4
Self, Being, and Growth People

“We must be courageous about exploring ourselves, write it out publicly, compare such personal theories with each other to see how general they are or how specific, & thus go toward a generalized phenomenology & general truth out of the varied personal truths.”

ABRAHAM MASLOW1

Although they propelled their fields in exciting new directions, the founders of humanistic psychology hadn’t planned to lead a movement. Rogers resisted the leadership role, rejected the ideas of control and authority attached to it, and feared being viewed as a guru. The leadership he did offer was gentle and unassuming—an extension of his therapeutic style. When he led a group, he was soft-spoken, deliberate, and patient. He deferred to the ideas of others, but carried his own convictions with grace.2

While May hoped to offer a new paradigm, to forge “a new dimension in psychiatry and psychology,” he too was wary of leading a movement. He was preoccupied, in the 1950s, with a more basic struggle to maintain his professional existence, the right of psychologists to practice psychotherapy rather than ceding the realm to psychiatrists.3 This battle was premised on the goal of keeping the field open to multiple perspectives rather than letting a single approach win out, as would have been required had he led a unified movement.

Maslow was more torn. His style, and his messianic aspirations, made him the most likely candidate to father humanistic psychology. By nature, he was more comfortable than the average academic with being grandiose, and his interests were better suited to a revolution than to the kind of incremental and systematic change that professionals in the field had come to expect and accept.4 He didn’t have much tolerance, however, for the trappings of traditional leadership. “I have rejected all demands to be pope,” he wrote in a journal entry, “or to accept pure disciples (students, yes) & prick suckers who pledge total & exclusive devotion.”5 He also didn’t have much interest in the kind of intellectual single-mindedness that tends to win the day for ideas and schools of thought. His ideas, and his beliefs, were constantly changing.

Maslow had in mind another type of leadership. “I am a leader,” wrote Maslow in the same journal entry, “in a higher & better sense, which allows autonomy for the other, if he can take it.”6 He hoped to lead by revealing the true nature of man’s potential, and by offering himself as an example. His goals were utopian, revolutionary.

In a sense, Maslow felt leading an academic or professional movement in psychology was beneath him. It would require getting down into the muck rather than raising himself, and others, up from it.

“If I can transcend the jungle,” he wrote in his journal, “by getting up above it and looking down calmly, then in principle I can climb up above the human species itself as if I were nonhuman, a God, a Martian, or, better, a human being in his divine moments, in B-cognition, looking from above at himself below, as one does on the psychoanalytic couch. I can then look at human beings, pushing aside my identification, my interests, my stake in them.”7

The result of Maslow’s ambivalence was that he became, in most respects, the leader of the movement, but he often refused to lead. He sought out peers rather than followers, hoping to facilitate fruitful connections rather than effective organizations. He built networks, like the mailing list, to support and connect the people who shared his concerns, and frequently tried to enlist others in his own efforts. With Anthony Sutich, a private practitioner in California, he met perhaps his most significant success.

Sutich had, somewhat organically, developed a critique that paralleled Maslow’s. Although he was no academic (because of a childhood baseball injury that led to lifelong physical immobilization, he had never even completed high school), he had been moved to write a few articles related to his specific frustration with the field of psychology.8 The first, “Proposed Improvement in Terminology in Relation to Personal Psychological Problems,” reflected his dismay over the objectification of patients and the pathologization of their concerns.9 Another, “The Growth Experience and the Growth-Centered Attitude,” proposed a positive agenda for psychologists, offering a growth-oriented perspective that would supplant the dominant adjustment orientation. In it, he outlined the optimal goal of therapy—“the development of the full-valued personality,” characterized by “maximal democratic self-direction.”10

Sutich had taken his inspiration from the humanistically leaning psychologists who had preceded him. From Karen Horney, he drew the idea that the goal of analysis was not a finished product. Instead, the end of therapy was signaled by the patient’s ability to proceed on his own. Like Maslow, he took from Kurt Goldstein the concept of self-actualization. He also referred to Rogers’s concept of individual “impulses to growth” and, more generally, to the growth-oriented work of Alfred Adler, Henri Bergson, and Erich Fromm.11

Interestingly, though, Sutich had developed his approach without being aware of Maslow. In fact, he was entirely unfamiliar with Maslow’s work until the two were introduced by a mutual friend in 1949. The affinity of their interests was evident immediately, and Maslow made a strong impression. “He was the proverbial roaring lion,” wrote Sutich years later. “He just paced back and forth, slashing right and left: he couldn’t stand the adjustment people, he couldn’t stand the behaviorists, and neither could I. Both of us realized we were isolated from the mainstream of psychology.”12

They discussed, at length, the plight of humanistically oriented psychologists; funding was increasingly unavailable to them, and opportunities for publication pathetically few. Sutich later explained, “So overwhelming was the predominance of behaviorism that any publishable material outside its scope was typically met with scorn, ridicule, or even worse.”13

Sutich himself had been affected by publication biases, and had been unsuccessful in getting a journal to accept “The Growth Experience and the Growth-Centered Attitude.” Maslow, drawing on the academic capital he had acquired, arranged—just weeks after being apprised of the repeated rejections—for the paper to be published in the Journal of Psychology.14 Sutich more than returned the favor.

