Encountering America: Humanistic Psychology, Sixties Culture, and
the Shaping of the Modern Self, by Jessica Grogan, Harper
Perennial, 412 pages, $14.99

Once upon a time in America (it was just after World War II),
mainstream psychology came in two and only two forms. There was
behaviorism and there was psychoanalysis, and no one with any other
intellectual orientation need apply. The theorists on campuses were
behaviorists; the therapists in offices were psychoanalysts.

Then came the revolution led by the humanistic psychologists,
beginning in the 1950s and rapidly gaining strength through the
1960s and early '70s. It brought encounter groups, regional "growth
centers" like Northern California's notorious "clothing optional"
Esalen Institute, experimentation with LSD and other psychedelic
drugs, and "client-centered therapy." Nothing was ever the same
again.

This is the story the cultural historian Jessica Grogan tells in
Encountering America: Humanistic Psychology, Sixties Culture,
and the Shaping of the Modern Self. Her narrative bogs down in
spots, mainly because of her penchant for uselessly precise detail.
Was there a conference of humanistic psychologists held during the
1950s, '60s, or '70s at which Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow, and
Rollo May did not present a paper? Grogan proudly presents
the exact title of the paper in each and every case, along with a
précis of its content. The chief effect is to show the extent to
which these men said the same thing over and over. Then there's a
30-page chapter that makes a heroic but rather pointless effort to
connect humanistic psychology and the civil rights movement. Its
content could be fairly summarized in one sentence: A few
humanistic psychologists tried to adapt the encounter group and
make it a tool to promote greater racial harmony, but nothing came
of their efforts.

Grogan does provide serviceable sketches of the lives and
careers of Rogers, Maslow, and May. She's also good on the
intellectual diversity of the humanistic psychologists. From the
beginning, she writes, there were "fissures built into the
movement," for its members held "many disparate views of health,
human nature, motivation, and behavior." Humanistic psychology, she
writes, was more "a broadly encompassing orientation" than "any one
specific theory." She notes that "within psychology and
psychotherapy," the rebellious spirit of the '60s "didn't manifest
as a [new] consensus in which all scholars and practitioners agreed
they had found a universal theory or methodological approach that
would reign supreme. Instead, it manifested as a dissolution of
consensus," so that "a plethora of diverse psychological theories,
services, and techniques were now emerging."

What might all these diverse
theories, services, and techniques have been said to have in
common, so that they all fit under the "broadly encompassing
orientation" of humanistic psychology? They were all devoted to the
proposition that human beings were individuals, not
interchangeable machines whose behavior could be predicted
experimentally and whose "mental woes," as Vladimir Nabokov
famously put it, could "be cured by a daily application of old
Greek myths to their private parts." They all believed that the
human individual came "hard wired," as it were, for personal
growth, and that the purpose of therapy was to create and sustain
an environment in which the obstacles so commonly thrown up by
social institutions to personal growth, self-actualization, and
realization of one's potential were deactivated, so that the client
could, in effect "cure" him- or herself. They all believed that
psychological health meant something more than merely being free
from mental illness, that it comprised a set of specifiable (and to
some extent measurable) personal qualities such as self-esteem,
self-confidence, and openness to experience.

As her subtitle suggests, Grogan is eager to see the humanistic
psychologists of (roughly) 1950 to 1975 as both exemplars and
influencers of the Zeitgeist. Her efforts in that direction are
hampered, however, by her failure to clearly identify precisely
what that Zeitgeist was. She comes perilously close to doing so on
several occasions, as when she writes that the people of the era in
question "seemed...anxious to be free of institutional
constraints," and when she describes political activists of the
period like Martin Luther King, Jr. as hoping that "social
change...would come about by placing a greater value on the
individual." She even credits the New Left (which she sees as the
primary voice of the political spirit of the time) as having
"proclaim[ed] its regard for the self-determining individual." Yet
never does she say in so many words that individualism was the
characteristic spirit of the '60s and '70s.

Probably it would have made her a bit uncomfortable to do so.
For Grogan doesn't really approve of individualism. She writes on
the very first page of her book that "humanistic psychologists were
keenly attuned" to the "truth...that individuals in all their messy
complexity should remain at the heart of psychological study and
practice." Yet, within no more than five pages, she is lamenting
such "distortions of humanistic psychology" as "talk shows and
self-help books" that "tout the importance of being true to our
inner selves" and "encourage selfishness." Selfishness, you see, is
"one of the most toxic themes of American culture." Just look at it
here, in all its awful repugnance, in the "Gestalt Prayer" of
humanistic psychotherapist Fritz Perls:

I do my thing and you do your thing.
I am not in this world to live up to your expectations,
And you are not in this world to live up to mine.
You are you, and I am I, and if by chance we find each other, it's
beautiful.
If not, it can't be helped.

One can almost see Grogan's curled lip and hear the disdain in
her voice as she quotes this perfectly reasonable and realistic
sentiment, and as she deplores the "often destructive
permissiveness" that she says became virtually "the rule" at
"growth centers" like Esalen during the late 1960s. She complains
bitterly about the way in which the counterculture of the period
"distrust[ed] all authority" and "expressed a blind allegiance to
absolute freedom that rested on the assumption that human nature
was fundamentally good." She complains that "the leaders of
humanistic psychology seemed incapable of adequately considering
anything beyond the distinct individual" and seemed to envision an
American society remade one individual at a time.

Worse yet, the encounter groups these psychologists led "seemed
to unwittingly encourage the development of negative
characteristics like self-focus [and] hedonism." It wasn't long,
according to Grogan, before the humanistic psychology movement as a
whole developed "a reputation for being overly individualistic and
encouraging of narcissism."

One result of that, needless to say, was that individuals began
to act in ways intended to benefit themselves—for example,
by starting businesses and attempting to make a profit. Grogan
doesn't really approve of profit. She writes of "the potential for
businesses to misuse humanistic principles in the ruthless pursuit
of profit" and notes that the humanistic psychology movement "did
little, if anything, to eradicate the baser profit motives of
corporate leaders" during the 1960s and '70s, though it did come to
exercise considerable influence on management theory at that
time.

Grogan seems unable to make up her mind whether humanistic
psychology is still with us. In the very first sentence of her
text, she identifies her subject as "a movement that originated in
the 1950s, formally emerged in the 1960s, and ignited, before
burning out, in the 1970s." Within a handful of pages, however,
she's entertaining the hypothesis that it never did really burn
out, "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." And though she continues
to write from time to time throughout the rest of the book about
the supposed demise of the movement, by book's end, she seems to
have persuaded herself at last of her alternative hypothesis,
writing that "if we measure the extent to which the leading
concepts of humanistic psychology have pervaded our culture...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. 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."