Ordinary Ecstasy

The Dialectics of Humanistic Psychology

John Rowan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317724575
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy Counselling
• Index: Psychology

Humanistic Psychology ranges far and wide into education, management, gender issues and many other fields. Ordinary Ecstasy, first published in 1976, is widely regarded as one of the most important books on the subject.

Although this new edition still contains much of the original material, it has been completely rethought in the light of postmodern ideas, with more emphasis on the paradoxes within humanistic psychology, and takes into account changes in many different areas, with a greatly extended bibliography.
Ordinary Ecstasy is written not only for students and professionals involved in humanistic psychology - anyone who works with people in any way will find it valuable and interesting.

Part 1
What is Humanistic Psychology?

1
Humanistic Psychology is and is Not Psychology

Humanistic psychology is and is not psychology. This paradox lies at the heart of humanistic psychology, and helps to make it what it is.

If we ask where humanistic psychology comes from, it comes from the Old Saybrook conference in 1964. There was a long build-up to this, starting in the 1930s or even before, and people like Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, Rollo May, Gordon Allport and James Bugental were key figures in making this happen (DeCarvalho 1991). But it was at this conference that the American Association for Humanistic Psychology took shape. And it did not consist entirely of psychologists.

It was Maslow who actually took the main initiatives in starting up the movement now known as humanistic psychology. In the spring of 1949 he and Anthony Sutich met for the first time. Out of their discussions emerged an agreement to work together on developing a psychology which would get away from the then current emphasis on less-than-fully-human behaviour. Maslow had already published his first paper on self-actualization, and Sutich had written one on growth experiences, which was published soon after.

In 1954 Maslow organized a mailing list for the purpose of circulating duplicated copies of articles that could not be published in the official journals because of the commitment of these journals to the behaviourist orthodoxy, or, on the other wing, to the psychoanalytic orthodoxy. The papers dealt with the wider possibilities of the human person, in areas like creativity and autonomy, and with topics like love and growth.

In the summer of 1957 Maslow and Sutich agreed that the time had come to launch a journal. What should its title be? Suggestions included: Journal of Growth Psychology, Journal of Ortho-Psychology (one meaning of 'ortho" is 'to grow or cause to grow') and Journal of Self Psychology. Carl Rogers suggested Journal of the Human Person; Herbert Marcuse proposed the name Journal of Human Studies.

It took until 1961 before the first issue of the Journal of Humanistic Psychology appeared. It was sponsored by Brandeis University, which helped with the costs. Within three months, more than 150 letters had come in, suggesting that an Association be formed. An organization committee was set up, and took a year to drum up possible members, write a constitution and arrange a founding meeting, which took place in 1963. The Association, whose first President was James Bugental, began as a subsidiary of the journal and was directly responsible to the editors. This enabled Brandeis University to help again with the expenses.

The Old Saybrook Conference

It was at the Old Saybrook conference, organized by Bugental, that things really came together. The list of attenders was remarkable:

• Allport, Gordon, Harvard University
• Barzun, Jacques, Columbia University
• *Bennis, Warren, MIT
• Bugental, J. F. T., Psychological Services Associates, Los Angeles
• Buhler, Charlotte B., University of Southern California Medical School
• Butterfield, Victor, Wesleyan University
• DuBos, Rene, Rockefeller Institute
• Kelly, George, Ohio State University
• Knapp, R. H., Wesleyan University
• Lasko, A. A., Psychological Service Associates, Los Angeles
• *MacLeod, Robert, Cornell University
• Maslow, A. H., Brandeis University
• Matson, Floyd, University of California, Berkeley
• May, Rollo, New York City
• *McClelland, D. C,, Harvard University
• Moustakas, Clark E. Birmingham, Michigan
• Murphy, Gardner, Menninger Foundation
• Murray, H. A., Harvard University
• Rogers, Carl, Western Behavioral Sciences Institute
• *Sarbin, T. R., University of California, Berkeley
• Shoben, E. J., Columbia University
• Tratch, Roman, State University College, Oswego, NY
• White, R. W., Harvard University
• *Note: Bennis, MacLeod, McClelland and Sarbin, according to Allport's notes, were not there. However, we also know that attending the conference were Anthony Sutich, Miles Vich and Norma Rosenquist (Lyman), among others (Taylor 1998).

This was a rich mixture. And it ensured that humanistic psychology had roots in literature, philosophy, education and letters generally, not only in psychology. In fact, people in the field have often referred to novels and poetry, philosophy and Eastern wisdom, and not only to psychology.

In 1965 the Association severed its link with Brandeis and became a charity, and in 1969 the control of the journal was transferred to the Association for Humanistic Psychology (AHP), which in the same year dropped the word American from its title, and became an international organization, some more of whose story is given in Chapter 12.

