9
The Sledgehammer Approach to Human Growth

“Esalen can be Hell as much as Paradise. The air is rarefied, the energy from the mountains, the canyon, the ocean, is powerful and prone to dramatic shifts. It is a climate only for those who are both vigorous and capable of total defeat. For here your nightmares must come true in order to fulfill your dreams. Here you are forced to fall flat on your face before you can drink the cool, sweet waters of joy. Many do not enjoy too long a stay, for here the mirror is ruthlessly turned round to face inward: the demons, flushed to the surface, are no longer ‘out there.’ The pace of karma quickens and comes home.”

RICK TARNAS1

In the summer of 1967, the summer of love, John Heider and his wife, Anne, drove their BMW motorcycle from New York to California, by way of Mexico City. John remembers the summer fondly: “Flower children had not yet become bitter. Heroin and speed and beggars were just beginning. The revolution of love based on community, drugs, and mysticism appeared translucent . . .”

A friend took them to Esalen in late July. “The baths in the evening light brought tears to my eyes,” wrote Heider. “Esalen was surely the Promised Land.” Enraptured, they stayed for four years.

Heider was on the verge of earning his doctoral degree in psychology. He’d spent his life in academics, growing up on the Smith College campus in Northampton, Massachusetts, as the son of a well-known Gestalt psychologist. He’d been to Harvard and Duke, been steeped in academic theory and scientific practice, and emerged from his studies a “grown-up scientist.” But along the way, he noted, “I lost my feeling of adventure in exploring the psychological world. I had traded excitement for professionalism and felt that sadness that comes when adult responsibility drives out the child’s sense of play.”2

At Esalen, Heider discovered a kind of science that reanimated him. It was “unsystematic” and “vaguely immoral.” It embodied Maslow’s concept of pre-science to the maximum. It challenged Heider’s ingrained belief that “no discovery, however fascinating or unusual, was real unless it had been adequately researched and presented to the scientific community by publication in a journal.”3

“ ‘Research’ at Esalen, I learned, was quite a simple matter,” wrote Heider. “If you have an idea, do it.”4

While Heider was at Esalen his fellow seekers experimented with alternating heat and cold while hyperventilating, heat and cold while fasting, trance states, extended silence, rebirth rituals, death rituals, nursing bottles for adults, inhaling CO2, confessional games, induced emotional outbursts, adults playing doctor, social nudity, fantasy trips, dream work, wrestling, and dancing.

The most common practice at Esalen, however, the one for which it became famous, was encounter.

Although Heider had participated in encounter as early as 1963, the groups he found at Esalen were a different animal. In the early groups, participants had assembled around a table “like executives,” with sharpened pencils and paper in hand.5 They were considerate, polite, accommodating. At Esalen, participants were shouting, touching, shoving, and curling up on the ground.

Esalen groups were defined by the principle of “letting it all hang out.” Openness and directness were the currency. As Heider described it, “I will tell you what I think and feel and want. I may want to hit you or to fuck you or your wife. I hate you, I envy you, I love you, I wish to exclude you, I don’t like your smell, my cock is bigger than yours, you are a bitch, you bore me, I am great. All this is being up front about what I am thinking anyway.”6

Encounter group participants were also likely to manifest their thoughts, feelings, and wants physically, and to direct their desires or aversions toward other group members. Displaying affection in the form of hugging, kissing, or groping was customary; expressing distaste by slapping and hitting and punching was rarer, but not infrequent. Sexual liaisons were often initiated in groups, though they were carried out in the cabins or dark recesses of Esalen’s grounds. For Heider, as for others, these unconstrained opportunities for self-expression were wildly liberating.

George Leonard, who with his wife had participated in an early group led by psychologist Will Schutz, noted the extraordinary desire for emotional intensity that defined the groups. The group he attended began with each participant screaming and pounding the floor. The participants, all couples in this case, were then asked to tell three secrets to their spouses that would threaten their relationships. Leonard recalls that a war bride from England confessed she had never wanted to get married and had hated every minute of it. A husband confessed he had been sleeping with his wife’s best friend; she responded by hitting him violently and repeatedly, then crying and claiming that he was a “shit” but she loved him anyway. Other tactics Schutz employed to encourage the experience of strong emotion included making faces, Indian hand wrestling, and growling. According to Leonard, the emotional catharsis attached to these activities served as a “quick fix” that wore off soon after the retreat ended. The woman who had hit her husband, for example, felt intensely connected to him by the end of the weekend, but divorced him six months later. Although he admitted the groups could be destructive, and the insights gained were likely to be unsustainable, he also thought they were wonderful.7

Esalen’s encounter groups had historical roots in the more conservative realms of academia and corporate training (T-groups). Aimed more at improving interpersonal dynamics than at personal transformation, the groups required a comparable level of interpersonal confrontation and often resulted in a comparable increase in self-awareness, but differed substantially in the amount of excitement they provided.

