“You need something to open up a new door, to show you something you seen before, but overlooked a hundred times or more.”
BOB DYLAN1
In the 1970s, many of the previous decade’s novelties became more commonplace. For the first time in history, the majority of American women worked outside of the home, and many lived in nontraditional arrangements—some communally, some with partners out of wedlock.2 And the counterculture, which was nothing but a ripple in the 1960s—estimated numbers in the 1967 Summer of Love, for example, don’t exceed a hundred thousand—had swelled into a “garden of millions of flower people by the early 1970s.”3 Hippiedom had grown commonplace; college and high school yearbooks from the early 1970s reveal shaggy beards, long hair, beads, and granny glasses, whereas yearbook photos from as late as 1968 showcase clean-shaven faces, short haircuts, modest dresses, and ties. The 1970s counterculture rejected the dominant cultural values of the past and attempted to construct viable replacements through the expansion of consciousness by dope-smoking, freer sexual mores, communal living, and “New Age” practices like encounter groups, Zen, and yoga.4
American psychology was entangled in this new ethos. In the form of humanistic psychology, it provided a justification for New Age techniques, and as a whole it offered a compelling means for understanding both a displaced modern self and a society fragmented by loss of faith in government and traditional religion.
As an academic specialty, psychology in general attracted students with its perceived cultural relevance and, in some cases, unconventional new techniques. Many psychology professors augmented traditional modes of teaching with the use of literature, popular television, “self-help” exercises, even encounter group methods. By the mid-1970s, it was a campus favorite. In 1976, three million students were taking psychology courses, 250,000 were majors, and 60,000 graduated with a BA in psychology (up from 17,000 a decade earlier).5
As a cultural phenomenon, psychology found a new life in self-help literature, a genre that grew at an exorbitant rate over the course of the 1970s. From 1972 to 1979, there were at least two self-help books on every nonfiction top ten list at any given time. Popular titles included Thomas Anthony Harris’s I’m OK, You’re OK, which used a theory of transactional analysis to support individual change based on ego integrity, and The Joy of Sex, which provided therapeutic advice for improved sexual relations.
The self-help industry maintained a tense relationship with psychotherapy. While one scholar concluded that the prescription of self-help books had become a common practice of psychotherapists, another study showed that self-help books were perceived by professional psychotherapists as being antagonistic to the field.6 They were often written by authors untrained in psychology, and they often made sweeping, and empirically unfounded, claims about the cure rates of their methods. Many self-help books actually disparaged psychotherapy directly; in his review of sixty-three self-help books, one scholar found 155 evaluative remarks about therapy, 84 percent of which were negative.7
Whatever the intellectual incongruities, in terms of public attention, the claims of psychology and those of self-help fed on each other. Humanistic psychology, in particular, profited from the self-help boom. The techniques associated with it were palpable in a way that recondite academic theory was not. It pertained to the masses, it was humanizing, and it was sexy.
Maureen O’Hara was a good example of how these various trends converged, and normalized, in the 1970s. When O’Hara participated in her first encounter group in 1970, it changed the entire course of her life. At the time, O’Hara was a third-year doctoral student in biology at the University of Leeds who had followed her husband to the United States for a teaching job at Oberlin College. She knew next to nothing about psychology. Oberlin, however, was in the midst of an organizational transformation, and as part of its self-study “everyone was in an encounter group.” There were faculty groups, student groups, student-faculty groups, faculty wives’ groups, and mixed groups.8
O’Hara attended a mixed group, composed of students, administrators, faculty, and faculty spouses, in which the provost himself participated. What shocked her most was the complete leveling of the hierarchy that occurred within the group. Focused on the theme of gender equality, the group began with an abstract discussion of equality, but quickly shifted to more personal confrontations between the women who were marginalized at the university and the administrators who were complicit in this practice. One female economist “burst into sobs as she confessed that she had not realized that following her husband to college in the middle of Ohio would mean she would spend her days holed up in her house with three kids and a dog losing her intellectual edge and going slowly mad.” Even the men began to express their sense of inadequacy with respect to their peers, and to the well-qualified women who were often confined to adjunct work.9
O’Hara noted that healthier group dynamics arose when participants emerged as distinct people and put aside their roles. Students expressed unexpected feelings of closeness to the faculty and the provost that seemed to endure beyond the encounter. In O’Hara’s eyes, the group represented not only a pedagogical triumph, but a new set of possibilities for how groups could access collective wisdom that transcended individual contributions.10
O’Hara was personally transformed by the authenticity of the group and full of expansive thoughts about the applicability of its mechanisms to all aspects of life. She concluded that this was the way students should learn. She withdrew from her biology program and began exploring doctoral programs in clinical psychology. The choice for her came down to the programs at Case Western University and Union Graduate School, both of which were strongly humanistic and organizational. At the time, the boundary between groups aimed at improving organizational behavior and those focused on personal therapy was relatively fluid; there were humanistic psychology programs housed in departments of management and organizational studies, and there were business interests represented in psychology departments.
