Triumph of the Therapeutic

In the fall of 1973, Newsweek’s editors asked me to assume responsibility for the Ideas column in addition to Religion. Ideas was a new section created the previous year as a place to profile intellectuals and discuss new trends, chiefly in the humanities and social sciences. It was a choice assignment for any writer, one that allowed me to come up to speed on a variety of disciplines, such as psychology and sociology, that I hadn’t much liked as an undergraduate.1 It also gave me the opportunity to get to know a number of writers and thinkers who profoundly influenced my own developing outlook. The two who taught me the most were social historian Christopher Lasch and child psychiatrist Robert Coles. Both men were at once politically liberal and culturally conservative, a confounding of intellectual allegiances that reflected my own bent. Both had a keen nose for intellectual pretense, and both imbued in me an innate suspicion of experts. Both were highly moral, genuinely humble men and both became valued friends.

Ordinarily, we do not think of the Seventies as a period fecund in new ideas or movements. Compared to the cultural revolution of the Sixties and the counter-counterculture of the Reagan Revolution of the Eighties, the Seventies—even while in progress—seemed bereft of definition or direction. But, as Nicholas Lemann astutely observed in a 1991 essay, “what was in fact going on was the working of the phenomena of the Sixties into the mainstream of American life.”2 Those among the firstborn of the boomer generation who had not dropped out permanently moved into the wider society, taking with them the mantras and mandalas of alternative religions along with their amplified music, lengthened hair, tie-dyed shirts, and, most conspicuously, their recreational drugs. Not for the first time in American history, the bohemians went bourgeois and—more to the point—the bourgeoisie went bohemian. Where the two coalesced was in the unfettered quest for personal growth, a quest that not only conditioned American religion but, in the hands of humanistic psychologists and psychotherapists, became a powerful alternative to religion itself.

Sigmund Freud anticipated that the analyst’s couch would replace the confessional and other religious—and therefore outmoded—methods for the cure of souls. Indeed, he imagined the psychoanalyst as a “secular spiritual guide” who would inherit the authority previously exercised by the Christian clergy.3 Freudian psychology appealed mainly to the nonreligious, and especially to secular Jews like Freud himself. Most of his patients were Jews, as were most of his friends, and most of his disciples in the formative years of Freudian psychotherapy were nonreligious. Even so, by the middle of the twentieth century, Freudian psychology exercised a cultural authority far beyond the long, expensive, and often inconclusive experience of psychoanalysis.

In 1966, sociologist Philip Rieff published a book with a resonantly prescient title, The Triumph of the Therapeutic. With the advent of Freudian analysis, he argued, a new character type, “psychological man,” had replaced the “political man” of classical antiquity, “economic man” of the industrial revolution, and, more recently, “religious man” of Judeo-Christian culture. By that he meant that Western culture no longer provided the kind of moral communities and character norms by which individual selves were tempered and honed for higher and agreed-upon social purposes. With the decline of such communities, the therapeutic process had assumed a kind of cultural suzerainty with psychology “legitimizing self-concern as the highest science.” In the emergent cultures of the West, Rieff predicted, “a wider range of people will have ‘spiritual’ concerns and ‘spiritual’ pursuits” in the form of self-discovery, self-realization and self-authorization.4

By the early Seventies, it was clear that the language and concepts of psychology and its instrumental handmaiden, therapeutic technique, had assumed the kind of cultural dominance that sociology and its activist handmaidens had enjoyed in the Fifties and the Sixties. Time acknowledged the shift by introducing a new section, Behavior, to its table of contents. But the emblematic magazine of the Seventies was neither Time nor Newsweek. Nor was it William Shawn’s New Yorker, Clay Felker’s New York, Willie Morris’s Harper’s, Harold Hayes’s Esquire, or Gloria Steinem’s Ms. It was T. George Harris’s monthly, Psychology Today.

From a wobbly start-up, with 150,000 subscribers in 1968, Harris built Psychology Today into a fat and trendy magazine with a circulation of 1.1 million by 1976 and a total “pass-along” readership four times that number. In its pages, the general reader could follow the latest developments in everything from post-Freudian psychoanalysis, developmental psychology, and behavior modification to sexology and the newest forms of spirituality. Harris, a genial fellow journalist who called me at least once a week from his office in Southern California, really believed that the latest trends in psychology and newest therapeutic techniques would heal the ancient divisions between psyche and soma, and even those between science and religion. The success of his magazine suggested he was hardly alone. This evangelical faith in “psychological man,” I want to argue, is what finally defined the Seventies’ contribution to American religion and culture.

The Erikson Influence

Oddly enough, the man most responsible for psychology’s rise in intellectual influence was nowhere mentioned in The Triumph of the Therapeutic. And yet it was psychoanalyst Erik H. Erikson, more than any other American intellectual, who refined Freud’s idea that the essential struggle of human existence is not religious but psychological in nature. He did this by moving beyond Freud’s emphasis on the first five years of life to focus on the lifelong process of developing an inner core of personal “identity” throughout the whole of the human life cycle. “If everything goes back to childhood,” he reasoned, “then everything is someone else’s fault and trust in one’s power of taking responsibility for one’s self may be undermined.”

When I came to Newsweek I knew nothing about Erik Erikson other than his connection to the phrase “identity crisis”—which, by the Seventies, appeared to be something everyone, at least in adolescence, was supposed to experience. This hole in my education amazed Robert Coles, who had studied with Erikson at Harvard, and he set about bringing me up to date. During Coles’s travels in the South in 1962, where he observed the black and white students who tested their idealism against the raw realities of segregation, Bob told me he regularly saw copies of Erikson’s first book, Childhood and Society (1950), among the few objects those courageous kids carried along with Bibles into Alabama jails. A conversation with sociologist Robert Bellah backed him up: “If there is one book you can be sure undergraduates have read, it’s Erikson’s first one,” he assured me. “You can’t always be sure they’ve read Shakespeare, but you know they’ve read Erikson.”

