The Mad Doctors. - The Road to Malpsychia: Humanistic Psychology and Our Discontents - book review

National Review, Sept 2, 2002 by Paul C. Vitz

The Road to Malpsychia: Humanistic Psychology and Our Discontents, by Joyce Milton (Encounter, 310 pp., $26.95)

If you want to understand the cultural revolution that took place in the 1960s, this book is a good place to start. Joyce Milton implies, without ever saying so directly, that psychological theories can bring about dramatic cultural change. We are used to the fact that political, economic, and religious ideas can cause revolutions; Milton's account offers evidence that psychological ideas can have the same power.

"Malpsychia" means bad psychology, and the chief characters in this book are the proponents of one particular kind of it: Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers, whose brand of "humanistic psychology" focused on "self-actualization," "getting in touch with your feelings" and expressing them openly. Milton also brings in for extensive treatment the LSD guru, Timothy Leary, and his sidekick Richard Alpert, later known as Ram Dass. Leary and Alpert had Ph.D.'s in psychology (Leary from UC-Berkeley, Alpert from Stanford); they both taught in the psychology department at Harvard.

Milton begins with some background: the contributions of cultural anthropologists Franz Boas, Margaret Mead, and Ruth Benedict. It was Mead and Benedict, in the 1930s and 1940s, who first presented to the American public the concept of cultural moral relativity, especially with regard to sexual behavior -- an idea that would bear fruit in the climate of the 1960s. While the book sometimes bogs down in too much anecdotal detail, Milton does a good job of capturing the '60s zeitgeist, and in particular of laying out the context out of which that zeitgeist emerged. The ideas that were to erupt into the culture at large in the '60s were already bubbling in the American psyche several decades earlier. By 1960, large numbers of Americans, especially college students, had been persuaded by their professors (and elements in the media) that their major problem was that they were repressed, especially when it came to sex. Freud's message, combined with that of Mead and Benedict, produced a widespread seeking for release. Into this explosive mixture fell two lighted matches: the concept of self-actualization, which received the imprimatur of the new "scientific" psychology, and drugs, such as LSD, whose use was touted by two Harvard psychologists. (Yet a third lighted match was the sudden availability of another drug: the "pill." But Milton does not take up that issue.)

Abraham Maslow was a representative New York secular Jewish intellectual of the '30s and '40s, and a personal friend of Mead and Benedict. He believed that the highest level of human functioning was "self-actualization"; the self-actualized were the secular saints of the world of humanistic psychology. Maslow did not restrict his concerns to psychology, however. He wanted to transform society, proclaiming, "I sometimes think the world will be saved by psychologists -- in the very broadest sense -- or it will not be saved at all." By "salvation" he meant the creation of a society filled with self-actualized people, those who had gotten beyond their "lower deficiency needs" (for example, the basic desires for safety and social belonging) and were now focused on such things as truth, beauty, and justice. He had no use for traditional religions, and even proposed a substitute for them: the "peak experience," a kind of mystical (but explicitly secular) oneness with the universe. Maslow contended that to reach this goal, a person had to throw off the inhibitions and restrictions that resulted from our culture and family upbringing. He promoted these ideas with evangelical fervor.

Milton's other key figure is Carl Rogers, who rejected his Midwestern Protestant heritage as a young graduate student and went on to be a major psychologist. Like Maslow, he proposed that the patient reject inhibitions, and self-actualize in a free-flowing contact with emotions and openness to life. Rogers was the ultimate anti-Puritan; he reduced reality and morality entirely to the personal choice of the individual, whose self was assumed to be entirely good. In his later writings, Rogers endorsed a complete subjectivity, in which each person is believed to create his own reality.

Rogers believed strongly in encounter groups, in which patients were encouraged to become uninhibited, self-expressing individuals. Rogers subscribed with enthusiasm to Maslow's comment that "face-to-face therapy is a luxury. It's too slow, and too expensive. It's not the right answer if you think, as I shamelessly do, in terms of changing the whole world."

But Rogers troubled Maslow, who had a wider education and greater respect for knowledge. Maslow considered Rogers's view of human nature shockingly simplistic and optimistic. Rogers was like that character from folk wisdom, the man who invents a hammer and then sees everything in the world as a nail: His theory of the fully functioning or self- actualized person made him see every personal and social problem through an extraordinarily narrow lens.