O’Hara chose Union, where she met a group of students who uniformly identified with humanistic psychology, though they divided between those who wanted to do individual work and those who were more interested in transforming the wider world. If O’Hara hoped to change the world, it was, at least initially, through the power of psychotherapeutic techniques to effect individual change. After her graduation from Union in 1976, the methods she used were a hybrid of complementary approaches. She was grounded in an emancipatory perspective (culled from feminism and civil rights) and a Rogerian view of a client’s capacity to invent her own way out of her problems, but she considered rational-emotive techniques, à la Albert Ellis, to be “arrows in the quiver” as well. Cognitive-behavioral theory (as we now know it) wouldn’t really emerge as distinct from humanistic methods until the 1980s.
O’Hara also used Gestalt activities. She used imaginative approaches, like psychodrama and acting out, to access other dimensions of patient awareness. Instead of asking a mother to imagine her teenage son’s response to a given situation, for instance, she would ask her to take his role, to respond by accessing a previously untapped level of empathy.11
When these diverse techniques, which O’Hara practiced for eighteen years as a “person-centered Gestalt therapist,” were deployed by a thoughtful psychotherapist, they could be invaluable in helping patients improve their lives and access parts of themselves that, in earlier eras, they may never have known. The experiential techniques were also, as internal critics like Maslow and May had recognized fairly early on, subject to abuse, distortion, and trivialization. And as the 1960s passed into the 1970s, it was often the self-indulgent rather than the deeper aspects of humanistic psychology and human potential that took hold—not just in the broader culture, but within the movements themselves.
Leo Litwak, who had visited Esalen in 1968 with serious reluctance, described the AHP convention of 1972 as pure party-style entertainment. The meetings were packed. The participants had a “decidedly California cast”: exuberant, informal, straightforward.12 The activities were eccentric: requiring couples to lie on the floor, to fantasize, to participate in encounter and psychodrama.
In the New York Times’s coverage of AHP’s 1970 annual convention, Robert Reinhold described eight hundred people strewn across the floor in the ballroom of the convention hotel, touching each other in silence, with their eyes closed.13 Tom Wolfe portrayed a similar scene in which a trainer was instructing the prone masses to take their fingers off the “repress button,” to “let all the vile stuff come up and gush out.”14
The emotional expulsiveness of these sessions had been parodied a year earlier in the popular film Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice. The film opens with a confrontation between Bob and Carol, in the context of an Esalen-style encounter group, about the distance in their marriage. As Carol begins to weep, the other ten participants crawl on hands and knees to join her and her husband in hugging and touching.15
In later describing the transformative experience to their friends, Bob and Carol repeat the phrase “I felt so moved.” They go on to transmit their new (and simplistic and naïve) orientation to human relationships. Carol offers such aphorisms as “The truth is always beautiful” and “No one should ever make anyone feel uncomfortable.” Meanwhile, everyone around them grows increasingly uneasy.
Such sentimentality, argued journalist Jane O’Reilly, was a blight on humanistic psychology, and a symptom of the “spacious and squishy” California thought that was infecting the nation.16 Host to the hippie riots on the Sunset Strip, the Summer of Love, the Human Be-In, and all variety of countercultural activity in Haight-Ashbury, California had, by the early 1970s, earned a reputation for softness. Although the state was undergoing staggering commercial and industrial expansion, and was a national research center, many Americans chose to dismiss it as the “land of fruits and nuts.”
According to O’Reilly, the Californian idea that problems are amenable to easy and quick cures had ravaged the human potential movement, just as it had overrun the nation. She described the movement as a debased process, a “circular ritual of reassurance,” and an evasion of reality. Although she conceded that humanistic psychology had done and continued to do amazing things to open people to change, she argued that the experiential emphasis had diluted its generative nature and replaced its theoretical dynamism with trite phrases and stale responses.17
Many of AHP’s leaders agreed with external criticisms of the movement, fearing the overemphasis on encounter threatened its respectability. In fact, the harshest criticisms of the experiential turn came from within humanistic psychology itself.
