This book tells the story of humanistic psychology, a movement that originated in the 1950s, formally emerged in the 1960s, and ignited, before burning out, in the 1970s. The angle of the story is intellectual and cultural; I care about both the intellectual theory and the cultural context that informed humanistic psychology, as well as the influence the movement had, in its own right, on both those realms. In telling this particular story, my purpose is to make people take seriously a movement that’s been largely dismissed from the academic circles in which it arose and that’s been gratuitously associated with the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s. I also hope to remind people of a truth to which humanistic psychologists were keenly attuned—that individuals in all their messy complexity should remain at the heart of psychological study and practice.
When I deliver this brief, cocktail-party explanation of the book to friends and colleagues, responses tend to fall into one of two categories. Some people focus on how little they know about humanistic psychology, aside from a vague recollection of a page of their Intro Psych text devoted to Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow, and they suggest it’s going to take concentrated work to convince them that some obsolete psychological theory could be relevant to their understanding of their lives and their culture at present. Others ask what happened to all the good stuff that was going on in the sixties in psychology (sensitivity training; encounter groups; progressive management; talk of human liberation, health, and growth), noting that it all just seemed to evaporate.
Defining humanistic psychology and defending its value is hard to do over wine and cheese, but I try to make a few basic points. First, that humanistic psychology was a collection of theories premised on the individual’s innate tendency toward growth. Second, its theorists hoped to return human subjectivity, and human complexity, to the study and practice of psychology. Third, in resurrecting a dialogue that went back to the beginnings of psychology in America and the work of William James, humanistic psychologists breathed some life back into a discipline that had moved too far toward scientism and the medical model and that had strayed too far from its philosophical and theological roots in the fundamentals of human existence. And finally, although humanistic psychology was firmly rooted in intellectual and academic principles, it had its broadest impact on the wider culture, where it resonated in realms as diverse as executive management, psychedelic drug use, and civil rights.
Abraham Maslow, “the father of humanistic psychology,” once asked himself in his journal how he would define the movement in one sentence. The answer he gave was grander than the one I’ve just given. It is, he wrote, “a move away from knowledge of things & lifeless objects as basis for all philosophy, economics, science, politics, etc. (because this has failed to help with the basic human problems) toward a centering upon human needs & fulfillment & aspirations as the fundamental basis from which to derive all the social institutions, philosophy, ethics, etc. I might use also for more sophisticated & hep people that it is a resacralizing of science, society, the person, etc.”1
In every one of his attempts to articulate the goals of humanistic psychology, Maslow looked beyond ways to modify the methods of psychological research and practice. His ambition was vaster than that. By changing the way psychology approached the study of people, he hoped to incite a cultural paradigm shift. He wanted to transform our view of human nature on the most basic level. In doing this, he would make it the job of psychology to answer philosophical, moral, and existential questions that were central to human experience.
The questions that humanistic psychologists like Maslow hoped to answer were endemic to modern society and had been asked before in many ways. How can individuals maintain a sense of agency in an increasingly mechanized and technologized world? How can Americans achieve a sense of identity based on values distinct from those of both capitalism and Christianity (or other traditional religions)? What does it mean to be psychologically healthy, beyond not being mentally ill? How can individuals’ unique and divergent experiences be quantified and meaningfully compared?
They also explored questions that were more universal in their scope: How can individuals find meaning in their lives? From where can they derive values?
These questions were particularly salient in the 1950s and 1960s, when humanistic psychologists were responding directly to deep cultural needs. Alienated by technological change, confused by the decline of traditional roles, unsettled by World War II and its consequences, and plagued by Cold War fears, many Americans found the positive and optimistic answers they provided compelling. This attraction was demonstrated, during the 1960s and 1970s, in high attendance rates at growth centers founded upon its theory, in widespread adoption of related techniques (like encounter groups and bodywork), and in the permeation of American culture with the language of human potential and encounter.
Although the specifics of our cultural moment may have changed, the issues with which humanistic psychologists were wrestling remain pressing. Instead of dishwashers and washing machines, we’re struggling to integrate smart phones and iPads. Our Cold War fears have been replaced by terrorist threats and the specter of global warming. Even with our new forms of social connectivity, or perhaps because of them, our sense of community still feels terribly inadequate. While opening up many frontiers, globalization threatens us with a new sense of smallness. Within psychology, the dehumanizing tendencies of behaviorism and psychoanalysis have been displaced by the equally reductionistic approaches of psychopharmacology and neuroscience.
