“It is as though a pond had become utterly still, so that a pebble dropped into it sent ripples out farther and farther and farther, having an influence that could not be understood by looking at the pebble.”
CARL ROGERS1
In 1979, psychologist William Kessen declared Carl Rogers “neither a cream puff nor an irrationalist.” “Like Messers. Cleaver and Dylan,” he argued, Rogers was “standing on a corner doing his act when the great whirlwind of the American 60’s blew him into history.”2
Never a glory hound, Rogers seemed relatively unfazed when he was deposited in the early 1980s in a cultural atmosphere in which people were no longer obsessed with his ideas. In some ways, he even welcomed the change, noting in 1986 that encounter groups had spread throughout the culture, but that “a lot of the kooky aspects of groups and the more crazy therapists have fallen by the wayside.”3 At the same time, though, he probably thirsted for the kind of receptivity he had once encountered, and began to look farther afield for eager audiences.
Just as he had always done, Rogers kept his nose to the grindstone. He published A Way of Being in 1980—an intensely personal volume that explores the evolution of his thinking, and feeling, in the 1970s—and revised Freedom to Learn in 1983. He continued to churn out articles and chapters on a range of topics that spanned the arc of his commitments: psychotherapy dynamics, person-centered education, the cross-cultural use of encounter groups. He had moved, over the course of his career, from a focus on individuals, to small groups, to communities, and then to nations.4 Explaining this transition, Rogers wrote in 1980: “I am no longer talking simply about psychotherapy but about a point of view, a philosophy, an approach to life, a way of being, which fits any situation in which growth—of a person, a group, a community—is part of the goal.”5
The 1980s found Rogers less focused on America; he traveled widely, conducting encounter groups aimed at uniting people from conflicting political factions—blacks and whites in South Africa, Roman Catholics and Protestants in Belfast, rival politicians from Central America. Even at his advanced age, he performed workshops in Brazil, Venezuela, Rome, Paris, and Poland. In these foreign locations, where his ideas were still novel, he met the kind of interest he had received in America in the 1960s. He performed demonstrations of client-centered therapy and groups, often to audiences approaching a thousand people, in places like the Soviet Union.6
Rollo May, who had so many times condemned the faddish elements of humanistic psychology, was liberated by the diminishment of cultural interest in the associated theories and techniques. For years he had rued the way many Americans read Love and Will, taking it as a justification for self-focused personal liberation, premised on materialism and hedonism, without the requisite emphasis on individual responsibility.7 In 1981, he rebroadcast this message to his readers in the publication of Freedom and Destiny, arguing that freedom had too often been defined negatively (as freedom from political oppression, cultural conformity, etc.) and that true freedom was “the possibility of development, of enhancement of one’s life; or the possibility of withdrawing, shutting oneself up, denying and stultifying one’s growth.”8 It was a choice to throw your weight behind growth or despair, an endeavor to balance your destiny (your existential, cultural, environmental, and personal liabilities and assets) with your creative will.
In 1971, not long after the publication of Love and Will, May had been the subject of a curious, forward-looking profile in the New York Times. “Listening to May in public you get the same feeling you get reading Love and Will—the feeling that you are swimming out to sea with him at your side,” wrote the Times reporter. “You know you are getting in over your head; indeed, you suspect that he is, too. But there is a reassuring buoyancy underneath, a sense that if you just keep on swimming everything will be all right.”9
When Freedom and Destiny was published, a decade later, the Times still showed respect for May’s intellectual prowess, but he was no longer treated as a herald of the future. He was more of a cultural relic. “Freedom and Destiny is a piece for trombone,” wrote the reviewer for the Times. “If it sometimes wails, this is not altogether Dr. May’s fault. If we keep on making the same mistakes, what choice has he but to point them out yet again? What can one do with people who fear their freedom, refuse their anxiety and can’t appreciate despair? Like an analyst whose patient won’t move to the next crisis, Dr. May can only sit back in his chair and re-cross his legs.”10 As he did at the 1975 theory conference, Rollo May held his ground, doggedly communicating his “humanistic” psychology, harping on the same points, sometimes seeming more of a nagging parent than a visionary. May’s audience for these 1980s books predictably shrank.
