Humanistic Psychology’s Agenda : It’s Time to Move Beyond the Touchy-Feely Stuff

It was, by any reckoning, the coronation of the Odd Couple as the co-presidents of the Assn. for Humanistic Psychology took office--Lonnie Barbach, a sex therapist and mother-to-be from Mill Valley, and John Vasconcellos, the Democrat from Santa Clara who chairs the Assembly Ways and Means Committee.

But then, AHP, now 25 years old and boasting a membership nationwide of about 5,000 (one-third in California) is not the most tradition-bound of organizations. Consider some of the topics explored during its weekend meeting at San Diego State University: communication with the spiritual world, the corporation as lover, planetary vision.

What these humanists--among them psychotherapists, educators, business types, housewives and househusbands--are about is loving and caring and nurturing.

Great Deal of Hugging

Their buzzwords are connecting and focusing and energy and they do a great deal of hugging and relating and sharing.

But this is 1986 and, in the view of a number of the organization’s leaders, it’s time to move beyond the touchy-feely stuff, beyond feeling good about oneself and into the realm of social and political action. AHP co-president Vasconcellos, a lawyer who has served 20 years in the Assembly, is pressing an agenda of “humanistic politics.”

Addressing delegates here, Vasconcellos called for “new beginnings” in AHP, an era in which the organization will become “politically and socially expressive and active and shrewd and effective” in carrying its vision of a gentler and more humane world into the mainstream of thinking.

In the view of psychologist Maureen O’Hara, whose presentation on “Science and Pseudoscience in Humanistic Psychology” drew a large and responsive audience, a giant step toward mainstreaming would be for AHP to disengage itself from “the fakirs . . . taking us for a monetary ride” and to “rededicate ourselves to scholarship.”

O’Hara, formerly a biologist in her native England who now teaches the psychology of women at San Diego State, asked, “Do we continue to follow charismatic leaders--pseudopriests and pseudoscientists--or do we get back to thinking?”

One thing about which the AHP has been doing a great deal of thinking is world peace; it has committees on North American-Soviet relations, and one of its superstars, Carl Rogers of the Center for the Studies of the Person in La Jolla, will lead a delegation to the Soviet Union in the fall. Indeed, several Soviet psychologists joined several of their American colleagues at this meeting for a panel discussion on “Forming a Relationship to Oneself and to the World.”

But this dialogue, a rather bland dissertation that somehow evolved into a discussion of challenges facing youth of both countries, was sparsely attended. The action, and the crowd, that evening was in a room below where Durchback Akuete, a healer-priest from Togo, West Africa, was evoking the spirits to send people into twitching, jerking trances from which they were to awake enlightened.

One of the volunteer participants, Kelly, later told the others in the room, “I kept getting a message that there’s one presence and one power in the universe.” Karen, who had just awakened from a lengthy trance, reported, “I became part of another world. . . .”

If there is a bit of a split personality within AHP, opening-night keynoter Marilyn Ferguson (“The Aquarian Conspiracy”) was thinking mainstream. Said Ferguson: “The New Age, I think, is a term that is well laid to rest. . . . If the thing that you want to happen is happening . . . it’s no longer a movement.”

Today, Ferguson told the 1,000 delegates, they can no longer just “sit around making futile resolutions and loving and hugging one another. . . . That’s not the bottom line of what’s going on in our society.”

It’s not enough, she suggested, to tell people to relax, to manage their stress, to give up their vices--and “everybody knows that love is better than hate, and peace is better than war.” It’s time to stop “telling our society what’s good for it” and start giving people solid information, Ferguson said.

As she sees it, “The struggle to make people understand the need for change is over” after a decade of turbulent societal upheaval, a decade that has left America in what she perceives as a state of “enlightened disillusionment,” seeking workable solutions to societal ills and inequities.

In separate workshops, people were meeting to talk about changing roles for men, black and white couples, creativity and humor, dealing with interracial tensions, the male couple, the evolution of community, nutrition and vitamin therapy and women in motion.

But if this all seems like pretty tame stuff for AHP, the exhibitors’ room offered diversions such as a display by the Unarius Academy of Science, whose curriculum has been “transmitted during the last 33 years by advanced intelligent beings from higher frequency worlds” and is geared toward “getting ready for landing of spacecraft on Earth in 2001.”

One of the more thought-provoking sessions explored “Appropriate Governance for a Human Future,” a discussion that encompassed the problem of the “thin thread” connecting the change makers to the institutions, the widening gap between those who can and those who cannot benefit from the new biotechnology and the growing power human beings wield over all non-human life forms.

As participants grappled with the question of effective action to right wrongs, Brian Murphy, chief consultant in education for the state Legislature, suggested that one thing needed was for those “on the cutting edge” today--those concerning themselves with the poor, with race relations, with the labor movement--to link up with those on “the old cutting edge,” such as the ecology and peace movements.

He asked, rhetorically, why it is that those on the frontiers of personal exploration, such as psychotherapists, have found it so hard to be involved politically. He termed it the “my-work-stops- here-and-the-world-starts-here” block and suggested that it is exacerbated by the language of psychology.