Lawrence Solomon, chairman of the 1972 convention, regretted the intrusion of the experiential and expressed his dismay over the “increasing slippage” between humanistic psychology’s ideals and the anarchic and anti-intellectual tendencies that had come to pervade the movement.18 Likewise, conference participant and UCLA business school professor Fred Massarik warned: “There is much concern with turn-on. [ . . . ] But it should not interfere with the think-on.”19
Rollo May, too, was exasperated. “May seldom participates in encounter sessions, and at the Miami Beach convention, when he was caught in a group that celebrated its ecstasy by jumping up and down, he simply jumped his way to the door and out of the room,” wrote David Dempsey. He went on to describe the ultimate inescapability of AHP’s “acting-out techniques,” explaining that May was later forced to participate in a “toe-touching orgy” and a trust march through the conference headquarters.20
Although academic sessions punctuated experiential meetings at the conventions, many participants had no academic ties and no interest in the more intellectual endeavors.21 Even at APA conferences, Division 32 members preferred experiential sessions, which the organization tolerated with condescension.22
To critics, the preeminence of encounter represented an unsettling evasion of systematic thought in both group leaders and participants. Many participants, seduced by the powerful experience of epiphany, seemed to have abandoned the goal of integrated self-transformation and appeared to no longer even feign interest in developing rational, scientific bases for the techniques they would employ. Some sought encounter with a degree of interest that approximated addiction.
“There were a bunch of people at Esalen and other places,” said Richard Farson, “who really thought if we turned the screw a little more, if tears really showed, that we were experiencing something deep, then vomiting or screaming would be even better.”23 The higher the pitch of the emotional intensity, they hoped, the more dramatic the personal transformation.
But the more grounded humanistic psychologists realized that just as psychedelic trips were unlikely to yield enduring change, self-actualization couldn’t be purchased at a weekend retreat.24 As the founders had conceived it, self-actualization was a lifelong process, requiring as it did continual striving and ever-expanding self-awareness. The “brief diet of uninhibitedness” that encounter groups provided, argued one critic, was more likely to result in a transitory sense of enlightenment than in lasting change.25 By design, many felt, encounter groups were incapable of impacting an individual’s daily sense of health.
Although encounter groups could be a beneficial component of individual experience and the process of change, promoters tended to treat them like a panacea. Sole emphasis on encounter was reductionistic, not holistic, betraying the purposes that humanistic psychologists had articulated in early theory. “Like the behaviorists of the sixties,” wrote Richard Farson, “we have become obsessed with our new technology, which, to my mind, fragments people as much as do the approaches of those whom we criticized.”26
Encounter groups also seemed to unwittingly encourage the development of negative characteristics like self-focus, hedonism, and emotionalism at the expense of communal concern and rational interest. By keeping individuals focused on their own needs, feelings, and desires, and by offering a quick fix, which led to the desire for further fixes, the groups seemed to act to both dissipate cultural dissatisfaction and diminish a sense of social responsibility.
Bernard Rosenthal, a professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology with an academic interest in encounter, warned that the groups opiated the masses and maintained the status quo.
“By diverting the desperation and resentment engendered by the prevailing socio-cultural system to innocuous transient satisfactions,” he wrote, the human potential movement “has prevented the confrontation and attack on the very issues that have spurred dehumanization. [ . . . ] By encouraging temporary self-actualization at episodic seminars and on weekends, it has artificially and falsely transformed the humanistic impulse and value-orientation into a non-authentic process in a closed-chamber environment and thus given a rather illusory view of its nature and power.”27
Episodic seminars, Rosenthal warned, lacked both an integrative quality that would carry over to the wider world and a value orientation premised on a sense of social purpose and context.28 The groups were characterized by a value neutrality that exalted all forms of experience equally. In refusing to differentiate and evaluate types of sensations, feelings, and interpersonal practices, though, group leaders were at odds with the decidedly non-relativistic bases of health the founders had proposed. “It is here the encounter movement reveals its affective promiscuity and valuative limbo—or possibly nihilism,” he wrote. “For it is ready for all experience, all states of being, and all explorations of sensation.”29 By being concerned with feeling in and of itself, the movement failed to account for its externalities: there was no reference to “purpose, direction, values enhanced, public policy sustained, social organizations supported, way of life abetted, and image of man subserved.”30
In this context, charged as they were by the American climate of rebellion and by their own liberation from mainstream psychology, many humanistic psychologists had disavowed pragmatic methodology.31 Historian and humanistic psychologist Eugene Taylor referred to the massive “inductive leaps” of associated theorists as partially responsible for the movement’s shortcomings. Too often, he argued, humanistic psychologists began with a theoretical premise and jumped to an application of it, without being able to answer for the steps in between.32