Heider credited Will Schutz singularly with the transformation of the staid T-groups of the 1950s and early 1960s into the extravagant and exciting groups of the mid-1960s. Schutz had been trained at UCLA as a social psychologist, found a niche in academics studying group processes, and held a hard-won assistant professorship at the Albert Einstein School of Medicine in New York. He abruptly abandoned this position, however, when he received an unusual offer from Michael Murphy in 1967.8 “[Murphy] said he could not pay me,” explained Schutz, “but I could offer three workshops, and if anyone came I would make some money. He could not provide a place to live; there was a garage where I could put a sleeping bag. But he could give me a title, any title I chose. I found this offer irresistible, and so I became the Emperor of Esalen (in my own mind). . . . I resigned from Einstein, got divorced, put my belongings in a Volkswagen, and headed west to Big Sur.”9

Schutz had developed his interest in encounter as a group leader at National Training Laboratories (NTL) in Bethel, Maine, where training groups (T-groups) had first emerged.10 NTL’s T-groups required participants to work together over extended periods of time (usually ten to forty hours total and sometimes throughout a two-week residential program), analyzing and discussing their experiences, feelings, perceptions, and behaviors with an open agenda.11

Although the groups were explicitly concerned with individual experience and striving, NTL had been guided by an interest in corporate leadership, a desire to effect personal change to improve business functioning. Corporations, for example, paid to send executives to NTL in the hopes of improving their productivity and increasing the company’s profits. Whatever augmented sense of fulfillment or ambition the participants gained, then, was most often merely instrumental in maximizing the company’s performance.

While many of NTL’s programs were excellent, participants became increasingly critical of their organizational objectives as the 1960s wore on. Whether or not they were sent by employers, many participants felt the business component was at odds with the personal component. Maslow, who spent some time in Bethel, wrote that NTL “mostly focuses on organization, group dynamics, watching form and process. [ . . . ] But this is in direct contradiction to the fact that most people are interested in it as a therapeutic and a growth experience on the personal side.”12

Humanistic psychologists like Carl Rogers extracted the principles of group work in the service of individual psychotherapy from places like the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute. Rogers geared much of his research at WBSI to the study of individual outcomes in the context of encounter groups.13 His experimentation ranged from making modifications to traditional group practices (replacing the facilitator with a tape recorder, for example) to conducting groups for schizophrenics.

Encounter groups provided Rogers with an opportunity to apply the principles of client-centered therapy in a broader way. A healthy group dynamic multiplied the number of potential growth-fostering contacts, surpassing the singular power of the therapist to give and receive empathy, and to engage in authentic communication.

For Rogers, an effective group facilitator was an entirely nondirective one. He approached his groups exactly as he approached individual psychotherapy, acting as a facilitator without imposing his own goals, biases, or analyses on the participants. In enumerating what he considered “nonfacilitative behavior,” he included pushing or manipulating a group, making rules for it, judging the success or failure of the group by its dramatics, attacking group members, and either imposing or withholding one’s own interests.14

Although Schutz’s approach was more directive, he too saw groups as more of a tool for self-analysis and awareness than a method for group change. When he imported NTL’s T-groups to Esalen in 1965, he constructed them mainly in terms of this personal side.15 His concern was with “making it real,” lending an experiential primacy to what had been an analytical abstraction.16

In this new incarnation of T-groups, he not only urged people to access their emotions and to express them, but he got participants to feel more, to be realer than real. Both the content and the structure of the groups operated to push people to their limits. Schutz was more confrontational than he had been at NTL, and he was more forthright in expressing his own perceptions and criticisms. He also conducted the groups as marathon weekend-long events in which sleep deprivation eroded inhibitions. After twenty-four hours without sleep, open and honest expression, as well as actual tears, seemed to flow more easily.

