the tenets of unconditional positive regard (an attitude of total acceptance), empathic understanding (consisting of warmth and attunement), and congruence (a lack of hierarchical doctor-patient boundaries and a sense of an open encounter between both parties).
Rogers’s presentation of the fundamentals of nondirective counseling culminated in “The Case of Herbert Bryan,” a verbatim account of eight sessions with a client that he included in the last 170 pages of the book. His main technique was empathic communication: a reflecting back of what Bryan was saying, not by using literal repetition, but by affirming his statements with imagination, acceptance, and understanding. When Bryan describes the physical experience of his anxiety, for example, Rogers links it to a deeper feeling of emasculation:
Bryan: “When I walk, that is, when I’m feeling badly, I walk hunched over and sort of like I had a bellyache, which I actually do have, psychologically.
Rogers: It just makes you more or less half a man, is that it? And only half able to do your work—.59
Bryan agrees to this interpretation, as he does to many of Rogers’s encapsulations. And, when he doesn’t agree, Rogers pulls back, fine-tuning his understanding and reframing his statements to make them more accurate.
While the transcript was fascinating and its publication groundbreaking, this unconventional move made Rogers inordinately vulnerable. In piercing the shroud of mystery that surrounded psychotherapy, he risked the ire of psychotherapists whose status depended, to a considerable degree, on the myth of the psychological expert’s magic powers. He threatened to make them look common, simple, human. The things he said in the sessions often reflected uncertainty, and he repeatedly fumbled as he tried to understand Bryan and say the right thing.
His unconventional work was dismissed by most academic psychologists, who didn’t seem to buy his claim that the publication of complete accounts of psychotherapy represented scientific progress. (The book wasn’t even reviewed in academic journals.) Somewhat surprisingly, though, clinical professionals were not cowed; he was invited to give speeches and workshops, and elected to offices in prestigious professional organizations.60
Rogers rode his professional esteem into the 1950s. Even the academy had to acknowledge his value, particularly since he continued to meet their requirements of systematic research and frequent publication. Moving to the University of Chicago, again as a full professor, he continued to systematize his therapeutic techniques, performing outcome studies and publishing the results widely (nearly fifty articles from the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s, in addition to three books). He served as president of the APA, as well as several other organizations, and won numerous awards, including the APA’s Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award. During the same time, he saw hundreds of articles and studies published on his nondirective method.61
It’s not an exaggeration to say that by the late 1950s, Rogers’s work had forever changed American psychotherapy. In 1957, the same year he accepted yet another academic post at the University of Wisconsin, Time devoted a full page to Rogers’s theory, which was by then quite familiar to those in the profession. Referring to Rogers as a longtime “maverick,” the author pitted him against psychoanalysts. Rogers’s “manful” attempt at defining his technique ran as follows: “We see therapy as an experience, not in intellectual terms. We treat the client as a person, not an object to be manipulated and directed.” In opposition, a neo-Freudian was reported to have contemptuously stated, “Rogers’ method is unsystematic, undisciplined, and humanistic. Rogers doesn’t analyze and doesn’t diagnose. We have no common ground.”62
Psychologists trained in the 1950s, most of whom had read Rogers’s theory firsthand, inevitably possessed a more nuanced understanding of his approach. As a result, they didn’t tend to see client-centered therapy and psychoanalysis as an either/or proposition. In fact, many found that it was not only possible, but also productive to incorporate portions of Rogers’s theory into their own approach.
Although Tom Greening, a future Association of Humanistic Psychology president and Journal of Humanistic Psychology editor, already had some familiarity with Rogers when he joined a private practice in Los Angeles in 1958, his psychoanalytic training and academic coursework at the University of Michigan had rooted him in a pathology-oriented tradition. His gradual shift toward a more humanistic paradigm was compelled, in part, by the impression Rogers’s concept of congruence had made on him, and by the notion of the I-Thou encounter (the highest form of communication, in which social roles are discarded in favor of an embrace of each participant’s total uniqueness), which Rogers, along with theologian Martin Buber, had explored when they visited Greening’s graduate school in 1957.
