“The way to change a society must necessarily be to change it simultaneously on all fronts, in all its institutions, ideally even, in all its single individuals within the society . . .”
ABRAHAM MASLOW1
Maslow and Allport’s belief that America was on the verge of greatness seemed to be confirmed at all levels of society. With the early displays of the student movement (the birth of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, for example), and the dawn of American youth culture (signified by the frenzy of the Beatles’ 1964 tour), younger Americans already inclined toward optimism seemed poised to help bring about a new and better age. In 1964, Martin Luther King, Jr., was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law and created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to enforce it. These gains suggested that the dedicated effort to improve race relations now had support at the highest levels. These new measures applied to women, as well, who were (at least in theory) also protected by the Equal Pay Act.2
Also in 1964, President Johnson described an ideal for America that sounded strikingly like Eupsychia. The “Great Society,” he proclaimed, “is a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community. . . . It is a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods. . . . But most of all, the ‘Great Society’ is not a safe harbor, a resting place, a final objective, a finished work. It is a challenge constantly renewed, beckoning us toward a destiny where the meaning of our lives matches the marvelous products of our labor.”3
As Americans paused between the death of John F. Kennedy and the intense and deeply disturbing escalation of the Vietnam War, they were buoyed by such rhetoric. It spoke to what one psychiatrist writing for the New York Times termed their “hypomanic” orientation—bounding energy, optimism, and lust for freedom. He described Americans as possessing a commitment to autonomy and individual freedom that was unparalleled not only in all the world, but in the entire history of mankind.4
Within psychology and psychotherapy, this liberatory optimism didn’t manifest as a consensus in which all scholars and practitioners agreed they had found a universal theory or methodological approach that would reign supreme. Instead, it manifested as a dissolution of consensus. Pluralism in perspectives was now the rule. Psychology departments expanded their course offerings dramatically in the decades following World War II. Texas A&M, for example, added classes on human motivation; learning; personality adjustment; and comparative, abnormal, child, differential, physiological, and industrial psychology in the 1950s and 1960s.5 California State University’s 1964–65 catalog reflected the diversity of perspectives being taught to the ever-increasing ranks of psychology majors: the school offered courses with developmental, analytical, behaviorist, experimental, social, personality, clinical, and industrial emphases.6
Psychotherapeutic practice saw a comparable proliferation of new approaches in the mid-1960s. In addition to the growth of cognitive-behavioral and client-centered techniques, the decade saw the emergence of techniques like transactional analysis, which aimed at offering a paradigm for group psychotherapy that framed interpersonal interactions in terms of the “games” and roles people play, and reality therapy, which focused on ameliorating symptoms directly rather than on attempting to treat core pathology.7 Other approaches that emerged or crystallized in the 1960s included family systems therapy, which approached problems in the context of relationships rather than in isolation; brief therapy, a short-term intervention aimed at problem solving rather than insight; and body psychotherapy, which combined insight-oriented approaches with touch, movement, and breathing techniques.8
Humanistic psychology had a lot in common with some of these theories. Reality therapy, for example, shared the present orientation and the ethic of self-determination that characterized humanistic psychology. It viewed human problems as endemic to human existence, rather than as products of mental illness. And it held that most problems could be mitigated by constructively addressing the areas in which a client’s basic needs were not being met.9 Echoed in its principles was Maslow’s motivational theory, as well as Rogers’s theory of growth.
The hospitality of the academic discipline of psychology to humanistic ideas, though, was just part of what was exciting about the psychological revolution of the 1960s. American culture itself seemed to have arrived in a place where it was open to the kinds of ideas humanistic psychology had to offer. For the first time, as a result of this openness, humanistic psychology began to change the lives of Americans who had little direct contact with psychology.
By mid-decade, it was reaching teachers and students. It reached managers and employees. It reached people dissatisfied with religion or looking for new forms of religious experience. It reached individuals seeking personal liberation, deeper connection, and sometimes just fun.