Nestled into the middle of that book was Erikson’s first schematic presentation of the eight stages or “crises” in the life cycle, which became the scaffolding for a widely influential model of human development. In his formulation, each crisis requires the resolution of a psychosocial conflict that structures and restructures the “I” or subjective sense of self. For example, in infancy the conflict is between basic trust and mistrust, and the desired developmental outcome is the infant’s capacity to hope. In maturity (stage seven), the conflict is between generativity and self-absorption, and the desired outcome is the capacity to care for succeeding generations. To Freud’s “internal” model of psychological formation Erikson added the “external” dimensions of social, cultural, and even religious experience in a hugely ambitious effort to account for the whole of human development, conscious as well as unconscious, from birth through old age. Erikson insisted that his developmental stages were “epigenetic,” meaning not only that later crises were influenced by the outcomes of earlier ones, but also that the restructuring of individual identity was an ongoing process that only ceased at death.

Like Freud, Erikson had the mind of a moralist. The conflicts that characterized his eight stages of identity formation sounded almost Calvinist and easily translated into virtues, a word he preferred to more psychological terms like “ego strengths.” Unlike Freud, however, Erikson did not dismiss religion as an infantile illusion. On the contrary, the subjects of his two book-length “psychohistories,” a genre he invented, were religious and moral revolutionaries: Martin Luther and Mahatma Gandhi. Like that quintessentially American psychologist of religion, William James, Erikson was interested in how the experience of religion, in contrast to the contents of faith, enhances or retards the formation of a healthy identity. He read deeply those theologians like Søren Kierkegaard and Paul Tillich whose efforts to transcend the boundaries of specific religious traditions and communities of faith echoed his own aversion to identities derived from mere belonging. Erikson deplored the “moralism” and “dogmatism” that he felt resulted from identities based on creed, class, sex, or nationality. He regarded these groupings as “pseudo-species” that, in extreme form, justified Hitler’s genocidal pogrom against the Jews. What he hoped to foster was a “species-wide” ethic of mutuality based on his own “universal” model of human psychosocial development. In that model, all forms of identity and belonging based on ethnicity, nationality, religion, community, and family are to be transcended and subsumed. In short, the only truly human identity was at once personal and universal, and the only true community was the universal human community.

By 1970, Erik Erikson’s influence on the way Americans thought about themselves, their children, and a great many other things had made him more than just a cultural icon. With his abundant white hair, limpid blue eyes, and meditative mien he looked at age sixty-eight—at least in the few photographs he allowed to be published—like a Western sage, the grandfather figure everyone could trust. In that year, Erikson won both the Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction and the National Book Award in Philosophy and Religion, for Gandhi’s Truth. The same year, Coles published a 440-page study of his mentor and his work. As a favor to Bob, Erikson waived his lifelong refusal to engage with journalists, which allowed me to profile him in a cover story for Newsweek.

“Erik Erikson: The Quest for Identity” appeared just before Christmas—a week usually reserved for cover stories on religion, which says something about the reverence accorded Erikson in the autumn of his career. Like most intellectuals, Erikson craved recognition from his peers but not the more popular kind the media provides. He was also highly circumspect in talking about himself. He would not allow Newsweek to photograph him, supplying his own photos instead. Nor did he permit me to interview him in person, so there was no way that I could register for readers my own sense of his presence off the page. I mailed my questions to him at his home in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and over a two-week period pages of neatly typed answers appeared mysteriously under my office door. In them, Erikson offered his thoughts on rebellious youth and adult authority, his feminist critics, morality, approaching old age, and why, for him, dialogue with journalists is “a forbidding business.” Altogether, his responses ran to a generous 2,300 words. But his only fleeting reference to himself was this witty closing riposte: “Let me say in conclusion, that the identity images an old man has to ‘restructure’ includes what he reads about himself in the press.” His was the most nimble prose in the magazine that week.

Despite his circumspection with journalists, Erikson had begun to write autobiographically about his own “identity confusions,” starting with his birth. He never knew his father and was never told his name. It is hard, he noted, to develop an Oedipus complex if you don’t have a real father to unconsciously contend with for the affections of your mother.

The deeper family secret, never revealed while he was alive, was that Erik was born out of wedlock and that his Danish mother was sent to Germany to have her baby in order to avoid scandal to her respectable Jewish family. There she married a Jewish pediatrician, Theodor Homberger, who adopted Erik at age three and raised him in a bourgeois German Jewish household. But unlike his parents, Erik Homberger was blond and blue-eyed and strikingly tall. “Before long,” he wrote, “I was referred to as ‘the goy’ in my stepfather’s temple; while to my schoolmates I was a ‘Jew.’ ” As for nationality, in his youth he privately imagined himself not as a German or a Jew but as the son of a noble Danish father.

Erik’s identity achieved real-life definition when, in his late twenties, he was adopted into Freud’s Vienna circle. His own analysis was under Freud’s daughter, Anna, who also trained him in the emerging discipline of child psychoanalysis. In lieu of any university or medical degree, this sterling psychoanalytic pedigree earned him the credentials to practice anywhere in the world as a lay psychoanalyst. While in Vienna, Erik met his Canadian-born wife, Joan, an artistic daughter of an Episcopal clergyman. With their two children they migrated to the United States in 1933, the land of new identities for immigrants and birthplace of the tantalizing myth of the self-made man. When, six years later, the Eriksons applied for U.S. citizenship, they chose a Danish and distinctly non-Jewish surname: Erikson. Erik Homberger became literally Erik son of Erik, as if he were his own self-creation.

This late-in-life revelation drew stinging criticism from some Jewish intellectuals who accused Erikson of deliberately suppressing his Jewish identity and early immersion in that community of faith. But as he produced more autobiographical essays, it became clear that Erikson understood himself to be an outsider to every circle in which he moved—a man who lived on the borders between Europe and America, the clinic and the university, science and religion without ever feeling “at home” in any of them. His whole theory of identity formation excluded the kind of concentric circles of belonging that augment the formation of personal identity in ordinary religious people like myself. To the contrary, his developmental model made psychology the arbiter of what was good or harmful in religion.

