Reflections on the Human Potential Movement

The Human Potential Movement is particularly significant because it set the stage for the present social acceptance of homosexuality.

Q: What went wrong with the humanistic movement of the l960s?

A: Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers and Rollo May taught that the most important source of authority is within you, and that you must listen to yourself. They created the theory of self- actualization, in which unstinting satisfaction of desires bodily or otherwise was implicit.

All the questioning encouraged by the humanistic movement leads us down a path toward infidelity, and when that happens, you can kiss civilization goodbye. Civil and public health depend upon faithful, monogamous marriage.

Don Clark did a revealing article in l973 for The Humanist. He said those of us who are denying our bisexual capacity are probably listening to ourselves with one ear. I think hes right- -if everyone were honest about their sexuality theyd probably be bisexual in fact, theyd be sexual toward anything and everything. I think its better not to be so honest.

Q: How did the Human Potential Movement affect our social philosophy?

A: It had a very strong effect. We now have a misapprehension of the demands of social justice. We believe that justice demands that nobody be condemned for anything. Weve decided that one belief is as good as another, and everyone has the right to say for himself, Thats right for me.

In the human potential movement, you prove your personhood by having sex in as unconstrained and uncivilized a way as possible. Its, Ill have what I want, when I want it.

Its very much like the little girl in the childrens novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, who says, I want it Daddy, and I want it now! Thats a good description of San Franciscos gay district Castro Street in the l980s.

Q: In what ways has sexual liberation hurt us?

A: Experience should persuade us that the sexual liberation laid out for us in the l960s is species-threatening. It leads to unlimited sensual gratification. Our children deserve better.

Q: How did Rogers figure in this movement?

A: Rogers wanted to explore the outer limits of therapeutic inquiry. But he betrayed his vocation as a psychologist because he came to the conclusion that there should be no such thing as a therapist. In fact, he even changed the name of his work from client-centered therapy to person-centered approach. With this approach the therapist disappeared, all authority disappeared and all limits disappeared.

Rogers work in the l970s, I think, was in part a defense of his own daughter Natalies conduct. She had enrolled with Maslow to get a masters degree and was bitten by the self-actualization bug. She left her husband and three children to become a real person. Her fathers and Maslows philosophy of self-fascination had persuaded her that marriage and motherhood werent good enough.

Rogers wrote a series of defenses of alternative relationships, including homosexuality, defending the freedom to be sexually experimental. He writes about people who had engaged in what would once be called, as he put it, living in sin, committing adultery, lewd and lascivious conduct, fornication, homosexuality, ingesting illegal drugs, even soliciting but who did so in their struggles for a better partnership. He said, We as a culture can relieve them of the ever-present shadow of moral reproach......implying the belief that if we will only take away the penalty, we can wipe out any culpability. He took behaviors which had for thousands of years been considered destructive to society and reframed them as representing progress.

One of Rogers granddaughters is a well-known lesbian activist. Rogers created a theory which his daughter and grandaughter set out to fulfill.

Q: How was Rogers work appropriate to the times?

A: Rogers books gave voice to something that was already brewing in the culture at that time.

In his l96l book, On Becoming a Person, he wrote a chapter called, To Be That Self Which One Truly Is. This gave voice to a fundamental argument of todays gay-rights movement the idea that one truly is homosexual.

Rogers voice carried great authority. He was a onetime American Psychological Association president, and he received the APAs first Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award. He was a weighty authority, and he wrote persuasively. Behavior that would have been confronted by the previous generation as shameful now became obligatory according to Rogers creed, One must be that self which one truly is.

Q: Did Rogers intend for the Human Potential Movement to go in such an extreme direction?

A: I think Rogers was carried along by all the fan mail hed get from college students letters like, Its because of your writings that Im now free and Thanks to you, Ive discovered my gay nature. Some of his readers would read encouragement for sexual license into his work, and later Rogers gave them more ammunition by writing more explicitly about sexual license.

Q: Did Rogers actively encourage such license in his encounter groups?

A: As long as Rogers and those who feared his judgment were there it was okay, because nobody fooled around in the presence of Carl Rogers. He kept people in line. He was a moral force. Rogers didnt get people involved in sex games, but he couldnt prevent his followers from doing it, because all he could say was, Well, I dont do that. Theyd say, Well, of course you dont do that, because you grew up in an earlier era; but we do, and its marvelous. You have set us free to be ourselves.

Q: But Rogers was himself a relatively conservative person?

A: His background was fundamentalist Protestantism, and he was once a seminarian. He may have found the behavior of some of his followers morally repellant, but as a therapist he believed his job was to help people find themselves. If he had just stopped at that after all, coming home to oneself is what happens at the hands of a good therapist but many people, including his own daughter, read too much into his good intentions and decided to free themselves. The most destructive form of that freedom was usually sexual.

