“One very important aspect of the post mortem life is that everything gets doubly precious, gets piercingly important. You get stabbed by things, by flowers and by babies and by beautiful things—just the very act of living, of walking and breathing and eating and having friends and chatting.”
ABRAHAM MASLOW1
By the late 1960s, humanistic psychology had moved out of its infancy. Its character felt more solid and defined, and at the same time its weaknesses and limits were better known. It was a player in most major academic circles, and was represented in the departmental course listings and faculty interests of most universities. And though it wasn’t the most popular theory in the field, it had its circle of intimates, who were loyal and outspoken. They gathered at a number of institutes in Northern California, but also in intellectual pockets in places as diverse as western Pennsylvania and rural Georgia.
Within certain psychology departments, humanistic psychology actually became the dominant orientation. As early as 1959, Duquesne University in Pittsburgh offered a master’s degree in existential-phenomenological psychology, adding a doctoral program in 1962. Sonoma State College established a graduate program in humanistic psychology in 1966. And private institutes like John F. Kennedy University in California and the Union Institute in Michigan both began programs in 1964.2
This was just the beginning. Some of the best-known humanistic psychology programs were established in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the movement was in full swing. Among them was an unlikely candidate for a humanistic emphasis: a small, rural college at the foot of the Appalachians in Carrollton, Georgia.
West Georgia College had become a four-year institution in 1957, as the town was transitioning from its agricultural roots in cotton production to a technological orientation in wire and cable manufacturing. Its students were locals, and the majority were politically conservative. They were insulated, in significant ways, from the student movement and the counterculture. Hippies, in fact, were a foreign element, not seen much before 1969, when the psychology department stirred things up.3
Several West Georgia psychologists who had been sifting through as much of the new psychological theory as they could find decided they wanted to refashion the department to be more relevant to students’ lives. Because they were impressed by Maslow’s work in particular, they decided to call him directly and ask him to recommend a new chairperson to head their program. He sent them his former student, Mike Arons, who immediately got to work hiring like-minded people. Almost overnight, thirty new courses were added, most of which couldn’t be found anywhere else in the nation (or the world). They included “Human Growth and Potential,” “Holistic Psychology East & West,” “Phenomenology of Social Existence,” “Phenomenology of Spatiality & Temporality Myths,” “Explorations into Creativity Values,” “Meaning, & the Individual Will,” and “Choice & Belief.” When teaching these courses, the faculty tended to use nontraditional resources, like literature, philosophy, art, film, and music, and in certain cases wrote their own texts to supplement the available literature.4
West Georgia’s unusual new program was alluring, attracting students from all over the world, many of whom were already established in professions ranging from law to bellydancing, and almost all of whom were looking for a change. Established professors found themselves unexpectedly drawn to the small-town Georgia mecca, as well. Brandeis psychologist Jim Klee, for example, left idyllic Waltham, Massachusetts, in 1971 for a sabbatical at West Georgia and never returned. These kinds of moves were even more impressive than the jumps of northeastern and midwestern academics from comfortable academic positions at distinguished universities to comparably suitable positions in California—at institutes like the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute, or the California Institute of Integral Studies, which had opened in 1968—where the better weather and more liberal politics compensated for the lack of prestige.
Regardless of the specific location, though, the centralization of humanistic psychologists at places like West Georgia occurred in part because they found themselves more productive, supported, and stimulated than they did when they were dispersed at larger (and sometimes more reputable) universities where their work was less valued. Humanistic psychologists’ project of establishing a base of humanistic research that could compete with the output of other orientations seemed daunting when members were isolated, but more possible when they could feed daily on each other’s insights and enthusiasm.
