“So great good can come out of nutty precursors who dimly see a real truth but in a crapped-up form. Progress is partly in reworking the crap & rephrasing in a more scientific way the truths that were mixed up with chaff.”
ABRAHAM MASLOW1
The questions of how to be scientific and how scientific to be loomed large for humanistic psychologists from the start. They knew that to speak to other academics, to influence professionals, to push the whole of American psychology in a positive new direction, they had to live in the real world, which meant they had to keep themselves from getting too far up in their heads, too theoretical, too ungroundedly idealistic. In addition to formalizing their scientific commitments and concretizing their approach, they needed to conduct scientific studies that built on the foundations of prior research. And they needed to publish them.
At the same time, however, humanistic psychologists hoped to revise orthodox science. They proposed a “resacralized” vision of science, in which the “idiotic” pursuit of singular scientific truths had ceased, and in which personal value commitments openly guided research.2 This practice would be more inclusive of human experience and human potential, and would be built on methods intended to capture the complexity of complete individuals rather than reduce them to their components. It would be directed at practical ends, bridging abstract theory and applications, always mindful that the usefulness of a theory was the supreme marker of its value.
Among the founders, Carl Rogers was the model of this new form of science, combining a carefulness in his methods with an honesty about his goals. He devised a scale to measure process change in psychotherapy; he created and tested a personal adjustment inventory; he performed several methodologically sound studies of psychotherapeutic outcomes with schizophrenics.3 At the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute, he conducted extensive research on the efficacy of his client-centered approach and of group psychotherapy.4 He broadcast his work far and wide, publishing six books between 1962 and 1972, as well as over fifty articles. Even Maslow, who could be fiercely critical of Rogers, was impressed by the rigor of his research, and grateful for the legitimacy it lent to the movement. “My respect for Rogers,” wrote Maslow, “grows & grows because of his researches.”5
Maslow’s case was more complicated. He was undeniably prolific: over the course of the 1960s, he published three books (Toward a Psychology of Being in 1962, Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences in 1964, and Eupsychian Management in 1965), and more than fifty articles. But by this point in his career he no longer performed scientific studies, and no longer wanted to. In his journal, he tended to blame his students and his peers for not following up on his theory of human motivation with solid empirical testing.6 Only in his darker moments did he blame himself.7
The ideological, if not the practical, priority early humanistic psychologists placed on science was displayed at their first invitational conference, an event they came to see as their “founding moment.” The Old Saybrook Conference, which took place in the coastal town of Old Saybrook, Connecticut, and lasted from Friday, November 28, to Sunday, November 30, 1964, consisted of seven presentations and a panel discussion, all related to the science of humanistic psychology.
The conference was organized by Robert Knapp, a professor of psychology at Wesleyan University, and supported by the fundraising efforts of Victor Butterfield, the president of Wesleyan, who was also in attendance.8 It was held at the Saybrook Inn, an elegant resort with abundant views of boats docked on coastal waters, several smoky bars, and plenty of quiet spaces in which to lay the intellectual foundations of humanistic psychology. Additional sessions were held on the Wesleyan campus, which was a thirty-minute drive from Old Saybrook.9
The meetings—like many such conferences of the time—consisted of a bunch of academic guys. The lynchpins of humanistic psychology were all present: Carl Rogers, Abe Maslow, Rollo May, Gordon Allport, Gardner Murphy, Henry Murray, James Bugental, Clark Moustakas, and Sidney Jourard, as well as soon-to-be-central figures like Miles Vich (future editor of the Journal of Humanistic Psychology). But nonpsychologists were represented, too. In addition to Butterfield, Jacques Barzun—the dean of Columbia University—was present, as were a phenomenologist from Cornell, a cultural historian from Berkeley, and a biologist from Rockefeller University. Of the psychologists present, the majority identified as social and personality psychologists, though most performed clinical work as well.10 Only two women participated: Charlotte Bühler, then a practicing psychologist in California, and Norma Rosenquist, the first organizational secretary for the American Association of Humanistic Psychology.
The tone of the conference was, predictably, intellectual and relatively subdued: it bore little resemblance to the radically experiential gatherings that would take place under the umbrella of humanistic psychology in the years to come.11 It followed the standard format of an academic conference. However, the participants later described it as having a spark that was missing from most gatherings of its kind. The speakers were impassioned. At their best, they were provocative, incisive, and even inspiring.