Meanwhile, the mainstream American media sounded the death knell for humanistic psychology. Many declared the utopian dreams of Maslow, Rogers, Murphy, and others dead and buried. In 1981, May’s reviewer described his rhetoric as “tired.” “He needs a new vocabulary,” he wrote, “for even truth needs a change of clothes now and then.”11
In 1985, a journalist for the New York Times wrote that although “in its heyday, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Esalen was a cultural landmark, the point at the continent’s edge from which a stream of new ideas and methods emanated . . . the encounter group movement, for which Esalen was a mecca, is moribund today.”12 The writer described the “graying” Esalen of the 1980s as being faced with the possibility of a “lasting irrelevance.” Most growth centers modeled on Esalen, of which there were over a hundred at the movement’s peak, had closed; by the decade’s end there were no more than a handful.13 The terms “human potential movement” and “humanistic psychology” disappeared from popular magazines and newspapers.
Many Americans had, no doubt, grown impatient with an approach that had failed to yield the kind of personal and cultural change for which they’d been hoping. A Gallup poll in 1980 found that 45 percent of Americans felt family life had gotten worse over the past decade; only 37 percent thought it had improved.14 They were pressed upon by rising divorce rates (which increased by 40 percent from 1970 to 1975 alone), economic stagnation, soaring crime rates, and energy shortages.15
A number of literary critics depicted the 1970s as a decade of hopelessness. John Updike wrote that “the American ride” had run out of gas.16 Norman Mailer complained that “it was the decade in which image became preeminent because nothing deeper was going on.”17
Even for still-hopeful human potentialists, the decade’s culmination in Reagan’s 1980 election was depressing. Reagan capitalized on the 1970s dissatisfaction, drawing attention to the excesses of civil rights, women’s liberation, and sexual freedom, and exploiting the anxiety that many felt when confronted even (or primarily) by the most liberatory aspects of those movements.18 He spoke to those who wanted to turn the clock back, as well as to many who’d been supportive of political reform and grateful for the personal freedoms it afforded, but who’d grown tired of the sense of centerlessness and disorder that had come to seem characteristic of the seventies. Facing the longest period of inflation in American history, the highest interest rates, a crushing energy crisis, and the legacy of the nation’s defeat in Vietnam, many Americans latched onto his rhetoric of strength and individual responsibility.19
American psychologists, too, seemed happy to move on. As Rogers himself noted, academics had been ambivalent at best about humanistic psychology. Although they awarded him numerous honors, including three awards for scientific achievement and elections to the presidency of both the American Association of Applied Psychology and the American Psychological Association, he felt they simultaneously perceived him as an embarrassment—“softheaded, unscientific, cultish, too easy on students, full of strange and upsetting enthusiasms about ephemeral things like the self, therapist attitudes, and encounter groups.”20 He described the impact of humanistic psychology as being largely absent from the textbooks, classrooms, and laboratories that academic psychology comprised.
Psychotherapy in the 1980s took a conscious step away from humanistic psychology, as well. A 1983 New York Times article identified new trends, including increased demand for short-term interventions, new interest in cognitive-behavioral therapies focused on isolated mental problems, and a preponderance of diagnosis-based treatment reimbursable by insurance companies. Citing a survey of four hundred clinical psychologists and four hundred counseling psychologists, the author reported that the majority (about 41 percent) called themselves “eclectic,” while 10 percent self-identified as “cognitive-behavioral,” 11 percent described themselves as “psychoanalytic,” and 7 percent said they were “behavioral.” “Humanistic” had been subsumed under “eclectic” but, as the author notes, had actually come to inform all categories. Contemporary therapists were described as warm, active, supportive, less detached, and more human.21
Out of the spotlight, and in diminished numbers, both the human potential movement and humanistic psychology kept kicking. Esalen responded to decreased cultural interest with a renewed commitment to scholarship and expanded social awareness. In contrast to programming in the 1960s and 1970s that relied heavily on encounter, and in the style of Rogers’s own work, ventures of the 1980s reached beyond the individual and into the wider world. A prime example was the Soviet-American exchange program that the institute launched in 1982, based on a model of citizens’ diplomacy and a desire to forge open communication between the nations.22
As of 1985, Esalen offered five hundred seminars per year, drawing about four thousand total participants.23 Michael Murphy, described in a 1995 New York Times article as a “somewhat marginalized figure,” remained vital and continued to refine Esalen’s program, to publish on human potential, and to advance new theories.24
Humanistic psychology pressed on, as well. Although conference attendance declined and courses at mainstream universities grew scarce, hundreds of practitioners continued to define themselves as “humanistic psychologists,” defending the significance and enduring relevance of their theory and principles.25 Even in the twenty-first century, humanistic psychology boasts an active association (with frequent, if not annual, conferences), and Division 32 maintains an energetic presence at APA conventions.26
Academic psychologists, however, no longer feel compelled to acknowledge the current, or historical, impact of humanistic psychology. One academic analysis of trends in psychology from 1950 to 1999, for example, tracks only the cognitive, behavioral, psychoanalytic, and neuroscientific schools.27 And while most introductory psychology texts devote entire chapters to these perspectives, humanistic psychology is often handled in a paragraph, if at all.
