AHP Perspective is a magazine published bi-monthly for members of the Association for Humanistic Psychology. It includes interviews, articles, essays, updates on member activities, conference announcements, and book reviews. Members receive the complete AHP Perspective as part of their membership.

AHP PERSPECTIVE February/March 2002 Table of Contents

Interview with Maureen O’Hara
	Don Eulert

Editor: You have strong feelings about the importance of this Handbook of Humanistic Psychology’s publication. Why?

Maureen O’Hara: Humanistic psychology is at an inflection point. For fifty years its basic ideas about authenticity, existential choice, freedom, self-determination, responsibility, empathy, mutual respect, mind-body wholeness, and environmental awareness permeated the entire culture. Now all but a few of the movement’s charismatic founders have gone, their students are getting ready to retire, and many practitioners have been forced to temper their radicalism and idealism to conform to the rampant instrumentalism of managed mental health care. Furthermore, mainstream academic psychology has swung ever more decisively in the direction of medicine and cognitive bioscience so that graduate students have almost no time to consider any of humanism’s questions of meaning and values. The general public is largely convinced that their troubles are nothing but screwed-up brain chemistry that can be corrected with the right pill.

On the other hand, this could be the moment for renaissance. Although the technical achievements of the last two decades are awesome, somehow the spiritual emptiness of it all is getting to people. And then the events of September 11 plunged much of the world into deep soul searching. Questions of meaning, and of ultimate spiritual concerns became front page news, and a whole society learned firsthand that terror, intolerance, sadness, and despair are human and cultural troubles, not medical problems. As a nation works through its grief, the relevance of a growth-oriented psychology—that looks to hope and the possibility of transformation instead of to drugs and short-term fixes—becomes vividly obvious.

The Handbook of Humanistic Psychology represents the work of a new generation of humanistic thinkers. The baton that belonged to Carl Rogers and Rollo May has been passed on. The list of authors is a Who’s Who of contemporary scholars in humanistic psychology, and the ideas addressed bring the reader up to date with the lively work that has been going on this past decade or so. This book makes it clear that the humanistic movement remains an intellectually sophisticated and technically elegant way of addressing the challenge of living a fully human life in the 21st century.

Editor: You’ve been at the forefront in dialogues about socially constructed realities—especially about the construction of gender and of self (person). Historically, humanistic psychology has focused on the authentic inner self. Has contemporary humanistic psychology simply widened the loop to encompass constructivist psychology?

O’Hara: Humanistic psychology has its origins in the same critical intellectual traditions as the constructivist viewpoint. When Abraham Maslow said that humanistic psychology was "not a critique within psychology" but was "a critique of psychology and the axioms upon which it stands," he was challenging psychology to go beyond its modernist foundations. When Carl Rogers asked, "Do we need ‘a’ reality?," he answered, "There are as many realities as there are people." And, of course, George Kelly, the acknowledged father of personal construct psychology, suggested that "anything that can be construed, can be re-construed." Like many people born in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, these early thinkers had their roots in both 19th century modernism and its romantic protest, and at the same time in 20th century constructivism. They were multi-epistemological. I don’t see this as a problem—in fact, in this polycentric world, I see it as essential.

Humanistic working sessions (like the basic encounter groups) that were so central to the development of humanistic psychology, were really constructivist laboratories. In them we came to take it for granted that the world looks different from a woman’s perspective or an African- American’s. And more important, when we began to trust our own experiences rather than the received truth of conventional wisdom, we realized that although some truths were promoted as universal or objective, they were not always statements of reality, but questions of power.

These days, I think of myself as a postmodern romantic. I make a distinction between the inner realms of consciousness, which I experience as something transcendentally true, and the symbols, thoughts, and utterances I have about it, and the exchange and encounter I have with others. The territory of ultimate reality may be described in many tongues, but the personal experience of it lies beyond universal meaning systems.

Editor: I see in your chapter that you seek a transformation of humanistic psychology, not a reprise or defense of where it’s been. What place/role do you envision for a transformed humanistic psychology?

O’Hara: Even if it were not obvious before, after 9/11 it became abundantly clear that the crucial challenge of the 21st century is not about technology, but about conscious-ness and epistemology. Consciousness framed in the ideas and philosophy of the 7th century collided with 20th century consciousness in what might be, if we do not learn from what happened, a hideous harbinger of worse consciousness wars to come.

There are think tanks, conferences, and task forces by the hundreds discussing the upside possibilities of powerful new technologies to take us "beyond human," but few of them focus on the question that is at the heart of the matter—what does it mean to be human at all? This has been the question at the core of humanistic psychology. Who am I? How do I make meaning out of the buzzing confusion of experience? What ethics should guide our community life? Who are you? People who have the opportunity to cleanse the doors of perception and to experience the infinite, even for a moment, are transformed.

I am convinced that people today, through their writing, art and science, and spiritual searching, are giving birth to a new cosmology that will become the world view of the first global civilization. The values, mythology, meaning systems, and epistemologies that come to frame the "ultimate concerns" (as Paul Tillich put it) of this new civilization have yet to emerge from among many rival contenders. Will it be 7th century Islam? Will it be Dalai Lama style Buddhism? Will it be Chinese Communism? Will it be Western secular rationalism? Will it be postmodern kitsch? Will it be Goddess feminism? Or will it be some new post-post-modern global cosmology that goes beyond all of these? My money is on both-and.