Henry Murray, who was known for his piquant critiques of academic psychology, didn’t disappoint. He opened the conference on Friday night with an unconventional keynote address/performance, titled “A Preliminary Sub-Symposium.” In it, he divided his own persona into three alters who argued about the purpose and future of humanistic psychology.
The first, Si, represented the type of humanistic psychologist who thought that by developing a unified theory, the movement could singularly deliver the field of psychology from the “Land of Bondage” (academic departments of psychology). Si himself had attempted to sift through the “immense output” of his productive colleagues to find the common ground on which humanistic psychology could rest.
The second alter, Mo, symbolized the naïve belief that humanistic psychology would be readily accepted as a complement to other scientific disciplines (physics and chemistry) and psychological approaches (behaviorism) and that it would build on rather than negate prior insights. He was a general researcher who had never taken a psychology course nor been subjected to the “initiation rites and mutilations” of the discipline.
The third alter, Dy, synthesized the ideas of the others, arguing for the necessity of engaging in genuine dialogue in order to arrive at a functional conception of humanistic psychology. “We are accustomed in our business,” he explained, “to polylogues, monologues, and long-winded monopologues such as Mo indulges in, but not to two-person confrontation, veritable dialogues.”12 Dy wisely argued for the necessity of not attaching intractably to one perspective and thereby reproducing the very habit that humanistic psychologists had criticized in others. He reminded his colleagues that they personally needed to cultivate the openness their own theory ascribed to healthy individuals.
Murray’s talk introduced the basic challenges that faced humanistic psychology. It would have to depart from conventional academic methods without alienating academicians and students of psychology. At the same time that he displayed his vitriol for academic psychology, “a straight jacket to a man who is yearning for functional autonomy,” he recognized the necessity of appealing, in particular, to graduate students. In his notes for the talk, he asked “whether we have anything in our heads that is comparable to the First Force: anything formulated that we can all subscribe to, anything that will appeal to the kind of all-A students that are nowadays selected for admission to our various graduate schools.”13
Murray’s concerns had been gnawing away at him for decades. In 1935, he published “Psychology and the University,” a paper in which he offered an extensive critique of the failings of academic psychology. “If psychology is defined as the science which describes people and explains why they perceive, feel, think and act as they do,” wrote Murray, “then, properly speaking, no science of the kind exists.” He referred to psychologists as “encrusted specialists” from whose “web of activity consideration of man as a human being has somehow escaped.” Attacking academic psychology specifically, he argued that researchers had contributed nothing more than “unusable truths.”14
At Saybrook, Murray expressed his fear that humanistic psychologists, who represented diverse perspectives and approaches, would have trouble righting these wrongs. “How would they come together to form a cohesive vision, with a shared purpose and goals?” he wondered. He also worried that humanistic psychology wouldn’t be able to live up to the challenge it had created in defining itself as a “third force.” Its theory, its research—its firepower—would have to match that of both behaviorism and psychoanalysis. In his notes for his presentation he indicated his disdain for the term “third force,” although he never spoke of the full extent of his condemnation (the lines were crossed out). “It has a militant ring to it,” he wrote, “which makes me thing [sic] of deGaulle or a stock-pile of conceptual explosives. Isn’t it a little premature? a little inflated? a challenge to Nemesis to punish us for intellectual hubris?”15
Rollo May saw the challenge differently. He was invigorated by the idea of rivaling the first and second forces. His Saturday morning talk, “Intentionality, The Heart of Human Will,” suggested that his own contribution would be one of intellectual weight and substance. He would attempt to back up the grandiose claims of humanistic psychologists, and would try to inspire others to do the same.
May discussed the concept of intentionality, an idea meant to refer not to voluntary intention—the aims we are consciously aware of—but to a more holistic conception of both meaning and action that spans the conscious and unconscious. “Intentionality,” he explained, “refers to a state of being, and involves to a greater or lesser degree the totality of the person’s orientation to the world at that time.” He argued for its relevance to psychotherapy, and its value in explaining all human action as motivated by a sense of meaning. And he indicted academic psychology for its omission of this concept, claiming that its absence impoverished our understanding of human experience and consciousness.16
In advocating for the inclusion of studies of intentionality in the realm of psychology, May argued, by extension, for the use of existential and phenomenological ideas, like those he explored in Existence. Such ideas would serve as whetstones against which humanistic psychologists could sharpen the insights they’d arrived at on their own, and they would add weight and depth in those areas where their theories were shallow. They would also, he believed, impart to the young science of humanistic psychology some of the prestige of European philosophy.