Rollo May, in a personal correspondence with several members of the organization, articulated his sense that AHP seemed to be turning into a “circus.” He cited the sensationalist bent of the meeting titles at the AHP convention as evidence of the trivialization of the movement’s larger concerns. The title “Childbirth for the Joy of It,” for example, reflected a “general aura of irresponsibility that ran through the whole program,” and ignored the pressing issue of overpopulation while carelessly treating babies as “playthings.” He also criticized the session titled “Should a Therapist Go to Bed with His Patient?” which was predictably picked up by the New York Times, for engendering impressions of the movement that were irrelevant to humanistic psychology. And he invoked the phrase Erik Erikson had used in reference to hippies: “They play with symbols that people die for.”33
In addition to condemning the “huckster” titles, May feared that humanistic psychologists had gone too far in opposing the nature of academic psychology. May argued that humanistic psychology’s antagonism toward APA had endangered the humanistic basis of humanistic psychology. “Our tendency in our reaction against APA has been an anti-intellectual one and we have tended to leave out the thinking, reflecting, historical man and put in only the feeling, touching man in the ‘now.’ ”34
In these charges, May was, of course, implicating his peers, his friends, and even himself in letting things get so bad. Caught up in the intensity of the cultural moment, humanistic psychologists often did worse than failing to prioritize intellectual issues; many were complicit in disregarding them. George Leonard recalls making a statement at an Esalen seminar that went on to haunt him. “Fuck history,” he had said. The audience “exploded with approving laughter” and the sound bite was repeatedly played on public radio. “If that cry was taken as simply a warning against inertia in the face of precedent,” wrote Leonard, “it might have had some merit. But to the extent that it would be taken as permission to ignore the lessons of the past, it had to rank among the dumbest things I had ever said.”35
Rollo May rued the fact that the organization was “formed by scholars,” but “taken over by hippies.”36 Like California, he suggested, the land where it had come of age, humanistic psychology was “full of illusions” and in flight from reality.37
Many humanistic psychologists, including some who saw significant value in encounter, had tried to prevent the subversion of the movement’s scholarly work to the experiential work of encounter. Maslow, for example, had often reflected on the necessity of balancing experiential elements with good theory and experimental researches.38 Murray, who as early as 1964 had proclaimed the movement “at once strident and confused,” urged humanistic psychologists to articulate a unitive vision, using logic and reason in the service of good science at least as often as they called upon experience.39
“So far,” wrote Richard Farson, “most of us simply haven’t done the hard work of making a humanistic psychology.”40 With regret, he asserted that “humanism as a psychology does not compare to behaviorism in scale, scholarship, or scientific discipline.”41
Farson, in a letter to fellow members of AHP, asked whether the group wanted to be a cult or an association (of shared interests, values and beliefs). Humanistic psychology’s “bad science,” Farson argued, had made it cultish, as had its reliance on jargon, its lack of intellectual dialogue, its belief in its own superiority, and its unwillingness to consider conflicting evidence.42 Rollo May shared this criticism, noting that “an aura of self-righteousness hangs over our movement.” Its very language, he observed, was replete with words that, in compensation for the movement’s relative powerlessness, projected an overly strong sense of personal power. (He took, for example, the basic term “self-actualization.”)43 The pervasive adoption of the group language fueled the cultish tendencies of the movement, producing a chorus of agreement in which members uncritically touted the humanistic message. Conflict was construed as “unproductive” and “un-humanistic.”44
The Journal of Humanistic Psychology, intended to be the intellectual bedrock of the movement, was perceived by many to reflect the same shortcomings as the larger movement—an inattentiveness to science, an uncritical air of self-promotion, and an espousal of overly simplistic solutions. AHP member and Harvard Business School professor Tony Athos, in conversation with Rollo May, described the Journal of Humanistic Psychology as “intellectually fly weight,” and identified the “tendency in our group not to want to think too hard.”45
Even Maslow, who hadn’t lived to witness the increasingly experiential focus of AHP in the 1970s, had foreseen the potentially destructive direction of the movement. In 1969 he wrote: “This is starting to get all confused. Just the way I am these days about 3rd Force psychology, Esalen, et. al.—conflicted.”46
Meanwhile, May and others made many attempts to appeal to their peers in AHP regarding the necessity of restoring intellectual balance to the movement. They were repeatedly, and perhaps predictably, disappointed in the lack of response. In an undated letter from Richard Farson to members of AHP, Farson expressed concern that the issues that caused many of the more academic-minded members of AHP to leave the association still had been neither “sufficiently aired” nor adequately acknowledged.47