In 1971 Don Gibbons, an Association of Humanistic Psychology member and psychology professor at West Georgia College, gathered enough signatures (the required 1 percent of APA members) to found a division of humanistic psychology within the APA.5 The first organizational meeting of the new division, known as Division 32, held on September 4, 1971, was attended by fifty-seven individuals and chaired by psychologist Albert Ellis. The division’s membership soared in the first few years and came to include a vibrant international contingent.6 This early success earned the division two seats on APA’s Council of Representatives and ensured that its members would have forums for their theory and research, both by forming a connection to JHP and creating a new journal titled Interpersonal Development.7
Also in 1971, a group of humanistic psychologists established a proper intellectual home for the movement. The Humanistic Psychology Institute (HPI, later known as Saybrook University) was the brainchild of Eleanor Criswell, who was then an assistant professor in Sonoma State’s humanistically oriented psychology department. Criswell was concerned that there was no real way to become a humanistic psychologist, no specific place devoted to training people to study and research humanistic ideas. Nor was there a place, she believed, where teaching embodied such humanistic ideals.8 She proposed the idea of a graduate school to the Association of Humanistic Psychology (AHP) in 1970 and became its first director.9 (The American Association of Humanistic Psychology had changed its name to the Association of Humanistic Psychology in 1969, acknowledging the increased international attention to its theories.10)
For the first few years, HPI and AHP were literally entwined, sharing a large industrial space in a brick building on Ninth Avenue in downtown San Francisco. Their aims were synergistic; together they searched for ways to bring new people into humanistic psychology and to transmit humanistic ideas to the world. Early on, HPI sought to create, at various universities, programs intended to train people specifically in humanistic psychology’s methods and theory. It cooperated with Sonoma State, for example, to found a one-year extension program designed to train people at any level (pre- or postdoctoral) in humanistic psychology. HPI soon turned to its own pursuits, however, establishing its independence from AHP and, beginning in 1972, offering graduate degrees.11
In many respects, HPI came to resemble the humanistic psychology movement in miniature. It built on the successes of related programs, but forged its own identity. It struggled to accommodate internal conflict (mainly between academic and experiential interests) productively. It tried to elevate institutional harmony over the individual interests of its faculty. And even when it failed on any of these counts, it kept pressing on.
At the same time that humanistic psychology was coming into its own at institutes and colleges across the nation, its father was beginning to fade. In February 1970, Maslow found himself eye to eye with his own mortality. Gazing at the ocean while driving south from Esalen, he wrote, “Thoughts of death while this will all go on. So impulse to hang on to it, appreciate it, be sure to miss not one single moment of it. It intensifies the beauty & the poignancy of it.”12
For three years, he had suffered intermittent chest pains, heart palpitations, insomnia, “sick exhaustion,” general fatigue, feebleness, trembling, and depression. But he had also experienced a new freedom from obligation and expectation, and had discovered new sources of transcendence.
What Maslow called his “postmortem life,” which began after his 1967 heart attack, was in his eyes all bonus. It was less planned, less structured, slower, and more relaxed. Periods of work were punctuated with the periods of rest his body required.
He found that the formlessness of this period of his life, and the long intervals of reading and observing, enriched his conscious awareness. His conclusions were better and more integrated, he believed, and his insight was clearer and more assimilated. He was beginning to self-actualize.13
He had chosen, during this period, an unlikely model for his personal transformation. His granddaughter Jeannie had been born in 1968. To Maslow, she was the embodiment of “being values.” She was “perfect and miraculous in her tiny perfection,” nonambivalent, uninhibited in her expression, orgiastic, defenseless, nonmonitoring, nonediting, non-self-observing, utterly amusable. She was free from competitive instincts, sexual hang-ups, and social restraints.14
Maslow wrote in his journal of the exhilaration and rapture that Jeannie evoked. Her presence defied the staleness of existence. Each time he saw her, she felt entirely new to him. She was unqualified delight and process-oriented pleasure.15
The extent of his enjoyment was, no doubt, a function of the expectation that he would soon die. He would miss seeing her grow up and would never discover the kind of woman she was to become. This realization, he wrote, “was sad & yet also intensified the experience & made me cling to it & suck every bit of juice out of it.”16
Maslow’s professional life, during these postmortem years, was characterized by a comparable degree of intensity. He vacillated between a sense of disappointment—in humanistic psychology, in the human potential movement, and in his own contributions—and a feeling of professional triumph.
In the years just before his heart attack, Maslow expressed, in his journal, a grave sense of self-doubt. While he had generated vital theory, he admitted, he had failed to follow up with the kind of meticulous research that would support and reinforce it.