May’s talk was significant for other reasons, as well. By offering a well-developed and specific model of the humanistic approach, he provided concrete ammunition for combating behaviorism. He urged a more nuanced conception of what academic psychology was lacking. And he presented a humanized conception of psychology that would appeal to Americans, who were invested in both science and subjectivity.
As May described it, phenomenology was noteworthy for the fullness with which it treated data.17 In contrast, the mainstream practice of psychology had evolved through a process of exclusion—of various objects of study, of overly subjective data—and a commitment to emulating the natural sciences. The unfortunate products had been a susceptibility to reductionism and a tendency toward logical positivism (manifested in the assumption that value-free singular truths were discernible). These consequences, humanistic psychologists felt, were disastrous for individuals. As psychologist Edward Shoben, who presented just after May, argued, “When a man treats himself as he treats heat, light, and electricity, he denudes himself of the very traits that make him distinctive in the universe, and his efforts at understanding are therefore sharply curtailed.”18
Psychologists erred as well, Shoben argued, in treating the philosophy of logical positivism as a “prescriptive set of procedural rules.” Within these limits, the only problems psychologists were free to tackle were the ones that conformed to the methods they used.19
But Shoben wasn’t arguing for the devaluation of quantitative methods. In fact, he saw humanistic psychology as promising precisely because of its intention to build on, rather than abandon, these empirical bases.
“Psychology’s great opportunity,” he said, “lies not in discarding its sturdily expanding methodological apparatus, but in informing it with the humanistic vision, the quest for an even fuller statement of the ‘law for man’ as against the law of thing. What this transformation most profoundly demands is a revised focus on the source of problems. Rather than coming from the structure of a science modeled on physics, problems could more fruitfully be derived from direct experience—of self, of interpersonal relations, of society, of education and art, of science and religion, etc.”20
In a similar way, other Saybrook presenters argued for a humanistic psychology that would expand on, rather than discredit, the work that had preceded theirs. This meant, most importantly, that they would build on psychoanalytic and behavioristic theory and research.
Despite the popular misconception that humanistic psychologists intended to discard the insights of previous movements, Maslow aimed for humanistic psychology to be “epi-Freudian,” “epi-behavioristic,” and “epi-positivistic.” By “epi-Freudian,” he meant, “building upon Freud. Not repudiating, not fighting, not either-or, no loyalties or counter-loyalties. Just taking for granted his clinical discoveries, psychodynamics, etc. insofar as they are true. Using them, building upon them the superstructure which they lack. This does not involve swallowing any of his mistakes.” Comparably, by speaking of “epi-behaviorism” and “epi-positivism,” Maslow was asserting that humanistic psychologists should begin with the traditions and insights of academic psychology, and then refine, adopt, reject, replace, or expand upon them according to what they learned through the application of their new methods and theories.21
In Carl Rogers’s Saturday afternoon speech, he praised the scientific virtues of behaviorism. “I value the concepts which are near and dear to the heart of the behavioral sciences,” he said. “The concern with observable behavior, the casting of all variables in operational terms, the adequate testing of hypotheses, the use of increasingly sophisticated design and statistics, all have meaning to me.”22 Rogers described himself as a true scientist—passionate about testing hypotheses, awed by the precision and elegance of empiricism.
His ideal, then, was to balance hard experimental science with complex subjective experience. For him, humanistic psychology existed between the polar extremes of psychoanalysis and behaviorism. It possessed qualities of both, but wasn’t a fanaticist’s religion. It was moderate, and thus more flexible. It was in dialogue with both sides but rejected the closed systems of the extremes.