Don Michael, a futurist and social psychologist who is emeritus professor of planning and public policy at the University of Michigan, reiterated the idea heard expressed from numerous AHP podiums that it is time to be less introspective and more action-oriented: “A group like this is very susceptible to forgetting there are a lot of barbarians in the world.”

Michael later joined Maureen O’Hara in giving the presentation on science and pseudoscience, which was an appeal to AHP to rededicate itself to scholarship and, as O’Hara phrased it, to “start keeping each other honest.”

She asked, “Who are going to be our authorities? When are we going to say, ‘This is just plain old superstition?’ ” When, she wanted to know, was AHP going to rediscover debate and criticism?

Those in AHP are susceptible to the lures of pseudoscience, Michael said, because “we want the comfort that scientific authority bestows” but “most of us are ignorant about the discipline required to do and understand science.” For example, he said, he frequently hears people reciting as if it were scientific fact the theory that “we only use 10% of our brains.” Nonsense, said Michael, asking, “What is 100% of our brains? We don’t know . . . so 10% can’t mean anything at all.”

Scientific Research

He then asked, “How many of you have done scientific research and testing? I suspect not very many.”

The time has come, O’Hara said, when “we are going to have to say yes to some things and no to others,” to “evaluate the claims that we make and the grounds they’re based on.”

Several participants expressed reservations about this--after all, there is no conclusive evidence that psychotherapy works, one said. Another felt it was essential that AHP deal with cutting-edge concepts, which often are not scientific; he didn’t want to “throw out the baby with the bath.”

AHP attracts people constitutionally open to new ideas, O’Hara said later in an interview, but many of these people “have never developed a discipline to evaluate the claims they’re open to. It’s the good news and the bad news. We never developed adequately our own methods of evaluation.”

Further, she said, because “we don’t believe in criticism and conflict,” there is a conscious effort to avoid disharmony. “I would like us to ask questions, like ‘What are the bases of our claims that psychotherapy works?’ We need to make the case to the public that humanistic, non-medical psychotherapy makes sense. I have no doubt, but we need to develop a theoretic rationale for what we do in our offices.”

As for the touchy-feely stuff, well, in O’Hara’s view, “It’s passe, not that touching is passe,” but if group contact makes some people feel good, fine. “One looks at that stuff with affection, that and the little old ladies here with their headbands and beads.”

But in the big picture, O’Hara said, “We have to think about the future and let go of the preoccupation with the now.”

Obviously, her message was not being heard by all. In a nearby workshop, participants sat and chanted in unison, “Your life is valuable, whatever you choose to do with it.” They meditated, following instructions to “picture the word ‘relax’ on the back of your forehead.”

Others, though, were tuned into things more global. At a workshop on “Sharing Personal and Planetary Security,” people talked about the violence ethic in America, about the “excitement” that binds Americans together in time of war and the seemingly futile search for this unifying element in today’s America, about the futility of fighting for people’s civil rights if there is no assurance of a tomorrow.

Virginia Satir, a therapist and author who at 70 is a much-loved past president of AHP, had just keynoted Sunday’s closing session, which started with a lengthy meditation, accompanied by guitar, and was followed by a lot of embracing of one’s neighbor and a movement exercise that had something to do with “extending our own boundaries.”

In the lobby outside the meeting hall, John Vasconcellos grinned as he watched the people dance-stepping around the sun-filled room, arms flung wide. “It’s better than beating up on somebody,” he said.

But Vasconcellos, who by his own description grew up a guilt-riddled “good boy” in a traditional Catholic family, has moved beyond the philosophy of feeling good. “My sense,” he said in an interview, “is that there’s been a growing hunger (in AHP) to carry the personal growth out into the world.”

He spoke of new AHP programs, such as international relations teams, the U.S.-Soviet exchange program, an education network, work in the area of holistic health. It is a significant departure, he said, from the days when people wanted little more out of their organization than to “come and enrich themselves experientially.”

He observed that his workshop, “Politics for Beginners,” had drawn 80 people, three times more than he had anticipated.

There’s nothing very esoteric about humanistic psychology, Vasconcellos explained--it’s about dignity, creativity, individuality, tenderness, genuineness. Still, he acknowledged, the AHP has done a poor job of “documenting its applications and successes.”

On that point, he is in agreement with Maureen O’Hara. But he believes that O’Hara has “a very traditional sense of what science is” and, for his part, he thinks it’s all right to be “on the frontiers of science. Whether these people are ahead of science or anti-science, I don’t know. But I’d rather see the exploration.”

He observed, “There are a lot of things here people are curious about that are foreign to me. And there are things here that were once foreign to me that are now part of my life.”

He views the humanistic psychology movement as “an explosion. Explosions always come out looking chaotic. It’s OK to be who we are, to explore the rough edges.”

If there are “enough of us out there doing this,” he is convinced, “people will begin to gravitate toward us,” to accept those in the movement into the mainstream as “people who aren’t afraid to be affectionate but can count at the same time. You can be open-hearted, compassionate--and responsible. It is not inconsistent.”

So, there are the group fringies, the Indian-robes crowd and all. Vasconcellos smiled and said, “They may do weird things, but they’re not hurting anybody.”