Of course, Rogers also believed he owed it to himself to become an individual, and his younger followers eventually persuaded him that he wasnt following his own ideas. He decided he had to cheat on his wife to be real. During the last seven years of her life, his wife Helen was bedridden, and Rogers admits he became romantically involved with some of the young women in his encounter groups. He says these involvements were platonic, and I believe him, but at any rate, they were inappropriate. Not only did he write about allowing himself to love other women, but in A Way of Being he felt obliged, for openness sake, to tell the world he wasnt sure he still loved his wife.

Q: Did Rogers fulfill the original mission of the human potential movement?

A: He fulfilled the lower part of the mission, but he betrayed the higher part.

Rogers did have some serious doubts. He wrote one very telling chapter in the l983 revision of his earlier l969 book, Freedom to Learn. This was four years before he died. He called this chapter, A Pattern of Failure. In it he described disastrous projects like the breakup through misguided encounter groups of the Catholic community of the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Rogers wrote honestly about those tragedies, although he did blame much of those failures on other people.

That revision of Freedom to Learn didnt sell very well, and when the book was published again after Rogers death, the self- reflective chapter was removed tragically, I think by the editors.

Q: Did Rogers have a change of heart before he died?

A: Perhaps on one level he saw what was wrong, but on another level, I believe he really couldnt afford to see it.

Q: What about Abraham Maslow?

A: Many people think Maslow was an unreconstructed human potentialist, but he did express a lot of regrets at the end of his career. Part of Maslows story may never be told. In fact, he burned some of his most intimate papers while he was in Ohio awaiting the birth of his first grandchild in September of l968.

To pass the time, he went to the Ohio State Fair where he was greatly impressed by the young midwestern farm people who, instead of rejecting all authority and experience, were following in their parents ways. While he was in Ohio he was also deeply moved by reading The Chosen, a novel by Haim Potok, about two families, one Hasidic, one conservative, in which both sons were being steered toward the rabbinate. Maslow was born a Jew, but he had proclaimed his atheism loud and clear his whole life. In fact when he was a boy, he had jumped up during his Bar Mitzvah and run out of the temple when it was his turn to read from the Torah.

Yet in his journals, Maslow wrote that he cried and got drunk the night he finished the book. I suspect he may have been asking himself at that time, What if everything in my life has been wrong? What if Ive hit the bulls eye of profligacy rather than integrity?

Perhaps he had had a revelation like Tolstoys character in The Death of Ivan Ilyich, because he had already begun to see what had gone wrong with the human potential movement.

Q: But why would he have burned part of his journals?

A: I speculate he might have feared he had miseducated people. He had seen his own theories backfire. He believed that his granddaughters quality of life was threatened.

Toward the end of his life, he began to urge his students to think less about their self-actualization and personal identity, and more about self-forgetting. Thirty years after writing a paper on the virtues of monkey behavior, he had begun to see individuals acting like monkeys in the name of self- actualization.

In later life, he wrote in his journals about his previously mistaken view of the sacred impulse. He concluded, My unconscious is not the boss, my impulse is not sacred and irrefutable. He condemned Carl Rogers idea that we should follow our feelings whether they were right or wrong. Maslow had caught on to the fact that this idea of the human-potential movement was a civilization-destroying concept. It failed to understand the reality of evil in human life. When we implied to people that they could trust their impulses, they also understood us to mean that they could trust their evil impulses... and that if they trusted them, they wouldnt turn out to be evil.

Q: What did Maslow say about homosexuality?

A: Not much specifically, although he did make statements like, The gay life is anything but gay. However Maslow was very clear in saying that the real growth center for human beings is the authentic family, male, female, mother, father, love, parenthood, joint childbirth.

Q: Youve talked about the dangers of psychotherapy.

A: Actually, the problem is TMP Too Much Psychology. Psychotherapy according to Rogers theory requires that the therapist practice acceptance, understanding and permissiveness. Those qualities often exceed their rightful parameters.

Q: What about the l973 decision to de-pathologize homosexuality?

A: I can understand that decision if you think of it in terms of Thomas Szaszs The Myth of Mental Illness. Homosexuality is more a form of moral distress, than of mental illness. In fact, most problems referred to psychologists today are moral problems, rather than than mental-health problems. People who come to therapy sometimes need to hear advice like, You cant do that. They need to hear talk of moral absolutes.

The fundamental problem, however, is not changing the diagnosis of homosexuality, but putting our beliefs about the scope of psychotherapy on hold until we can get our thinking straightened out. Psychology has been called upon to substitute for all morality, and that is simply too much to ask.