“Encounter sessions, particularly of the Schutz variety, were often wild events,” wrote Tom Wolfe in an influential essay. “Such aggression! such sobs! moans, hysteria, vile recriminations, shocking revelations, such explosions of hostility between husbands and wives, such mudballs of profanity from previously mousy mommies and workadaddies, such red-mad attacks.”17

Schutz’s methods diverged from the T-group model in more than just their personal emphasis. The countercultural interests of participants—in alternative sexual practices, nudity (the hot-spring-fed tubs on the grounds quickly became both coed and nude), and drug experimentation—gave group leaders license to be more experimental and radical than they could have been at a place like NTL. Maslow noted that Schutz’s move to Esalen was good for Esalen intellectually, but was perhaps bad for Schutz, who quickly adopted more eccentric practices.18

Media attention probably egged Schutz on. Journalists consistently highlighted the more extreme elements of Esalen, focusing in particular on the breaking of social taboos and the transformative power of encounter groups. Leo Litwak’s 1968 article for the New York Times Sunday Magazine was representative of the kind of attention Esalen received at the time. The article began with Litwak as a skeptic, armed with “all kinds of tricks for avoiding encounter,” reluctantly attending one of Schutz’s groups.19 In the early group activities, he was uncomfortable with the indiscriminate touching of strangers and the awkward expressions of private emotions. His defenses eroded slowly then quickly, ultimately dissolving in a revelatory arm-wrestling match with a sullen teenager to whom he’d taken an immediate dislike. Litwak found himself, in this heated moment, tapping into new depths of his own emotions at the same time that he was propelled to new heights of empathy. By the end of the weekend, his perspective on encounter was completely transformed: “Our group gathered in a tight circle, hugging and kissing, and I found myself hugging everyone, behaving like the idiots I had noticed on first arriving at Esalen.” He attributed this change, in no small part, to Schutz’s confrontational style and unorthodox practices.20

More and more, Esalen became identified with its characters. Overpowering personalities like Schutz’s affected not only the experience of specific encounter groups, and the cultural perceptions that surrounded the institute, but the tone and direction of the institute itself. Esalen proved uniquely susceptible to such influences, despite the fact that early in its development, Murphy and Price had laid down ground rules to prevent it. One rule stated that “No one captures the flag,” meaning that no individual, however charismatic, would be allowed to dominate the culture. Another rule was that “We hold our dogmas lightly,” meaning that all religious dogma would be treated as essentially psychological and never taken literally.21 Ironically, the antihierarchical power structure prevented enforcement of these imperatives.

Fritz Perls was another eccentric and extravagant figure, who, through the force of his personality, became a dominant figure at Esalen.22 When Heider arrived, Perls was 75, and “a distinguished, if controversial therapist.”23 Trained as a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, Perls had actually led his first encounter groups at Esalen in February 1964, billing them as a form of “Gestalt Therapy,” and describing their goals as expanding the “scope of awareness,” connecting the individual to the environment, and “ending the subject object split.”24

In contrast to traditional encounter groups that relied on the self-direction of group members, Perls held the reins in his groups. He utilized the concept of a “hot seat,” a position in which the seated individual received his full attention. Another empty chair was set beside the seated individual and served as an object of projection (it became the victim’s mother, father, spouse, etc. as needed). Perls then proceeded, in the words of one Esalen historian, to “take the person apart by noticing and commenting on every defense mechanism, every body posture, every quiver of the voice or eyes.” Instead of allowing group members to interact with the hot-seated individual, Perls assumed full control while the group watched on in silence and, often, awe. After a brutal dissection of his subject, Perls measured his success in tears. He then attempted to reintegrate the “fractured” person in order to create an all-new gestalt, or whole person.

“When I first met Fritz,” wrote Heider, “I was afraid of him. I was afraid he would waste me with a glance or a word. He does this to importunate strangers, especially stuffed shirts and I incline in that direction.”25 But for many, Perls’s drama, humiliation, and attention were irresistible. They were inspired to come to Esalen just to work with him.

Perls quickly ascended as Esalen’s “star,” earning a guru status the founders had never intended for their group leaders. He embraced the role with zeal. Described by his wife, Laura, as “a mixture of a prophet and a bum,” he often wore long white robes or flowing multicolored shirts and sandals.26

Aside from his dramatic appeal, the themes Perls espoused were particularly resonant with the emerging counterculture. He wrote and spoke about the centrality of emotion, the search for meaning, the importance of interpersonal relationship and self-expression, and the value of erotic passion.27

At the same time that he met the needs of many participants, he also offended and angered his peers at the institute and subverted the founders’ influence. Some of Perls’s favorite sayings directly opposed Murphy’s vision of Esalen. Perls was proudly anti-intellectual and claimed to hate philosophical discourse, calling it “mind-fucking” or “elephant shit,” “for its size and importance.”28 According to humanistic psychologist Maureen O’Hara, Perls felt that if it was intellectual, it was shit, hence his other mantra, “Lose your mind and come to your senses.”29