Greening’s early style, and early debt to Rogers, are exemplified in one of his first psychotherapy cases. In 1959 he began treating “Carol,” a functional but neurotic grade school teacher who was quickly becoming overweight, depressed, and suicidal. One night, she called him after ingesting a bottle of pills, frantically explaining that the ghost of her mother was reaching from her closet to drag her to hell. Although he was panicked, as a green therapist with no crisis training, he managed to offer her three things that she thanked him for twenty years later. He was fully present (in the I-Thou encounter sense), he kept his cool in the face of grave pathology (unconditional positive regard), and he held out a positive vision of a future beyond the painful present (a kind of humanistic hopefulness).63
It wasn’t atypical, in the 1950s, to see traces of Rogers’s theory even in the practice of psychotherapists like Greening who ascribed only a peripheral influence to him. Although psychoanalytic techniques still predominated in the 1950s, psychotherapy tended to be a hybrid of various theories. Patients weren’t necessarily lying on couches anymore, or free-associating while their analysts silently evaluated them. And psychoanalysts, in general, tended to be less severe and reductionistic than strict Freudians had been.64
Clinical psychology programs housed diverse influences, as well. Although behaviorism was the rule, and all else the exception, places like the University of Michigan—where Greening received his doctorate—emphasized psychoanalysis in a way that was depth-oriented, holistic, and “meaningful.”65 This program stood in contrast to Greening’s undergraduate institution, Yale, which was strongly behavioristic and where Greening had actually dropped out of a psychology class mid-year “in disgust” to take more literature courses.66
In the late 1950s, Greening, presumably in a way that was typical of other psychotherapists at the time, read much that fertilized the seeds Rogers and others had planted. He read Wilhelm Reich, a psychoanalytic body therapist who broke Freudian taboos on neutrality by sitting next to patients, touching them directly to relieve and increase awareness of tension, and answering their questions directly in an authentic shared dialogue.67 He read Hellmuth Kaiser, who soon published the influential story “Emergency,” a fictional account in which a psychotherapist pretends to be a patient in order to effectively treat a fellow psychotherapist (thereby turning the doctor-patient hierarchy on its head).68 He read Theodor Reik’s Listening with a Third Ear, a volume focused on encouraging psychoanalysts to develop a more human and holistic way of tuning in to a person, one in which the therapist makes use of her “unconscious feelers” and is not afraid of her sensitivities or flights of imagination.69 And he read Rollo May’s Existence, a collection of writings—some new, some in translation—that fused his prior literary and philosophical interest in existentialism with psychotherapy in a revolutionary new way.
Tom Greening actually preferred the work of Rollo May to that of Carl Rogers. He had more “craziness,” was more artistic, and—particularly in drawing on European existentialism—was deeper and more philosophically grounded.70
Like Rogers, May had flown his Protestant Midwestern coop for the psychologized intellectual climate of New York City. But while Rogers’s religiosity seemed almost detachable, May’s spirituality was his connective tissue. In New York, he replaced his Methodism with the neo-orthodox theology of Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr, but ultimately abandoned both in favor of a soulful existentialism. His introduction to psychotherapy came first when he received training in pastoral counseling methods (as a counselor) at the YMCA, and later when he undertook psychoanalysis (as a patient) with Alfred Adler. His psychology would forever be absent the scientific lilt that defined both Maslow’s and Rogers’s approaches.71
As a practitioner, and not an academic, May had an entirely different agenda than either Maslow or Rogers. He hoped to reunite psychological concerns with their spiritual and philosophical bases. He endeavored to perform public ministry, offering a psychologized view of the human condition in the trade books he published. He also struggled to secure for psychologists the right to practice psychotherapy free from medical and scientific constraints.