“As I felt the research impulse drain out of me,” he wrote in his journal in 1966, “I guess I must have felt that the right to call myself a psychologist was also draining out of me, & in several kinds of situations I’ve felt inadequate, not sufficiently trained, etc.”17
His sense of professional alienation ran deep. “The positivists have so much taken over APA & the elementary texts & graduate education that AAHP is not even known to most,” he wrote “& my kind of work is shoved into a corner where I’m a hero to a few & unknown, neglected, despised by most, or simply not defined as a ‘scientific psychologist.’ ”18 His hurt was a product of decades of representing a minority perspective, of receiving rejections from prestigious journals, of being dismissed by peers for his unconventional views and approaches. Against his optimistic nature, he had begun to internalize some of the harsh criticism he had encountered, and to experience a sense of doubt that made his work feel futile.
He was being too hard on himself. In reality, the cultural fascination with humanistic psychology had given it a boost professionally. The proliferation of courses and academic programs devoted to Maslow’s principles was one measure of his success. Another was his election to the presidency of the American Psychological Association. In 1966, near the time when he was fantasizing about being thrown out of the APA, he received word of his nomination.19
This was a big moment for Maslow, and for humanistic psychology. “Astonished by being nominated to presidency of APA,” Maslow wrote in his journal. “Apparently I’ve read the situations incorrectly, feeling out of things, alienated from the APA, rejected & rejecting.”20
The presidency of APA, an organization whose membership would surpass thirty thousand by 1970, was the most distinguished post an American psychologist could occupy.21 Maslow was flattered by the recognition. His orientation toward the perceived value of his work changed almost overnight. He noted the advantages for AHP, “for adding weight & prestige to my causes, for having a guaranteed hearing for anything I want to say.”22
At the same time, Maslow privately expressed his vexation at APA’s choice, fearing that their endorsement of him represented an attempt at co-optation. What was being affirmed, he feared, wasn’t his theory but a neutered interpretation of it that was unthreatening to the values of American academic psychology, which, after all, hadn’t departed in any remarkable way from the constraints Maslow and his peers had railed against in the 1950s. His friend Frank Manuel remembers how disturbed he was: “What had he done, he kept asking morosely, what had become of him, when it was possible for those positivistic piddlers to choose him?”23
After his heart attack, Maslow judged his obligation to APA to be among the most taxing responsibilities he faced. He lacked the kind of energy, and the kind of interest, that the position required.24 Prioritizing his health and seeking a reprieve from his “panicky” dreams, Maslow canceled his presidential address.
But no such evasion could quell the tide of interest in his theory that his election to the position signified. By the late 1960s, the success of Maslow’s books was a further testament to his preeminence. His work circulated widely. Two hundred thousand copies of Toward a Psychology of Being, for example, were sold even before a trade edition was issued in 1968. And terms like “peak experience” and “self-actualization” were on the lips of “legions of admirers,” many of whom had never read his work.25
The success of Rollo May’s books was another indication of the size of the audience with whom the basic theories of humanistic psychology resonated. In fact, May’s publications, which included Psychology and the Human Dilemma (1967) and Love and Will (1969), were among the bestselling books in popular psychology at the time. In a nine-page article, a New York Times reporter documented the sales of Love and Will in its first year and a half as being in excess of 135,000 copies, and wrote that it was “fast becoming the source book for post-Freudian man.”26
In Psychology and the Human Dilemma, May spoke to individuals in a time of transition, when traditional values were obsolete and viable alternatives hadn’t yet emerged to fill their place. The basic human dilemma—that of maintaining a sense of significance in light of one’s objecthood, wrote May, was only exacerbated by unsettling cultural changes in sexual mores, religious beliefs, traditional roles, and governmental authority.27
In the late 1960s, many Americans were feeling disoriented by cultural flux. In 1968 alone, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy were assassinated, the My Lai massacre and the Tet Offensive shed new light on the horrific nature of America’s involvement in Vietnam, and Lyndon B. Johnson finished his term in shame. The women’s liberation movement began to gain steam, while the civil rights struggle raged on and student protests continued. As the election of Richard Nixon suggested, though, many Americans had abandoned the idealistic hopes that had fueled not just the radical movements of the decade but the liberal legislative programs of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.
Naturally, May’s solutions to this cultural upheaval were psychological rather than political. Grounded in his experience providing psychotherapy, May touted the values of heightened personal awareness, freedom and self-determination, responsibility for oneself and others, and an acceptance of the requisite anxiety involved in living.28 Man was intuitively capable of so much more, May claimed, than psychologists had made him out to be.