Although Carl Rogers had published scattered articles prior to the mid-1960s that extended his insights to educational theory, he began a more concentrated effort to reform the education system around 1965.10 He published in journals like Educational Leadership, and in edited books like Five Fields and Teacher Education, Contemporary Theories of Instruction, and Teacher Education and Mental Health.11
The basic message Rogers had for teachers regarding learning was the same one he had offered psychologists regarding psychotherapy. Learning is growth. The drive toward it springs from a “natural potentiality” that needs to be nurtured rather than controlled. For Rogers, self-discovered learning was the only effective means of learning. Likewise, the only acceptable role for a teacher was as a facilitator. Facilitators needed to serve as flexible resources, providing clarity and organization but not direction. They also needed to accept their own limitations, and to act as participant learners, offering their own motivation as a model.12
In the 1960s, when the progressive ideas of John Dewey were already being radicalized by reformers like Paul Goodman and George Dennison who advocated a thoroughly student-centered approach, Carl Rogers’s educational theory found a particularly eager audience.13 Like Goodman and Dennison, who advocated smaller student bodies and ungraded schools, and argued that learning was facilitated by relationships rather than instruction, Rogers boldly suggested that we do away with teaching altogether. His aversion to hierarchical, conclusion-based learning led him to conjecture that grades, examinations, and degrees had no place in the learning process.14
According to Rogers, an effective teacher/facilitator would look a lot like an effective psychotherapist. For one, he would be real. Unlike a conventional teacher who stands stiffly at the front of the classroom as “a faceless embodiment of a curricular requirement or a sterile tube through which knowledge is passed from one generation to the next,” a good teacher wouldn’t hide behind a façade. He would enter into an authentic relationship with the learner, and would show his true feelings (whether they be excitement, boredom, anger, or sadness). He would also accept his students, prizing them not as trophies, but as imperfect people with great potential. Finally, he would display sensitive empathy, validating his students in a way that met their basic needs and freed them up for true growth and learning.15
Teachers couldn’t be expected to display these qualities if their own educational experiences were “cut from a different cloth.” For this reason, Rogers focused his energies on reforming teacher training, banking on the hope that the gains would trickle down. He taught classes for teachers in training, lectured on the topic, and published detailed suggestions for teacher training programs.16
His recommendations included taking an unstructured approach to teacher training. Rather than giving them structured assignments, book lists, and study guides, he advocated giving them the freedom to follow their own desires in learning. He also recommended doing group work—in the style of groups variously known as training groups (T-groups), encounter groups, and sensitivity training groups that were used commonly in industry—that would encourage future teachers, through experiential learning, to better understand their own internal dynamics, as well as their impact on others.17
In addition to informing teacher training theory, Rogers’s ideas helped spawn a whole field called humanistic education, which centered on the premise that students should have a sense of choice and control in learning, that the curriculum should incorporate the interests of the whole person, that evaluation should be self-directed, and that teachers should be more supportive than critical.18 In the 1960s, the humanistic education movement helped to revive the Montessori model, as well as to expand Waldorf schools.19 It also helped public school educators to look critically at their classroom practices.
Although Maslow, too, valued humanistic education, he found himself, almost by accident, serving as the movement’s ambassador to industrial management.
Describing the evolution of his priorities, he wrote, “I gave up long ago on the possibility of improving the world or the whole human species via individual psychotherapy. This is impracticable. As a matter of fact it is impossible quantitatively. . . . Then I turned for my utopian purposes (eupsychian) to education as a way of reaching the whole species. I then thought of the lessons from individual psychotherapy as essentially research data, the most important usefulness of which was application to the eupsychian improvement of educational institutions so that they could make people better en masse. Only recently has it dawned on me that as important as education, perhaps even more important, is the work life of the individual, since everybody works.”20
Maslow’s willingness to enter the realm of business was a product of his holistic theory of social change. Operating under the assumption that every unit of society is related to every other unit, he felt that inciting a humanistic revolution would require a simultaneous attack on all fronts. When he first applied his theories of human motivation, Eupsychia, growth, and self-actualization to management, though, he almost certainly didn’t anticipate how much of his time and energy that realm would end up absorbing. He did recognize from the beginning, however, that in America industry was indisputably the most powerful institution.21
Unlike other realms, where humanistic psychologists actively pushed their insights, the corporate world came to Maslow, entreating him to offer any business-related ideas he could muster. In 1962, when Andrew Kay offered Maslow a handsomely paid summer fellowship at Non-Linear Systems, he requested only that Maslow dictate into a tape recorder off-the-cuff possibilities for motivating employees and encouraging them to self-actualize.22 Maslow, frustrated by his middling academic salary, and by the sense that he was underappreciated both at Brandeis and within the broader field of psychology, had been unable to refuse.