This lack of recognition, though, is a poor measure of the movement’s impact. The greatest testaments to humanistic psychology’s enduring significance are the numerous ways in which American mental health professionals have adopted the leading concepts of prominent humanistic psychologists; the way that later movements in mainstream psychology have subtly replicated its values and reproduced its goals; and the way that the American vernacular, and American ideas of self, have incorporated its language and ideas.28 If anything, it’s the utter pervasiveness of the humanistic perspective that has made evidence of its influence so elusive.
The most tangible indicator of humanistic psychology’s legacy might be the frequency with which, upon walking into any psychotherapeutic situation, Americans now encounter some hybrid of the humanistic perspective. Individual counseling, social work interventions, and pastoral counseling all reflect strains of early humanistic theory.29 They tend to be nondirective, privileging meaningful subjective input from patients and relying on their active involvement in the counseling process. Modeled, in part, on Carl Rogers’s client-centered (now termed person-centered) approach, they employ theories of empathic understanding, present-orientation, and self-direction.30
Contemporary therapeutic interactions are also premised on a personalized and humanized concept of professionalism. Grounded in humanistic psychologists’ view of patients as fully human participants in the therapeutic process, this approach has supplanted prior concepts of professionalism that relied heavily on hierarchical distinctions, experimental control, and notions of a value-free, objective science in interactions between psychologists and patients or study participants.31 Backed by research that supports the efficacy of self-disclosure, therapists, who used to act as blank slates onto which patients could project their inner conflicts, are now more likely to share personal information.32
Social workers, even more than clinical psychologists, now tend to employ methods that draw directly from Rogers’s client-centered theory. The “core conditions” of effective social work practice are commonly thought to include empathy, warmth, and genuineness on the part of the therapist.33 And everything from the standard social work interview, intended to establish an effective therapeutic relationship based on affirmation of the client’s worth and dignity, to the content of longer-term interventions, which regard as their cornerstone the therapist’s continued encouragement of and positive regard for the client, reflects Rogers’s style and leading concepts.34
Rogers’s theory has also made an indelible mark on pastoral counseling. In a turn from moralism and in opposition to mass culture, pastoral theologians have adopted a Rogerian “ethic of self-realization which define[s] growth as the primary ethical good,” elevating individual improvement over competing priorities.35 Pastoral counseling, in fact, was ahead of its time in adopting this theory. As early as the 1940s, Rogers’s Counseling and Psychotherapy became a standard text in theological seminaries, and his techniques proved a staple in seminary training, effective even in a brief introductory format.36
While Rogers may have had a greater impact on the mental health field than his fellow founders, he was certainly not the only humanistic psychologist to provoke theoretical change in therapeutic realms. Maslow’s theory, for example, has encouraged psychologists to consider the positive aspects of human nature, as evidenced in the strengths and health of clients.37
Rollo May’s theory has also been widely applied within counseling. Considered to be “the father of American existential psychology,” May attuned psychotherapists and lay readers to the productive value of anxiety and conflict.38 In constructing fears and conflicts as fodder for effective treatment, rather than as mere obstacles to overcome or symptoms to eliminate, May helped balance the psychoanalytic and behaviorist approaches that preceded his own. Like Rogers, he also helped to convince psychotherapists (and pastoral counselors) of the value of empathy.39 Finally, his consideration of the social responsibility of the therapist, as expressed in 1978 in Psychology and the Human Dilemma, influenced psychologists to reconsider their role in the cultural problems of their time.40
In addition to informing a modern conceptualization of counseling, the techniques of humanistic psychology laid a foundation for practices outside of the realm of individual psychotherapy. Bodywork, like yoga and meditation, for example, has its roots in the holistic approaches of humanistic psychology and the human potential movement.41 Built in part on the Rogerian ideas of “organismic wholeness” and the Maslowian idea of self-actualization, these practices incorporate mind, body, and spirit in the service of healing. In valuing an active therapeutic process, emotional integration, and self-awareness, bodywork has also integrated the guiding principles of active participation, transcendence, and present-orientation.42
Many of humanistic psychology’s principles and techniques blended seamlessly, and almost unnoticeably, with American practice. As historian Christopher Lasch wrote of Carl Rogers’s approach, it was in many respects “as American as apple pie.” It tapped into American ideas of free will, human perfectibility, and personal responsibility.43
