10
Such Beauty and Such Ugliness

“Like a bird on a wire, like a drunk in a midnight choir, I have tried in my way to be free.”

LEONARD COHEN1

After their taped psychotherapy session, Gloria reached out to shake hands with Perls. He extended his cigarette and ashed on her palm. Gloria was humiliated.2 Still, when she was confronted with the choice of which psychotherapist to work with on a regular basis, she chose Perls.

The choice seemed to be between the therapist who would gently teach her to accept and trust herself, the therapist who would pragmatically guide her toward constructive behavioral change, and the therapist who would brutally tear down her defenses, leaving her exposed, vulnerable, and scrambling to regain her dignity.

Gloria’s decision, while somewhat unexpected, was the choice of thousands of Americans in the mid to late 1960s who flocked to encounter groups, to Esalen, and to many of the other, more intensity-seeking pockets of the counterculture.

Perls’s groups, like his individual therapy sessions, were modeled on his devotion to the ideal of utter self-reliance, individualism, and freedom. He denigrated dependence and vulnerability in all their forms, dismissing these qualities as immature and linked to interpersonal manipulation.3 Rather than offering a supportive model of empowerment, though, Perls offered a hostile approach that bordered on sadism.

“If I get myself in a corner,” Gloria told Perls during the session, “you’re going to just let me drown.” He seemed to enjoy her struggle, repeatedly mocking her and calling her a phony. Indeed, the only emotion he seemed to accept from her was anger. Gloria justifiably accused him of acknowledging as genuine only her brave, independent statements, and of dismissing as phony her earnest expressions of fear and anxiety.

Perls’s tough love seemed to spur Gloria to action, flooding her with adrenaline, and making her more proactive than she would have been in a less charged interaction. But his contempt bias—against the qualities that make people existentially fragile, interpersonally accountable, complicatedly human—was dehumanizing, as well. This element, characteristic both of Perls’s sessions and of other encounter groups, was what made certain manifestations of the encounter group craze in the late 1960s particularly toxic.

Over the course of the 1960s, Schutz and Perls threw down in a pound-for-pound contest of escalating extremes designed to evoke catharsis. John Heider likened the process to an addiction in which leaders sought “ever more potent blowouts,” with the illusion that they would yield ever more dramatic highs.4 A more common outcome, however, was an increase in the depressions that followed. Peaks were often followed by exaggerations of the original discomforts. For this reason, both leaders and participants became like junkies chasing a high.

Many were literal junkies, as well. In the summer of 1967, in particular, hundreds of LSD heads, and as many stoners, gathered at Esalen.

Heider described this time at Esalen as wonderful and awful, compelling and repulsive. The flip side of the extravagant beauty of Esalen, the utter sense of freedom, the promise of illumination and awakening, was pain and darkness that ran deep.

“I have never seen such beauty and such ugliness before,” he wrote. “I have never seen the human spirit so exalted or so degraded. The baths: an eternal flow of hot water, sited on the cliff face, sea, sky, mountains, families bathing together, lovers, meditation and massage in the sun. The baths: dreadful grime, old cinder blocks, body lice and staph, heroin and death from ‘unknown causes.’ ”5

Some lived in filth, in tents and trucks on the grounds of Esalen, which Heider described as a “refugee camp.”6 While some attended encounter groups, others were basically there to score a kind of contact high, neither attending workshops nor supporting the institute monetarily. Without an invitation to do so, they forced a connection between their own goals and those of the already mythologized retreat.

Although armed with aphorisms of peace and love, these squatters compromised the atmosphere of Esalen and damaged its standing in the community. One local restaurant owner refused to serve “hippies” and “beatniks.”7 Neighbors perceived Esalen to be an escalating threat to their safety and security. According to Murphy, they infused the air with a “drunken mysticism that undermined every discipline we set for the place.”8

The chaotic intrusion of counterculturalists, who tended to lack commitment to the goals of human potential and who sought little more than a safe haven where they could “drop out” of American culture, deeply troubled Esalen leaders, who found themselves trapped by their own antihierarchical and democratic philosophies.9 In 1968, George Leonard and Michael Murphy experienced a profound dismay with some outgrowths of human potential, even expressing urges to disown the whole movement. As Leonard later professed, “We quickly learned that just as it was much easier to change the world than to change it the way we planned, it was much easier to name a movement than to unname it.”10

The problems at Esalen were emblematic of what was happening at other growth centers across the country. In the late 1960s, an often destructive permissiveness seemed to be the rule at many of these retreats. Maslow saw several parallels between the practices of growth centers and of rebellious youth. They both tended to scrap reason and rationality in favor of emotion, and were too singularly “Dionysian”; they perceived education, science, and other forms of logical thought as akin to imprisonment; and they mistook impulsiveness for healthy spontaneity. In distrusting all authority, they expressed a blind allegiance to absolute freedom that rested on the assumption that human nature was fundamentally good, and that evil was solely a product of social inhibitions and restraints. They also didn’t seem to understand the ways in which law and order facilitated freedom. “They think of power as evil,” he wrote, “not realizing that they must temper, restrain, and control the forces of inhumanity and chaos within the human soul.”11