Unlike previous civilizations, this emerging global one must be characterized not by like-mindedness or alignment with a single absolute truth, but by diversity, multiplicity, and complexity. This is where the knowledge gained over five decades of humanistic theory and practice, refocused on the challenges of these times, could be brought to the service of a new pluralistic society.

Editor: "Brought to service?" Would you say more about how that could happen?

O’Hara: The influence of any intellectual movement depends on more than just the strength of its ideas. It also depends on old fashioned organization. This is probably why humanistic psychology under the guise of human relations training, personal mastery development, executive coaching, creativity training, and team building, is still so phenomenally successful in the business context. They know how to organize. But outside that, as California State Senator and former AHP President John Vasconcellos has insisted, when we are not willing to get involved at the political level, those with values and agendas other than humanistic ones make the laws. We have lost clout over the last decades. If we want to regain it we have to participate—on local school boards, on city councils, in newspaper editorials, in state psychological associations, education associations, and parent teacher groups—wherever policy is discussed. As a society we can build our public policy on impoverished images of what human beings are, or we can base them on a more hopeful and creative view. But to have influence will require that we get involved.

Editor: Saybrook Graduate School is the epicenter of the humanistic psychology movement. Can you share what it’s been like to serve as President, and what’s moving and shaking now?

O’Hara: I have been the President of Saybrook for the past two years. After the untimely death of President Gerry Bush, the Board of Trustees asked me to take over as his successor. How has it been? I can honestly say it is the most challenging thing I have ever done —and the most rewarding.

I work every day with a fantastic group of people who are transforming Saybrook into a center of humanistic and transpersonal research and training for the 21st century. I am having the chance to walk my talk and to try to lead a whole community through a period of deep self-reflection and recalibration of its mission. Saybrook is home to the next waves of the humanistic and transpersonal thinkers.

We are taking humanistic and transpersonal psychology into new arenas. Currently, we have graduate programs in psychology, organizational systems, consciousness and spirituality, and social transformation. Students research topics as diverse as performance enhancement in musicians, the use of First People’s traditions in Canadian education, and dreamwork and trauma recovery. We are seeing this new generation putting the humanistic tradition to the service of new populations—Cambodian child prostitutes, Marin County police officers working with people who are homeless and who have mental difficulties, people’s cooperatives in Haiti, and so on. I am inspired by what people are doing.

Probably the most exciting new development at Saybrook is the growth of our organizational systems program. Since the early days when Richard Farson, Charles Hampden Turner, and Gregory Bateson were involved, Saybrook has had a focus in organizational and systems science. Now we have built a program in organizational studies that embraces the personal, the spiritual, the institutional, and the environmental levels. We consider business within the framework of sustainability, human development, and spiritual meaning.

I think it’s an awesome blend of the best of humanistic thinking and the growing edge of organizational studies.

Editor: In their historical review of movements in humanistic psychology, Taylor and Martin (p. 24) summarize, saying that today Saybrook is "dominated more by human sciences than by humanistic or transpersonal psychology." Can you explain what this means?

O’Hara: Humanistic psychology and human science are not separable, in my view. I understand human science as referring to a raft of nonreductionist, postpositive methods of inquiry that take a critical, interpretive, and selfreflective stance for granted. These approaches are more often qualitative than quantitative, although they may combine both, and include phenomenological, hermeneutic, narrative, appreciative inquiry, critical theory, and action research. At Saybrook, we favor the use of such nonreductionist modes of science precisely because we are interested in questions of human experience that are irreducible. At the same time though, as a doctoral program we are interested in science and high quality scholar-ship. Because of this dual agenda— humanistic and transpersonal psychology and new nonreductive modes of inquiry—Saybrook faculty and students are invested in the development of advanced modes of inquiry that can yield useful, reliable, and generalizable knowledge to add to our understanding and appreciation of the perennial questions of existence.

Editor: Any other comments?

O’Hara: On a final optimistic note, last week I had a visitor from the UK. He is a 30-something jazzmusician turned journalist writing a book about what he has dubbed the "Play Ethic." He said he did not know much about humanistic psychology, but as we spent one of those wonderful, lazy afternoons together, where the conversation drifted across territory as vast as hominid evolution, romanticism, digital technology, mythology, and computer games, it became patently obvious he was one of us. But as he talked, and described his own new synthesis of ideas from art, semiotics, liberal politics, religion, the entertainment industry, new journalism, and his own native optimism about human potential for transformation, I realized not only was he one of us, but I was one of him. Here was the next iteration. So even if humanistic psychology does not find new wind to fill its sails, we can be sure that people like my new friend sense its emergent presence and will take it on from here.

MAUREEN O’HARA, Ph.D., is President of Saybrook Graduate School, San Francisco, and Past President of AHP. She is a noted clinician, writer, futurist. She has presented nationally and worldwide at events such as the World Psychotherapy Conference in Vienna, and World Future Society, and Organizational Development conferences. She is a Distinguished Clinical Member of the California Association for Marriage and Family Therapy, Fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science, and Fellow of the American Psychological Association.

AHP PERSPECTIVE February/March 2002 Table of Contents

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