Given the resonance of humanistic psychology with American interests, it’s not surprising that the supposedly defunct movement has come back in other forms—even within the field of academic psychology itself.44
The most obvious derivative is the positive psychology movement that sprang up in 1998, quickly gaining adherents in the United States and around the world. Articulated by founders Martin Seligman and Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi in 2000 as “the study of strength and virtue,” positive psychology combined the interests of humanistic psychology and the scientific goals of academic psychology.45 Seeking to operationalize virtues, values, and strengths in a way that would allow for their empirical identification and measurement, positive psychologists agreed with humanistic psychologists’ rejection of a pathology-oriented discipline that focused on weakness and damage while attempting to expand psychological study to realms of well-being, contentment, and optimism.46
The similarities between humanistic psychology and positive psychology are numerous. Comparing Seligman to Maslow, one scholar notes the shared desire to “create an optimistic psychology, one that sees the human personality as more than just a collection of neuroses and tics.”47 In opposition to mainstream psychology’s post–World War II focus on pathology, Seligman directed an initiative toward “the empirical study of flourishing individuals and thriving communities.”48 His theoretical basis for such work was strongly reminiscent of Maslow’s contributions. For example, in developing a “manual of the sanities,” which he called the Values in Action (VIA) Classification of Strengths manual, Seligman, with Christopher Peterson, identified virtuous character traits that replicated Maslow’s being values (B-values) and included wisdom, transcendence, temperance, and justice.49
Yet despite their extensive similarities, positive psychologists have conspicuously failed to acknowledge the tradition of humanistic psychology that preceded them by nearly four decades. In fact, when confronted directly with this apparent debt, positive psychologists have disavowed any connection. Martin Seligman, in particular, has distanced his theory from those of the founders of humanistic psychology and belittled the movement’s impact.50
For Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi an essential component to the program for a positive psychology is a commitment to the scientific method, which they presume humanistic psychologists to have lacked. In an implicit critique of humanistic psychology, Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi explained that “in this quest for what is best, positive psychology does not rely on wishful thinking, faith, self-deception, fads, or hand-waving; it tries to adapt what is best in the scientific method to the unique problems that human behavior presents to those who wish to understand it in all its complexity.”51
Reducing humanistic psychology to its least scholarly elements, Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi wrote in 2000 that “one legacy of the humanism of the 1960s is prominently displayed in any large bookstore: the ‘psychology’ section contains at least ten shelves on crystal healing, aromatherapy, and reaching the inner child for every shelf of books that tries to uphold some scholarly standard.”52 Statements like these earned the ire of humanistic psychologists and generated a flood of letters to the American Psychologist demanding that the founders of positive psychology acknowledge the obvious origins of their ideas in the humanistic psychology movement. One respondent wrote, “It was 99.6% pure rejection of their so-called ancestors (even purer than Ivory soap!).”53
Regardless of the justifiable indignation of humanistic psychologists, positive psychologists, seeking to forge empirically testable theories within the boundaries of scholarly respectability, couldn’t risk being associated with a movement that had become disassociated from academic psychology. Tactfully responding to humanistic psychologists’ allegations, Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi wrote, “We do not wish [ . . . ] to blur the boundaries completely between the positive psychology we hope to see emerge and these worthy traditions. We are, unblushingly, scientists first.”54 And Csikszentmihalyi graciously wrote the preface to the 2001 Handbook of Humanistic Psychology, describing his own intellectual debt to Maslow and Rogers and acknowledging the value of the therapeutic contributions of humanistic psychology.55
In addition to seeking to evade association with the perception of humanistic psychology’s unscientific bases, the founders of positive psychology have tried to distance themselves from the movement’s reputation for being overly individualistic and encouraging of narcissism. Instead, positive psychologists have been pragmatic, advocating the inculcation of specific skills to overcome negative thought patterns and to promote socially harmonious action.56 Positive psychologists have also sought to move beyond the study of inner-oriented virtues, extending their study to civic virtues, which include altruism, responsibility, nurturance, tolerance, civility, work ethic, and moderation.57