It seemed to me from his autobiographical writings that Erikson’s focus on identity as the central drama of human life was as much an effort to explain himself to himself as it was to explain others to themselves. This would hardly be the first time that an intellectual breakthrough grew out of a very personal problem. But one had to question whether his theory was as “species-wide” as he claimed.

As Erikson advanced into old age, he tended to invest the achievement of a fully integrated sense of “I” with moral, prophetic, and even quasi-religious import. His last project, never completed, was to follow up his book on Gandhi with a shorter one on another historical figure whose message of “universal love” he much admired: Jesus. In it, Erikson planned to explore how Jesus’ personal sense of “I” was connected to the “I Am” by which, in the story of Moses, God identifies Himself. Along the way, Erikson also intended to compare the healing techniques of Jesus (favorably, I gathered, from a preliminary essay he published in 1981) with those of Sigmund Freud.

In the early Eighties, Harvard University established a research center in the names of Erik and Joan Erikson. By then Erik had begun to acknowledge what his closest friends had long known, that from the beginning Joan had been her husband’s close and indispensable collaborator in all his work. Through the mediation of the center’s amiable director, Dorothy Austin, I was finally able to meet the great man and his wife in person at the center. I was particularly keen on learning more about his work on Jesus.

Erikson was in his eighties then. Age and infirmity had diminished him physically but his pale blue eyes were alert and his welcome was gracious. As we exchanged pleasantries, I complimented him on the expensive bottle of Château Haut-Brion that a prior visitor had left him as a gift. He offered to open it right then and there in a gesture that any other time would have been a gracious offer. The problem was that it came at ten thirty in the morning. Joan intervened to deftly dissuade him, and in that moment I sensed that Erik was in the early stages of dementia and that there would be no book on Jesus or any discussion of it. In our conversation, Erik could not recall his earlier collaboration with Newsweek or our correspondence. But Joan Erikson did. As I gradually realized, it was she who had selected the photos we had published and—more to the point—it was she who had crafted the elegant responses to my questions.

In Erikson’s declining years, his wife assumed total responsibility for her husband’s lifelong work, in addition to writing books of her own. Indeed, after Erik’s death in 1994 Joan published a new edition of his final book, The Life Cycle Completed, to which she added a ninth stage of identity formation based on her experiences of her husband’s struggles in his final years. Clearly, Joan Erikson wanted to leave for posterity a theory of the human life cycle with nothing left out.

Erikson’s work was psychology’s last great effort to create a comprehensive theory to account for the whole of human experience. Certainly it was the last psychological enterprise to influence a wide general audience beyond interested intellectuals. One measure of his influence is the nearly one hundred books eventually produced by the members of Erikson’s informal summer seminars held on Cape Cod. The core group included psychiatrists Robert Coles and Robert J. Lifton, between them winners of a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize, plus psychologist Kenneth Keniston, historian Bruce Mazlish, and sociologist Richard Sennett—all of whom published important books that drew sustained attention from reviewers. Another, more dubious measure was the flash flood of “psychobiographies” of public figures—Richard Nixon was the most popular choice—in which authors who had never met their subjects confidently put them on the couch. Mercifully, the trend was short-lived. There were no real sequels to Gandhi’s Truth because that book owed as much to Erikson’s literary gifts as it did to his theory of identity formation.

All of Life’s a Stage

Much of Erikson’s appeal in the Seventies was based on the way his general model of psychological development seemed to answer a felt loss of an ordered and meaningful direction to human life like the kind religions had once provided. Influenced by Erikson, a variety of social scientists worked to fill the void. For example, at Harvard, psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg wrote books outlining six stages of cognitive moral development, to which he kept adding half and quarter stages as his theory grew ever more complex. Echoing Kohlberg, James Fowler, a psychologist of religion, developed a six-stage model for the growth of religious faith. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s bestseller, On Death and Dying, identified five stages in negotiating life’s closing chapter. But the bulk of the psychological stage work characteristic of the Seventies centered on calibrating the middle years of life, a period when men, especially, seemed to wake up and find themselves “lost” on the path through life, like Dante in the opening lines of The Divine Comedy.

The most celebrated book of this genre was journalist Gail Sheehy’s Passages, which offered itself as a “guide to the predictable crises of adult life.” It was the “predictable” that gave Passages its must-read cachet and kept it on the bestseller lists for two years. In it, Sheehy popularized (and to some extent appropriated) the work of researchers at Yale, Harvard, UCLA, and elsewhere who set out in the Seventies to prove that even in adulthood all of life’s a stage. Yale psychologist Daniel Levinson was quite open about the youth culture’s role in the genesis of their work: “Most of us who decided to study adult development did so in the late Sixties, when we were already in our mid-40s. We were sensitive to the challenges of the young, who saw our lives as stupid and empty. Some of us thought they were right.”

In one of his own books, The Seasons of a Man’s Life, Levinson argued that every adult male passes through a predictable sequence of stable and transitional periods, each lasting four to eight years, during which he builds, modifies, and rebuilds the basic structure of his life. The influence of Erikson was self-evident. But where Erikson focused on unconscious processes in the development of adult identity, Levinson stressed the conscious choices a man makes about occupation, marriage, and life goals as he forges his identity. The import seemed to be: Life is a series of sequential, age-related changes and in the end we become the sum of our choices.

—

This was supposed to be good news, not only for the young who feared there was no life after forty, but also for the middle-aged, who could now picture their lives as a secular Pilgrim’s Progress with several transitions yet to come before Kübler-Ross’s final five stages kicked in. Very shortly, however, there was a reaction from “life span” researchers who felt that the life-stage folks (I was never clear on the distinction between the two) were establishing age-related norms for how individuals should feel and act. In fact, argued Bernice Neugarten, a nationally prominent gerontologist at the University of Chicago, the United States was actually evolving into an “age-irrelevant” society—and all the better for it. “Our society,” she declared, “is becoming accustomed to the 28-year-old mayor, the 50-year-old retiree, the 65-year-old father of a preschooler and the 70-year old student.” That may be so, said sociologist Glen Elder Jr. But, he countered, “We have to have age norms to anchor and structure our lives. An age-irrelevant society is a rudderless society.”