Eastern Thought

We have seen how important the Old Saybrook conference was in this history. But there is one important strand in the life of humanistic psychology which is not very obviously represented there, though in my opinion it was implicit: Eastern thought. The reason why this was so was perhaps because in Eastern thought psychology, philosophy and spirituality are not so separate as they are in most Western thought. In the 1950s and 1960s there was a great wave of interest in such things in the literary world. Humanistic psychology also wants to hold these things together, rather than keep them apart.

The so-called Beat Generation included poets like Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti and Corso, and novelists like Kerouac and Burroughs. They were all deeply taken by Eastern philosophy and religion, and in particular by one aspect of it - the emphasis on spontaneity and mistrust of the intellect as a controller. But the crucial thing was that these people did not just read Suzuki and the Tao Te Ching: they acted on what they found there.

This was quite new. For many years cultured people had appreciated Eastern art and metaphysics, and had occasionally joined some official Buddhist cult - but to go right to the heart of Zen and Taoism and act out what one found there - that was different. Of course the established intelligentsia reacted with scorn: these young people didn't really understand what they were doing, they were immature and shallow, and besides it was dangerous.

It is clear in Rogers' approach to therapy that the therapist or counsellor may or may not have a great deal of knowledge or experience, but the important thing is to leave it all behind in the actual therapy session with a client. (This is not really very different from the practice of the best psychoanalysts, such as Bion, as Bergantino (1981) makes clear.) The important things is to be all here now, totally present to the client. And this means letting go of knowledge, of theory, even of experience of similar cases. Rogers actually gives this quote from a film-maker, Frances Flaherty:

What you have to do is to let go, let go every thought of your own, wipe your mind clean, fresh, innocent, newborn, sensitive as unexposed film to take up the impressions around you, and let what will come in. This is the pregnant void, the fertile state of no-mind. This is non-preconception, the beginning of discovery.

(Quoted in Rogers 1990, p. 270)

In terms of our social stereotypes, this approach is much more feminine than masculine. This is an important theme which we shall return to again and again. To the extent that we can actually live and work in this way, we begin to exemplify a quality which the Chinese call tzu-jan (spontaneity, nature). Another example would be the artist painting a picture who accidentally splashes paint on to the canvas, and instead of rubbing it out or covering it up, makes it into an integral part of the finished painting. This is taking responsibility for our actions. It is my mistake, which I made; I do not blame an external clumsiness, or an external brush, or an external self who wanted something else. I take it into my whole situation as a part of that situation, neither minimizing it nor exaggerating it. It is there, and has its own meaning, which I must now take into account.

This is opposed to a theory of painting which holds that the artist has a picture in the imagination which is then put on to canvas as accurately as possible, and still more to a theory of painting which holds that the artist is there to represent as accurately as possible what is out there in the world. But these theories of painting are not held by many artists today, though they are held by many non-artists who want artists to conform to them. In fact, many artists are very much influenced by the Taoist approach which is also found in Zen and some of Tantra. As the six precepts of Tilopa put it:

No thought, no reflection, no analysis,

No cultivation, no intention;

Let it settle itself.

(Quoted in Watts 1957, p. 99)

Zen is all about letting go. One of the key terms is wu-wei (non-action, non-making, non-doing, non-striving, non-straining, non-busyness) which is in some ways not all that far from the Western idea of 'not pulling up the roots to see how the plant is getting on'.

One of our characteristic and very masculine beliefs in the West is that if we have a problem, the correct thing to do is to face it, grapple with it and deal with it. In this way we do two new things: we turn the problem into a thing (usually giving it a name, which helps considerably in this) and a dangerous thing at that; and we raise up an opponent of some kind, which becomes equally real and hard and definite. Medicine is an excellent example of this, as Inglis (1964) has spelt out in some detail. This almost invariably has the same result - the problem and its opponent become institutionalized and permanent.

In psychology this happens all the time. A problem arises, like the reliability of a battery of questions. It is found that reliability can be increased by adding items to the battery. Now we have so many items that the battery can only be used on very special occasions; also the meaning of the words keeps changing with time, and so on.

The Zen approach is to let go of your problems, rather than tackling them. Does the word 'reliability' make sense? Does the whole idea of giving the 'same' test to two different people make sense? It would be convenient if human beings were like machines, because we know how to handle machines, and 'we' want to handle human beings in the same way. But do we? Who is the 'we' who want to predict and control human beings? Do you want to be predicted and controlled?

If we can ask enough of these simple Zen questions we can perhaps start to let go of some of our psychological assumptions.

