Humanistic Psychology at The Crossroads Essay Discussion

Humanistic psychology today stands at a turning point in its history. The Society for Humanistic Psychology (Division 32 of the American Psychological Association [APA]) has produced six successful conferences offering a wide variety of programs to a diverse and growing constituency. Recently, the APA Task Force on Evidence-Based Practice (2006) recognized the legitimacy of humanistic factors such as qualitative research, sound clinical judgment, and the “context of patient characteristics, culture, and preferences” as key criteria for the delivery of evidence-based practice (p. 273). There have been a growing number of books and articles on humanistic theory, practice, and research in the APA’s arsenal of books and journals (see Introduction, this volume); and even the prestigious American Psychologist has published the existentialists’ call that we return to the romantic as a still missing piece of the puzzle of what it means to be human (Schneider, 1998). Indeed, mainstream academics who have launched their own form of positive psychology have invited humanistic thinkers to publicly debate the issue (Waterman, 2013). Is positive psychology, as many humanistic psychologists contend, a usurper of an already established venue? Or is positive psychology, as many cognitive psychologists would have it, a development superior to its humanistic forebears given that this newer form is more experimental? Humanistic Psychology at The Crossroads Essay Discussion

One easily could interpret these developments as destiny at the crossroads. Or, to put the question in another way, 50 years after its heyday, will humanistic psychology finally, and quietly, slip into oblivion by being absorbed into the mainstream—gone with nothing more than a whimper instead of a bang, its votaries once having been full of sound and fury but now signifying nothing? Or is the long-awaited era of its maturity finally at hand, what has gone on in the past being but a prelude to what is to come?

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We (Taylor, 1999a, 2011) are responding to the future of the humanistic movement with guarded optimism. Our only caveat is that humanistic psychology may be able to resurrect itself within the larger field of American academic psychology, but only under a set of specific conditions informed by its own history. Although the humanistic movement is generally associated with the field of psychology per se, over the past 60 years, it has come to influence a variety of fields beyond the social sciences—medicine, law, dentistry, nursing, and business administration, to name but a few. Recent historical scholarship, however, reaffirms what the founders already knew but many today forget—namely, that humanistic psychology did not just appear out of nowhere. It originally was an outgrowth of personality, social, abnormal, and motivation psychology—those subfields of academic psychology long considered to be the so-called soft sciences (Taylor, 2000). Humanistic Psychology at The Crossroads Essay Discussion

While reductionistic behaviorism had maintained an ideological stranglehold in academic departments of psychology, especially since the 1930s, psychoanalysis came to control clinical teaching in psychology and psychiatry during the same period. Within the academic arena, however, the more overtly reductionistic subfields—such as learning, sensation and perception, mathematical, and physiological psychology—that dominated the laboratory scene were challenged by the rise of the macropersonality theorists. Researchers such as Henry A. Murray, Gordon Allport, and Gardner Murphy rejected the reductionistic atomism of experimental psychologists, whose main focus was the study of the white rat. They argued instead for psychology as a person-centered science. These voices then became the grandfathers and grandmothers of the humanistic movement in psychology, which first appeared during the 1940s, when Carl Rogers articulated his client-centered therapy, and grew to a crescendo during the 1950s, when Rollo May and others introduced the existential and phenomenological viewpoint into psychology and psychiatry and Abraham Maslow defined the self-actualizing personality. After that, a period of institutionalization began.

The Journal of Humanistic Psychology was officially launched in 1961, followed by the founding of the American Association for Humanistic Psychology a year later. In November 1964, the historic First Old Saybrook Conference was held, at which Murray, Allport, Murphy, and Kelly passed the torch to Maslow, Rogers, and May, legitimizing the humanistic movement as a viable form of discourse within academic psychology. The Humanistic Psychology Institute, the first PhD program of the movement, began in 1971, and the Division of Humanistic Psychology was launched within the APA in 1973 (Taylor & Kelley, 1998). For all intents and purposes, it looked outwardly like the field was well launched, and the expectation of deans and college presidents was that it soon would usher in a new dialogue between science and the humanities, healing the historic rift between C. P. Snow’s two cultures. Humanistic Psychology at The Crossroads Essay Discussion