Maslow’s criticism of growth centers stemmed, in part, from the distance between his personal experience and the experiences of the rebellious human potentialists. Maslow—like Rogers—was, above all, an academic psychologist and a staid husband and father: his interest in experiential rebellion was largely intellectual.12

His ambivalence about countercultural activities, like drug use, was intellectual as well. Because he believed that psychedelics offered a valuable experimental opportunity to study higher realms of human consciousness, as well as an experiential opportunity to glimpse self-actualization, he agonized over their destructive potential.13 On January 18, 1968, armed with anecdotal data from the events at Esalen and from Leary’s exploits, Maslow wrote decisively, “I think LSD is clearly dangerous now, so no conflict there—dangerous, that is, for self-administration.”14

The cautious line that Maslow and others had advocated, between open exploration and thoughtful moderation, proved too difficult for many Esalen participants to tread. The thrill of drug-induced stimulation had seduced many visitors into the singular pursuits of these ends. As a direct effect of the rampant drug use, Esalen suffered a series of misfortunes. In 1968, Lois Delattre, a graduate of Esalen’s first residential program and an administrative employee of the San Francisco office, experimented with MDA, a psychedelic drug of the amphetamine group. She died within hours.15 Delattre’s death was devastating to the Esalen staff, who had known her well. Many blamed Esalen for her misfortune.16

This event eroded Esalen’s air of security and utopian invulnerability. Closely following Delattre’s accidental death were the suicides of Marcia Price and Judith Gold (a shooting and a drowning in the baths, respectively). The deaths further shook the Esalen community, causing them to seriously question what Esalen had become.17

Meanwhile, the founders of humanistic psychology, like the founders of Esalen, expressed a mounting sense of frustration with the excesses of the encounter group movement. Maslow’s Esalen critique file grew “fatter & fatter.”18 In 1969, he wrote, “Too many shits at Esalen, too many selfish, narcissistic, noncaring types. I think I’ll be detaching myself from it more & more.”19 May expressed a similar dissatisfaction, describing, in 1971, his avoidance of encounter groups and his temporary resignation from the Association of Humanistic Psychology as protest.20

Not every humanistic psychologist grew as disillusioned as Maslow and May. “You had to be present at the time to understand the tremendous energy of the movement,” explained former AAHP director John Levy, who saw the association move in many of the same kinds of experiential directions as Esalen had. Levy, who was later nostalgic for the excitement of the times, didn’t regret the strongly experiential turn in the least. “It was what people wanted.”21

Esalen leaders like Murphy, Leonard, and Price were at least as excited by the dramatic turns Esalen took as they were dismayed. Murphy, for instance, eventually conceded that Esalen’s divergence from his vision was natural and inevitable.22 Just as painful experiences, tragedy, and loss were often the price of growth and increased awareness, he felt that Esalen’s adolescent phase was a necessary step toward the maturation of the institute. He refused to engage in a reductionistic dialogue that artificially dichotomized Esalen’s founding years and the more chaotic events of the late 1960s. Both were of a cloth, and both were valuable in distinct ways.

The cultural energy that blew through Esalen fueled humanistic psychology as much as it derived fuel from it. And the encounter groups, whose excesses were a source of dismay, earned at least as much esteem as disapproval. In fact, the enthusiasm they generated inspired many to widen their application and use them in the service of other interests.

Psychedelic enthusiast Paul Kurtz supported encounter to aid in self-transcendence. California politician John Vasconcellos advocated a form of encounter for self-esteem building. And Look magazine editor George Leonard touted the groups as a potential solution for racial inequality in America.

While Leonard’s goals seemed grandiose, he found encounter to cut to the heart of racial struggles. What was needed to achieve interracial harmony, he felt, was brutal honesty, a willingness to reckon with our own deep-seated prejudices, and a solid attempt to achieve understanding across races.23

Leonard was perhaps more attuned to racial problems than most. Born in Atlanta in 1923, he had had firsthand exposure to the racism of the Deep South. He had seen the horrors of black tenant farming during his summers in Monroe, Georgia, and considered the practice to be “probably worse than slavery.”24 His discomfort with the elusive and apologetic presence of blacks in the small town incited in him a commitment to racial reform that shaped his career. By 1953, when he moved to California, Leonard was an anomaly: he was Southern, white, and an integrationist.25 As a senior editor for a major national magazine, he created special issues on civil rights, reporting the confrontation over integration at the University of Mississippi himself.26

Although Leonard had no background in psychology, he had been drawn into the orbit of humanistic psychology through his introduction to Michael Murphy on February 2, 1965. The two instantly connected, partially on the basis of their concern for the systematic denial of the ability of oppressed Americans to reach their highest potential. Two weeks later, they spent three nights at Leonard’s house brainstorming ways to extend civil rights and to aid individuals from diverse backgrounds in achieving self-realization.27

Leonard immediately began to envision ways to get blacks to Esalen, where they could experience the personal transformation he felt they so deeply needed. This transformation, he hoped, would be a crucial step in the eradication of racial inequality in America. Murphy and cofounder Dick Price agreed that greater racial diversity and the consequent inclusion of varied perspectives would enrich the experience of all participants. The consistent lack of diversity at seminars had perplexed and sometimes disturbed them. Still, neither had taken action to target seminars and workshops specifically to blacks.28