In 1957, Sutich proposed to Maslow the idea of a journal that would formalize the channels of communication between humanistically oriented psychologists, give them the assurance of publication, and transmit their ideas more widely. Unsurprisingly, Maslow was enthusiastic, offering his wholehearted support for the idea. Also unsurprisingly, he delegated the organization of the journal to Sutich. The grander Maslow’s vision became, the harder he found it to concern himself with the details.

“I guess one big factor underlying everything,” Maslow wrote in his journal, “is the feeling that I have so much to give the world—the Great Message—and that this is the big thing. Anything else that cuts it or gets in the way is ‘bad.’ Before I die, I must say it all.”15 It was imperative, he concluded, to delegate administrative duties, as well as the empirical testing of his theory, to his colleagues and students.

For Maslow, the late fifties were a time of building generative alliances that would empower his goals. Another vital connection was his relationship with Clark Moustakas, which had begun with the publication of The Self in 1956. Moustakas was a man not unlike Carl Rogers, a quiet but expressive man, a “careful listener” with an intuitive preference for freedom over authority.16 His unassuming nature, and his unwavering commitment to humanistic principles, were no doubt a complement to Maslow’s wilder enthusiasms.

In 1957 and 1958, Maslow and Moustakas hosted two meetings through the Merrill-Palmer Institute in Detroit that sowed the seeds for a professional association to follow. The early meetings established a catalog of themes that would come to define the humanistic vision—these included self-actualization, health, creativity, human potential, intrinsic nature, individuality, being, and meaning.17

Meanwhile, the organization of the journal progressed despite several challenges. The first was in finding a good title. Maslow and Sutich had initially agreed on the Journal of Ortho-psychology (from the Greek orthos, to straighten or correct), but when the Orthopsychiatric Association opposed the title, they discarded the idea. Maslow suggested other titles, like Psychological Growth, Being and Becoming, Personality Development, Existence, Third Force, and Self-Psychology, but nothing felt right. They eventually took the suggestion of Maslow’s son-in-law, then a psychology student at Brandeis, and named it the Journal of Humanistic Psychology (JHP).18

Whether or not the title was “good” was a matter of debate within the soon-to-coalesce movement. It was evocative, but it also caused confusion. The use of the term “humanistic” was meant to be a selective one. It was intended to draw out the ideals related to “humanism”— specifically dignity, worth, responsibilities, and fulfillment—but to oppose the modern association with atheism. As Sutich explained, he and Maslow hoped to reclaim the term, banking on the idea that “in the long run the positive, affirming, explicit value commitments of psychologists with this orientation would restore ‘humanistic’ to its original positive emphasis.”19 But the title did tend to cause confusion about the journal’s (and later the association’s) purpose. Early in the journal’s run, psychologist Gordon Allport worried that the label “humanistic psychology” implied “humanism without any scientific constraints,” whereas the movement that Allport hoped for was one that “might be said to have the outlook of humanism, but the constraints of science.” “Label not good,” he wrote.20 But it was too late. Humanistic psychologists were already sentenced to decades of explaining how they differed from humanists.21

Another impediment was the journal’s lack of funding. This particular burden fell on Sutich’s shoulders. The first meager infusion of money came from his personal savings and donations from his friends. Although the president of Brandeis, who had initially denied support of any kind, eventually agreed to sponsor the journal, he refused to fund it.22

In spite of these obstacles, the idea of the journal created a buzz. Even before the first issue was published in the spring of 1961, Sutich received numerous unsolicited manuscripts and expressions of interest. A host of psychological luminaries agreed to serve on the journal’s board of directors, most notably Kurt Goldstein, Aldous Huxley, Lewis Mumford, David Riesman, Erich Fromm, and soon-to-be-central figures in the movement like Rollo May, Carl Rogers, and Charlotte Bühler.

Sutich initially relied on a core of contributors to provide repeat submissions. Maslow published an article in virtually every issue—eleven of the first fifteen. Charlotte Bühler’s work was featured in seven of the first eighteen issues. Other frequent appearances were made by James Bugental, whose articles appeared in five of the first thirteen issues and whose column “Persons Behind Ideas” ran from the fourth through sixth volumes, and by Sidney Jourard, who made five contributions to the first nineteen issues of the journal.