It was a revolution within the academy whose time, however, had not yet come. Abraham Maslow and Anthony Sutich, two of the most influential founders of the movement, were emblematic of the currents at work during that period. With Sutich as founding editor and Maslow as contributor and national point man, the Journal of Humanistic Psychology soon came to represent a new emphasis in psychology on the experience of the fully functioning person, on emotional maturity and interaction in relationships, and on values in science, especially the psychology of the science-making process. Its original home was Brandeis University, and its editorial board included influential figures in academic and clinical psychology as well as other disciplines. Furthermore, it was buttressed by the inclusion of the existential and phenomenological perspective, flourishing at the time as a growing cultural force but with no direct avenue into psychology until the humanistic movement came into being and remolded it as a form of psychotherapy. Along these lines, humanistic psychology became a force for cultural change by focusing on significant dimensions of personality left unexplored by the experimental reductionists’ methods.

Maslow and Sutich, however, quickly became dissatisfied with experiential and social transformation that left the spiritual quite out of the picture (Sutich, 1976). They conspired self-consciously to introduce this dimension back into psychology by bolting from the editorial and organizational positions they had made for themselves in the humanistic movement and founding, in 1969, the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology and its attendant organization, the Association for Transpersonal Psychology. The spiritual dimension of experience, the actualization of self and being, metavalues, meditation, and higher states of consciousness became the new foci of their efforts. Humanistic Psychology at The Crossroads Essay Discussion

By making this abrupt transition, Maslow and Sutich effectively took most of the leaders of the humanistic movement at the time with them. One unintended consequence, however, was a dramatic shift in emphasis away from psychology in the academy to psychology in culture at large. The counterculture psychotherapeutic movement was fully under way by that time, fueled in part by the advances of humanistic psychology and also by the widespread experimentation with psychedelics, the rising interest in religious movements from Asian cultures, the antiwar movement, the rise of feminism and radical gender politics, a new, anti-intellectual culture of the body, and a period of sexual experimentation and new definitions of the family unprecedented in the modern era.

Humanistic psychology became transformed into something else overnight, virtually indistinguishable from its new, myriad, and more radical forms. The forms themselves, however, are readily identifiable. When humanistic psychology became absorbed into the psychotherapeutic counterculture, it effectively fractionated into three separate and unintegrated streams, none of which had any avenue into the academic university environment. The first was meditation and altered states of consciousness, the second was experiential body work and group dynamics, and the third was human science. Meditation and altered states of consciousness have persisted as transpersonal psychology. Experiential bodywork, still expanding in its old forms, also has evolved into therapeutic touch, Reiki healing, and shamanic journeying, whereas group dynamics has moved from the churches into the corporate boardrooms. Human science has come to encompass political psychology, gender studies, social criticism, and all forms of postmodernism, from constructivism to deconstructionism and contextualism. Humanistic Psychology at The Crossroads Essay Discussion

Yet, while the influence of humanistic psychology suddenly became subterranean, its newly launched institutions remained visible within the dominant culture, proceeding along a relatively unchanging course that continues to be defined by issues and personalities from the 1960s and early 1970s. In these more visible forms, humanistic psychology today looks like a persistent throwback to that era. In its invisible form, however, it has evolved through a series of cultural phases, from sensitivity training, growth groups, and therapeutic massage to biofeedback and meditation, socially engaged spirituality, psychotherapy and shamanism, and now alternative and complementary therapies. It now has surfaced, reincarnated more pervasively after 60 years in the form of a shadow culture that is transforming the dominant culture at nearly every niche from the bottom up (Taylor, 1999b). The old humanistic psychologists still are there, but they now call themselves transpersonalists, Gestalt therapists, psychophysiologists, integral psychologists, mind–body practitioners, postmodernists, and human (as opposed to natural) scientists.

