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

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.

Milton's book is less about the theories themselves than about the lives of the people who produced them. She has the "dirt" -- many anecdotes -- and it is clear that Leary and many of the other figures discussed here led very disordered and in many cases disturbing lives. Milton tells how Rogers reacted when his loyal and supportive wife of many years became chronically ill. At the height of his fame, and filled with energy, Rogers greatly resented the restraints that being a caretaker required: "If I give up my life or my personhood to take care of her then I am going to become bitter. I am going to become angry inside at what I have given up. I am not going to want to be with her - - it would be out of a sense of duty -- and that isn't the kind of relationship I want." The idea of responsibility, or of love involving self-sacrifice, was missing from his intellectual system. Nor did his theory have a serious answer to the question of how to cope with suffering.

Milton also recounts how Rogers destroyed the Immaculate Heart of Mary order of nuns in Los Angeles. In 1967, the order had 560 teaching sisters, several elementary schools, and its own college and high school. Soon after the introduction of the encounter-group mentality -- getting in touch with feelings, under Rogers's guidance -- the order fell apart. Most of the sisters left the community; some got married; others moved into lesbian relationships. The whole gruesome process has been described in detail by others, but Milton gives a good summary. Rogers appears to have felt no remorse over the results of his ministrations; he was opposed to Christianity in any case.

Rogers also seems to have done a pretty thorough job on St. Anthony's Franciscan Seminary in Santa Barbara. He introduced encounter groups and the lessening of discipline there as well. In 1993, the seminary was identified by the London Guardian as the center of the "most widespread and scandalous" pedophilia ring in the history of the American Catholic Church.

The person whose life is most thoroughly treated by Milton is Leary -- and it must be said that his life is quite an amazing spectacle. A lapsed Catholic, Leary loathed Christianity with what Milton describes as a "laser-like concentration." He declared that Mother Teresa and Pope John Paul II were two of the most evil people alive, but admired Jack Kevorkian and his "work." Even Maslow saw Leary as a psychopathic personality type. Milton calls him "a consummate con man." He was an alcoholic and an almost-out-of-control womanizer; his first wife committed suicide, saying in her note, "I can't live without your love." He routinely had sex with his patients. He took psilocybin and LSD hundreds of times, pushed them on students, and hoped to turn the whole country into a turned-on nation. Milton states: "The goal was to have 4 million Americans turned on to LSD by 1969, a number that Leary figured would be the critical figure for blowing the mind of the American society."

The tale Milton tells is fascinating, but she does not put her argument as clearly as she might have. The reader needs to understand that the stories of these amoral and disordered lives are not just anecdotes: They are, rather, directly relevant to the theories of these psychologists. When a theorist proposes an answer to the question of how we can live well, the theorist's life offers valuable evidence. In the case of these characters in Joyce Milton's fine book, the conclusion is as sad as it is obvious: Psychologist, heal thyself.

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