Be All You Can Be

As influential as it was, Erikson’s developmental psychology represented only one avenue—and a very cautious and cerebral one at that—by which, in Rieff’s terms, “psychological man” sought to occupy the place once held by “religious man.” The bolder bid by far came from a wide assortment of theorists and therapists gathered under the broad tent of “humanistic psychology.” On the one hand, humanistic psychologists rejected Freud’s essentially tragic, even pessimistic view of the human condition; on the other, they rejected the stimulus-response behavioral psychology associated with J. B. Watson and B. F. Skinner. As a third way between these schools, humanistic psychology advanced a decidedly optimistic view of the individual’s abilities to overcome whatever is inhibiting one’s pursuit of personal well-being. In the therapeutic marketplace of the Seventies, humanistic psychology was popularly known as “the human potential” movement.

Like almost everything else from the Sixties that expanded in the Seventies, the human potential movement began as a California phenomenon. Its epicenter was the Esalen Institute, created in 1961 by a pair of Stanford graduates, Michael Murphy and Richard Price, on Murphy’s former family estate overlooking the Pacific Ocean on the cliffs of Big Sur. The site had a countercultural pedigree. Before Esalen, Big Sur was known chiefly as the occasional redoubt of Beat generation writers and the final home of the pre-Beat writer Henry Miller. Coincidentally, 1961 was also the year that U.S. censors allowed U.S. publication of Miller’s 1934 hard-core paean to male sexual liberation, Tropic of Cancer.

Initially, Esalen was an expensive but laid-back California think tank cum high-end spa where the kind of big-picture intellectuals that Time liked to feature on its cover—Arnold Toynbee, Linus Pauling, B. F. Skinner, Paul Tillich, Ashley Montague—gave forth in shirtsleeve seminars. In its first year alone four thousand people visited Esalen. Joan Baez, Simon & Garfunkel, Bob Dylan, and at least half the Beatles came by to perform and soak up the vibes. The site’s hot mineral baths, where romping nude was encouraged, gave Esalen a sybaritic sheen.

It was here, in 1965, that Michael Murphy and former Look magazine editor George Leonard coined the term human potential and proclaimed it a movement. But it was only after Ramanujam and I teamed up for Newsweek on a profile of the great Indian philosopher-mystic Sri Aurobindo that I began to grasp what Esalen and the human potential movement were ultimately up to.

At a Stanford class on world religions, Murphy was introduced to Aurobindo’s magnum opus, The Divine Life, a book of more than 1,100 pages that he would read over and over for the rest of his life. Aurobindo had studied Western science at Cambridge University in the 1920s and his book was a ponderous synthesis of Darwinian evolution and Hindu metaphysics. In it, Aurobindo envisioned an evolution of divine consciousness in the human mind and body that would eventually invite a corresponding descent of the “Supermind”—his word for Brahman—into the material universe. The result would be the transformation of the human species into supermen, an evolutionary leap that would be signaled by the reappearance of the classic siddhis, or supernormal powers described in the ancient Vedic literature.

Through his own system of integral yoga, Aurobindo claimed that he himself had personally achieved this evolutionary leap forward in 1926. On the same day, he turned control of his ashram at Pondicherry, India, over to his spiritual consort, Mira Richard, the beautiful young wife of a French diplomat who had left her husband after Aurobindo recognized her as the embodiment of the “Divine Mother.” Long before his death in 1950, Aurobindo identified “the Mother” as the vessel through which the ocean of divine light (the Supermind) would begin to empty into the material universe.

In 1956, Murphy arrived at the ashram, where he spent the next fifteen months meditating eight hours a day with 1,800 other devotees. On the evening of February 9 that year, the Mother announced to the ashram that she had willed the downward flow of divine light. Later, she also revealed her plans to create a new international receptacle for this downpour of superconsciousness: Auroville. With official sponsorship by UNESCO and platting by utopian city planners, Auroville was meant to be the world’s first “planetary” city, built five miles away on the Bay of Bengal on land donated by the Indian government.

Like an urban Noah’s Ark, Auroville hoped to attract immigrants from each of the world’s nations, with a maximum population of fifty thousand. In this way, it would be a concrete realization of the eventual unity of humankind—but without any of the inhibiting conventions of less evolved societies. Citizens of Auroville were to be “free of moral and social conventions,” including marriage, although couples who wished to were allowed to procreate. There would be no religious observances permitted, either, only the system of “integral yoga” created by Aurobindo. Auroville opened its doors in 1968 to a couple thousand immigrants. Two years later, Apollo 12 astronaut Charles “Pete” Conrad reported seeing an inexplicable light “as big as Venus” flashing steadily from a point “down from Burma and east of [that country]” on his return flight from the moon. Inhabitants of Auroville, which still exists, cited Conrad’s observation as proof that the Supermind was indeed descending.

Murphy’s vision for Esalen was grounded in his reading of Aurobindo and his experiences at the ashram. Esalen, too, would be a place where the evolution of human nature would be advanced through a melding of Eastern spiritual practices and Western experimental science. Unlike the discipline at the ashram, however, life at Esalen would be intellectually freewheeling, wholly democratic, and sexually unbuttoned. But while others “did their thing,” Murphy focused his own research on “the enlightenment of the body” as set forth in his most important book, The Future of the Body (1992). Murphy believed that human beings were capable of supernormal functions like seeing and traveling beyond the limits of the body if only they could find the right techniques. In his view the ancient siddhis defined the ultimate potential of the human potential movement.

Like Auroville, Esalen was to be a place that espoused “the religion of no religion,” which meant that every exercise in mind expansion and self-transcendence, every sense-enhancing technique, every form of ritual dynamics, above all, every explanation of what life is really all about, was welcome except those derived from Bible-based religions. This made Esalen the American Mecca for mystical seekers and fleers from traditional religions, a retreat where all forms of dogma and behavioral norms—certainly anything that repressed or forbade or stigmatized—were to be checked at the door. Not surprisingly, Episcopal bishop James Pike of San Francisco became one of Esalen’s most ardent supporters and a father figure to Murphy, who had been reared in the Episcopal Church.