Psychology in the academy, meanwhile, became somewhat more humanistic, but not by that name. Behaviorism, which had dominated the laboratory science of psychology since the 1930s, gave way to cognitive psychology, which in turn was quickly absorbed into the newly developing disciplines of the cognitive neurosciences. Mainstream science, previously driven by physics and mathematics and their subordinate sciences, suddenly became more biological as well, leading to the present-day interdisciplinary emphasis at the nexus of fields such as molecular genetics, neurology, endocrinology, immunology, and psychiatry. Humanistic Psychology at The Crossroads Essay Discussion

Psychology has participated significantly in these endeavors, primarily because the neuroscience revolution is all about the biology of consciousness. Artificial intelligence, parallel distributive processing models of cognition, and MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) scanning of mental processes from abstract problem solving to mental imaging have come into vogue. As a result, clinical psychology has become more medicalized. Clinicians are called on to perform almost the same diagnostic functions as are psychiatrists when mental illness is the primary issue, prescription privileges for psychologists already have been instituted in the military on a limited scale, psychologists have almost totally colonized psychoanalysis (a field previously controlled exclusively by physicians), and psychologists and psychiatrists remain embroiled together in the fate of managed care. Humanistic Psychology at The Crossroads Essay Discussion

At the same time as it has become more biological, however, mainstream psychology also has become more philosophical, commensurate with a similar expansion in disciplines associated with the neurosciences. Questions about the relation of the brain to our experience, long banned as unscientific, now are at the center of discussions about the nature of consciousness. The facts of science now are being discussed in terms of their context. The language of behaviorism has been transformed into the more cognitive language of mentalism. And the whole issue of values in science once again is on the table, as experimental psychologists tout the benefits of promoting what Seligman (1990, 1993) called a “positive psychology,” the study and application of science to positive, growth-oriented outcomes. Cloninger’s seven-factor theory of personality even has developed a transpersonal scale to measure religiosity as it emerges in later life (Cloninger, Bayon, & Svrakic, 1998).

The question now before us, however, is this: Where does humanistic psychology fit into this picture? Today, the Humanistic Psychology Institute has become Saybrook University, a fully accredited-at-a-distance PhD program, but dominated as much by human science as by humanistic and transpersonal psychology. Division 32 within the APA stands by itself as one of the smaller but still functioning (and in recent times, growing) divisions, except that its journal, The Humanistic Psychologist, never has been able to widen its subscription base enough to make it financially viable. The Association for Humanistic Psychology remains active but represents only a small core of the psychotherapeutic counterculture and, as such, has practically no avenue into academic psychology. Its main organ, the Journal of Humanistic Psychology, no longer is owned by the association but rather operates independently due to financial constraints. And although the majority of psychologists in the APA might consider themselves person centered, nondirective, and even growth oriented, only the smallest fraction would use the term humanistic to describe their orientation. Humanistic Psychology at The Crossroads Essay Discussion

Mainstream psychologists, if they have any name recognition at all when asked about the movement, think of humanistic psychology as unscientific, guilty of promoting the cult of narcissism, and a thing of the past. Transpersonal psychologists are convinced that because humanistic psychologists study existential states and transpersonalists study spiritual ones, and because spiritual states are superior to existential ones, transpersonal psychology has superseded humanistic psychology (see, e.g., Walsh, Chapter 45, “Authenticity, Conventionality, and Angst: Existential and Transpersonal Perspectives,” and Schneider, “A Reply to Roger Walsh,” this volume). Bodyworkers and those advocating group dynamics tend to remain distant from the intellectual milieu that connects the humanistic tradition to the disciplines of higher learning, whereas the votaries of human science have been swamped by a radical Marxist ideology that has managed to colonize every liberal niche created by the humanistic movement in psychology in the United States since the 1960s.