Even from this fairly narrow base, however, the ideas being generated were expansive. The most common topics in the early years of the journal included the role of ideals and principles in the psychological conception of the self, individual striving for health and self-actualization, transcendence and peak experiences (spiritual or mystical experiences during which one is at one’s best), and creativity. These first issues were also testing grounds for therapeutic concepts that would become popular later on. The idea of “sensitivity training,” a form of group therapy involving open and direct communication, first appeared in the Spring 1963 issue of the journal in two separate articles.23

Early articles reflected the journal’s novel commitment to viewing human psychology in a positive light. Not only did they seldom deal with psychopathology in any capacity, many charted an explicitly hopeful, generative approach to human experience. Sometimes this positive orientation manifested in explicitly utopian visions, as in the case of Maslow’s article, “Eupsychia—The Good Society,” or in visions of transcendence, as in his article “Health as Transcendence of Environment.” More often, however, it was fairly down-to-earth. It didn’t propose that healthy people would always be happy, or even satisfied. Instead, it argued that human struggle would always have meaning, that people would always be striving, that conflict could always be productive. Even while exploring neurotic resistance to therapy, one early contributor proposed a growth theory. And, in tackling the alienation of identity, another envisioned a path toward personality integration.24

By collecting research and theory on creativity, autonomous motivation, goals, and values, Sutich and Maslow hoped to amass a body of research and theory to reorient the psychological conception of the individual. The individual, they hoped, might begin to be seen—at least by psychologists—as productive and driven rather than rotely dysfunctional or pathological. An emphasis on human capacities and potentialities might come to replace, or at least complement, the predominant fascination with weakness and deficit.25

By 1961, after decades of behaviorism, and more than half a century of positivistic methods, these goals resonated with a substantial subgroup of psychologists. Submissions proliferated; interest bloomed; praise flowed freely from subscribers. It quickly became clear to Sutich that an organization was required to unite the growing ranks of humanistic psychology.26 The American Association of Humanistic Psychology (AAHP) was established in 1962 at the first of a series of conferences sponsored by Sonoma State College.27 At this founding meeting, James Bugental, a psychotherapist who had formerly held a tenured position at the University of California, Los Angeles, was named president.

The first official meeting of the association occurred in the summer of 1963, in Philadelphia, and attracted 75 participants (attendance would double the following year).28 The meeting was professionally significant in establishing the new organization’s themes, which were broadly oriented around ideas of personal growth and the infusion of values into the supposedly value-free realms of empirical psychology. But even more powerful was the meeting’s personal significance to its participants, who, according to Sutich, felt they had created a new “belonging group” that would deliver them from professional and intellectual isolation and frustration.29

The new “belonging group” created by the formalization of humanistic psychology filled personal and cultural, as well as professional, needs. “My own work,” wrote Maslow in a journal entry, “has been a personal search for a personal answer to personally felt problems which I was trying to solve for myself & for the world at the same time.”30 He’d concluded that the peaks of human experience, like his experience of the birth of his daughter, were so profound on their own terms that they provided justification for the humanistic approach. At the same time the troughs of human awfulness—for Maslow, the rise of fascism—highlighted the necessity of adopting it as counterbalance.

Anthony Sutich too found an avenue of inquiry that resonated with his personal experience. Having spent his entire adult life on a gurney, without even the use of his arms, Sutich had cobbled together a professional identity and a vital psychotherapy practice, proving, in much the way Kurt Goldstein’s patients had, the innate human impulse toward growth and self-actualization. “He could tilt his head to the side, talk through clenched teeth, and move one of his hands,” wrote one humanistic psychologist, but he found ways to read (using a hanging device), to counsel (using an overhead mirror), to attend the foundational meetings of humanistic psychology, and to surpass the doctors’ predictions of his life expectancy by fifty years.31

Sutich was representative of humanistic psychologists who faced existential struggles beyond the average, and found ways (in the form of theories, values, belief systems) to conceive of them as meaningful. Real or imagined encounters with death were a particularly compelling motivation for becoming a humanistic psychologist; intensely focusing on personal meaning and values could serve as a generative way to reckon with a pressing sense of one’s mortality. Maslow was another prime example: the possibility of his death was never far from his field of vision. His recurrent debilitating fatigue, heart problems, and generally poor health drove him to systematically evaluate what he hoped to accomplish before his inevitably premature end.32

Rollo May’s existential confrontation was produced by a long bout of tuberculosis. During his “inner pitched battle between wanting to live and wanting to die,” he came to identify will, faith, and personal responsibility as constitutive of psychological and physical health.33 Confined to a sanatorium in upstate New York, stripped of his standard defenses—daily personal and professional distractions, sexual intimacy, and family responsibilities—he experienced firsthand the divisive nature of unmitigated anxiety.34 He concluded that it could crush you, weaken you, and cause you to succumb to illness and death, or it could raise you up, expand your sense of purpose, and compel you to engage more fully with your own life.