Similar reincarnations of humanistic psychology emerged within social work theory in the 1980s and 1990s, reflecting the themes of self-actualization, striving, and health-seeking. Specific approaches that incorporated these themes included “solution focused therapy,” a form of brief therapy that is thoroughly client-directed and present-focused, and “assets-based community development,” a method of identifying and employing a community’s strength to sustain its development.58 Another approach, the “strengths” perspective, even more tangibly reflected many of the goals of the founders of humanistic psychology.59
Based on theoretical and ethical objections to an illness-orientation and the hierarchical therapist-client distinctions found in some sectors of the field, the strengths perspective construes healing as an innate capability and values the social worker primarily as a catalyst in the client’s self-determined change.60 It takes as its goal the identification of individual, family, and community strengths, primarily in realms of dialogue and communication, membership, resilience, healing, and wholeness.61 The strengths perspective’s elevation of inborn individual drives toward health, rather than illness-oriented explanations of individual pathology, echoes the priorities both of humanistic psychology and positive psychology.
But, like positive psychologists, advocates of the strengths perspective have made only scant reference to their intellectual predecessors in humanistic psychology. In fact, they claim the emergence of therapeutic perspectives explicitly oriented toward applying a positive view of clients’ innate potential is a fairly recent phenomenon.62 While strengths-perspective advocates haven’t directly criticized humanistic psychology or expressed a need for ideological distance from it, the differences between the movements are implicit in their theory. The consideration of social-political forces, for example, is primary among the priorities of strengths-perspective social workers, most of whom would take issue with the assumption of humanistic psychologists that social change is a direct result of self-actualization.63
Outside of mental health fields, though, professionals found it easier to appreciate, and acknowledge, their debt to humanistic psychology. “Professionals from education, religion, nursing, medicine, psychiatry, law, business, government, public health, law enforcement, race relations, social work—the list goes on and on—all came to feel that here, finally, was an approach which enabled them to succeed on the previously neglected human dimensions of their jobs, to reach the people for whom they felt responsible but were often unable to help,” wrote Richard Farson.64 Humanistic psychology offered these diverse professionals a way to conceive of their employees, their clients, their constituents, and their patients that was compassionate and optimistic. In many cases it moved them from seeing their charges as responsibilities, or even problems, to seeing them as the vessels of their highest ambitions.
This happened in business, too, where humanistic psychology’s theories and techniques found their widest, and most overt, application. Major corporations used humanistic psychology to make their workers more efficient, more productive, and happier.65 Common applications in this setting ranged from employee retreats to seminars on sensitivity training that derived directly from the work of humanistic psychologists like Maslow and research institutions like National Training Laboratories. For some business owners, like Andrew Kay of Non-Linear Systems, Maslow’s work took on biblical proportions, while for others, his management theory was a key resource. The journal Maslow kept during his summer with Kay went through several printings—it was published in 1962 by NLS as a pamphlet titled “Summer Notes on Social Psychology of Industry and Management,” and more formally in 1965 as Eupsychian Management.66
Of this legacy, some humanistic psychologists are proud, interpreting this application to be evidence of the humanization of business that resulted from the movement.67 Others question the motives of corporations in employing humanistic psychology principles and techniques within management strategies.68
“The history of our work,” wrote Farson, “is dotted with [ . . . ] examples of our unwittingly serving the interests of the more powerful against the less powerful.” As in the case of union leaders, who “intuitively knew that ‘communication’ cools out the oppressed worker, making it possible for management to maintain something approximating the status quo,” Farson argued, many business leaders have used humanistic theory for corporate profit, without any real interest in the contentment of their workers.69 Another scholar suggests that in valorizing the use of the movement’s theory by corporations, humanistic psychologists confused a first-order change with a second-order change, that is, they mistook a mere change of form for a more radical change of structure.70
In extracting the concepts of humanistic psychology at the expense of the overarching orientation, everyone from corporate leaders to academic psychologists and psychotherapists may have ultimately undermined, and even debased, the founders’ intentions.71 Maslow, Rogers, May, and others had hoped not only to empower individuals to realize the full extent of their potential and to revise psychology’s pathology orientation, but also to to reorient psychological science and oppose the damaging effects of the cultural imperatives of conformity and adjustment in favor of a complex selfhood based on wholeness and self-determination. Perhaps predictably, they fell far short of these lofty goals.