Inevitably, this enticing surrogate for religion found a common mode of discourse in the language and concepts of humanistic psychology. In its headiest days, Esalen was headquarters for the movement’s most celebrated theorists: there one could experience the self-actualization psychology of Abraham Maslow, the Gestalt psychology and “organismic integration” of Fritz Perls, the psychosynthesis of Roberto Assagioli, the encounter groups of Will Schutz, and the work of scores of other autodidacts that bespoke Rieff’s triumph of the therapeutic. To Murphy, they were all welcome as pragmatic Western explorations in the service of Aurobindo’s evolutionary philosophy.5

By the time I began writing the Ideas section, every American city with a hundred thousand or more inhabitants had its personal growth centers, forming a kind of twentieth-century Chautauqua circuit for human potential practitioners. In 1981, social researcher Daniel Yankelovich estimated that “perhaps as many as 80 percent of all adult Americans” in the previous decade were involved in a search for self-discovery, personal growth, or spiritual liberation.6 At least 17 percent of them, he figured, were serious searchers who identified explicitly with the human potential movement.

In the fall of 1975, I began sampling some of the more popular techniques and interviewing practitioners with a view to writing a cover story. I tested techniques for enhancing my body awareness, tried a few visualization exercises with Jean Houston, who would later give advice at the White House to Hillary Clinton, and had my aura read by two different psychics. The first said it was red, the second royal blue, which indicated to me that auras, like beauty, are in the eye of the beholder. I, of course, saw nothing. I deliberately avoided more painful therapies like the deep massage of Ida Rolf and the expensive ones like Arthur Janov’s primal scream therapy, which aimed at releasing repressed childhood traumas locked in the central nervous system and cost six thousand dollars for six months of treatment. According to one popular handbook on the human potential movement, there were more than eight thousand ways to “Awaken in North America,” and like the tips of tree branches the movement kept throwing off new buds. Who could keep up?

As a shortcut I began attending gatherings of the Association for Humanistic Psychology (AHP), which Abraham Maslow founded as an umbrella organization for anyone who had developed a method for unlocking our hidden human potential or wanted to experience one. A third of the members were psychologists but AHP accepted anyone willing to pay the thirty-five-dollar annual fee. The conference I remember best was held in two Atlantic City hotels, where 1,600 delegates were offered 135 workshops on the growth potential in everything from adultery to Zen. The popcorn was free for those who took in the workshop on the liberating effects of watching erotic films.

This was better duty than the earnest conferences of Methodists and Presbyterians I’d attended, but a lot of the folks I met were not all that different. Many of them planned their family vacations around such meetings, like doctors, dentists, and Southern Baptists do. The conference theme was “The Human Spirit in Transition,” which sounded like the credo of a creedless church. Indeed, several conferees I met in evenings at the bar said they’d first encountered the movement in the basement of their Unitarian church.

The conference grand finale was the Saturday night nude swim at one of the hotel pools. This tradition originated at Esalen, where nude bathing was a cherished form of uninhibited sharing of embodied selves. Esalen brochures featured photos of nubile naked masseuses administering vigorous after-bath rubdowns to the nude bodies of long-blond-haired men. There weren’t a lot of either in evidence in Atlantic City that weekend, but still, as a reporter, I thought I ought to observe the participants at play. Problem was, I’m nearsighted. To swim without my glasses was to observe nothing but watery blurs, but to swim in a pool of naked bodies with them on was to announce myself a voyeur. My solution was to volunteer to be the person who handed out the towels, which I did from a critical vantage point behind the diving board. What I can now report is that there was no sharing of embodied selves in the pool—and certainly no erotic payoff in watching mostly pear-shaped middle-aged men and women bouncing off a board.

Re-creating Werner

By the summer of 1976, I felt that I had sampled enough of the human potential, my own and others’, to put together a cover package on what I chose to call “the consciousness movement.” But Newsweek’s new editor, Ed Kosner, wanted one last piece: a profile of Werner Erhard, the inventor of est, the latest, slickest, and most lucrative package of instant self-improvement on the human potential market. In 1971, its first year in operation, Erhard had induced some 83,000 Americans to pay $250 each for the privilege of spending four fifteen-hour days on successive weekends locked inside a hotel ballroom while he and his trainers assailed them as dupes and dummies and “assholes” in a systematic attack on whatever ego structure they had managed to develop. est was a lowercase acronym for Erhard Seminars Training, a set of “processes” he had put together to induce others to experience for themselves the same enlightenment that, he said, had come to him spontaneously while driving on a California freeway, where, indeed, one is apt to encounter a lot of assholes behind the wheel. As the French word for “is,” est also signified that Erhard had discovered the secret of reconciling what we want to be with what is.

Central to Erhard’s marketing plan was the idea that est could best be sold by word of mouth from those who had taken the course. Journalists were encouraged to write whatever they wanted to about est—Tom Wolfe’s famous New York magazine essay on the human potential movement, “The Me Decade,” opened at an est session—but only after they had experienced est for themselves. Like other trainees, journalists were not allowed to take notes during sessions and pens and notebooks would be confiscated if they tried. My friend John Leo, who covered the social sciences for the New York Times, left after the first weekend because he didn’t like Erhard’s top sergeants telling him when he could eat and when he could relieve himself. I was not interested in writing about my own experience of est and thereby becoming part of Erhard’s publicity machine. But I was keenly interested in learning what Erhard thought he was doing and why, and for that I insisted on interviewing the man himself. No interview, no profile in Newsweek, was my position.

Erhard had already disclosed enough about himself to make him a prime candidate for any analyst interested in identity crises. Born John Paul Rosenberg, he ended his formal education in Philadelphia when he married right out of high school and took a job selling used cars under the name Jack Frost. At age twenty-five he abandoned his wife and three children and fled to California, where he eventually married and sired four more children. There he worked as a motivator of door-to-door salesmen, among other jobs. He also changed his name again, this time to a combination of two prominent Germans he had read about in Esquire: the physicist Werner Karl Heisenberg and former West German chancellor Ludwig Erhard. Werner Erhard claimed he had spent eleven years exploring Eastern religions and various strategies for expanding his human potential, including Scientology, before his freeway experience when he suddenly “got it.”