Like Maslow, May indicted psychologists for failing to provide the affirmation and validation people so badly needed. He also argued that the discipline of psychology, by its rhetoric and the scientistic philosophy that underlay it, had helped strip people of precisely the inner resources that were needed most in periods of cultural despair. Addressing the mainstream psychologist, he wrote, “You have spent your life making molehills out of mountains—that’s what you’re guilty of. When man was tragic, you made him trivial. When he was picaresque, you called him picayune. When he suffered passively, you described him as simpering; and when he drummed up enough courage to act, you called it stimulus and response. Man had passion; and when you were pompous and lecturing to your class you called it ‘the satisfaction of basic needs’ . . .”29
In contrast, the psychology May espoused was designed to embolden individuals, to celebrate their complexity and gird them for action. He again used the language of existential psychology to give meaning to their struggles and offer solutions. In Love and Will, he normalized neurosis, targeting the culture as its source and thereby freeing individuals from blame for their pathology. He distinguished neurotics from the masses by the fact that the usual cultural defenses didn’t work for them; neurotics experienced consciously that of which the unfeeling majority was temporarily unconscious. The solution for societal neuroses, he felt, was the same as the solution for personal neuroses: expanding people’s awareness so that specific issues could be illuminated, assimilated, and embraced.30
“The microcosm of our consciousness is where the macrocosm of the universe is known,” he writes. “It is the fearful joy, the blessing, and the curse of man that he can be conscious of himself and his world. For consciousness surprises the meaning in our otherwise absurd acts. Eros, infusing the whole, beckons us with its power with the promise that it may become our power. And the daimonic—that often nettlelike voice which is at the same time our creative power—leads us into life if we do not kill these daimonic experiences but accept them with a sense of the preciousness of what we are and what life is. Intentionality, itself consisting of the deepened awareness of one’s self, is our means of putting the meaning surprised by consciousness into action.”31
Both May’s and Maslow’s theories suggested that individual development could counteract social deterioration. But in the final years of his life, Maslow began to see society as more central to self-realization. He recognized that his prior conceptualizations had favored the individual at the expense of groups, and that for an individual to thrive, she would need social nurturing and a sense of belonging.32 He proposed what he termed the “bodhisattvic path,” which integrated individual development with social zeal, arguing that both the self-improver and the social helper had to evolve simultaneously.33
In using the Buddhist term for enlightenment (bodhisatt-vic), Maslow nodded to the other turn his theory had taken in his last years. His sickness didn’t make him a religious man, but it pushed him to make room for “small ‘r’ religion” in his theory.34 While his concept of self-actualization had assumed that the healthiest individuals experience ecstatic peaks, his later theory of self-transcendence proposed a “high plateau,” where transcendence was less intense, but also less fleeting. Plateau was both poetic and cognitive, rather than purely emotional, and replaced the element of surprise with the element of choice. Often attained through hard work, and often brought on more gradually, sustainable transcendence was more appropriate for older people, who were systemically less able to tolerate the violence of peaks.35
While humanistic psychology certainly allowed for man’s transcendent nature, Maslow felt it necessary to generate theory more specifically focused on topics like unitive consciousness, mystical experience, and cognitive blissfulness. With the help of Anthony Sutich and psychiatrist Stanislav Grof, he founded a subsidiary school of humanistic psychology devoted to these interests, called transpersonal psychology. It began with the first publication of the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology in 1969.36
That same year he worked, when he had the energy, on a new book titled The Farther Reaches of Human Nature. In it, he developed the ideas of his friend and colleague Douglas McGregor, specifically “Theory Z,” a concept that raised the ceiling on his hierarchy of needs. McGregor had first proposed the idea in 1960 in a book called The Human Side of Enterprise, which was influential in industrial management. Theory-Z people, Maslow explained, were able to transcend self-actualization (Theory Y).37 They viewed peak and plateau as the most important things in life, and spoke naturally in being-language (the language of mystics, seers, profoundly religious men). They were holistic, awe-inspiring, responsive to beauty, and they were able to identify the sacred in everyday life. At the same time, though, they were less happy than healthy self-actualizers; they seemed to possess a “cosmic sadness” and were more reconciled to evil.38 Perhaps he counted himself in this group, or deemed it his ideal, as he sat perched on the precipice of his life, able to see farther but also aware that he had not much farther to go.