In 1967, Leonard enlisted the help of friend and neighbor Price Cobbs in the cause. He proposed that together they create a series of black-white encounter groups, which would operate like traditional groups, but with mixed-race participants and pointed honesty about concerns, emotions, and beliefs related to race. Cobbs, a black psychiatrist whom Leonard had first met during an interview for a Look piece on Cobbs’s experience of moving into an all-white San Francisco neighborhood, was reluctant to join in Leonard’s lofty attempts to achieve interracial harmony and secretly feared that Leonard’s interest was driven by textbook white liberal guilt.29 Cobbs was also reluctant to get involved specifically with Esalen.30 Unlike many blacks, Cobbs had heard of Esalen, but had “identified it as a playground of middle-class white dilettantes.”31

He was compelled, however, by what he perceived as Leonard’s genuine commitment to racial issues.32 As anyone who has spoken to him even briefly knows, Leonard was persuasive, and his enthusiasm infectious. He argued that the traditional ways weren’t working. Explaining his motivation for bringing interracial encounter to Esalen, he later wrote, “Black-power militants screamed their hurt, anger, and hatred. By revealing themselves and voicing the truth, they begged for encounter. White leaders responded with conventional language, cautious words. How could there be understanding without self-revelation? Didn’t the whites feel outrage, fear, repressed prejudice? The measured, judicious response seemed a lie.”33 Leonard was determined to make racial change mean something more than superficial policy-based actions; he wanted to cut to the emotional center of interracial attitudes and experiences.

Cobbs “shared this sentiment” and agreed to work with Leonard. He had sensed in his own practice a deepening divide between the races rather than the healing one would expect in the era of civil rights. He was concerned that by pushing racial issues to the forefront, the nation had unintentionally opened a floodgate to a deep fount of poisonous rage. He was as desperate as Leonard to find a solution, but he was also ambivalent. Even after committing to run the group, he considered canceling it in favor of attending a black power workshop on the East Coast. His wife convinced him to honor his commitment.34

The first black-white encounter group was titled “Racial Confrontation as a Transcendental Experience.” It was structured in the traditional Esalen manner, as a full weekend marathon event with neither the participants nor the leaders allowed to sleep, and was advertised in the Esalen brochure with the following description:

Racial segregation exists among people with divided selves. A person who is alien to some part of himself is invariably separated from anyone who represents that alien part. The historic effort to integrate black man and white has involved us all in a vast working out of our divided human nature.

Racial confrontation can be an example for all kinds of human encounter. When it goes deep enough—past superficial niceties and role-playing—it can be a vehicle for transcendental experience. Price Cobbs, a Negro psychiatrist from San Francisco, and George Leonard, a white journalist and author born and raised in Georgia, will conduct a marathon group encounter between races. The group will try to get past the roles and attitudes that divide its participants, so that they may encounter at a level beyond race.35

The participants arrived on the evening on Friday, July 21, 1967, in casual attire, eyeing one another suspiciously. While the group was large (thirty-five participants) and racially mixed, it replicated the class composition of previous groups, largely drawing from the upper-middle class. It was also unbalanced in its ratio of whites to blacks and of black men to black women (more whites and black men). Cobbs later wrote, “In terms of how they looked, my fears were immediately dispelled. They all appeared to be the kind of people who attended seminars and lectures and were interested in something called ‘race relations.’ ”36 The only anomalous participant was a young black man who worked for the highway department and had been repairing roads at Esalen. The man had noticed a flyer posted about the workshop and was struck by its inclusion of race and by the novelty of this as compared to the many flyers he’d seen posted that had never mentioned race.37

Like traditional Esalen encounter groups, the weekend began with physical stretching exercises led by a “Chinese guru.” The participants then moved to a larger seminar room where they made themselves comfortable in chairs or on oversized pillows on the floor. At the urging of Cobbs and Leonard, they began to introduce themselves and explain why they were there. The exceptionally charged nature of the group immediately began to manifest itself. A white schoolteacher from Los Angeles explained, a little too emphatically, “I’m here to find out what blacks really want.” A black man expressed his assumption that his white peers were college graduates who played tennis and chess. A white man explained his interest in racial encounter with a description of his liberalism.38

Cobbs, in an effort to prevent more division among participants than what already existed, opted out of conducting the small group work that was typical of encounter. He kept the larger group intact, and made sure all members were engaged. Since encounter groups differed from group psychotherapy in that the leaders were also active participants, Cobbs and Leonard attempted to model their own interracial friendship to the group. Even in this united context, however, the group was deeply divided. The civilized demeanor that governed the daily lives of the participants quickly devolved into angry accusations, infused with a growing sense of bitterness and desolation.

The black participants engaged in what Cobbs referred to as a game of “one-upsmanship,” before directing their hostility against white participants. There was a lot of name-calling and accusations that certain blacks were either not black enough or not appropriately black. One light-skinned black woman called a darker-skinned black man “a dirty little nigger” when he described his interest in sleeping with a white woman in the group.39 Even within the races, or perhaps more so within the races, suspicion and hostility ran deep.