Mainstream psychological science, and behaviorism in particular, were, for the founders of humanistic psychology, manifestations of a trend toward reduction, control, and mechanization that they saw as endemic to American culture as a whole. This inclination, many argued, was motivated by 1950s fears related to the degradation of traditional values and the more concrete threat of nuclear annihilation. Behavioral control promised a kind of orderliness that felt safe, but that, in reality, threatened the very nature of human existence. “It appears to me,” stated Rogers, “that many of the modern trends would indicate that we are moving inexorably toward a world in which men will be no more than conditioned ants in a gigantic anthill.”23
Biologist René Dubos, who presented later on Saturday evening, recognized, for good or ill, the tremendous powers that technological advances had granted us, including the ability to alter our lives, manipulate our environment, even change our physiology. He argued that the grave danger of science lay not in the acquisition of these new powers, but in failing to establish positive values to guide them. Without identifying our ideals and taking a stand, he warned, “we shall find ourselves drifting aimlessly toward a state incompatible with the maintenance of the humanistic values from which we derive our uniqueness.”24
Dubos’s presence at Old Saybrook testified to the significance of humanistic psychology to the pressing issues of the time. Dubos, who had begun his career as a soil microbiologist, had earned fame from his contributions to the development of the first antibiotics in the 1940s. In the years that followed he had turned from a “bench” science focused on experimental results to a humanistic science focused on human values.25 His main interest in the 1960s was in trying to create a science of human nature, one that was sensitive to an individual’s environment and sought to define health as creative adaptation.26
Although it’s unclear how Dubos found his way to the conference, his intellectual and personal affinity for Maslow, Rogers, and others is quite apparent. While his peers in biology sought absolute truths and flew to reductionistic extremes, Dubos kept an eye on the complexity of phenomena, and deemed the assumed rationality and orderliness of the scientific method to be an illusion.27 His concern for the social context of all science reflected the kinds of concerns Maslow and others prioritized. He urged scientists to identify their personal and social goals, and make “courageous choices” based on subjective judgments and ethical standards before embarking on research.28
In a way atypical of a biologist, Dubos viewed good science as contextualized inquiry informed by subjective evaluation. “Indeed, it is commonly stated,” he explained at Old Saybrook, “that biology has lost contact with the humanities because it has become too ‘scientific’ and as a consequence no longer deals with the problems peculiar to the humaneness of man. There is no doubt, of course, about the loss of contact, but the explanation of the difficulty, in my judgment, is that biology is not scientific enough.”29
The isolation of biology, like the isolation of psychology, indicated to humanistic psychologists a larger cultural trend—one of compartmentalization, dehumanization, reduction. In his Sunday morning presentation, “Humanistic Science and Transcendent Experiences,” Maslow described this trend as our present Weltanschauung, or worldview. He warned against the dangers of indulging our desire for control, of clinging to a false sense of order and security, of channeling our fears into suspicion and obsession.30
Speaking in the generalizations that were becoming more and more characteristic of him, he indicted conventional science, and standard scientific training, for its cowardice and aversion to risk. Normal scientists, he argued, clung too tightly to illusions of objectivity; they were overly cautious, fearful, small, unworthy, stubborn, and obsessive. They were “coral-reef makers rather than eagles.”31 They were a local manifestation of a cultural response to global threats (of nuclear annihilation, racial strife, the dissolution of traditional values) characterized by extreme caution and obsessive fear. They were small men who cowered in bomb shelters rather than trying to remake the world that had caused their fear in the first place.
In contrast, researchers willing to discard orthodox science in favor of a more humanized conception were tall men, able to grasp and generate big ideas.32 They were “worthy” of great thought. They were models of full human development.
Maslow’s comments were self-congratulatory. They were also an expression of uncertainty. He knew he had been bold, and had gone out on a limb with his theory, and he was energized by the risks he had taken.33 At the same time, though, he suffered from recurrent self-doubt and anxiety. He was wary of the extent to which he subjected himself to scrutiny and laid bare his own insecurities, and knew he couldn’t survive long without approval from his peers.34
Their pursuit of intuitive convictions put humanistic psychologists in a vulnerable place. And they felt that vulnerability. They also believed, however, that there was a certain honesty in their own admission of subjectivity that was absent in the perspectives of more conventional scientists. After all, they argued, all science rests on subjectivity. By relying on induction and intuition, they weren’t doing anything differently from any other scientist. More traditional scientists invoked their own values daily when they decided what to study, how to study it, and how to interpret the results.