That summer, Maslow’s attention was occupied by the vital activities of the plant, and by the utopian experiment Kay was trying to implement. Relying on the theory put forth in Maslow’s Motivation and Personality, on the ideas of WBSI’s president Richard Farson, and on other motivational texts, Kay had already undertaken a radical participatory management experiment. He had dismantled assembly lines, abandoned scheduled breaks and time cards, removed penalties for lateness and sickness, and placed the reins of management in the hands of production teams. The teams managed their own finances, decorated their own workroom, and saw products through from inception to completion.23
Maslow was enlivened by the results: high employee morale; low turnover; high customer satisfaction, sales, and productivity. The scientist in him was elated that his theories were being put to the test in the real world. At the same time, though, he was concerned that his rather provisional theory had been the inspiration for such sweeping changes. He feared his ideas were “being taken as gospel truth” without sufficient inquiry into their scientific validity or reliability. “The carry-over from clinic to industry is really a huge and shaky step,” he wrote, “but they’re going ahead enthusiastically and optimistically, like Andy Kay, as if all the facts were in and it was proven scientifically.”24
Unlike academics, whose interest in psychological health or illness tended to be intellectual, business leaders like Kay were highly motivated to adopt Maslow’s principles. Humanistic management promised advantages beyond increased worker satisfaction. If successful, it could yield greater productivity, profit, and innovation. It also might have a liberatory effect on managers, freeing them from non-trusting, antagonistic relationships with workers and promoting a more gratifying daily existence.
Kay’s enthusiasm for Maslow proved to be evidence of more than just a personal affinity. Almost everywhere Maslow went in the world of California business and management theory, he encountered enthusiasm. At UCLA’s Graduate School of Business Administration, for instance, he forged a connection with Fred Massarik, who was trained as a psychologist, and James V. Clark, a management theorist who’d helped bring T-group methods for training managers to the West Coast. At the Western Training Labs (WTL), a West Coast version of Bethel, Maine’s National Training Laboratories (NTL), Maslow met Bob Tannenbaum (who was also on the faculty at UCLA). Tannenbaum and Massarik had coauthored a book, Leadership and Organization, that advocated the use of group processes to promote self-awareness and self-development in workers—thereby generating human capital that would in turn serve as a corporate asset.
Tannenbaum, Massarik, and Clark helped persuade Maslow that, in spite of the potential for businesses to misuse humanistic principles in the ruthless pursuit of profit, industrial applications of his theory were a piece of his Eupsychian vision. By propelling man’s economic life in an “enlightened direction,” they could broaden the scale of humanistic psychology’s impact, far exceeding the potential of individual psychotherapy to effect change. “Psychotherapy tends to focus too exclusively on the development of the individual, the self, the identity, and so forth,” Maslow wrote. “I have thought of creative education and now also of creative management as not only doing this for the individual but also developing him via the community, the team, the group, the organization—which is just as legitimate a path of personal growth as the autonomous paths.”25
Seeing this intuition play out in an actual American corporation in the summer of 1962 fed Maslow’s optimism; it persuaded him that democratic values were winning over imperialistic or aristocratic ones, that American business was progressive, that American workers were more satisfied and accomplished than workers anywhere else. The centrality of his own theory to enlightened management approaches gave him a further boost. He came to see himself as something of an abolitionist, extending democratic principles to the workplace; emancipating workers who had been downtrodden, angry, and only passively resistant; and giving them an avenue for creative expression.26 It comforted him to know that, while academic psychologists had failed to extend his work, there were realms in which people were willing and eager to press forward on his behalf.
At the same time that Maslow was extending his insights to business, he was finding ways to apply them to religious seekers. In 1964, in the spirit of William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience, Maslow published Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences, in which his purpose was to extend spirituality beyond organized religion. “I want to demonstrate that spiritual values have naturalistic meaning, that they are not the exclusive possession of organized churches, that they do not need supernatural concepts to validate them, that they are well within the jurisdiction of a suitably enlarged science, and that, therefore, they are the general responsibility of all of mankind.”27
The fundamental unit of all religions, he argued, was actually a psychological state. He saw peak experiences as the building block of all religions, but also as the basis for personal forms of spirituality that didn’t depend on organized churches. Peaks were natural, not supernatural, and could be investigated and discussed using a naturalistic approach.28
Peak experiences were not, he argued, the sole property of the pious or devout, or even always available to them. They belonged most reliably, instead, to the psychologically healthy. Someone too rational would inevitably be a “non-peaker,” as would someone who was afraid of losing control or going insane. Although he was careful not to set religion and science in opposition, he warned that “ultra-scientific” people would not be open to the flood of emotion characteristic of religious or peak experiences.29
In the mid-1960s, when people seemed eager for ecstatic experience, and anxious to be free of institutional constraints, humanistic psychology introduced new avenues of spiritual experience. One California Episcopal chaplain, Reverend James J. Baar, was quoted in the New York Times identifying this trend: “What everybody wants to do is to be turned on. . . . People feel boxed up, they don’t know why. They feel frightened by challenges instead of lusting for them.”30 Baar saw the practices of humanistic psychology as providing a better answer than the church for improving people’s daily lives. In fact, he left the church with the express intention of facilitating workshops designed to extend humanistic principles to individuals.