Although he bent himself to the academic requirements of earning a doctorate at Teachers College, his humanistic inclinations were always evident. In studying anxiety for his doctoral thesis, he attempted to quantify fourteen individuals’ experience of anxiety with techniques ranging from checklist questionnaires to Rorschach inkblot tests. Ultimately, though, he placed greater value on subjective reports and insights gained from interviews, and defaulted to philosophical interpretations. The greatest trigger of anxiety, he found, was itself subjective, a sense of being “trapped” with every choice threatening “vital value.”72
May’s dissertation didn’t offer any earth-shattering insights about neurotic anxiety (though he did suggest that an individual’s creative power was the key to overcoming it); it was more on the topic of normal anxiety that he made a contribution. Describing anxious states as part and parcel of human existence, he found the threat of sickness and the inevitability of death to be the constituents of an unavoidable, but potentially manageable, sense of human uneasiness.73
Needless to say, May’s dissertation didn’t earn him much academic esteem, but it did pave the way for his future theoretical and clinical pursuits. After publishing it in 1950 as The Meaning of Anxiety, he never again felt compelled to don the guise of empiricism. His next book, Man’s Search for Himself, published in 1953, was written for a popular as well as professional audience, was entirely theoretical, and was his first New York Times bestseller.74
Man’s Search for Himself reflected another of May’s atypical interests: he was committed to the fusion of individual with cultural concerns. He considered himself a public minister, aiming to treat the spiritual, philosophical, and psychological condition of the culture as much as of the individual. In the opening of the book, he identified the reciprocal relationship between a culture gripped by anxiety (in the wake of two world wars, with the threat of a third, and with a fair amount of economic uncertainty) and individuals defined by symptoms of anxiety (loneliness, defensiveness, and neurotic fixations).75 At the root of the self-perpetuating plague of anxiety, May argued, was a collapse of meaning and belief, the product of which was a stifling of our creative and constructive impulses.
The answer, for May, was an “ethics of inwardness,” an elevation of the self above society, a retreat from cultural dependence. “This is what our society needs,” he wrote, “not new ideas and inventions, important as these are, and not geniuses and supermen, but persons who can be, that is persons who have a center of strength within themselves.”76 Hardly stereotypical of the decade of conformity, and more in keeping with psychotherapy than academic psychology, May greeted the 1950s with a powerful call to the individual.
A summons for self-consciousness, self-love, creative engagement, a realization of potentialities, a full use of our powers. This is what May offered to America in 1953. This was the same year that Joseph McCarthy, whose witch hunt of government officials, teachers, and Hollywood icons had filled Americans with fear and suspicion, was called out publicly by Edward R. Murrow, and a year before he was censured by the Senate.77 By taking a stand against McCarthy, Murrow urged Americans to let reason prevail over fear.78
As the first cracks of liberatory light permeated our national consciousness, May warned that conformity, perhaps as epitomized in McCarthy, was antithetical to selfhood, and to cultural health. He reminded Americans that while we are unavoidably interdependent, we need to assert our autonomous identities, to affirm our capacity for self-creation, to take responsibility for our own, and the world’s, problems.79
This articulation of the inner locus of responsibility, and of creativity and power, paved the way for May’s greatest, and most unique, contribution of the 1950s: a volume called Existence, which he published in 1958. The book joined the original essays of European philosophers and psychologists with summarative essays intended to clarify the nature of existential psychotherapy. In placing the individual at the center of her own misery, anxiety, and joy, it displayed a paradigm that had been nurtured in Western European dialogues, but had never before been transmitted to an American audience.