James Bugental, the American Association of Humanistic Psychology’s first president, sought a life-affirming theory in large part as a reaction to his own intense fear of death, which, though unrelated to any physical illness, could grow so acute at times that he would be nearly unable to breathe.35

As Harvard psychologist Gordon Allport wrote in 1960, “Suffering cleaves two ways: sometimes it seems to break, and sometimes to make, personality. Injury, disease, imprisonment, ‘brain washing’ often bring a permanent collapse and despair; but often, too, these same conditions bring firmness, richness and strength.”36

Many humanistic psychologists, when dangling over the cliff, had glimpsed, and then followed, the path back to a stronger foothold. Their minds bore the imprint of both the terror and relief that the precipice embodied. And they forged their theories as maps that might take psychologists and patients from the pit of pathology to the perch of mental health. In some cases, the theories themselves served as anchors for other would-be humanistic psychologists, nourishing their own inclinations toward life-affirming theory (as in the case of Maslow, who studied with Goldstein and Max Wertheimer, or May, who drew inspiration from Kierkegaard and Ludwig Binswanger—both European existentialists whose work he showcased in Existence).

Of the European immigrants who influenced and participated in humanistic psychology, Viktor Frankl’s trials were the most extreme. But the experience of political, intellectual, and cultural oppression under fascism shaped the views of many. Charlotte Bühler, for instance, lost first her funding, then her academic position, then her homeland due to the political instability in Vienna and her half-Jewish parentage. Bühler was an Austrian psychologist who, with her husband Karl Bühler, ran the world-renowned Vienna Psychological Institute and carried a ten-year grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. Shortly after Bühler was dismissed, her husband was arrested for his political beliefs and held in protective custody for six weeks; the two fled the country in 1938.37

Bühler’s experience of political persecution intensified her humanistic leanings. In her early work, she had focused on intentional behavior, adaptation, creativity, and personal style from infancy to adolescence. Against common practice, she had performed naturalistic observation, and had used case studies and subjective report as data. With her grant, she and her students analyzed children and adolescents in a Viennese adoption center. In an attempt to form a unified theory of normal stages of childhood development, they gathered everything from minute-by-minute observations to diary entries and intelligence tests.38

“I once believed,” she wrote, “that I had been carrying out behavior experiments like Watson, whose work I was studying just then. Only later did it become clear to me that—regardless of the design—what I observed were persons, and not reflexes. In fact, these early studies were, in a sense, precursory to humanistic psychology’s interest in the personal-as-a-whole.”39

Bühler’s later work overtly displayed the mark of her own struggles to remain a whole person in a politically and culturally broken environment. She extended her research beyond childhood and adolescence to the entire life cycle, and replaced the concept of homeostasis that had influenced her earlier work with the ideas of self-realization and life goals.40

In the 1930s and 1940s, the theories of most thoughtful psychologists (and certainly most of the Jewish ones) were influenced by the rise of the Nazis. Abe Maslow, who had been born in the United States to immigrant parents, would come to believe that his entire shift in orientation, out of behaviorism toward something more encompassing, had been related to his experience as a Jew, and to the feeling that narrow behaviorist theories had little to say about evils as pernicious as anti-Semitism and racism. “I learned later in psychoanalysis,” he wrote, “that much of my push and my change in direction came out of being the object of anti-Semitism (and also, therefore, of being especially horrified by anti-Negroism).”41

While the cultural circumstances of postwar America certainly weren’t as dramatic as Frankl’s experiences at Auschwitz, or those of Bühler and her colleagues in Vienna, they provided fertile enough ground for the positive assertions of humanistic psychologists. In 1962, the year of AAHP’s founding, many Americans were still deeply shaken by World War II and the scale of destruction it had involved. They were anxious as well about the possibility of nuclear annihilation. In 1962 alone, the US performed more nuclear tests than in any year before or since (nearly 100 separate tests in locations ranging from Nevada to the Johnston Atoll in the North Pacific and Eastern Kazakh, USSR).42

“If we talk in terms of probabilities,” Maslow explained, “I’d say there is a real probability that we must take into account that the world may be blown up and we with it. This is clearly possible.”43

The year brought a series of dramatic events that pitched Americans between optimistic and pessimistic extremes. The Cuban Missile Crisis, for example, evoked in many Americans a kind of opponent process, a contradictory emotional experience, in which Kennedy—in staring down Khrushchev—launched them to the height of their terror and the brink of nuclear war, before dramatically restoring them to a feeling of secure world dominance when the Soviets were reported to have balked and the immediate threat to have subsided.44