In recent years the word Zen has become rather too popular for its own good, and we have even had books like Zen and the Art of Motor Cycle Maintenance which are not about Zen at all, and are even quite opposed to Zen. One of the classics remains the book of stories edited by Reps (1961), which is beautiful and unpretentious. I also liked Watts (1957), because of its explanation of the Chinese characters. Kapleau (1967) is very helpful and explicit. And it seems to me, in spite of all the controversy, that Roots and Wings (Rajneesh 1979) goes to the heart of the matter. It is full of the spirit of paradox, which is so fundamental to humanistic psychology.

Another of the Eastern influences has been Taoism. One of the assumptions often made in psychology is that we have to concentrate the powers of our intellect upon the things we want to study. We have to see them clearly and distinctly, and talk about them unambiguously. Only in this way can we prove them true or false.

There is a whole other approach which we find in the Tao (Rawson and Legeza 1973). This is that we can only start getting close to something when we unfocus our eyes. As long as we stay focused and single-minded, we are limited by the categories which our intellect (or someone else's, in really bad cases) has already set up. We are at the mercy of old knowledge, which has become fixed and inflexible. When we unfocus, we let in the object, and we let out our other faculties - feeling, intuition, remote associations, creativity.

The I Ching (Walker 1986) is the classic Taoist way of demonstrating this. If we want to make a difficult decision, we prepare ourselves to throw the coins or stalks, ask the question while casting the objects, and then interpret the pattern set up, referring to the traditional wisdom on the subject. If we can do this in an intuitive and centred way, an answer either comes or it does not. If it comes, it is probably the best decision we could have made, because our whole self is involved, and not just one cut-off part of ourself. If it does not come, we are not ready to make that decision yet; and that is important too.

Many of us have had a similar experience when doing crosswords, particularly the more difficult ones. If we laboriously puzzle over each clue, trying to make logical sense of it, nothing much happens. But if we unfocus, and let the words play around in our minds in an intuitive way, this is often much more productive, particularly if we are familiar with that specific series of puzzles.

I mentioned the word 'centred' earlier, and this is a crucial word in Taoism. Mary Caroline Richards writes movingly about how centring in the person is like centring in pottery:

As I grow quiet, the clay centres. For example, I used to grieve because I could not make reliably a close-fitting lid for a canister, a teapot, a casserole. Sometimes the lid fitted, sometimes it didn't. But I wanted it to fit. And I was full of aggravation. Then a GI friend of mine who was stationed in Korea sent me an ancient Korean pot, about a thousand years old. I loved it at once, and then he wrote that he thought I might like it because it looked like something I might have made. Its lid didn't fit at all! Yet it was a museum piece, so to speak. Why, I mused, do I require of myself what I do not require of this pot? Its lid does not fit, but it inspires my spirit when I look at it and handle it. So I stopped worrying. Now I have very little trouble making lids that fit.

(Richards 1969, pp. 22-23)

In Taoism centring has a very precise meaning. In the body there are three 'crucibles' where energy is processed, and they run down the centre of the body. The function of Taoist meditation is to connect up these three crucibles (tan-t'ien) so that the energy may flow freely and produce a state of ecstasy.

In Maslow's book on science, he says that if we want to know more about how to do genuinely human science (the experiential kind) we can go to Taoism and learn about receptivity.

To be able to listen - really, wholly, passively, self-effacingly listen - without presupposing, classifying, improving, controverting, evaluating, approving or disapproving, without dueling with what is being said, without rehearsing the rebuttal in advance, without free-associating to portions of what is being said so that succeeding portions are not heard at all - such listening is rare.

(Maslow 1969, p. 96)

But if we can do it, says Maslow, these are the moments when we are closest to reality. Contemplation is something which is hard to learn, but it can be learned, and it is an essential moment in the scientific process as Maslow sees it. And again recent thinkers such as Anderson and Braud (1998) agree with him.

The discipline of T'ai Chi is a moving meditation which is deeply wound into Taoist philosophy and practice. It is carried out every morning by many thousands of people in China today. It is often taught as a fixed series of exercises which have to be learned and practised exactly until the pupil matches the master. But as Ma-Tsu said many years ago:

The Tao has nothing to do with discipline. If you say that it is attained by discipline, finishing the discipline turns out to be losing the Tao ... If you say there is no discipline, this is to be the same as ordinary people.

(Quoted in Watts 1957, p. 117)

Note carefully what this is saying. It is not saying that the Tao is attained by discipline, and it is not saying that the Tao can be attained without discipline. The collateral Indian phr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Introduction
• PART ONE What is humanistic psychology?
• PART TWO Applications of humanistic psychology
• PART THREE The future of humanistic psychology
• Journals and magazines
• Some useful addresses
• Bibliography
• Author index
• Subject index