Well then, some ask, why should we look for insight into our current condition in a movement that so obviously failed to solve these problems the first time around? And not only did it fail, it disappeared. Humanistic psychology, they argue, was a fad of the sixties and seventies, no more relevant to our lives today than disco and bell-bottoms.
To the evaporation issue I tend to argue, depending on my mood, that the ideas and practices of humanistic psychology have dispersed so widely and thoroughly they’ve become virtually undetectable—they’re the air we breathe. Or, when I’m feeling more cynical, I explain that these theories and techniques have been so distorted—exploited by business interests and invoked as a justification for drug abuse, infidelity, or narrow self-focus—they no longer embody the intentions or resemble the original forms from which they were born.
Many Americans have some understanding of the extent to which our contemporary culture is a “therapy culture,” one in which we hold fast to notions of the self as changeable and redeemable and in which we have largely replaced more traditional structures of religion and morality with the values of therapy. They watch Oprah, they read self-help, and they might even attend therapy instead of church. But it’s less likely that they understand the ways in which our twenty-first-century existences, relationships, and choices owe a unique debt to humanistic psychology. Its language has seeped into our relationships, our self-expression, our self-talk. We speak regularly of our “potential” and our need for “growth.” We look for marriages to be growth-fostering, therapeutic. We may even ask of our spouses the very things one could expect of a humanistic psychotherapist (unconditional acceptance, impeccable emotional attunement, and empathy).
If we do go to therapy, we’re likely to see the founding ideas of humanistic psychology embodied, at least in part, by our therapist. We sit in chairs or on couches, face-to-face. We guide the sessions ourselves, receiving empathy and encouragement, and a minimal amount of direct instruction. We may call our therapist by her first name, and we may even learn details of her personal life (how many kids she has, for example, or what kinds of lessons she’s learned from her own marriage).
We may also, however, find a distorted form of humanistic psychology in psychotherapy and in the wider culture. We may find therapists who don’t seem to do anything but listen; they may seem almost passive in their acceptance of our flaws, of our endless complaining, of the ways in which we repeat dysfunctional patterns in our lives. Rather than propelling us toward growth, in the way Carl Rogers theorized and demonstrated, they may enable our fixations. And rather than modeling a healthy positive regard, they may merely display a begrudging tolerance.
We encounter distortions of humanistic psychology in our daily lives, as well. Talk shows and self-help books, for example, often tout the importance of being true to our inner selves, even when it’s at the expense of our families or our community. In defiance of the intentions of Maslow and others to reform society by improving individuals, these cultural voices may be so committed to affirming the individual that they ignore moral questions and encourage selfishness.
The distortion of the movement’s founding principles is not a recent development. The moment of humanistic psychology’s inception in 1962 was itself cytokinetic. As quickly as humanistic theorists put forth their ideas, they split in a hundred different directions. Even before the official creation of the movement, Maslow’s ideas were adopted widely in management theory, often with the intention more of optimizing production and maximizing profit than of improving workers’ lives. Almost as quickly as it was formed, humanistic psychology erupted into the human potential movement, a cultural outgrowth that quickly dispensed with its thoughtful academic foundations and the caution that had characterized the original theory. These wild detours, though, were the very roads that brought us to the vastly different configuration of culture and psychology we find today.
My cocktail-party answer is informative, particularly if you corner me long enough to extract a fuller explanation, but in one sense, it misses the macro. This is also the story of the relationship between culture and psychology in America as it evolved from the postwar to the Reagan eras. The narrative is dramatic and rocky; it snakes across a revolutionary period of intellectual experiment, through a phase of countercultural excess, and into a period of social conservatism that was nonetheless undeniably stamped by the legacy of what came before. It’s the story of how figures like Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, and Rollo May resurrected the humanizing principles and productive paradoxes that were present at the birth of American psychology but were diluted by positivistic and scientistic pursuits. It traces their specific contributions—to psychotherapy and the philosophy of science—in relation to the broader field of psychology, assessing the ways in which the field expanded to absorb some of the interests of humanistic psychologists, while at the same time it contracted to reject others more strongly. American psychology was elevated by the insights of humanistic psychologists, damaged by their excesses, and, ultimately, forever changed.