Perls also ridiculed Murphy’s commitment to meditation, deeming it “neither shitting nor getting off the pot.” He opposed the presence of “mystics and occultists” at Esalen, dismissing their brand of enlightenment as frivolous. But Perls himself often experienced a quasi-mystical sense of illumination, both through his groups and through his experimentation with psychedelics.30 He so strongly advocated the use of LSD, in fact, that he sometimes rejected students who had never taken the drug.31

Perls justified his techniques as a product of Gestalt psychology, a perspective he described in Gestalt Therapy in 1951, Gestalt Therapy Verbatim in 1969, and The Gestalt Approach and Eye Witness to Therapy, which was published posthumously in 1973.32 His introduction to The Gestalt Approach captures the vision of Gestalt psychology he advocated. Attempting to shrug off “professional jargon” and psychological complexity, Perls explained, “The basic premise of Gestalt psychology is that human nature is organized into patterns or wholes, that it is experienced by the individual in these terms, and that it can only be understood as a function of the patterns or wholes of which it is made.”33 Although he located the foundations of his practice in German Gestalt psychology, he drew from it selectively, omitting some of its most central elements.34

As Perls’s six-year stay wore on, he became a problem for those trying to run Esalen. With a massive sense of entitlement and a guru complex, Perls acted as “an institution within the institute.”35 His programs were listed separately, and he lived in a private residence on Esalen’s grounds, an odd round house with a grass-covered roof that he had extracted from Murphy by promising to pay for it (a promise he didn’t keep).36 In the vein of what many of his colleagues at Esalen identified as one of the most toxic themes of American culture, Fritz seemed to care only about himself and urged others to do the same. This attitude was evident in his Gestalt “prayer”:

I do my thing and you do your thing.

I am not in this world to live up to your expectations,

And you are not in this world to live up to mine.

You are you, and I am I, and if by chance we find each other, it’s beautiful.

If not, it can’t be helped.37

Perls was also infamous for his seduction of female participants and his proselytization of sexual promiscuity. One of his female patients recalled: “He told me I should fuck around. It was really a crazy thing to tell me. He created problems I didn’t really want. I’m ‘supposed’ to fuck around because my therapist tells me that.”38

Group leaders like Perls often did worse than exacerbating the problems of group participants. In several cases, they did real damage—stripping individuals of their familiar defenses and sending them home emotionally fragile and psychologically vulnerable.39 The more extreme results ranged from divorces to physical violence. Although Price had intended Esalen as a “proving ground” for applying the insights of humanistic psychology to diagnosably mentally ill and severely struggling individuals, the institute had proved far more efficacious for those with average problems.40 Several suicides at Esalen in 1968 and 1969 served as painful indications of the Esalen staff’s inability to provide comprehensive services to the severely disturbed.41

The “here and now” philosophy espoused by Perls and others often prevented encounter group leaders from seeing the bigger picture, which included the inevitable personal and social consequences of individual action. In his notes on this type of encounter, Maslow wrote that there is more to learn than “to give honest feedback and expect honest feedback, to be authentic and candid and the like. With the wrong sort of people, this automatically leads to getting clobbered or to getting defeated rather than achieving anything.”42 Perls thought Maslow, in turn, was a “a sugar-coated Nazi . . . [who] pandered to a happy world of optimism that did not in fact exist.”43

Though Maslow’s criticism posed a challenge to him, Perls was relatively insulated from it. Maslow was rarely at Esalen, and the two occupied different realms—one academic and one cultural. Perls was more threatened instead by the permanent presence and radical practices of Will Schutz. When Schutz came to Esalen in 1965, he inherited from Virginia Satir the supervision of Esalen’s nine-month residential program—a group that John Heider joined in September 1967. Schutz intended for the program to train encounter group leaders and shape them in his image.