By the second night, the group devolved into an “angry pissing match.” “What do you know about having your kids called ‘nigger’ and there’s nothing you can do about it?” shouted the group’s one black woman to a white woman. “When’s your kid ever been spit on because he was black?”40 It seemed impossible that a member of the ruling class could ever really understand the experience of the oppressed, and it seemed offensive for her to try.

Black participants zeroed in on what they saw as the problem of the “white good-guy liberal,” a person who defined himself as against racism but replicated the subtle dynamics of racial prejudice with his ignorance of black reality.41 The category, of course, applied to white women as well. When a white woman asked a black participant for his friendship, he responded with intolerance. “Fuck you!” he shouted. “And fuck your condescension. Fuck your pity!” Other participants threatened violence.42

The rage was so free-flowing and unabating that both Leonard and Cobbs began to give up hope. “Everything, it seemed, had failed,” wrote Esalen chronicler Walter Anderson. “The weekend was a failure, the people themselves were failures, and the prospects for tearing down the barriers between races were nil.”43

On Sunday morning, however, some time after the sun rose, a transformation occurred. Emotionally overwrought, a white woman began to cry, claiming that she only dated black men because she had given up on white men. She was laid bare, exhausted from the weekend’s strife, no longer willing to defend her views or her actions. She was at a breaking point. Fortunately, it was a collective breaking point. Her desperation struck a deeply human chord; it existed not because of logic or strategy or defensiveness. It was involuntary, authentic, uncontrollable, and it was powerful enough to evoke the sympathy of both the white and black participants. The episode ended in tearful hugging and emotional reconciliation.44

To Leonard, the moment of tearful recognition testified that the group had worked its magic, unleashing an emotional catharsis that represented a new level of understanding between individual participants and suggesting the possibilities for broader interracial understanding in the culture. He was euphoric; the group had been saved. Cobbs also left the group optimistic, but without dreams of reconciliation or even resolution. Cobbs later wrote in his 2006 memoir, “The participants at this first black/white confrontation group learned so much about one another that weekend that few, if any of them, went home unaffected. Many friendships were formed. Some of the participants came away offended and upset. A few seemed shell-shocked.”45

Cobbs’s primary impression was of the unveiling of a common black experience of anger and frustration and a common white experience of prejudice and ignorance. Encouraging others to see “the truth of black rage” soon became his primary interest. For this reason, he heightened his commitment to encounter groups, deciding to venture to Big Sur on weekends for modified versions of the same experience.46

In the flush of preliminary success, Leonard saw the black-white encounter group as a model for how broad social change would occur.47 To heal a culture that harbored deep racial tensions, it was necessary first to recognize and then to exorcise them through mutual understanding. But like Murphy, who was always skeptical of encounter, Cobbs had practical concerns about the ability of the groups to elicit enduring and pervasive change in cultural attitudes. He doubted as well the ability of humanistic psychotherapy to effectively address the needs of blacks.

Without a thorough knowledge of the “Black Norm,” Cobbs argued, even the most sensitive humanistic therapist would fail to offer effective treatment. “To find the amount of sickness a black man has,” Cobbs suggested, “one must first total all that appears to represent illness and then subtract the Black Norm. What remains is illness and a proper subject for therapeutic endeavor. To regard the Black Norm as pathological and attempt to remove such traits by treatment would be akin to analyzing away a hunter’s cunning or a banker’s prudence. This is a body of characteristics essential to life for black men in America and woe unto that therapist who does not recognize it.”48 The components of the “Black Norm” included both a cultural depression that Cobbs explained as a realistic sadness acquired from actual injuries suffered and a cultural antisocialism that he described as a general lack of respect for laws that hadn’t been created in the interests of blacks.49 Cobbs felt that the ignorance of psychotherapists with regard to the Black Norm, and their subsequent tendency to pathologize black characteristics, was responsible, in part, for the distaste many blacks felt for the entire institution of psychology.

If humanistic psychologists were going to effectively prioritize black Americans, they were also going to have to overcome black resistance to psychotherapy, and to arouse broader black interest. Unfortunately, the historically tortured relationship between blacks and psychology was a major impediment to black acceptance of any given set of psychological theories or techniques. While humanistic psychology diverged dramatically from psychological schools that had relied on medical and scientific power to control and manipulate individuals, it also possessed similarities to the movements that preceded it. For one, it was a largely white movement, led by scholars who had very little knowledge of black experience. Also, it was largely inaccessible. Seeking therapy from humanistic psychologists required money and knowledge about where to seek treatment. While its theories had begun to seep into the broader culture, as a therapeutic tool it remained the province of an overwhelmingly white cultural elite.