To reach a modus vivendi, Kosner invited Erhard to lunch at the Four Seasons, Manhattan’s prime power restaurant, where he rented the private dining room for a high-level encounter. I think Kosner wanted a chance to size up Erhard for himself almost as much as he wanted to make a newsstand-friendly cover story happen. Erhard sat at the center of one side of a long table flanked by eight trusted trainers. Kosner sat opposite him with eight Newsweek staffers. Since I was going to write the story I sat at the end of the table to observe the interplay. Kosner and Erhard had much in common: they were about the same height and build; both were Jewish; both had experienced marital problems; both had reached career pinnacles—Kosner as the youngest editor in Newsweek’s history, Erhard as a multimillionaire entrepreneur—before the age of forty. For nearly three hours, the two sparred as if they were diplomats negotiating a treaty. Erhard insisted that est was not a set of ideas that I, as ideas editor, could grasp apart from personal experience of the training sessions. Eventually we reached an agreement: I would interview Erhard once, for as long as needed, and would forgo est training. But the interview had to be by long-distance phone since he was off to Hawaii the next day. Erhard would discuss anything except his personal life, but I could not quote him. That was the deal.

After listening to Erhard describe the est processes, I realized why you could no more experience est over the phone, even if it was the master on the other end, than a sinner could get saved over lunch with a revivalist. That’s because est was structured exactly like a revival: first show the crowd the need to change their lives and then show them how to do it. In both cases, the method relied heavily on crowd psychology with its attendant shouting, sobbing, and other forms of emotional letting go.

The first set of est processes aimed at inducing physical exhaustion by rationing food and drink and restricting bathroom visits. The next set exhausted the mind and emotions by attacking the ego and its defenses. The whole point, said Erhard, was to dislodge everyone in the room from their “belief systems,” which in est-speak meant the predetermined meanings the mind imposes on experience, and to force them to focus on the misery they were actually experiencing under Erhard and his trainers.

Dialectically, the second process introduced self-hypnosis, visualization exercises, and other techniques by which trainees were taught how to make their backaches, headaches, and other est-induced discomforts disappear. Once trainees realized that consciousness can alter bodily states, they were open to accepting one of est’s cardinal principles: “You are God of your own universe. You caused it.” In the closing process, the crowd was shown how to create an inner “space” into which each of them could retreat and immerse themselves in their own private consciousness. Trainees were said to “get it” when they finally realized that while they cannot change other people or the rules they had to observe if they were to get along on the job, in love relationships, or in any other social situation, they did have the power to prevent any of these associations from affecting what was most precious in life: their personal sense of well-being or (to use another est term) their “aliveness.” It was all a matter of self-consciousness.

est was not the first programmatic effort to psychologize the American myth of the self-made man. Nor was Erhard alone in teaching others how to recognize that they can be “perfect” just the way they are—another est axiom. But among human potential gurus he was certainly unique in insisting that those who worked for him learn to “re-create Werner” by executing every task precisely according to the boss’s detailed instructions. Not the least of the ironies est embodied was Erhard’s demand that those who trained others to discard their belief systems must first adopt Werner’s belief system as their own.

At the height of its popularity, est averaged nearly six thousand graduates a month and by 1982 had trained more than three hundred thousand people, a fourth of them in California alone. Who were these people? More than half of all est graduates had come of age in the Sixties; nearly all were white and nearly all had gone to college but only 57 percent had graduated. Women outnumbered men. Of those who were employed, most est graduates held middling clerical jobs like the salesmen Erhard once had trained. More than two-thirds were either never married or divorced when they took the training. Only one in ten practiced a religion.7 In short, they were mostly thirty-somethings who had difficulty making adult connections.

Criticism of the human potential movement was almost as plentiful as the therapies it spawned. “Narcissism” was the label most often used to decry the culture’s inward turn. Among the most discerning critics was Christopher Lasch, who recognized that the widespread preoccupation with self was not a modern iteration of Narcissus’s love of his own image but just the opposite: the pathology of people who lacked a sense of self-worth and so turned to experts whose therapies promised to provide a self worth having.8 What Lasch overlooked, however, was the manifestly religious thrust behind the growing edge of the human potential movement.

Going out of Body

Inevitably, humanistic psychology begat a fourth way of probing human potential called “transpersonal psychology.” This movement grew out of workshops at Esalen and, like the evolutionary mysticism of Sri Aurobindo, sought to synthesize Asian and other “ancient wisdom” traditions with Western psychology. Transpersonal psychologists took as their field of inquiry the scientific examination of out-of-body, near-death, and similar “transpersonal” experiences as evidence of the human capacity to escape the confines of the body and even transcend death itself. Most transpersonal psychologists, I was told, believed in reincarnation—as did a fourth of the American population, according to polls taken in the Seventies.

My introduction to this emergent discipline took place in Council Grove, Kansas, at the eighth annual meeting of the Association for Transpersonal Psychology, where an assortment of Native American spirit guides and shamans, Asian spiritual masters, and psychic researchers joined experimental psychologists in exploring ways in which human beings connect spiritually with others in this world and in the next. “Transpersonal psychology assumes that psychic energy is a concrete force that can be transmitted to other people,” explained the conference organizer, Dr. Stuart Twemlow, a psychiatrist at the venerable Menninger Clinic in Topeka. The clinic was once famous for the way that Karl Menninger, a pious Christian, made religious midwesterners comfortable with Freud and psychoanalysis. But the mystical paths the transpersonalists were treading were precisely the sort of ventures that Freud found repellent in the psychology of his protégé Carl Jung.

By way of illustrating the power of psychic energy, a young Menninger Clinic psychologist offered his own experience as an example. Through deep meditation, he said, he was able to enter an altered state of consciousness that allowed him to travel out of body at will. In one experiment, he said, he traveled from his office to his home, observed his wife preparing dinner in the kitchen, checked the time, and returned without her noticing. “I looked in a hallway mirror while I was there and I couldn’t see myself,” he said. “But when I returned from the office that evening I was able to tell my wife exactly what she had done in the kitchen, and exactly when she did it.”