Rogers had done the same thing decades earlier. Rejecting what he perceived to be the doctrinaire Union Theological Seminary, he found solace in the intellectual freedoms of Teachers College.31 Too much structure had always offended him: he saw it as hindering rather than fostering learning and growth. But while Rogers may have been done with organized religion, it wasn’t done with him.
In the 1950s and 1960s, pastoral counselors took to Rogers’s theory like fish to water. His core concepts of empathy, congruence, and unconditional positive regard seemed to channel for them the ideal of gentle guidance that characterized many Protestant churches. His positive view was in tune with the way many American Protestant denominations had long since evolved away from the harsher views of human nature and potential that had been characteristic of the early American church. His ethic of acceptance echoed the idea of God’s forgiveness. By offering pastoral counselors an alternative to the reigning psychoanalytic theory, with its emphasis on a kind of secularized version of original sin, he also freed counselors from a structure that didn’t mesh well with their preference for focusing on the potential good rather than evil in man.32
As the field of pastoral counseling gained steam in the early 1960s, Rogers’s ideas found analogues in professional theory. Carroll Wise, for example, proposed the idea of “non-coercive counseling,” and Paul Johnson developed a theory of “responsive counseling,” both in application to the pastoral counseling situation.33 The infusion of new theory aided in the growth of the field. “Clergy have been in the business of healing broken hearts, minds and souls for years,” explained one reverend.34 “The pastoral counselor has taken his gift for that area of ministry and expanded on it.”
In 1963, the American Association of Pastoral Counselors was founded on the theoretical orientation of Carl Rogers and the principles of humanistic psychology. Its practical purpose was to accredit pastoral counseling training programs, but its larger mission was to join psychological insight and nondirective practice with religious tradition and spiritual commitment, in the hopes of yielding a holistic approach to human experience.35
In the early 1960s, growth centers and communes provided another channel for exploring personal spirituality and therapeutic growth in the spirit of humanistic psychology. Around the country, growth centers drew visitors for weekend or weeklong retreats in which group leaders employed a variety of techniques ranging from encounter groups to workshops on yoga and meditation. In brief or extended interventions, the aim was the same: people were looking for self-actualization.
Communal living experiments proliferated in the 1960s, as well, and offered an immersion experience in therapeutic thinking about human growth. One of the most interesting examples was Synanon, which began in 1958 in Santa Monica, California, as a drug rehabilitation program, but evolved in the 1960s into a collection of alternative communities aimed at self-realization through authentic living. One of Synanon’s key features was its mandatory “truth-telling” group, which came to be known as the “Synanon Game.” The groups were led by former addicts who modeled honesty and openness. They typically lasted two to three hours, occurred three times a week, and consisted of ten to fifteen people. Participants, and leaders, were expected to tell their personal stories and then to face the brutal criticisms of fellow group members.36
In demanding utter directness with regard to the self and others, the groups possessed a rawness that seemed to go deeper than ordinary interactions. Charles Dederich, Synanon’s founder, felt these groups to be uniquely appealing to addicts, who he believed had often been unconsciously seeking peak experiences in their consumption of drugs and alcohol. They had the right idea, he argued, but had been going about it in the wrong way.37
Maslow recognized in Synanon a value that transcended drug and alcohol rehabilitation. “(1) First of all,” he wrote, “it raises for me the question of the ‘dark night of the soul,’ of symbolic death before rebirth. These people have hit the bottom of the barrel. Is this a necessary prerequisite to rebirth, to real honesty & bluntness? . . . (2) My guess from what I’ve read is that real, blunt, tough candor is the leading thing in Synanon, & maybe that’s what we can learn from it. Also that people can take it under the right conditions. (3) Part of ‘the right conditions’ is experiential-knowledge of the cures. [The leaders have] gone thru the same mill & the patients know it.”38
When Maslow learned that Synanon had begun to admit nonaddicts, he was pleased. In their stripping of defenses, the groups possessed an innocence and naïveté he found therapeutic. He also approved of the general toughness of the groups, and of how the participants were “not afraid to hurt” themselves or one another in their quests to take responsibility for their actions. Maslow identified in places like Synanon the potential for raising people’s self-awareness without depending on psychotherapy.39
By the late 1960s, almost fifteen hundred people were living in Synanon centers nationwide, and as many as six thousand nonaddicts regularly attended the truth-telling sessions.40 Maslow saw this as a success for humanistic psychology, and for society. In 1966, he addressed members of Synanon, priding the center as a family, an educational system, a culture, a world.41