Many blacks undoubtedly associated humanistic psychology with the larger field of psychology, for which they had acquired a well-founded distrust. The history of American psychology and psychiatry was woven into the history of racism in both the American medical establishment and the American government. In the past, doctors had hypothesized that the black brain was “smaller and less developed” than the white brain, thus explaining why blacks were “not capable of managing a high degree of civilization.”50 They had also identified genetic predisposition in some racial stocks as an explanation for mental inferiority in blacks.51

For many blacks, seeking assistance from psychological institutions was also incompatible with their cultural and religious beliefs. The horrific legacy of slavery and segregation had instilled in many black Americans a sense that they were capable of and expected to endure “superhuman” levels of psychological and physical suffering. Problems in daily life or relationships, including the experience of anxiety or depression, appeared trivial in comparison to the obstacles their ancestors had overcome.52

One black psychiatrist has argued that the belief in superhuman strength produced a cultural imperative that blacks stay strong in the face of extraordinary psychic and physical obstacles. This mentality was reinforced by various mediums of black culture—music, poetry, and literature—and was perpetuated in black churches, where ministers delivered sermons designed to arm parishioners against difficulty.53 In aggrandizing the values of self-denial and self-sacrifice, though, ministers tended to prevent blacks from admitting to mental distress.

The concept of a healing God to whom believers could pray for the abatement of mental distress solidified the construction of psychological difficulties as a private, and thoroughly personal, struggle. Trust in religious solutions often precluded the possibility for reliance on a psychological “expert” whose motives were invariably less trust-inspiring than those of God, religious figures, and fellow church members.54

The fact that psychology was a predominantly white institution, and that whites were the cause of much of blacks’ distress, further prevented blacks from seeking professional help. But this pride, and this stoicism, also proved to be a form of masochism. Black men historically have suffered the highest levels of suicide of any American demographic and have always had a greater likelihood of being diagnosed with serious illnesses when evaluated by clinicians.55

While many blacks’ distaste for psychology dated back to even the earliest incarnations of American psychology, it became in many ways more acute in the late 1960s, when the ideals of integration were giving way, in large segments of the population, to a more black-centric politics, influenced by black power.56

In 1968, sociologist Lewis Killian wrote that “in practice integration had turned out to mean the token integration of a minority of qualified blacks into what remained a white man’s society.”57 Another scholar noted that many blacks at the time were characterized by “the experience of bitter disappointment, disgust, and despair over the pace, scope, and quality of social change [and by] the prolonged and direct encounter of certain civil rights workers—especially those connected with SNCC [the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] and CORE [the Congress of Racial Equality]—with the grim and aching realities, the dark and brute actions and deceptions of certain sections of the deep South.”58

The trajectory of the civil rights movement, from hope and faith in integration to cynicism and anger, had paralleled the evolution of eminent black psychologist Kenneth Clark’s sentiments. In 1952, Clark had testified in Briggs v. Elliott, one of the five cases combined in Brown v. Board of Education.59 Drawing on the doll studies that he and his wife Mamie Clark had performed on racial prejudice in children in segregated and desegregated schools, Clark’s testimony spoke to the necessity of desegregating schools to eliminate racism.60 By the mid-1960s, however, his patience had waned as he looked in vain for progress on integration. In 1965 he wrote: “I am tired of civil rights. Maybe I should develop some ideas concerning the enormous waste of human intelligence sacrificed to the struggle for racial justice in America at this period of the 20th century. How long can our nation continue the tremendous wastage of human intellectual resources demanded by racism?”61 In the years that followed, the black power movement took hold, and with it came a new black psychology.

While those who applied humanistic psychology to race sought to negate racial differences with humanistic understanding, black power offered both recognition of the unique experiences of racial minorities and symbolic compensation for previous wrongs they had endured. A splinter group of black psychologists channeled the black power perspective by refusing to enter into a paternalistic relationship with white-centered movements like humanistic psychology. Instead, they attempted to construct an alternative psychology, independent of white theory and inapplicable to white individuals. They drew inspiration from black nationalists like Frantz Fanon, a psychiatrist from Martinique who was a physician, scholar, and political militant in the Algerian revolution, and who identified mainstream psychology with “scientific colonialism.”62

Ironically, new black psychologists had more in common with humanistic psychologists than they cared to admit. Many of their foundational concepts seemed to be drawn directly from Maslow. Chief among these guiding precepts were “an affirmation of one’s own cultural integrity and psychological strength” and an “elevation of the total person” in the service of attaining “optimal” mental health.63 As their perhaps inadvertent adoption of humanistic theory suggests, humanistic psychology seemed, in many respects, to be ideally suited to the interests of blacks.

Black psychologist and University of Michigan professor Adelbert Jenkins recognized this affinity and was optimistic about humanistic psychology’s ability to appeal to blacks. He believed, as well, that humanistic psychology’s reformulated notions of mental distress and of human nature could help overcome blacks’ resistance to psychotherapy. Mental distress was, according to humanistic psychologists, not internally derived but a product of an environmental resistance to human potential through the frustration of healthy individual strivings. Individuals, however, were not powerless to rise above environmental oppression. On the contrary, they were inherently health- and growth-oriented and, given the opportunity, would maximize their potential. This formulation implied that the American government, and the culture at large, was still on the hook for the obstacles they had set in the way of blacks (in the form of discrimination and oppression), but that blacks had not been irreparably damaged and would continue to seek greater heights of self-realization.64