Although a humanized conception of management came to dominate business theory in the 1960s and 1970s, it did little, if anything, to eradicate the baser profit motives of corporate leaders. Likewise, though a client-centered approach came to pervade psychotherapy, it did little to offset the field’s reliance on diagnosis and pathology. It was in 1980, in fact, that the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders committed clinicians to the discrete categorization of mental illness. While the first two editions of the DSM had relied on a “biopsychosocial” model, in which individual problems were dynamic and ranged on a continuum, the third edition adopted a research-based medical model, with discrete and clear-cut categories for diagnosis.72
In a recent polemic against modern diagnosis, psychologist Gary Greenberg lamented the descriptive nosology that has dominated the field since the 1980s. “The trick with the descriptive approach to diagnosis,” writes Greenberg, “is to keep your eye on the loose-leaf notebook and not the patient.”73 Disregarding the patient’s account of his interior life, his personality, and the circumstances in his life, the clinician as diagnostician, according to Greenberg, is anything but humanistic. “The industry is working hard to eliminate the human element from psychiatry,” he writes, “but for now the best it can do is to circle the answers in notebooks and train practitioners to ignore what’s in front of their eyes.”74
Although positive psychology promises a fuller treatment of the individual, at least in terms of balancing pathology with strength, it also replicates many of the tendencies that humanistic psychologists originally railed against. While pathology-based interventions left the good life undefined (health as the absence of symptoms), the bulk of the work conducted under the heading “positive psychology,” and its derivative “happiness research,” arbitrarily presupposes a subjective sense of satisfaction as the ultimate goal.75 A 2010 article in the New York Times, for example, took for granted that such happiness should be the supreme measure of whether things are working in our society. Reviewing the work of Derek Bok’s Happiness Around the World, the critic asks why we should worry about growing inequalities in wealth distribution when lower-income people are not less happy.76
As psychologists Frank Richardson and Blaine Fowers and philosopher Charles Guignon point out in Re-envisioning Psychology, current marital research suffers from a similar evaluative error; in determining the success of a marriage, most studies equate marital success with personal happiness. “The whole idea that personal happiness or well-being is of primary concern,” they argue, “is part of the overweening contemporary emphasis on the individual,” where individual success is equated with the emotional experience of personal satisfaction.77 Conspicuously absent from these studies is an inquiry into communal and relational values, individual experiences of meaning, definitions of the good life, and reasonable ideas about the constituents of effective marriages.
Marriage is just one of many topics of psychological research that Richardson, Fowers, and Guignon perceive to be representative of psychology’s current problems. In fact, contemporary psychology as they conceive it doesn’t seem to differ substantially from the psychology of the 1950s that humanistic psychologists found to be so oppressive. Academic psychology still continues to claim value neutrality. Psychotherapy still encourages individuals “to think of themselves in too narrow a way.” And committed students and colleagues, they note, question the intellectual worth and social significance of contemporary research, worrying that it amounts to nothing more than a “manipulative behavioral technology.”78
Worse than perpetuating this narrow focus, though, the authors argue that psychotherapy actually exacerbates modern social ills by placing the inner self above all else. This individualistic emphasis compounds the erosion of communal feeling, individual alienation, and emotional disconnection, and fuels a sense of meaninglessness. Instead of seeing this as a pattern that developed in spite of, or in opposition to, humanistic psychology, though, the authors suggest that the work of humanistic psychologists might have unwittingly fueled the problem. Rooted in the excesses of the human potential movement in the 1960s and 1970s—encounter groups and est retreats—our current obsession with self-fulfillment, inner selves, individuation, and individuality, they claim, are now some of the most toxic elements of American psychology.79
In We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World Keeps Getting Worse, James Hillman and Michael Ventura make a similar claim. They see modern psychotherapy as solipsistic and worry about the ways in which it redirects inward individual energies that could serve social, political, and environmental ends.80 The humanistic psychology movement, of course, was saddled with these concerns from the start. While many battled against them, the flow of cultural energy to and from the movement, and the short-sightedness of certain members of the movement, meant that humanistic psychologists were themselves implicated in these offenses.