Civil rights activities in 1962 were similarly tumultuous, revealing both deep fear and hatred in American society and the desire to help and to heal. On September 30, when James Meredith, the first black student admitted to the University of Mississippi, tried to register for classes accompanied by four hundred federal marshals, a mob of more than two thousand people attacked them. The next day, three thousand federal troops quelled the riots, forcibly allowing Meredith to enroll.45

While these actions suggested that something was sick in American life, they also showed that organized cultural forces were rising to remedy the infection.46

Carl Rogers described the liberation effort as “a fresh current in our culture, a fresh breeze blowing through the world, that is showing itself in many ways and speaking through many voices.” “As I endeavor to understand this vigorous new cultural trend,” he said, “it seems to me to be the voice of subjective man speaking up loudly for himself. Man has long felt himself to be a puppet in life, molded by world forces, by economic forces. He has been enslaved by persons, by institutions, and, more recently, by aspects of modern science. But he is firmly setting forth a new declaration of independence. [ . . . ] He is choosing himself, endeavoring to become himself: not a puppet, not a slave, not a copy of some model, but his own unique individual self.”47

Rogers’s emphasis on the primacy of the self, and its potential for transcending societal obstacles, was a note that echoed through many levels of American society in the early 1960s. But it tended to sound the loudest when it came to civil rights.

Martin Luther King, Jr., in his address to Dartmouth College in 1962, framed the struggle for racial equality as a quest for “human dignity” and “freedom.” But at the same time that he demanded the protection of an individual’s selfhood, he also argued for the collective goal of elevating universal human worth. “The basic thing about a man,” he stated, “is not his specificity but his fundamental; not the texture of his hair or the color of his skin, but his eternal dignity and worth.” Because each man is intrinsically valuable, unique, and dignified, he argued, all men should have equal opportunities for fulfillment.48 Social change, then, would aim at the collective, but would come about by placing a greater value on the individual.

The New Left (a collection of liberal, radical movements centered primarily around student activism in the sixties) seconded this sentiment, proclaiming its regard for the self-determining individual. In the Port Huron Statement, drafted in 1962, the leaders of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) asserted: “The goal of man and society should be human independence: a concern not with the image of popularity but with finding a meaning in life that is personally authentic; a quality of mind not driven by a sense of powerlessness, nor one which unthinkingly adopts status values, nor one which represses all threats to its habits, but one which has full, spontaneous access to present and past experience, one which easily unites the fragmented parts of personal history, one which openly faces problems which are troubling and unresolved; one with an intuitive awareness of possibilities, an active sense of curiosity, an ability and willingness to learn.”49

Humanistic psychologists fed on these kinds of proclamations. Maslow’s journals, for example, are a testament to the inspiration he took from the social and intellectual movements of the 1960s. In a characteristically enthusiastic entry, he wrote, “The new Zeitgeist is value-full (value-directed, value-vectorial), human-need & metaneed centered (or based), moving toward basic-need gratification & metaneed metagratification—that is, toward full-humanness, Self-Actualization, psychological health, full-functioning human fulfillment, i.e., toward human perfection as the limit & as the direction.”50

For an optimist like Maslow, all the talk of social revolution cast a bright glow on America. Previously unforeseeable social changes came into focus; previously limited individuals suddenly looked capable of so much more. These perceptions were reinforced almost daily by the parade of individuals who pronounced, in what sounded to Maslow like a distinctly Maslowian style, a new era of the self.

The convergence of the rhetoric of the liberation of the self—in psychology, civil rights, and the student movement—was new, as was the scale on which the language was adopted. But the themes were not. Such “humanistic” concerns were embedded in the history of America. They related to individual worth, human dignity, rights, responsibilities, and fulfillment. They pertained to the racial inequalities made manifest in the treatment of Native Americans and of African slaves; to debates about the role of government that originated in the discrepant views of political parties; and to questions about the role of science and religion in the modern world. Rather than converging spontaneously once the 1960s dawned, they had roots in the 1950s.

In 1955, Allport had identified the existence of a “healthy and contrary trend in America.” In particular, he pointed to the liberalizing of philosophies of child rearing; to more holistic, humane treatment of workers in the industrial economy; and to the popularity of therapy as evidence of a growing belief that a “person must settle his own destiny” and that life presented an endless series of opportunities for the realization of growth.51

Allport saw humanistic psychology as an extension, and a culmination, of the kind of work he had been conducting for decades. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, his theory and research were consistently oriented toward the uniqueness of the individual and her attempts at harmonious existence in the social sphere. Marrying cultural interests with psychological concerns, he probed questions of religious experience at a time when many Americans were either turning their backs on traditional religion or seeking a reconceptualization of religious experience. He also probed at racial tolerance at a time when tensions over civil rights were high.