Jenkins extracted, from humanistic psychologists, a positive program capable of adaptation to the specific concerns of blacks in America. He also identified the applicability of their platform of protest to black psychology. Humanistic psychologists offered a reasoned critique of the ignominious tendency of social scientists to overlook social injustice by focusing on individual dysfunction. They accused psychoanalysis and broader drive theories, for example, of constructing pathological behavior as a product of a flawed psyche, locating the source of pathology within the individual and, in effect, blaming the victim. In all likelihood, argued Jenkins, accepting the psychoanalytic paradigm would have exacerbated the “sense [in blacks] that something inside themselves prevented them from struggling effectively to realize their full psychosocial potential.”65 According to one historian of black psychology, drive theory had also helped to “reinforce what can be referred to as nativist themes by declaring that human differences resulted from causes within people rather than environmental forces in society. Therefore the ‘plight’ of blackness, including the so-called culture and cycle of poverty, had been blamed on inherent inadequacies of blacks themselves.”66

Theories of environmental conditioning, which humanistic psychologists also opposed, further reinforced psychology’s inclination to “blame the victim” by explaining mental distress and pathological behavior as direct products of small-scale environments, such as the family or the neighborhood, but rarely with reference to larger social forces. Such behavioral theories, which were dominant in the 1940s and 1950s, had the potential to blame black families for the distress of black children, rather than locating black families, and their particular challenges, in the context of the broader culture and its systemic disadvantaging of blacks.

Even as drive theory tended toward psychological determinism, environmental conditioning theory suggested environmental determinism. In both cases, the individual will was denied, leaving the “subject” passive at best and inherently psychologically pathological at worst.67 Humanistic psychologists, of course, hoped to correct the errors of both psychoanalysis and behaviorism. They criticized these theories for denying individual subjectivity and disempowering will, and in their place offered a theory that, they believed, would inherently align better with black interests. The direct application of their guiding principles to the unique situation of blacks, however, tended to remain at the theoretical level.

Unfortunately, Jenkins’s work, which melded humanistic psychology with black concerns and was well respected, was relatively peripheral to the humanistic psychology movement (at least in its early years). More central contributions, like those of Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers, tended to exclude black issues entirely.

Maslow himself was sensitive to the natural affinity between the goals of humanistic psychology and of black liberation movements, but he felt no particular obligation to forge a connection between the two. In fact, he tended to blame blacks for their lack of attention to the relevance of humanistic psychology. In his personal notes, he wrote, “One sad thing about the whole business is that you can interpret one aspect [ . . . ] of the Negro rebellion as reaching out for this very humanistic entranced personal ethic and philosophy. They reach out for it as if it didn’t exist. And yet it does exist. They just don’t know about it. You could call it in a way an answer to their prayers, to their demands. In principle it is something which should satisfy them, because it’s a system of values which involves a reconstruction of science as a means of discovering and uncovering values (rather than it being value-free). Not only that, but it includes the beginnings of a strategy in tactics of reaching there. That is, a theory of education, including a philosophy of education including both means and ends of education.”68

Implicit in Maslow’s statement was an awareness that the goals of humanistic psychology, which prioritized the capacity for choice, for freedom, and for self-development, were inherently complementary to the objectives of civil rights. Absent, however, was any identification of humanistic psychology as having a responsibility for connecting with blacks.

In the 1960s, most humanistic psychologists professed their unrestrained support for improving race relations, but were, in reality, unwilling or uninterested in taking race relations to the forefront of their professional lives. The attention paid to racial issues at the annual conferences of the American Association of Humanistic Psychology and in the Journal of Humanistic Psychology was scant. In fact, not one article in the first two decades of JHP explored racial issues.69

This combination of personal interest and lack of professional attention tended to come across as racial tokenism; humanistic psychologists seemed superficially willing to endorse the goal of racial equality but not to work for it. The critique blacks lodged against whites in humanistic psychology paralleled their critique of white liberals in general. As sociologist Lewis Killian wrote in 1968, “Much of white support for black rights appears to be lip-service, an approval of rights without a corresponding commitment to do anything to grant them.”70

In his relatively brief interaction with humanistic psychology, Price Cobbs had identified this racial tokenism. When he raised issues regarding racial dynamics and concerns, other members often responded by saying, “Let’s just be human!” Cobbs felt deeply that just saying “I’m liberal and I’m for you” wasn’t enough, but that that was all that many humanistic psychologists were willing to offer.71

Stanley Krippner shared this view of humanistic psychology’s limitations in terms of exploring race. He argued that because they felt race was a social construct, many humanistic psychologists believed a revisionist perspective based on common humanity would erase the societal distinctions between blacks and whites.72 Krippner observed that whether dangerously naïve or just overly idealistic, humanistic psychologists tended to minimize and even ignore the pervasive nature of the racial prejudice with which the culture was saturated. Further, they tended to alienate racial minorities by homogenizing human experience, and ignoring the individual struggles and psychological scars characteristic of minorities living in a racially divided culture.73

Carl Rogers had hoped to do better. Championing the goal of using humanistic psychology to achieve racial understanding, Rogers himself facilitated several black-white encounter groups and celebrated the results. “The outcomes are a gut-level experiential learning [about] racist attitudes on the part of whites, and a rare opportunity on the part of blacks,” he later wrote.74 For blacks, he felt that the “bitterness and rage which exists” could be expressed productively, easing the burden of misunderstanding and isolation. Rogers touted the outcome of racial encounter as “the surprising result [that blacks and whites] tend to become persons to each other and can talk openly and freely without reference to stereotypes or color.75 But while Rogers harbored high hopes for the integrationist potential of the groups, he tended to view race-based encounter as a side project, and only intermittently gave it his attention.