In their unwillingness to accept internal criticism, certain AHP members were being self-destructive. Farson targeted the organization for subverting its own goals of embracing complexity, of encouraging productive conflict, and of fostering a plurality of perspectives. The practice of evading complexity, he argued, was anti-humanistic; internal conflict, self-criticism, and self-examination were critical to the productive and healthy evolution of an organization.48 He encouraged humanistic psychologists to view their organization in the same way they conceived of individuals. Growth would be attained not by the exclusion of conflicting perspectives, but through the integration of new perspectives, forged hermeneutically.49
In addition to the overemphasis on techniques of personal transformation, he found AHP more committed to the goal of countercultural revolution than to the project either of reorienting notions of human nature or of revitalizing the practice of psychology. “Is AHP to be, as its name implies,” he asked, “an Association for Humanistic psychology, devoted to the open-minded yet clear-thinking exploration of the nature of human existence and the possibilities of human growth, or is it to be an association dedicated to promulgating the faith that a certain kind of large-scale change is now taking place (or is about to take place) in American society and/or the world?” For Farson, answering in favor of the former was the only way to distinguish AHP from a cult.50
Although Farson, May, Murray, and others did their share of grumbling, they were careful to avoid the pitfalls of indulging their differences. They attempted, instead, to adhere to their principles, tirelessly communicating their criticisms in ways they hoped would be constructive. Most of this communication came in the form of articulate memos and occasional verbal addresses. But, in 1975, they made a larger-scale effort, organizing a theory conference that would allow members to air their concerns and to forge a vision of a healed organization. The conference would have the additional conciliatory effect of reuniting estranged humanistic psychology dropouts, like Rollo May and Henry Murray, whose membership was contingent upon a more serious consideration of the association’s theoretical underpinnings.51
From April 4 to 6, 1975, twenty-four AHP members assembled in Tucson, Arizona, for the AHP theory conference.52 The conference marked an attempt to wrest the movement away from the cultural tide that had flattened much of its 1960s sense of purpose. Speaking in generalizations, many historians and cultural critics describe the tenor of the 1960s as activist, altruistic, authentic, sincere, dramatic, courageous, and moralistic; in contrast, they characterize the 1970s as surface-oriented, self-oriented, subdued, and ethical, but unimpassioned. In this new clime (or some approximation of it), the revolutionary ideals of humanistic psychologists, as well as the intellectual purposes they hoped to achieve, were gravely threatened.
Intent on restoring the movement to a footing from which it could contend with the cultural obstacles it faced on its way to fulfilling the promise imparted by its founders, the major players of humanistic psychology spent some time preparing. Each participant submitted a position paper in which he or she focused on his/her specific concerns about AHP. A solid grasp of the problems, they hoped, would provide the best starting point for imagining solutions.
Participants expressed near-unanimous agreement with Farson’s apperception of the necessity of reinvigorating humanistic psychology’s investment in scientific exploration. Again and again, they voiced their dismay over the current state of imbalance between experiential and theoretical emphases.53
In his paper, social psychologist Brewster Smith expressed this common sentiment.54 He wrote, “I feel close affinity with some of the founders of AHP. But I am also put off by much, both theoretical and practical, that goes on in the name of humanistic psychology. As a psychologist, I continue to identify with the goals of scientific psychology that ask for evidence, and I hope to contribute toward a cumulative, self-corrective discipline that, insofar as it participates in the social process of science, also has reason to believe that it can take advantage of the last legitimate refuge of Progress.”55
Charles Hampden-Turner, who had been the president of AHP in 1974 and who was engaged in research on the application of social science to human rights as a fellow at the Wright Institute in Berkeley, argued that the negotiation of the scientific and the experiential should be a complex one, like “sailing between Scylla and Charybdis.” Instead of exercising this care, he wrote, “we have rushed pell mell to the opposite ends of each polarity to try and build a systematic theory out of feelings, ambiguity, openness, softness, depth and involvement, etc.”56
The renewed humanistic psychology that participants envisioned included a “systematization of subjective experience,” an “open, participating inquiry,” a moral, value-directed inquiry, and a unified view of human experience that would balance subjective and objective inquiry.57
For May, the need to address the theoretical shortcomings of the movement preceded the need to strengthen the movement’s scientific bases. He opened the conference with some remarks on AHP’s history and the origins of the gathering, highlighting the fact that humanistic psychology had begun as a protest against behaviorism and psychoanalysis. Even in the face of rapid growth, however, humanistic psychology persisted almost singularly as a protest movement, making its lack of substance increasingly evident. “But if humanistic psychology is only a protest,” said May, “we can be sure that its demise will be assured.” In order to redeem its value, May felt, humanistic psychology needed to stand on its own, advancing valuable theory and research that was sensitive to the complexity and holism of human experience.58