To conclude that humanistic psychology failed because of its inability to smooth out its implicit paradoxes and propel American psychology to utopian heights, though, would be reductionist. Because of the entrenched nature of humanistic psychologists’ ideas within psychology and within the culture, in fact, the results of the movement are exceedingly difficult to evaluate. Whether you consider humanistic psychology a success, a failure, or a little of both depends on your perspective.
If we measure the extent to which the leading concepts of humanistic psychology have pervaded our culture, in fact, we might deem the movement a whopping success. The language of humanistic psychology is everywhere: humanistic ideas of self, growth, health, individual potential, and relation are now woven into the very fabric of our thoughts and perceptions.81 The fundamentals of “humanistic” communication, encounter, and expression populate our interactions with our spouses, our employees and bosses, our friends and children. They ring from the lips of our talk show hosts, and they populate our self-help shelves.
If we examine contemporary criticism of American psychology, like that of Richardson, Fowers, and Guignon or Hillman and Ventura, however, we might conclude that the movement failed. The field seems hamstrung by the same scientific constraints that characterized it in the 1950s, and many researchers and practitioners display a comparable resistance to conducting interdisciplinary work (asking philosophical questions, exploring social concerns, considering cultural context). While cognitivism and neuropsychology have largely displaced behaviorism and psychoanalysis, these newly dominant approaches seem to have replaced the narrow interpretive frames of the past with comparably narrow frames of their own.
From a hermeneutic perspective, though, the “humanistic” dialogue that crystallized in the humanistic psychology movement in the 1960s and 1970s continues. A 2010 article in the New York Times harks back to Rollo May’s belief in the value of anxiety and existential struggle. The author, Jonah Lehrer, considers the “upside” of depression, exploring specifically its creative value and enumerating several cases in which it might represent a healthy response to troubling circumstances.82
In a similar vein, several contemporary books question our culture’s haste to medicate “illnesses” like depression without adequately considering the possibility of nonpathological sadness. Just as Maslow described self-actualizers as wisely unwilling to adjust to a sick system, Gary Greenberg (author of Manufacturing Depression) argues that many healthy individuals are being treated for individual problems that represent a healthy response to problematic cultural conditions. According to Greenberg, both psychotropic medications and cognitive-behavioral interventions attempt to adjust the sane individual to an insane society, rather than the reverse. Likewise, Jerome Wakefield and Alan Horowitz (The Loss of Sadness) complain that our categories of pathology have expanded to encompass even normal and understandable emotional reactions to negative events.83
For decades, Carl Rogers argued for the necessity of an affirming and growth-producing environment in the individual experience of health. But pathology-oriented interventions undermine these conditions. Frank Furedi argues in Therapy Culture that by assuming negative outcomes (even before they occur), our culture has produced an environment more conducive to victimhood than growth. He makes specific reference to the aftermath of September 11, when thousands of therapists were mobilized to support New Yorkers who were expected to have pathological reactions to the trauma. No one considered the possibility that they’d be able to cope with it in healthy ways.84
Malcolm Gladwell points out in his article “Getting Over It” that people are actually quite resilient in the face of trauma. He cites the estimate that 85 to 95 percent of individuals will cope with trauma remarkably well, not even requiring psychotherapeutic intervention.85 Why, then, is a positive orientation to human nature still so foreign to psychologists? Why do the numbers of diagnoses continue to skyrocket?
While a range of critics from Lehrer to Gladwell make plain that the American culture we now inhabit isn’t any more “eupsychian” than the one that produced the humanistic psychology movement in the 1950s, suffering as it does from a pervasive pathology orientation, the continuity of their critique with that of seminal humanistic psychology figures suggests a form of victory. In the 1950s, the writings of humanistic psychologists were relegated to remote academic journals and small presses, whereas now articles that take up these themes appear in The New Yorker and the New York Times, and books on these issues are published by major presses like Simon & Schuster, Routledge, and Harper Perennial. For now, the humanistic (and humanistically oriented) psychologists who remain can find comfort in the continued presence of this kind of critique, and in the hope that the tide within psychology will again shift toward a fuller, more positive, and more contextualized treatment of human experience.