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Humanistic psychologists, meanwhile, generally have bought into postmodernism and its ideology, believing human science to be a more general rubric that differentiates a mechanistic approach to science from a more person-centered one. This appears somewhat of a false dichotomy given that human science as a field of study has been completely overrun by radical trends in European social criticism that have little direct relevance to humanistic and transpersonal psychology and, in fact, represent forces hostile to it. At the same time, the humanistic movement has spread its meager resources out over a vast terrain, aiming at business, law, medicine, the arts, and culture in a way that has quite obscured its origins in psychology. Psychology, meanwhile, has become more humanistic, but its more liberal transformation has not gone by that name. Humanistic Psychology at The Crossroads Essay Discussion

So we now are able to sharpen the question considerably by re-asking it in a different but more historically informed way: What is the potential future of humanistic psychology within psychology? Will it be absorbed into the mainstream? Or will it awaken psychologists to the construction of a new science that finally addresses the full spectrum of human experience, thus potentially transforming the other sciences through psychology and, at the same time, opening a new dialogue between science and the humanities?

If humanistic psychologists continue to proceed along their present course, dissipating their attention across too many subject areas and believing that their future lies in propounding the already outmoded theories of postmodernism while forgetting their basic roots in psychology, then their basic contributions are destined to be co-opted by mainstream psychologists, and their fate will be similar to that of the experimental Gestalt psychologists of the 1930s. Gestalt psychology was the first uniquely experimental laboratory challenge to the Wundtian atomism that has always dominated American experimental laboratories, because Gestalt was holistic at the same time as it remained scientific and experimental. American experimental psychologists effectively neutralized its epistemological challenge, however, by co-opting its major ideas of figure-ground, closure, contrast, continuity, and the like into the flow of general psychology textbooks without confronting the metaphysical questions it raised about the way in which basic science is conducted. American psychology then went on to being behavioral and reductionistic. Humanistic psychology now appears to be undergoing a similar assimilation. Humanistic Psychology at The Crossroads Essay Discussion

If humanistic psychology decides to focus its attention back on the discipline of psychology, however, then an entirely different outcome might ensue that could place the humanistic movement at the forefront of not only a sea change in psychology but also a major transformation of the social and natural sciences. But certain new conditions would have to be established for a change of this magnitude to take place. We had already provided (Taylor, 1999a, 2010) the details of this proposal, so the present chapter is confined to just the bare outlines.

To regain its stature in the visible halls of academia, humanistic psychology would have to temporarily distance itself from its more radical offspring long enough to reclaim its historical position among the soft sciences and to engage psychologists as scientists, clinicians, and administrators in terms useful to their own endeavors. It also would have to be led by voices of significant stature that self-consciously identify themselves with the movement. Humanistic Psychology at The Crossroads Essay Discussion

To do this, humanistic psychology temporarily would have to become less transpersonal, less experiential, and less political and, in exchange, return to being more psychological. For example, it could constructively embrace Seligman’s positive psychology at the same time as it could promote Cloninger’s seven-factor theory over the five-factor theory now in vogue. It could prepare itself to become more of a viable interpreter of the humanistic implications of the neuroscience revolution, particularly regarding the problem of consciousness. It could bring psychologists to a renewed focus on the need for a more person-centered science—that is, a science of psychology that focuses on the person as its primary subject matter.

Our contention is that humanistic psychology, by claiming its legitimate place in the history of American psychology as the offspring of personality, social, abnormal, and clinical psychology, could resurrect the dialogue with psychologists about the growth-oriented dimension of personality, could reorient the training of clinicians toward education for transcendence instead of a psychology of the neurosis, and could reemphasize the existential nature of the psychotherapeutic hour as not only the crucible for personality transformation but also the laboratory for a new type of experimental psychology. Concretely, humanistic psychologists also could focus the precious resources of the movement on Division 32 in the APA, which needs a serious infusion of financial support, more members, and more subscribers to its journal. Humanistic Psychology at The Crossroads Essay Discussion

By instituting such changes within their own ranks, humanistic psychologists might immediately garner the attention of mainstream psychologists. The next question, however, is more crucial: What will humanistic psychologists tell their mainstream counterparts if they actually could get their attention?