In the early 1960s, Allport continued to pursue topics like racial prejudice, but with a newfound optimism. “The age-old disorder of prejudice is beginning to yield to diagnosis and treatment, much as other endemic diseases have yielded,” he wrote in a collection of essays published in 1960. “We have, therefore, abundant reason to keep faith with all humane prophets of equimindedness in the past.”52 He saw gains in civil rights as related in large part to scientific progress. He noted that studies demonstrating the pathological nature of prejudice, and the environmental rather than genetic basis of many racial differences, had helped convince people to be more rational, compassionate, and understanding when it came to race.

Such progress for Allport stood against the backdrop of a broader reorientation of psychology toward the positive. As a pioneering “personality” psychologist—he had taught one of the first undergraduate personality seminars in the nation, titled Personality: Its Psychological and Social Aspects, as a lecturer at Harvard in 1924—Allport focused on establishing norms for the integrated, normal personality. In surveying scientific research in the field up to 1961, he found that a great deal of overlapping work could serve as a guide to determining the characteristics of a functional, real man, rather than an artificial ideal man or a symptomatic, pathological man. A mature individual, he concluded after sifting through theory and research, could be defined by his ever-extending sense of self, his warm relating to self and others, his emotional security, his realistic perceptions (free of prejudice or bigotry), his ability for self-objectification, and his unifying philosophy of life (religious or secular).53

Allport was one of a number of social scientists, mental health workers, and philosophers who had begun to focus on positive outcomes. He was also one of many who found in humanistic psychology a proper home for his interest in replacing the dominant abnormal paradigm with a health-focused psychology.

The founding of AAHP brought together a number of individual psychologists who had been struggling, in some cases for decades, to forge a definition of health that met the requirements of acceptable academic psychology. Above all, these concepts of health needed to be thoroughly scientific—both operationally valid and empirically based—to match, or preferably surpass, the conceptual weight of accepted categories of psychopathology.

Maslow doubted that most sympathetic psychologists fully grasped the extent of the transformation required to push psychology in this direction.54 It required more than just empirical testing of new categories. Because the definitions of health put forward by humanistic psychologists stepped into the realm of values far more conspicuously than did those of their counterparts in pathology, the discipline of psychology would require a dramatic overhaul to accommodate them. It would require a broadening of psychologists’ fundamental view of legitimate science. Maslow wrote, “Science has to be redefined & expanded to manage all human questions, including values = Taoistic, experiential, holistic science.”55

This redefined science would take an approach to human values that the more theoretically inclined would have identified as hermeneutic. By putting forth ideas about human values that “seemed” true, humanistic psychologists hoped to then catalyze a dialogue that would encompass a series of theoretical revisions, propelling the definition of “true” values ever closer to validity.56 Their scientific processes would mirror this cyclical, revisionary approach. Just as mainstream psychologists empirically tested concepts by repeated investigation into reliability and validity that incorporated only minor modifications, humanistic psychologists planned to fine-tune their theories by continually testing their assumptions against data (both subjective and experimental) gained from their investigations and discussions.

Both Maslow and Sidney Jourard had written explicitly about the dialogic process by which they hoped to arrive at a functional definition of the concept of health. In Jourard’s 1958 book Personal Adjustment: An Approach Through the Study of Healthy Personality, he recognized the subjective territory into which he needed to travel in order to quantify health. He also argued, however, that such subjectivity was actually at the root, historically, of mainstream psychological methods. The steps humanistic psychologists would take to define the values of health, he contended, mirrored the process mainstream psychologists had used to arrive at ostensibly objective scientific categories and operational definitions of illness.57

Jourard’s scale of health demonstrated the hermeneutic approach put into practice. The scale covered areas like family relationships, eating and drinking habits, and workplace dynamics, and enabled psychologists to evaluate individuals on a five-point scale of fulfillment for each component of health. In establishing the scope of the scale, Jourard claimed that “we needn’t be that blind, because we already have some intelligent guesses about some of the determiners of optimum, ongoing, ‘wellness-yielding’ personality.”58 Heretically, Jourard argued that his own experience as a thinking, feeling, observing person had qualified him to make some preliminary guesses about what would constitute “true” health. His survey, designed to quantify “wellness,” demonstrated these initial guesses: on a scale of marital health, for example, he included the following spectrum, ranging from unhealthy to healthy:

1. Feels a complete failure as a spouse. Gets no satisfactions out of being a spouse.

2. Can perform marital role with borderline adequacy, gets no enjoyment out of it.

3. Adequate as a spouse, gets more satisfactions than frustrations out of it.

4. Adequate as a spouse, gets positive satisfaction out of it.

5. Adequate as a spouse, the relationship is growing.59

Jourard’s assessment of the “ideal” state of marriage portrayed what he believed to be the implicit condition of health: not a static state of achievement, but a dynamic state of continuous progress. This stood in sharp contrast to cultural illusions about happy marriages, which dictated that they be eternally romantic and consistently conflict-free.