The intensity of Perls’s groups was, if anything, surpassed by Schutz’s activities. Schutz encouraged his groups to do all kinds of things that “the culture would not approve of,” which typically involved getting nude as quickly as possible.44 Perls derisively referred to Schutz’s team of encounter group leaders as his “circus,” while Schutz trivialized Perls’s workshops by calling them “the Flying Circus.”45

According to George Leonard, who was the vice president of Esalen in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, while Perls was a physically deteriorating man in his seventies, Schutz was “the great conquistador,” a physically dominating presence. With an ego comparable to that of Perls, he would challenge others to “break him”—expose his vulnerability and bring him to tears. As far as Leonard knew, this was never accomplished. His model for encounter was the “more openness, the better,” and his success was judged by his ability to reduce his residents to a sense of despair that would ultimately yield to a feeling of transcendence.46

Schutz’s method of compelling catharsis provided an appealing form of instant gratification and release, and his groups became nationally acclaimed. His book Joy went through five printings, and his unorthodox techniques, his frankness with talk show hosts, and his encouragement of the audience to emulate his candor earned him many television appearances.47 In 1968 alone, he went on the air with Johnny Carson, Phil Donahue, David Susskind, Dick Cavett, and Merv Griffin.48

Despite their rivalry, Schutz and Perls ran groups that were more alike than they were different. They both depended, perhaps too heavily, on the concept of catharsis. As a group leader, Heider grew increasingly conscious of the limits, and potential dangers, of this reliance. Like Maslow, he harbored concerns about “unearned” peaks. “I believe that it is preferable,” he wrote, “to allow the participant to confront the anxiety over a period of time than to perform a cesarean and take the infant from the womb.”49 The line between the drama that the groups required and a superfluous, sensationalistic drama was a fine one, and one often stumbled across by the sometimes reckless, and certainly self-righteous, Schutz and Perls.

The founders were aware of these oversteps. “Many of our programs,” explained Michael Murphy, “were kind of the sledgehammer approach to human growth. [ . . . ] There were encounter groups there where the darkest and the dirtiest things you could dig up from your own psyche or accuse someone else of was being tossed around. People were saying things to one another that thirty years later they haven’t forgiven one another for.”50 Whether or not such emotional violence was therapeutic was a matter of contention. Therapy, for decades, had been acknowledged as a process that tended to amp up discomfort on the way to reducing it. But it was one thing to deconstruct yourself in the service of self-improvement, and another to tear down someone else, indulging, as one might, in a certain amount of sadistic pleasure.

Destructive or not, emotional release was one of the main goals of thousands of Americans who turned toward therapy in the 1960s. While hordes flocked to Esalen for encounter group therapy in the mid to late 1960s, still more sought individual psychotherapy.

One popular article described this mass interest as evidence of a revolution “that threatens in the long run to have a greater effect on our society than all the political turmoil that the headlines chronicle.” Lives, the author argued, would never be the same; man’s basic concept of himself was “about to undergo a most convulsive change.”51 It seemed, to some, the last nail in the coffin of organized religion and, to others, the death knell for traditional structures of living, including defined gender roles and generational hierarchies. What would it look like if we were all living examined lives? Or worse, if we were all capable of examining the lives of others?

While psychology had expanded greatly in the postwar years, it took on a new life in the 1960s. It seduced even fairly non-neurotic people into therapy and expanded cultural interest in all things psychological. In contrast to the near monopoly that the psychoanalytic orientation had had over therapy since the 1920s, a plethora of diverse psychological theories, services, and techniques were now emerging. As a result, Americans were confronted with an “imponderable dilemma of choice.”52 In the 1960s, Americans were introduced to transactional analysis, reality therapy, family therapy, behavioral therapy, cognitive-behavioral therapy, nude marathon therapy, and of course encounter group therapy.

The variety of interventions under the umbrella of “humanism” alone were innumerable. According to cognitive behaviorist Albert Ellis, a subgroup of members at the first meeting of the Association of Humanistic Psychology arrived at a minimum of twenty radically different concepts of humanism applied to psychology, many of which were contradictory.53 Ellis’s self-identification as a humanistic psychologist itself was a bit surprising, since many viewed his rational-emotive therapy (RET) as contradictory to AAHP’s goals. People tended to view it as antihumanistic, wrote Ellis, because it is “exceptionally hard-headed, persuasive, educational, and active-directive. [ . . . ]”54 But he defended his form of therapy as “the most humanistic means of personality change that have yet been invented.” Focused on creativity, beliefs, attitudes, values, and maximizing human potential, its goals, if not its techniques, aligned perfectly with those of other humanistic psychologists.

The disparity between Ellis’s approach and other forms of humanistic psychotherapy was highlighted in a 1965 film titled Three Approaches to Psychotherapy. In the film, thirty-year-old Gloria undergoes three sessions with separate therapists: Ellis, Rogers, and Perls.