In our opinion, the single most important contribution that humanistic psychologists have to make to modern psychology is to bring the attention of the experimentalists to focus on the phenomenology of the science-making process and, once the attention of the discipline is focused on that point, to articulate a phenomenological (rather than a positivistic) epistemology as the basis for a new experimental science (Taylor, 2010, 2011).

Such a science is not new; we have heard a similar call in William James’s radical empiricism and from depth psychologists such as Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud and theologians such as Paul Tillich. Maslow (1966) pointed in that direction with his Psychology of Science, and it also was the basis for Giorgi’s (1970) interpretation of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty in Psychology as a Human Science. It is also the foundation of Dignaga’s Buddhist theory of perception. At any rate, it is a scientific psychology that would address the full range of human experience while at the same time accommodating non-Western epistemologies, two key conditions not presently fulfilled by contemporary positivistic epistemology. What implications such a new science would have for the social and behavioral sciences, and even for physics and biology, would remain to be worked out. But even established in its most primitive form, it would more than adequately fulfill the original agenda of those who founded humanistic psychology in the first place. Humanistic Psychology at The Crossroads Essay Discussion

REFERENCES

APA Task Force on Evidence-Based Practice. (2006). Evidence-based practice in psychology. American Psychologist, 61, 271–285.Cloninger, C. R., Bayon, C., & Svrakic, D. M. (1998). Measurement of temperament and character in mood disorders: A model of fundamental states as personality types. Journal of Affective Disorders, 51(1), 21–32.

Giorgi, A. (1970). Psychology as a human science. New York, NY: Basic Books.

Maslow, A. H. (1966). The psychology of science: A reconnaissance. New York, NY: Harper & Row.

Schneider, K. J. (1998). Toward a science of the heart: Romanticism and the revival of psychology. American Psychologist, 53, 277–289.

Seligman, M. (1990). Learned optimism. New York, NY: Knopf.

Seligman, M. (1993). What you can change and what you can’t: The complete guide to successful self-improvement. New York, NY: Knopf.

Sutich, A. (1976). The founding of humanistic and transpersonal psychology: A personal account (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Humanistic Psychology Institute, San Francisco, CA.

Taylor, E. I. (1999a). An intellectual renaissance of humanistic psychology? Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 39(2), 7–25.

Taylor, E. I. (1999b). Shadow culture: Psychology and spirituality in America. Washington, DC: Counterpoint.

Taylor, E. I. (2000). What is man, psychologist, that thou art so unmindful of him? Henry A. Murray on the historical relation between classical personality theory and humanistic psychology. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 40(3), 29–42.

Taylor, E. I. (2010). William James and the humanistic implications of the neuroscience revolution: An outrageous hypothesis. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 50, 410–429.

Taylor, E. I. (2011). JHP at fifty. Journal of Humanistic Psy

chology, 51, 401–407.

Taylor, E. I., & Kelley, M. (1998). Historical outline of humanistic psychology. In History and systems of psychology course guide. San Francisco, CA: Saybrook Graduate School.

Waterman, A. (2013). The humanistic psychology-positive psychology divide: Contrasts in philosophical foundations. American Psychologist, 68, 124–13 Humanistic Psychology at The Crossroads Essay Discussion

Course Description
This course explores the historical roots, theoretical foundations, major works, and guiding philosophy of Humanistic, Transpersonal and Existential (HTE) psychology. This course also examines the different approaches to studying HTE as it relates to human motivation, needs, will, love, and existence in a contemporary world.

Humanistic psychology has a rich history and tradition of arguing for the human experience as the essence of understanding human behavior. This basis for understanding is divergent from the views in cognitive psychology, psychoanalysis, and behaviorism. Humanistic Psychology at The Crossroads Essay Discussion
ASSIGNMENT DESCRIPTION
Based on your readings,
1). What do you believe is the place of humanistic psychology as a movement within the discipline of psychology?
2). Explain. What observations can you offer about the movement’s credibility among members of the psychological community?
3). What has contributed to how humanistic psychology is perceived within the larger discipline? Explain. Humanistic Psychology at The Crossroads Essay Discussion