Maslow had been consulted on Jourard’s work, and in touting its value, he leveraged his own academic reputation to support the scientific risk Jourard was taking by moving into this realm.60 While Maslow’s 1950 study of self-actualizers had been risky, it had softened psychologists a bit on unconventional attempts to quantify health. The numerous psychological studies that followed up on Maslow’s pilot study—many performed by researchers unknown to Maslow—supported his initial hypotheses. They demonstrated substantial overlap in the identifiable qualities of self-actualized or healthy individuals, which suggested there was something valid and repeatable about these rather preliminary theories. Even Thomas Szasz, a reputable psychiatrist with a firm foundation in medical science, was ultimately convinced by the early 1960s that Maslow wasn’t just arbitrarily creating notions of sickness and health as good and bad.61

While Jourard had forged his theories of healthy characteristics from his intuition, and Maslow had drawn on his observations of healthy friends and historical figures, Rogers garnered his impressions from his clinical work. In 1962, in a collection aimed at educational reform, Rogers described these observations, noting that the healthy individual seemed increasingly open to experience, and decreasingly defensive. He exemplified this point in an excerpt from a session in which his “client” began to find himself more open to his bodily experiences (of pain, exhaustion, and pleasure) as he got healthier. The healthy individual, he argued, had a fuller sense of being, an engagement with the process of existence, and an acceptance of life’s fluid nature. A patient might experience this as a sense of forever becoming more himself, reorganizing and integrating himself even beyond the point at which therapy ends. Rogers also noticed that a healthy individual possessed a holistic self-trust; rather than confining decisions to the head, the heart, or specific data, the healthy individual would rely on his own experience, his total reaction, to dictate his direction. He likened this process to the method by which a computer instantaneously takes in all input, weighs it, and offers an approximation of the best way to meet its varied needs.62

The outlines of health offered by Rogers, Jourard, and Maslow differed somewhat in their specifics, but the substantial areas in which they overlapped constituted the very ground of humanistic psychology. These ideas were the basis of a superstructure of human potential. Taken as a whole, and interpreted beyond their descriptive detail, they suggested the possibilities of human existence, the goals for a good and meaningful life.

Humanistic psychologists’ overarching view of human nature was simple in its form, but complex in its implications. To summarize it concisely, it was the romanticist belief that people are good. Most humanistic psychologists, Rollo May excepted, felt that humans were innately driven toward wholeness, and that their underlying nature was positive.63 Rather than thinking that pathology, or even evil, naturally arose from individuals, they saw it as a product of an unhealthy environment. Their concept of human nature evoked Rousseau’s notion that the natural state of man was characterized by a generative self-love (amour de soi), and uncorrupted by a socially imposed, competitive pride (amour-propre). Although they tended to subscribe to Freud’s concept of the unconscious, they refused to define id impulses as “dark” and expanded these desires to include those for creation, inspiration, humor, and love.64

This positively oriented view of human nature served as the basis of a humanistic theory of individual motivation. Unimpeded, most humanistic psychologists believed, individuals would strive for self-actualization (according to Maslow, though, about 98 percent of us would be impeded). Evidence of this upward striving appeared repeatedly in psychotherapy, Rogers and others argued, where the creation of a healthy environment eroded obstacles to higher motivations, and helped to revise prior negative experiences that had blocked individuals’ true natures from materializing.

In the early years of AAHP, the founding members wrangled over the specifics of the theory of human nature they embraced. For most, ideas of motivation were fairly nuanced, though they didn’t depart too dramatically from the previous incarnations of human nature as laid out by psychoanalysts and behaviorists. Charlotte Bühler, for example, attempted to define explicitly these four “basic tendencies” of the individual:

1. Satisfying one’s needs (for love, sex, ego, and recognition)

2. Making self-limiting adaptations (by fitting in, belonging, and remaining secure)

3. Moving toward creative expansion (through self-expression and creative accomplishments)

4. Upholding and restoring the inner order (by being true to one’s conscience and values)65

Bühler’s sketch was in line with a variety of theories that had preceded it. The first tendency fit with an id-driven theory of needs gratification as much as it did with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, or a behaviorist’s idea of adaptive instincts. The second tendency also aligned with a psychoanalytic perspective, like the one outlined in Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, in which the requirements of existing as an individual within a civilization entailed a fair amount of self-limiting adaptation, and it paralleled the behaviorist theory of environmental conditioning. The last tendency, to uphold and restore inner order, reflected Freud’s concept of psychic homeostasis—the balanced tension of the tripartite psyche (id, ego, and superego)—as much as it did Maslow’s being values or B-values, which were the highest values derived from peak experiences, including the appreciation of wholeness, beauty, truth, simplicity, and more.