Maslow and Bertha had left their home of eighteen years in January 1969 to settle in Northern California. The departure was bittersweet. On the one hand, they felt uprooted and insecure. They were sad to give up their house, and the “blessed river” they lived along. At the same time, they were relieved to escape the more unpleasant aspects of Brandeis, and of Boston.39
Maslow’s students had grown progressively offensive to him. They were more rebellious than ever (a group of black militant students had recently vandalized scholarly work in protest of institutional racism) and lacked respect for authority.40 He felt a comparable sense of frustration with his colleagues, whom he perceived as apathetic or unthinking.
The weather had become an issue as well. The cold Boston winters taxed Maslow physically and made him feel like an invalid. California’s gentle weather, he hoped, would prove salubrious and possibly even extend his life.
The real allure of California, though, was a fellowship at the Saga Administrative Corporation, a company that managed college cafeterias. As the company grew dramatically, its president developed an interest in humanistic management. He offered Maslow a Mercedes-Benz, a generous salary, and a private office with a secretary. In exchange, Maslow had no duties to the company, but was expected to work on his own writing and maintain his relationship with the company for two to four years.41
Abe and Bertha bought a home in Menlo Park, just outside of Palo Alto, and installed a swimming pool, in the hopes of further strengthening Maslow’s heart.
Meanwhile, Maslow’s outlook improved. He adored the people at Saga and found the plant itself attractive and homey.42 His journal entries in the few months following the move described his sense of gratitude and privilege, and detailed relief at being released from his duties and schedules. By all reports, he was the happiest he’d ever been.
Although his health wavered throughout 1969 (he reported in late April that he had spent a month on his back), his energy seemed to soar in the early months of 1970. In addition to travel within California, time with his granddaughter, lectures, and parties, he recorded numerous ideas for applying humanistic psychology to race relations, student riots, poverty, and more. He planned a book on humanistic politics.43
On June 8, 1970, he experienced his third heart attack while jogging in place beside the pool, and died instantly.
At his memorial service a few months later, his friends, including those who had once affectionately mocked his grandiosity, took serious stock of what it meant to lose Maslow’s utopian thinking. It had served an essential function, interrupting them from their daily tasks and redirecting their sights upward. “When utopia dies, the society is spent,” warned his friend Frank Manuel.44 Maslow died certain that this would not be the case. He felt good about himself and proud of the work he had done. And he offered his life as proof of his theory.45
Brandeis Professor James Klee was tempted to conclude that “they do not make men like Abe Maslow anymore,” but he resisted. That kind of despair went against what Maslow had built. His sense of wholeness and his clarity of vision were themselves models of how hope could win.46 At his memorial service, his close friend Ricardo Morant explained how both Maslow and Einstein had “sensed a different cadence than the rest of us.” Where others saw only change, Maslow saw growth and development. “For our sake,” said Morant, “we can only pray that he also sensed more clearly.”47
Maslow left his legacy on tenuous footing. He hadn’t trusted his colleagues to do the work required to elevate humanistic psychology to a higher plane. In 1969 he had counted only himself and Rogers as “among the living.” “Fromm has gone downhill,” he wrote. “May may get to Mt. Olympus but really isn’t there yet. And that’s it. The younger ones may or may not grow to the B-realm. Can’t tell yet. And Fromm & May are just not empirical enough. Also many of the other therapists & philosophers.” He wondered too if Murray would accomplish anything great before he died.48 And, though he respected Rogers as a researcher, he was continually dismayed at his lack of depth, and his failure to include metaphysical concerns and consider evil.49
His cynicism about his peers had likely stemmed, in part, from frustration with himself. Though he repeatedly defended his “freewheeling explorations, affirmations, and hypotheses” as necessary and utterly testable prescientific endeavors, he was aware that in leaving the actual empirical testing to others he was leaving a hole in the movement that might never be filled.50
What he could entrust his enthusiastic followers to do was to continue to organize and promote the movement. One fortuitous product of his election to the presidency of APA had been an expanded sense of recognition professionally and a wider berth for those with ideological similarities.