His approach was typical of humanistic psychology adherents, who tended to express initial excitement about the potential of black-white encounter groups but later became distracted by the numerous aspects of humanistic psychology that competed for their attention.76 He was concerned about social injustice but not willing to subordinate other concerns in favor of activism. More extreme reactions came from humanistic psychologists like Virginia Satir, who failed to acknowledge any obligation the movement might have to pressing political issues of the time. Satir, when confronted about her lack of political consciousness, replied, “I want to change the family and their interactions. I want to change the communications and I even want to change the way therapists see dynamics and interactions. But I like the world as it is otherwise.”77

The brand of humanistic psychology that Satir (and others) practiced reflected an extreme personal focus that was a liability for the movement. Although the goal of racial harmony was aligned with their liberal interests and utopian aspirations, humanistic psychologists often reverted to acting like other psychologists, taking comfort in their disciplinary insularity and bowing out of broader cultural conflicts.78 In the case of civil rights, the AAHP mimicked the shortsightedness of larger organizations like the American Psychological Association (APA), which attended to the needs of black members (and the larger cultural crises they represented) only when forced to do so.

The APA didn’t even begin to acknowledge racial concerns until 1969, when at their annual convention twenty-four graduate student members of the newly formed Black Students Psychological Association (BSPA) demanded the APA council respond to their requests. Standing shoulder-to-shoulder in front of the council, the students asked that more black students be recruited to undergraduate and graduate programs in psychology, that blacks receive better representation in the APA, that black students be offered socially relevant experience in programs designed to benefit the black community, and that the credibility of the black power movement be recognized.79

This organized protest of black students was typical of the increased pressure facing professional organizations in the late 1960s. The American Sociological Association, for example, faced a comparable “disruption” at its own annual convention in 1969.80 In these organizations, as in most professional and academic organizations of the 1960s, blacks were underrepresented and their race-specific concerns generally unrecognized.81 But by the end of the decade, even associations with few black members began to feel internal pressure to confront racial issues.

Black students had grown, over the course of the 1960s, increasingly organized and self-assured in their sense of mission.82 The civil rights activities of the 1950s, including the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954, the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955, and the University of Alabama riots in 1956, erupted in the form of further protests and riots in the 1960s, infusing racial issues with a sense of undeniable urgency.83 Beginning with the freedom rides of 1960, the establishment of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee that same year and of the Congress of Racial Equality in 1961, the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, and the subsequent formation of the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission designed to enforce it, civil rights swept through the decade on a swift tide of activity and change.84

The response of the APA to the challenge from black graduate students was decidedly mixed. Milton J. Rosenberg, University of Chicago professor and council member, told the students that “the council was ‘beyond racism’ and was tired of the ‘make it hot for whitey routine.’ ”85 In frustration APA president George Miller asked, “How can we keep [psychology] a science if we try to solve everybody’s goddamn problems?”86 Other psychologists were more sympathetic to the demands of the black students, but doubtful about their relevance to the mission of the APA. University of Texas professor Sigmund Koch expressed his remorse that “psychology has no answers in respect of the problems [black students] are concerned about.”87

While these sentiments were typical of psychologists in response to the clash between disciplinary interests and social concerns, they were also common to liberals in other professions, who felt that, though they naturally supported equal rights, racial equality was irrelevant to their professional priorities. Many blacks judged the compromised efforts of predominantly liberal professional organizations toward racial integration to be insufficient and even insulting.88

The suspicion of psychologists’ racial tokenism compelled blacks to approach even the most earnest attempts of humanistic psychologists as inadequate. The success of Leonard and Cobbs’s black-white encounter groups, for example, was compromised by the markers of white liberalism that accompanied them.89

Centralized at Esalen, which had earned a reputation as an “upper-middle-class utopia,” the groups hardly seemed designed with black interests in mind.90 The breathtaking location—the cliffside views, the sulfur-infused hot springs, and the rolling hills of organic gardens—suggested a level of luxury and self-indulgence that was estranged from the daily experience of prejudice and struggle familiar even to middle-class blacks, and was unimaginable to the many blacks who lived in rural or urban poverty.91

The sexual ethos of Esalen, too, was foreign to many blacks, smacking as it did of the white leisure class.92 Esalen’s baths were clothing-optional during the day and entirely nude at night, and sexual promiscuity (between visitors or between visitors and staff) was rampant. These facts were widely publicized by the media. To many blacks, nudity as a form of protest was a bit frivolous, particularly in comparison to civil rights, the war in Vietnam (which was so costly to minority communities), and women’s liberation. It also ran counter to the strong influence of the black church.93