Bühler’s third proposition, though, displayed the departure of humanistic theory from the first and second forces of psychology. The idea that it was a basic human tendency to move toward creative expansion (essentially to grow) involved a reenvisioning of the individual in a bold, new light, and was difficult even for many within humanistic psychology to accept. This was partly because the proposition didn’t resonate with everyone’s experience. Where was the darkness, the cracks, the pathos? Hadn’t we all met, in others or ourselves, evil, or at least extreme shittiness? It was also troubling, to many, because it seemed to lead away from an ethic of individual responsibility: if all negative behaviors were the consequence of the environment distorting the intrinsic goodness of the individual, then were people ever really at fault for the evil acts they did?

Rogers tended to see the matter most simplistically. For him, evil behaviors originated from cultural influences. “I see members of the human species,” wrote Rogers in a correspondence with Rollo May, “as essentially constructive in their fundamental nature, but damaged by their experience.”66 This idea was appealing, in part because it made evil acts seem preventable, controllable. It offered an alternative, in the world that Hitler made, to the idea that the dark side of human nature knew no bounds. And it took the blame off individuals, allowing for a practice like psychotherapy to absolve them of their guilt.

When it came to human nature, Maslow also agreed that people were basically good, or could be made good. “Good social conditions,” he wrote, “are necessary for personal growth, bad social conditions stunt human nature . . .”67 But for Maslow, the equation was never as straightforward as it was for Rogers. He criticized Rogers, in fact, for being too simplistic. “Rogers doesn’t have enough sin, evil, & psychopathology in his system,” he wrote in his journal. “He speaks of the only drive as self-actualization, which is to imply there is only a tendency to health.”68 Maslow feared that Rogers was being Pollyannaish, and that it was irresponsible to disentangle negative actions from the conglomerated self. Health, after all, entailed an acceptance of our imperfection, rather than a sanding off (or denial) of our rough edges.

Rollo May was an even harsher critic. He saw Rogers’s ideas as seductive, but dangerously naïve. Pathology, like health, he felt, was a product of the individual, and viewing destructive behavior solely as a product of culture didn’t make sense. Cultures consisted of people, he argued, and to construct them as outside forces acting on individuals was illogical. More likely, he felt, culture reflected individuals themselves. It contained good and evil components, productive and destructive elements. “Yes, the culture admittedly has powerful effects on us,” wrote May to Rogers. “But it could not have these effects were these tendencies not already present in us, for, I repeat, we constitute the culture.”69 May also suggested that positive change could only emerge from individual change, and did not exist as a disembodied cultural current that would sweep us all along.

Rogers’s assumption that people were good was unreconcilable with much of May’s theory, which rested on the idea of the productive value of negative emotion. May preferred to characterize the individual by the concept of the daimonic—“the urge in every being to affirm itself, assert itself, perpetuate and increase itself.” “If the daimonic is integrated into personality,” wrote May, “it results in creativity, is constructive.” The unintegrated daimonic would result in destructive behavior.70

Although at odds, Rogers’s and May’s perspectives both effectively pointed to the potential cultural value of psychotherapy as a human practice, and to the potential value of focusing on the individual’s capacity for health (rather than on her deficits). Rogers felt the psychotherapeutic relationship could heal by acting as a corrective to an individual’s unhealthy relationship to the culture. Healthy conditions in therapy had the power to negate negative cultural influences, enabling people to realize their true potential and to thrive. At the same time, May held that psychotherapy could serve as an integrating force, channeling our daimonic energies toward positive ends. Essential to this integration, however, was a balanced view of the individual, an affirmation of his positive and negative emotions. A Rogerian therapist, May feared, might fail to validate an individual’s angry and aggressive feelings. By being too nice and cheery, a therapist might also deprive an individual of an object against which to work out some of his negative emotions.71

The differences in Rogers’s and May’s perspectives on human nature were emblematic of fissures built into the movement. Although it was possible to make generalizations about humanistic psychology (it was positively oriented, health- and growth-focused, interested in innate strivings toward one’s potential), in 1962 the specifics were up for grabs. Early meetings were directed toward a unifying vision, but there were times when the movement resembled little more than a pastiche of overlapping but ultimately dissimilar theories.

Recognizing the difficulty of unifying the fledgling movement in the direction of cohesive theory, Gordon Allport wrote, “all of us [ . . . ] sense significant pattern, maybe few central qualities.”72 The lack of a cohesive theory made it easy for adherents to pick and choose the elements that best justified their own designs. Just as many Americans had excerpted from psychoanalysis the elements that best aligned with their own interests (the importance of early childhood, the rational division of the mind, individual solutions to collective problems) while downplaying the most dissonant aspects (childhood sexuality, the death instinct), those interested in humanistic psychology would find in the 1960s the opportunity to interpret humanistic psychology in ways that validated even their baser interests (their self-absorption, their hedonism, even their denial of harsh social realities).73