This was not the first time I’d met someone who claimed to travel out of body. At that time, the researcher in the Science department at Newsweek, a young man with a BS in physics, routinely disappeared into the empty office opposite mine at lunchtime so that he could spend the hour traveling out of body to all sorts of places. But what caught my attention in the psychologist’s story was his Dracula-like encounter with the mirror. What unseen part of him, I wanted to know, did the traveling?

It was, he said, the work of the subtle energy that lies coiled at the base of the spine, known in Hindu Tantric lore as the Kundalini, or “serpent power.” Adepts in Kundalini yoga say they are able to activate this power through seven openings, or chakras, in the astral body connected to the physical body that we see. By activating these spiritual power centers, he explained, his expanded consciousness was able to travel without his physical body and to see without being seen.

Once again, I thought, Kansas really is the Land of Oz. “So what happens to expanded consciousness once the physical body dies?” I asked.

“That’s the big question transpersonal psychology hopes to answer,” he replied.

Embracing Death

Between 1968 and 1972, some 1,200 books were published on the subject of death and dying. That output matched the total number of volumes on the same subject published in the previous eighteen years. By 1976, another 800 titles were added to the list. Several of them, like psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s On Death and Dying and psychologist Raymond Moody’s Life After Life, a study of near-death and other out-of-body experiences, were mega-bestsellers that revealed a public anxious to have empirical evidence of a new and better life beyond the grave. Even more philosophical books like Ernest Becker’s brooding The Denial of Death, cultural studies like historian Philippe Ariès’s The Hour of Our Death, and psychologist Rollo May’s Love and Will made the bestseller lists along with new editions of a hardy perennial, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, which Americans read—erroneously—as a step-by-step guide to the afterlife.

During this same period, thanatology, the psychological and sociological study of death, dying, and bereavement, became a discrete academic discipline: Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in New York, the University of Minnesota, and Wayne State University in Detroit were among a dozen institutions with research centers in thanatology. Additionally, more than one thousand U.S. colleges, nursing schools (though not, oddly enough, most medical schools), and even high schools offered seminars on how to deal with death and dying. One high school in Minnesota went so far as to take students to a local funeral home so they could take turns lying in a casket.

In her 1963 bestseller, The American Way of Death, British writer Jessica Mitford had excoriated the American funeral industry for masking death by making corpses look as if they were merely in repose. Now, a decade later, Americans writers and thinkers were obsessed with putting death at the center of cultural conversation. “Death is the most important question of our time,” declared psychiatrist Robert J. Lifton. The reason, he argued in his book The Broken Connection: On Death and the Continuity of Life, is that the threat of nuclear war had subverted traditional forms of transcending death through one’s children, through lasting works of art, and through nature’s cyclical renewal of the earth. Other theories were more sociological. Some experts said the cultural preoccupation with death was a reaction to increased longevity: for the first time in history, half of Americans could expect the Bible life span of three score years and ten. Eighty percent of the elderly now died in hospitals, rather than at home, and advances in prolonging life for the aged raised emotional ethical issues like who should pull the plug and when.

In the early months of 1970, I suggested to Newsweek’s editors that instead of the usual religion piece at Easter time we focus the cover story on the human predicament that the Resurrection narratives were meant to address: death and the hope of eternal life.9 Newsweek’s top editors were not encouraging. No magazine had ever put death on its cover, they argued, and besides, the subject was too abstract for a newsmagazine. But if I wanted to go ahead and write something, they’d be willing to give it a look.

“How America Lives with Death” turned out to be one of the most personally satisfying pieces I ever produced for Newsweek. Even now, I think it captured a moment in American history when death had ceased to be a metaphysical mystery or a summons from God, but rather a managerial problem for the medical and other technicians charged with supervising nature’s planned obsolescence. When the deadline approached, the editors decided that death was too dour a subject to sell well on the newsstand. They replaced it with a cover story on the Gremlin, American Motors’ new subcompact car, and ran my piece inside. I suspect the real reason for the switch was that our always-upbeat editor in chief, Oz Elliott, was secretly a thanatophobe.

I don’t remember how many newsstand copies the Gremlin sold. But I do remember that nearly all the letters in response to that issue of the magazine were about death. I read them as evidence that a lot of ordinary Americans were indeed preoccupied with the subject. So did T. George Harris, who in a subsequent issue of Psychology Today invited his readership to participate in a survey on death. Thirty thousand responded, more than twice the number who had filled out an earlier survey on sex. By default, I became Newsweek’s resident thanatologist, reviewing books and writing several pieces on death. Indeed, it was probably death that later earned me the nod as ideas editor.

In 1978, death finally did make the cover of Newsweek, this time at the urging of the editors themselves. By then those in the academic and therapeutic communities concerned with death and dying had, in the fashion of the times, declared themselves activists in a new movement. The general thrust of “the death awareness movement” was to abolish the cultural taboos surrounding death, especially the institutional barriers that separated the hospitalized dying from the merely sick—a system that California’s New Agey governor, Jerry Brown, denounced as “apartheid” for the terminally ill. Inspired by Cicely Saunders’s hospice movement in England, one branch of the death awareness movement promoted practices such as administering morphine cocktails to lessen the pain of terminal cancer victims, group therapy for all terminal patients, and moving the dying out of hospitals and into homelike settings where they could live out their last days in the company of visiting relatives and friends. Thanks in large part to the pioneering work of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and her attention-getting books, counseling the dying became a new and almost heroic calling among clinical psychologists.

In its more audacious efforts, the death awareness movement sought to make the approach of death less forbidding by facilitating preliminary access to the afterlife. At the Menninger and other clinics that embraced transpersonal psychology, terminally ill patients were trained to focus on out-of-body states as a way of overcoming the physical and emotional confrontation with death. In this way, psychiatrist Stuart Twemlow claimed, “patients prepare themselves for the death of the physical body, become less frightened and are able to integrate the last remaining time they have in this dimension.”