“I have come to realize,” Rogers stated at Saybrook, “that all science is based on a recognition—usually prelogical, intuitive, involving all the capacities of the organism—of a dimly sensed gestalt, a hidden reality.” He saw the intuitive leaps being made by humanistic psychologists as categorically similar to the leaps made by all scientists, when accepting all truths, no matter how “objectively” they were deduced. “All knowledge,” claimed Rogers, “including all scientific knowledge, is a vast inverted pyramid resting on [a] tiny, personal subjective base.”35
These were the kinds of inductive leaps Maslow had called “pre-science.” He had argued that all science began on shaky ground, born from common-sense assumptions and the intuitions and values of researchers. As long as researchers were human, we would never be able to distill scientific pursuits to purely objective bases. And it was better, Maslow and Rogers agreed, to honestly identify one’s values and potential biases than to allow them to inform research covertly.36
The final presenter, a clinical psychologist from Ohio State named George Kelly, again took up the argument for the necessity of the kind of pre-science Maslow was talking about.37 Scientists needed to be open-minded and flexible, he argued, rather than guided by rigid expectations. He warned against “the notion that we ought always to be right before we commit ourselves,” and advocated instead for the creation of an academic climate that would allow researchers to concede mistakes and revise their constructions.38 The scientific method itself depended on a hypothetical leap, but too many researchers stuck to safe hypotheses that were readily verifiable.
He warned that the entire stimulus-response paradigm, on which psychologists relied so heavily, was overly narrow and would lead to interpretational errors. By relying solely on observable behavior and making the assumption that intentions could be objectively deduced from actions, stimulus-response theorists, he found, often got it totally wrong. In the case of aggressive behavior, for example, an observer would ascribe aggressive intent to the actor, and would blind herself to cases in which the aggressive behavior was intended to elicit positive change. Aggression could be initiative, argued Kelly. The aggressive person could be doing something wrong to set something right. From his perspective, subjectivity was key, and accurate assessment could only be gained by also looking at personal evaluations.39
Although Kelly was a humanistic psychologist, he was also a cognitivist. He was best known for his Personal Construct Theory, which suggested that individual perspectives were formed and reinforced through expectations and experience.40 His presence at the conference, like the presence of others with distinct perspectives, suggested humanistic psychology was a broadly encompassing orientation that was more about a philosophy of science than any one specific theory. This generalism was a source of strength, but it was also an impediment. The varied perspectives humanistic psychology embodied were hard to unify, and hard to pin down in practical terms.
The founders themselves were conflicted (amongst themselves and within themselves) about what they wanted humanistic psychology to be. They hoped to translate their philosophy of science into a concrete school of psychology that could rival the interests that had oppressed them. But they tended to fall down in conducting the foundational research that would build the scientific superstructure of humanistic psychology, and in their own professional lives the tendency was to move away from the kinds of affiliations and alliances that might actually bring an influential school of psychology into being. Rogers’s research was valuable, but it was inadequate, in itself, to concretize and operationalize a humanistic psychology movement. Murray maintained an often tense appointment at Harvard, where his interests were at odds with those of the larger department of psychology and of the university. And Maslow had ceased to perform his own research.
In order to produce research output on a scale that would rival behaviorism, humanistic psychology needed greater numbers. But while the numbers in the movement would grow dramatically in the coming years, they wouldn’t be the right kind of numbers. The ranks would fill with psychologists who were drawn to the irreverence of the theory, or to what was perceived as its defiance of traditional academic practice. Others would seek the thrill of the derivative experiential techniques. Far fewer would join the movement in order to perform meticulous, systematic research.
A few participants came away from the Saybrook with presentiments of these problems. They feared that humanistic psychologists’ resources were inadequate to achieve the grand goals they had proposed. And they worried that the collection of humanistic theories the movement embodied didn’t hang together. Despite his respect for figures like Maslow, May, and Rogers, Murray concluded that the “third force” was “at once strident and confused.”41 He doubted its ability to effect meaningful change within mainstream psychology.42 He also questioned his own ability to contribute meaningfully to the movement and declared the guiding vision and dimensions of humanistic psychology difficult to articulate. He was the only participant unwilling to publish his contributions to the conference, deeming them unworthy.43
Murray was in the minority, however. Most of the presenters, and participants, at Old Saybrook left the conference enthusiastic, inspired by the insights shared, renewed by their connection to like-minded scholars, and ready to chart a new course for the field. In his journal, Maslow described his satisfaction with the meeting, focusing in particular on the sense of kinship he was beginning to feel in his efforts to remake psychology.44 Gordon Allport described the “overwhelming enthusiasm” of fellow participants, identifying humanistic psychology not as “a school, or a person, or a theory of Personality, but a ground swell.”45