For many psychotherapists, Existence was their first introduction to the philosophy of existentialism. As May explained it, existentialism was most basically concerned with ontology, or the science of being, where being was understood as the point of balance that individuals negotiated between a deep fear of nonexistence and meaninglessness and a positive drive to explore existential freedom and possibility. Existential psychotherapy, as he proposed it, would focus on the concept of Da-sein, or being, in which an individual is continually in the process of “being something,” of actively choosing his own existence. The existential therapeutic approach was meant as a complement to more traditional psychoanalysis, where the emphasis was on one’s past, and how that past shaped one’s present orientation. Existential psychotherapy, as May proposed it, would acknowledge the past and its influence but would privilege the individual’s choices and self-awareness in the present, and potential in the future, over the story of her past.80
Although May’s collection represented a synthesis of European ideas, a reproduction of seminal writings that were widely popular in Europe, and a convergence of existentialist thought that had taken various forms in America, he recognized that American psychotherapists were likely to resist it.81 May ascribed this resistance in part to the “still-Victorian” nature of the United States, but also to the narrowly scientistic approach of American psychology.82 May argued that widespread commitment to behaviorism, combined with the “Lockean” or pragmatic tradition of American psychology, further inhibited the adoption of new paradigms that would step beyond technique.83
Existential psychology relied on a phenomenological method of inquiry that began with the intuitive experience of phenomena, as perceived with conscious awareness, and attempted to draw conclusions about the essential features of subjectivity in the hope of a fuller comprehension of being.84 Anticipating criticism that this approach was unscientific, May argued that the existential-phenomenological movement in psychiatry and psychology had arisen “precisely out of a passion to be not less but more empirical.”85 Taking the phenomenological-existential psychologist Ludwig Binswanger—whom May featured in Existence—as an example, May argued that scholarship and practice that attempted to erect a bridge between psychiatry and phenomenology was “anything but anti-scientific.”86 Binswanger had advocated phenomenology for the fullness with which it treated data, the meaning of which had been previously obscured and hidden by narrow naturalistic methods.87
May intended existential psychotherapy to complement existing approaches rather than overthrow them. If one conceptualized human experience as multileveled, existentialism would come in at the foundation, analyzing the ground beneath human experience, with a particular emphasis on situations of human crisis.88 May argued that a psychology that couldn’t deal with such foundations, or have anything to say about the most profound crises, was scientific in only the narrowest senses. As an illustration of this, one of the essays in May’s collection cited the work of Viktor Frankl, an Austrian-born psychiatrist whose theories had been forged in considerable part while he was imprisoned in the concentration camps of Auschwitz, Kaufering, and Türkheim.89
Frankl had been profoundly struck, while in the camps, by how some prisoners were able to continue to create meaning, and to hold on to some degree of optimism, even while watching their loved ones die and staring, plainly, at the likelihood of their own deaths. During and after his internment, Frankl focused on the memory of his wife and on the creation of his theory of logotherapy, which he was finally able to publish after his release. He concluded that the strength of the conscious ability to construct meaning was what differentiated individuals who survived inhuman obstacles more than anything else. Thus he proclaimed the “will to meaning” to be primary among successful human characteristics; instead of imagining that suffering could be avoided, Frankl focused on the catalyzing power of horrific pain to push individuals to transcendent levels of individual existence.90 Quoting Nietzsche, Frankl asserted, “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.”91
Frankl went on to apply his existential theory to therapy through his practices of ontoanalysis (a form of existential therapy that focuses on uncovering hidden meaning in everyday actions and experiences) and logotherapy (a type of therapy focused on “will to meaning”). These practices aimed at uncovering meaning in even the most minute objects and events, enabling individuals—many of whom had been entirely stripped of existential freedom—to reanimate their existences. This constructive approach infused psychotherapy with a dialogue of meaning and values that had been absent in psychoanalysis.92
May’s hope in publishing Existence was to cultivate in the field of psychotherapy a greater openness to the humanistically oriented work of theorists, like Frankl, Binswanger, and Erwin Straus, whose ideas pushed most therapists out of their comfort zones. Through the collection, May modeled a willingness to talk about meaning and values, and to reconnect psychology with the types of philosophy from which it had been so cleanly severed just decades before.
In laying his piece of the foundation of humanistic psychology, May posited not only the idea that our deepest problems were caused (and resolved) intrapsychically; he also complicated the optimism that Rogers and Maslow brought to their work by emphasizing the tragic dimension of human existence. If Maslow brought a view of the highest reaches that humans could achieve, and Rogers brought a psychotherapeutic technique to empower individuals to achieve them, May brought the counterweight—the idea that greatness was only possible through struggle and the awareness that struggle would never wholly remit.