May justified his break from AHP, which had lasted several years, in terms of his discomfort with the emotion-focused therapy and bodywork, which he found essentially anti-intellectual. He likened himself to Henry Murray, who had dropped out of the movement due to its anti-intellectualism. He also said, however, that his time away from the movement had convinced him of the necessity of humanistic psychology’s existence. “If we didn’t have such an organization called humanistic psychology,” he said, “it would be necessary that we found one and call it the same name.” Thus May excused humanistic psychology for the awkwardness of its infancy and adolescence, and promised to redouble his efforts to work toward a mature theory.59
May maintained that there were invaluable components of humanistic psychology that needed to be preserved and fostered. Humanistic psychology, he felt, was in tune with what people valued: how to live, how to make love, how to get along with others—concepts that were “simply thrown to the wolves by modern, academic psychology.”60 An appropriate theory would, he believed, represent a balance between the principles of science and the human problems of living. It would not privilege subjectivity over scientific principles. Those who did, he felt, were no better than modern academic psychologists who were singularly devoted to objectivity.61
Other participants expressed their concern over what Floyd Matson, professor of American Studies at the University of Hawaii, identified as the perception of humanistic psychology’s political irrelevance, and they sought to distance their movement from the human potential movement, recognizing the threatening elements of the conflation. “Humanistic psychology has long been afflicted with the stigma of hedonistic self-indulgence, the image of social irrelevance,” argued Matson. “No doubt this labeling has been grossly unfair—a plain case of mistaken identity resulting from the popular equation of humanistic psychology with the amorphous ‘human potential movement.’ ”62
In spite of the air of agreement that characterized many contributions to the conference, some felt that the gathering itself suffered from its own weaknesses. Some participants saw it as contaminated by the softness it had been convened to critique. Concerns about increasing the depth and complexity of humanistic inquiry, for instance, were repeatedly met with the question “But how do you feel?”63 “I don’t like psychoanalysis any better than this gathering does, but it does have some blood in it,” said Gregory Bateson, “and I feel that this gathering is losing blood.”64
Another critique leveled at the conference was that too many of its attendees were inclined to respond to the threat from human potential and other experiential outgrowths by taking refuge in the movement’s past, in ideas and language from the founders that had been intended to serve as starting places rather than as settled orthodoxy. Tony Athos observed that too often the “beautiful questions,” those that required deeper probing, were responded to with a “crummy useful answer.” By responding too quickly and using the language of humanistic psychology formulaically, “you lose something marvelous in the question, so that you just leap from insight to action and technique, and we don’t accumulate anything, refine our actions, or improve our techniques. We skip what reason can give us because of what it appears to take away from our vision and insights.” May wholeheartedly agreed, recapitulating Athos’s question as “Why does the answer impoverish the problem?” And in proffering an answer: “I think it is because we never push our answer deep enough.”65
Certain members did take the opportunity afforded by the theory conference to wrangle over the deeper questions. May and Rogers took up the issue that had long bifurcated them: the question of whether it was reasonable to assume that individuals were inherently good and innately motivated toward positive growth. “This is why I’m very concerned about our tendency to break our arms patting ourselves on the back, saying we are self-actualized, we are happy, we are people of peak experiences,” said May. “With all due respect to a man I love very much, namely Maslow, I don’t think self-actualization is in our bones. [ . . . ] We will come out of our fox holes shooting. All of these aspects of life which are horrifying we cannot put aside.”66
Others conceded that presuming man to be inherently good was somewhat arbitrary, but advocated the assumption nonetheless. Brewster Smith explained, “Well, my starting point would really be with Nietzsche, who said, ‘Man is not either good nor evil, but we will make man good.’ He is expressing a positive commitment to make man good.”67 Carl Rogers shared this view: “When Rollo thinks I have held ‘man is by nature good,’ ” he said, “I don’t think I have ever said that; I certainly haven’t said it in the last 10 or 15 years. What I’ve tried to say is that when a certain definable psychological climate is provided, the person tends to move in the direction of becoming a socially constructive organism.”68
The reaction to the conference was mixed. Rogers left feeling cynical. He later expressed his regrets to fellow attendees in a memo titled “RE: A Disappointment.” “In the wholly intellectual directions we took,” he wrote, “we could not have been sharply distinguished from traditional psychologists. So we made ‘progress,’ instead of making progress.”69 He regretted perpetuating the intellectual focus and wished they had devoted more time to the feelings of the participants.