When confronted with open nudity at Esalen, black men must have been at least a little wary.94 Several historians have documented the care with which certain black men held themselves to standards of sexual morality, in the face of entrenched cultural myths that had constructed them as hypersexual predators.95 Even Cobbs’s initial reaction to Esalen reflected his perception of the threatening nature of sexual impropriety at Esalen. “Oh God,” Cobbs thought, “what have I gotten myself into? Me, a conventional young black professional, raised to be respectable. The visions of long-haired hippies swimming nude made me wonder what my mother would have thought about us being there.”96

Cobbs was also particularly concerned about the geographic limitations of hosting black-white encounters in Big Sur, viewing the inaccessibility as an obstacle to the realization of meaningful social change from the groups.97 Big Sur was a 150-mile trip from San Francisco on the Pacific Coast Highway, a narrow and serpentine roadway of treacherous hairpin curves that was uniquely susceptible to adverse weather conditions, flooding, and falling rocks (like the one that would eventually kill founder Dick Price).98

Both Murphy and Leonard were sensitive to Esalen’s limitations in this respect. Even before the first interracial encounter group, Murphy had proposed opening a city location that would better suit the needs of black participants. He hoped that it would attract wider community attention and enable people from the city to attend groups. Esalen’s San Francisco extension officially opened in 1967.

The new location, modeled closely on the original in terms of workshops and seminars, was initially a great success, with attendance exceeding ten thousand in the first two months of operation.99 Even with little advertising, the inaugural event alone, a lecture by Abe Maslow titled “The Farther Reaches of Human Nature,” had drawn an audience of two thousand people.100

Murphy, who became primarily responsible for the San Francisco extension while Price stayed on at Big Sur, brought to the project the same serious intentions he had infused into the original institute. In the first year it attracted serious scholars, including B. F. Skinner.101 It also honored its intentions to address race issues meaningfully, offering four racial confrontation workshops in the summer encounter series of 1968. The registration form explained that:

Open racial confrontation is at last a reality, but it has brought bloodshed and death, terror and polarization. Rather than fear a confrontation, we must welcome and embrace it. For only in direct and honest encounter can white racism and black self-hatred be discarded. This series of Racial Confrontations is to allow for bloodless riots where the most dreaded thoughts and emotions may be expressed, where self-delusions that limit can be stripped away. Only when such confrontation has occurred can man expand his blackness and whiteness into creative humanness.102

Unfortunately, the San Francisco extension wasn’t able to sustain the interest of the leaders, or participants, for very long. Attendance began to drop off after the initial surge of interest. The racial encounter groups were poorly attended by blacks and reflected the same middle-class bias of the initial Big Sur group.103 Viewing the San Francisco extension as secondary to that of the Big Sur branch, Esalen leaders seemed to have failed to devote the necessary resources to outreach for the center.

The San Francisco office was plagued by internal tensions as well. Faced with staff whose commitment to racial issues differed dramatically from one person to the next, the extension proved as vulnerable to the dividing potential of racial conflict as any other organization. These tensions were most aptly demonstrated in 1969, when an argument erupted between Ron Brown, a black graduate student at the San Francisco wing, and Bill Smith, a white administrator. The argument quickly escalated into shouting, and several things Smith said, including his threat to call the police, struck Brown as being racially loaded. Michael Murphy, George Leonard, and Price Cobbs met with the two to try to ease the conflict, but to no avail. As was typical, Murphy backed away from the confrontation, angering Leonard and Cobbs. Brown later said of Murphy that he “just never understood the racial part of it.”104 This insensitivity drove Cobbs away from Esalen; he never again ran a group there. Leonard, too, kept his distance from Murphy for a while, and Murphy himself lost some of his evangelical zeal for Esalen’s mission.105

The San Francisco extension was a sinking ship. In spite of early attendance, it had lost money from the start and soon began to tax the Big Sur facility.106 In the 1972 catalog, Esalen reported in the news section that the San Francisco extension lost $125,822 in 1971. In the same catalog, the San Francisco facility announced its intention to cosponsor its programs with the Gestalt Institute of San Francisco.107 Eventually, around 1973, the facility’s treasurer recommended to Murphy that the extension close. Whether this financial necessity stemmed from a lack of public interest or organizational mismanagement was a matter of some contention, but the outcome was evidence that the San Francisco Esalen never found the groove that the Big Sur Esalen did. “Perhaps Esalen needed that deep black Big Sur soil to thrive,” remarked George Leonard, in retrospect.108

Leonard’s statement suggests the otherworldly quality of the Big Sur Esalen; it was hospitable to the lofty goals of spiritual seekers but ill-suited to the weighty, urban social issues of the time.109 In recognizing the disconnection between this laboratory of change and the real world, Leonard was admitting, too, the structural limitations of the racial encounter techniques in which he had once invested his hopes for the redemption of society. Even though it would be nice to get the world leaders into an encounter group, the resulting change might be more contained than he’d originally hoped, and a good deal more personal.110

Leonard was one of many humanistic psychologists who were beginning to believe, toward the end of the 1960s, that placing the individual in the interpersonal context of encounter was another form of individual therapy. Although it might produce healthier, more fulfilled individuals who, when collected, might reach a critical mass and take society in new and better directions, the basic unit of change was to be the singular person.