One way Twemlow and others in the movement induced such experiences was by hooking patients up to a “signal generator” that used taped recordings of sound impulses to aid the separation of consciousness—or soul or astral body, depending on one’s metaphysical preference—from the body. The signal generator was the invention of Robert A. Monroe, a Virginia businessman who claimed he had sent 1,400 psychologists and other people on out-of-body trips over the past seven years. On his own voyages Monroe claimed to have explored other “reality systems” where he communicated nonverbally with “very intelligent beings that know nothing of our physical-matter systems.”

I regret now that I did not accept his invitation to test his invention myself, if only for the sake of this book. But I did the next-best thing: spend a day with Monroe’s most celebrated trainee, psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, who on various out-of-body trips had befriended spirit guides of her own.

Kübler-Ross’s Grateful Dead

By the spring of 1978, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross had become the Mother Teresa of the death awareness movement. Her work at the bedsides of more than a thousand terminally ill patients had earned her considerable moral capital—not to mention sixteen honorary degrees in the previous four years—which she was now spending lavishly on proving that there is life after death. At the time, Elisabeth and her husband, Manny, a neuropathologist, were living in Flossmoor, a suburb on the far south side of Chicago, where we agreed to meet. Their home was more California than Middle West—a long, low-slung house of redwood with a deck overlooking an oval swimming pool. Inside, a billiards table was set up in the dining room. At least one member of the household knew how to relax.

Elisabeth greeted me in an apron and invited me into the kitchen while she fixed us a stew for lunch. She was a short woman with a head of curly hair and spoke with a marked Swiss accent. Watching her bustle about, I immediately thought of the no-nonsense putzfrau on the Old Dutch Cleanser label. It was hard to imagine that this was a woman who traveled an average of 250,000 miles a year giving lectures and workshops around the world.

Elisabeth had a medical degree and had spent three years in analysis in preparation for her career. But from our conversation it was quickly apparent that she had since drunk deeply from the wells of the human potential movement. Only recently, she said, she was attending a conference on transpersonal psychology when, while walking between workshops, she suddenly experienced the full force of the Kundalini bursting through the chakras in her astral body.

“So what was it like?” I asked.

“Like a thousand orgasms all at once,” she replied. These were, I recalled, the exact words that Timothy Leary had used to describe his trips on LSD. There was, I began to realize, a kind of shared language among pilgrims on the pathways of human potential, as well as a menu of spiritual peak experiences, like the Kundalini, they were all expected to master.

Our conversation turned quickly to another of those experiences: Elisabeth’s personal journeys out of body. Thanks to Monroe’s machine, she said, she had learned to travel “at the speed of light horizontally,” change course at sharp angles, and arrive at “places where nobody probably had ever been. It felt super.” She demonstrated by making an airplane of her right hand in zigzag flight over her plate of stew. On one of her flights, she said, she had met “Willie,” one of three spirit guides who gave her reports on how life goes on the other side of death, which she was gathering for another book.

But the most rewarding experiences, she wanted me to know, were the occasional visitations she received from “materializations” of grateful former patients she had assisted on their deathbeds. These visitations were just some of the scientific evidence she had collected to prove that death is just a door to another dimension of life. When I asked for examples, she described how one patient, Mary Schwartz, materialized in Elisabeth’s office at the University of Chicago nine days after her death.

“Were you frightened?” I asked.

“No, I just felt pleased,” she said. “Mary had come to thank me and the Unitarian hospital chaplain for helping her pass over. Since the minister was no longer on staff I gave her a piece of office stationery and suggested she leave him a signed note.”

With Elisabeth’s help I managed to track down the minister at a hospital in Boston. He sent me a copy of the handwritten letter, which began cheerily enough:

Hello there, Dropped in to see Dr. Ross. One of two on the top of my “list.” You being the other. I’ll never find or know anyone to take the place of you two. I want you to know, as I’ve told her, I’m at peace….

For my cover story “Living with Dying,” Newsweek replicated this portion of the letter as an illustration accompanying my sidebar on afterlife investigations. I had to think it was the first time any newsmagazine had published a letter from beyond the grave. The remarkable thing, though, was that of the four hundred or so letters to the editor we received on the cover story, not one questioned the authenticity of this written communication from the dead.

A year after my interview with Kübler-Ross, her husband filed for divorce. He had staked his wife to a forty-acre spread outside San Diego for Shanti Nilaya (Sanskrit for “Ultimate Home of Peace”), a center for investigating psychic healing and conjuring with therapeutically powerful spirit entities. There Elisabeth became embroiled with Jay Barham, the self-ordained minister of the Church of the Facet of the Divinity, who conducted séances with materialized “spirit entities.” Critics later charged that the entities were actually men and women Barham hired for sex with those who attended the pitch-dark séances, though the San Diego District Attorney’s investigation was dropped for lack of evidence. The scandal tarnished Kübler-Ross’s reputation. She had believed in Barham’s powers and claimed kinship with a number of spirit entities herself. Nonetheless, she continued to believe that death should be welcomed as a “growth” experience, and published another dozen books on death, dying, and the afterlife before her own life ceased in 2004.

During my pilgrimage along the converging paths of the human potential movement, I was reminded at every turn of a maxim often attributed to G. K. Chesterton: “A man who won’t believe in God will believe in anything.” In many ways, the entire project of uncovering our hidden human potential also represented the latest recrudescence of the ancient Gnostic dream of realizing one’s higher, spiritual and immortal self through secret knowledge (gnosis) and esoteric practices aimed at transcending the limitations of the body, including death.

But as Christopher Lasch recognized, this modern form of Gnosticism had sociological roots as well. Lasch understood that sturdy selves could not be therapeutically engineered because they are formed through communal attachments and responsibilities. In short, Lasch shrewdly connected the Seventies’ inward turn to the disappearance of meaningful work and to the decline of institutions like the family, neighborhoods, churches, and other social networks.10

Lasch wasn’t the only one to notice the breakdown of the family. Others, on the alienated fringes of society, noticed, too. And they were prepared to create new religious forms of belonging to take the bourgeois family’s place.