Most participants either disagreed with Rogers’s comments or qualifiedly acknowledged them, still recognizing the necessity, and value, of what had transpired at the conference. Tony Athos disagreed outright with Rogers’s criticism, while Fred Massarik agreed that “there was no time for the wide range of experiencing which goes beyond intellect,” but conceded that there had been an inevitable need for choice and focus in the face of limited time.70
Richard Farson, who had, at various points, played the roles of Rogers’s student, research assistant, and boss, regarded the anti-intellectual comments Rogers sometimes made with perplexity and frustration. “I don’t know why he did that,” Farson claimed. “He was very interested in systematic personality theory.”71
Farson later recalled a discussion he had moderated between Gregory Bateson, a well-known anthropologist and committed humanistic psychologist, and Rogers. Bateson, who was a “real intellectual heavyweight,” participated in what became a theoretical debate, until Rogers cut it off at the pass, suggesting that Bateson talk about his feelings. Farson remembers the embarrassment he felt over Rogers’s comment, ashamed that he would bow out of the real intellectual course that the discussion was taking. For Farson, the event displayed a latent anti-intellectual streak in Rogers, as well as Rogers’s relative inability to learn from his colleagues, including Rollo May, who was another intellectual heavyweight and whom Farson perceived to be ahead of Rogers in many respects. Rogers seemed capable of learning from his students, but often struggled with his colleagues, explained Farson.72
Farson’s awareness of Rogers’s weaknesses existed beside his enormous respect for him. In characterizing and complimenting him, Farson noted the ways in which Rogers had refused to impose his perspective on others. “It is Rogers’ style to let go of ideas,” he wrote, “to share them, to avoid ownership, to prevent them from becoming dogmatized and identified solely with him.”73 One consequence of this perspective, and of Rogers’s general antiauthoritarian orientation, was that people continued to take his ideas in directions he hadn’t intended. Farson explained that “Rogers’ work has been corrupted over the years by practitioners who have discovered the technique but not the philosophy.”74
A few months after the theory conference, the AHP annual convention took place in Estes Park, Colorado. It was the best attended in AHP history, with approximately twenty-five hundred participants. It featured a range of seminars, many with an intellectual and philosophical weight that rivaled the appeal of the experiential sessions.
One local journalist touted the vitality of the theory he encountered. Although Mountain Gazette reporter Mike Moore had attended the conference “with a fistful of prejudgments, hellbent on writing a frolicsome satire” and expecting to be “touched, felt, or laid,” he instead spent the week in intellectual reverie. He described Rollo May’s talk on personal mythology as having made “Jung and Spengler and even Kierkegaard come alive and dance.”75
Moore’s conclusions, however, almost certainly had more to do with his choice of seminars than with the gestalt of the conference. The fad therapies that populated the program and the eccentric practices that the members engaged in certainly had more appeal (in terms of pure numbers) and made more noise than the more academic presentations.
The raciest, and in some sense most compelling, element of the conference was the est seminar, which was led by est founder Werner Erhard himself. Erhard was a self-made man, who, without psychological training, had devised an aggressive program of experiential transformation. Since 1971, Erhard’s seminars had been blazing through the nation. They typically cost $250 a pop and required a fifteen-hour commitment over two weekends.76 At the AHP convention, Erhard found a wealth of participants eager for his brand of transformation and several leaders whose ethic of toleration prevented his exclusion.
A typical “est” experience involved the systematic demoralization and imperious reconditioning of 250 people gathered in a large auditorium. The trainer attempted to “dismantle” participants’ value systems, belief structures, and notions of right and wrong and good and evil that had “been screwing up [their] lives over all these years.” But what the sessions generally amounted to was the experience of being condescended to, ordered around, and assaulted with obscenities. According to Peter Marin, who reported on human potential techniques for Harper’s Magazine, est is “a mixture of ideas and techniques borrowed from the behavioral sciences, Eastern Philosophy, the traditional American classroom, Marine boot camp and modern brainwashing methods.”77 To another journalist, Erhard’s methods appeared “to be little more than scientology without the tin-cans and all the sci-fi horseshit that Hubbard indulges in.”78 In comparison to the cultishness of “est,” the journalist found regular encounter groups to be harmless. He wrote, “They had a kind of innocence to them. They were at their worst merely boring or silly.”79
For many, including hungry journalists, Erhard’s presence represented AHP’s implicit endorsement of his approach. But Rollo May spoke out publicly against Erhard’s methods, calling them “anti-humanistic” and asking why he had even been invited. George Leonard and others politely tried to distance themselves from the “Henry Ford of Human Potential.” “We certainly don’t endorse ‘est’ by having him here,” remarked Leonard.80
Just as the disruptive and sensationalistic styles of Esalen leaders had diluted the more gentle influences of leaders like Carl Rogers, fad therapies like est had overshadowed the more reasonable approaches that better represented the interests of the organization.81 As they had before the theory conference, the leaders of AHP found themselves powerless to oppose or prevent the intrusion of sensationalistic experiential elements. The experiences were, in fact, precisely what many AHP participants were seeking.