Gloria is relieved, in the first session, to encounter Carl Rogers’s gentle demeanor; his soft voice assuages her nervousness. As she presents her concerns about integrating her new identity as a sexually adventuresome divorcée (her devilish side) with her more “wholesome” role as a mother, he is unconditionally accepting, nondirective, earnest. He leans forward, nods frequently, and smiles. When Gloria explains her uncertainty about whether or not to be honest with her daughter about her sexual promiscuity, he empathizes, affirms what she’s saying, and lends more clarity to the issues she’s confronting.

Gloria, however, grows frustrated and makes plain her desire for Rogers to weigh in as a psychological expert. She wants to know whether her daughter will be more damaged by knowing that her mother’s sleeping around or by being lied to. “I’m going to ask you,” says Gloria, “and I want you to give me a direct answer.”

Rogers won’t give her an answer. “I guess I’d like to say,” he delicately explains, “no, I don’t want to let you stew in your own feelings, but this is the kind of private thing I couldn’t possibly answer for you . . . but I’d like to help you get to an answer.” His unconditional acceptance spurs Gloria to the climax of the session, when she remarks, “Gee, I’d like you for my father.” Rogers follows by saying, “You look to me like a pretty nice daughter.”

By earning her emotional trust, respect, and admiration, Rogers ultimately convinces Gloria that she does, in fact, know how she wants to proceed. But the session leaves the viewer with the sense that she wanted something harsher: to be punished or vindicated, rather than accepted.

Fritz Perls gave her what she wanted in this regard. Though Gloria repeatedly claimed to be scared of him, there was a subtext of flirtation to their banter even while the overt tone of the session was, at times, antagonistic. The session was formless; they didn’t discuss Gloria’s problems, her life, her history. Instead, they existed in the “here and now,” which meant Perls picked at her statements, focused on her orientation toward him, and drew attention to her every movement. She smiled throughout, chain-smoked, and wiggled like a little girl. At the same time, she grew incensed when he played games, and when he accused her of being phony.

Gloria’s repeated remarks to Perls suggested the antihumanistic strain that ran through his version of Gestalt therapy. “I want you to be more human,” she pleaded. “I don’t feel close to you at all, Mr. Perls,” she claimed. “You seem so detached. I feel like you’re not recognizing me at all.”

As Perls explained it, his form of therapy was aimed at humanistic goals, because it forced the patient to recover her lost potential and stand on her own feet. His relentless attempts to manipulate and frustrate Gloria were intentional efforts to make her confront herself.

Ellis’s session was comparably antagonistic, though neither as playful nor as hostile as that of Perls. With his didacticism, abrasive New York accent, and unemotional style, he engendered neither feelings of warmth nor anger. He went immediately to the problem Gloria said she wanted to solve: she attracted men whom she didn’t respect or find interesting, while she repelled or withdrew from the men she desired.

Ellis focused on the cognitive components of her conflict—her catastrophizing, her negative self-concept, and her fear of coming across as “dumb.” He explained to her, in depth, the irrational beliefs she was imposing on various interactions, and the ways that she was overgeneralizing singular rejections as blanket rejections. He ended the session by giving her a “homework assignment,” a simple prescription to try being herself with the men she found desirable.

Gloria left the session feeling that the three distinct forms of humanistic psychotherapy had more contradictions than commonalities. Each approach had played to a different side of her. She referred specifically to Perls bringing out her “fighting” side, and Ellis engaging her “thinking” side. And she implied that Rogers elicited her self-acceptance, even if he left little room for her self-contempt.55

The viewer was left with a comparable sense of dislocation. How could three such dramatically different approaches, premised on three thoroughly distinct sets of values, serve the same goals? As humanistic psychologists had been arguing, they couldn’t. The outcome of therapy was going to look really different depending on the orientation of the therapist you encountered, particularly if the goal of therapy wasn’t simply the remission of pathological symptoms but evolution toward a better, more expansive self. A protégé of Perls might end up living a rough-hewn life characterized by off-putting interpersonal directness and experiential intensity, while a successful patient of Ellis might be defined by her utter practically, rationality, and Vulcan-like lack of emotion. Meanwhile, a well-therapized patient of Rogers might adopt an overwhelmingly optimistic attitude, a powerful sense of ambition, or, as Gloria feared, a tendency toward a blob-like softness. In any case, it was becoming clear that popular magazines had it wrong when they talked about psychotherapy as a concrete process in which diverse individuals sought uniform treatment for their problems and obediently swallowed the answers the “experts” provided. Thanks in large part to humanistic psychologists, and their efforts to bring new perspectives to the treatment of individuals, psychotherapy in the mid-1960s was a many-colored thing.