Perhaps from the beginning, the interests of the AHP members had been destined to win out over the commitments of the leaders. Who could prevent, for example, a group of humanistic psychologists that included Stanley Krippner from ascending a nearby mountaintop at sunrise to attempt telepathic communication with a group of researchers in Bogotá, Colombia? Charged by their belief in the paranormal, the group had built a fire, gathered in a circle, and attempted to first connect mentally with one another, then with the earth, and, finally, with the group in Bogotá through their connection with the earth. They each threw a coin from the I Ching into the circle to transmit a message, which was then interpreted by the Bogotá researchers using their own I Ching.82
For the leaders to distance themselves from these events through parody and condescension, though, would have been too simple, and too hypocritical. What’s more, it would have missed something essential about what mattered to the movement. For the participants in the est seminar and the telepathic communication, something deeply important was happening.
Tom Wolfe describes these kinds of techniques as fundamentally religious and argues that they—in combination with other countercultural activities—constituted the Third Great Awakening.
In addition to encounter groups, LSD trips, and parapsychological practices, the sexual promiscuity of human potentialists was a piece of this awakening, albeit the piece that would earn the most derision. For critics, sexual awakening was bitterly opposed to intellectual or even philosophical progress; it was superficial, extraneous. For many Americans, extreme or alternative sexual practices seemed nothing more than a passing fad.
Still, for participants, they often echoed the cant of something deeper. “At a sex farm in the Santa Monica mountains of Los Angeles,” wrote Tom Wolfe, “people of all class levels gathered for weekends in the nude. They copulated in the living room, by the chess table, out by the pool, on the tennis courts, in the driveway, with the same open, free, liberated spirit as dogs in the park or baboons in a tree. In conversation, however, the atmosphere was quite different. The air became humid with solemnity. If you closed your eyes, you thought you were at a nineteenth-century Wesleyan church encampment at Oak Bluffs.”83
In Los Angeles, psychologist Paul Bindram practiced a form of encounter that incorporated nudity, group massage, and a warm pool. Re-creating the birth experience, the whole group focused on one person, gave him a bottle, and rocked him. Bindram described the results as parallel to those of LSD, but without the dangers, and claimed the groups often catalyzed Maslowian peak experiences.84
Humanistic psychologists hesitated to disparage any particular approach. In the final years of his life, Maslow had endorsed Bindram’s experimentation and protected his professional standing in the APA. In a correspondence with Bindram, Maslow wrote, “I must say that I consider the taboos on nudity to be entirely a matter of folkways and customs rather than a matter of ethical or moral principle in any cross-cultural sense.”85 Instead of trivializing Bindram’s work for breaking with convention, Maslow remained open to the possibility that deeply important things were happening in his groups.
Not everyone saw it like Wolfe, Bindram, or Maslow, though. The countercultural nature of these activities made them laughable, to some, and easy to dismiss. When an interview with Bindram appeared in a 1972 collection titled Inside Psychotherapy alongside descriptions of Gestalt therapy, encounter, and Frommian therapy, one critic wrote, “Reading this book you might think therapy is a form of grooving, not treating sick people.” Incredulously, he asked whether psychotherapy had actually become a branch of the human potential movement.86 The implication was that these strange new practices were the faddish product of a decade of excess, and were further diminished by the sheer multiplicity of them.
After 1975, AHP participation began to decline. In 1976 and 1977, the annual conference attracted about two thousand participants. By 1980, the year of Ronald Reagan’s election, the culture had moved on: only a thousand participants attended.87 Explaining the comparable decline of interest in Division 32, humanistic psychologists Christopher M. Aanstoos, Ilene Serlin, and Tom Greening blamed the “new socio-cultural conservatism” of the dawning Reagan era, “for which the term ‘humanistic’ meant something sinister.”88 Maureen O’Hara notes that the liberation movements of the 1960s had fragmented, rather than congealing as many had once hoped. They had lost the power to impact society as a whole (and hence lost their wider appeal). Meanwhile, she argues, the “dominant military-industrial complex and massified techno-society” actually consolidated, increasing its political clout.89 With the diminishment of “lay interest” in the organization, it returned, by default, to an association of professionals.90