CRITICISMS AND LIMITATIONS OF HUMANISTIC PSYCHOLOGY
One of the things we are often accused of is being too self-indulgent and narcissistic. One critic said that the AHP really stood for the Association for Hedonistic Pursuits (hedonism is the philosophy of personal pleasure). It is an accusation which I believe deserves an answer. It really can give offence to serious people when they see courses advertised at £150 a time on "Turning Inward", or "Loving your Body", or "Integrative Holistic Macrosynthesis". The first step is obviously to get clear what we are talking about. There seem to be six things that are worth distinguishing: self-esteem; egotism; selfishness (exclusive); selfishness (inclusive); and self-actualization.
SELF-ESTEEM
This is a general feeling of being convinced of one's own worth. It is also often called self-love, self-respect or having a good self-image or self-concept. This seems to me a healthy thing, and most people in the helping professions would be only too pleased if their clients had more of it. What is often called love is a kind of addiction, or what is nowadays called co-dependency, and this is quite unhealthy. But if people can give more love to themselves, they are better able to give it to others and to accept it from others in a genuine way.
EGOTISM
This is a general feeling of being convinced of one's own pre-eminence. It has a lot to do with pride, with an inflated self-image, with a kind of self- importance. Ego-boosting leads to this. Egotism always sees things in terms of better and worse, so it is always having to prove something. This is not something which anyone I know is trying to foster.
SELFISHNESS (Exclusive)
This is looking after one's self-interest with blinkers on. This kind of selfishness can only see what is straight in front of it. It is a kind of tunnel vision. It is as if the rest of the world somehow did not exist. It is impulsive - if I want something, I have to have it now. This is not something which anyone I know wishes to encourage.
SELFISHNESS (Inclusive)
This is looking after one's own self-interest without blinkers, letting in everything from inside and outside. It means going after what I really want, but with complete openness to experience. At my best, I am in touch with all my relevant feelings and all my relevant values and all the relevant information, and I can then act spontaneously in whatever situation I find myself. This kind of spontaneity is the most rational action of which I am capable. The world would be a better place if there were more of this open and all-embracing selfishness around, and the word "empowerment" is often used today to indicate that we are aiming at this particular goal.
SELF-IMPROVEMENT
This is about the attainment of long-range goals. It has to do with good self-management. This is a tricky area, because it can lead to a kind of self- separation, where one part of me is trying to improve another part of me - leading possibly to a kind of self-oppression. But if this can be avoided, self- improvement obviously makes sense. One thing needs to be watched: if someone improves as a slave-driver, that would be a bad thing in my book.
SELF-ACTUALIZATION
This is being all I have it in me to be - being that self which I truly am. As we have seen in earlier sections of this booklet, this is the main aim of humanistic psychology as a whole. We get hints of what this is like in peak experiences, which have been well described by Maslow and others. Obviously there are dangers here: as Maslow himself pointed out, we can start to go after peak experiences in a programmed way which is basically deficiency-oriented, and also basically self-defeating.
To sum up, then, the things we are positively interested in as proponents of humanistic psychology are not self-indulgent or narcissistic, but socially defensible and politically desirable.
HUMANISTIC HERESIES
Let us turn our attention now to another area - the question of the way in which humanistic psychology can go wrong when one of its elements is blown up and exaggerated out of proportion. I have called these the humanistic heresies, and I think there are at least nine of them. Here they are:
1. Instrumentalism
This is where people use the methods developed within humanistic psychology to oppress others in new and more effective ways. Techniques can be useful when a person wants to do something, but genuinely doesn't know how to do it. Instrumentalism loves technique for the power it gives to the practitioner. Albert Speer, Minister of Armaments and War under Hitler, ran his ministry in accordance with the best principles of humanistic management. Many organizations today which are less than admirable teach social skills in ways taken from humanistic psychology. This can also happen in education: is telling children to reveal their dreams any better than telling them to copy the sums off the blackboard? The content is different, but the form is the same - the teacher is the provider and the student is the consumer. The point is that humanistic psychology is always about the realisation of potential, not about its guidance into some groove laid down by someone else. We stand for real freedom and real communication, and systems which allow and encourage this.
2. Feelingism
Feelings are important to recognise and do justice to, and humanistic psychology is noted for its attention to feelings. But sometimes this can get exaggerated, so that people are expected to express feelings all the time, or even to express certain approved feelings all the time. This is a distortion and is quite undesirable. Feelings are in reality no more important or central than sensing, thinking, intuiting, imagining, desiring, willing and so forth. All these things can be connected to the centre or disconnected from it. For good communication and real intimacy between people, not only feelings need to be cultivated, but also honesty, freed energy, clear demands and other human qualities. We re trying all the time to encourage the real person to come out, and this means the whole person. We are encouraging the person to put her or his whole self behind life and action. One-sidedly feeling people would be monsters, just as much as one-sidedly thinking (sensing, intuiting, imagining, desiring) people would be. What we are aiming at is integration, not feelings.
3. Autonomy-ism
One of the key things about humanistic psychology is the way in which it emphasises taking responsibility for oneself, and on creating one's own world. As a therapeutic stance, and taken in a first-person way, this can be extremely valuable. It is the classic empowering move for people who have defined themselves as victims hitherto. But taken in a third-person way this becomes oppressive and punitive, a denial of solidarity and fellow feeling. The point is that "You alone can do it, but you don't have to do it alone". Both sides of the statement are true, and they must not be separated from each other. Autonomy is important, but love and mutual support and nourishment are important too. The sequence goes: dependence, counterdependence, independence, interdependence; it is important not to stop at independence. Autonomy as a total ideal is for hermits.
4. Peace-and-love-ism
This is the way in which group leaders and others aim at warmth, trust and openness in a way which says that if you are not being warm, trusting and open you are not getting it right. This is just as harmful as any other attempt to tell people what to think and what to feel. We are not in the peace and love game, we are in the reality game. If we attend closely to reality and do justice to what is present, what is there, my experience is that peace and love do ultimately ensue, but if they do, they too are real. However, there needs to be a note of caution the other way too. I have seen people dismiss certain workshops on love as "peace-and-love-ism" when in fact what the leader was doing was to use "total love" exercises to explore the scope and limits of love. The test is simple: what happens when hate, lust, fear or anger comes out instead of love? If the leader welcomes them and works with them and helps the person work through such feelings, that is fine: but if they are ignored or shunted aside, or wished away, then we are faced with peace-and-love-ism.
5. Peakism
Here people get hold of the bit about peak experiences being important, and turn it into something to strive for. Instead of the emphasis being on opening oneself up so that peak experiences have a chance to get in, all the emphasis goes on pushing oneself to greater and greater heights. The recent craze for fire-walking is a good example of this. But a deficiency-oriented search for private peaks can become very narrow and nasty.
6. Spiritual-ism
An inelegant word to describe an all-too-elegant reality. This is where one gets so very spiritual that one loses touch with the ground altogether. It has been said that New Age music is like the peak of a pyramid suspended in mid- air, and this expresses well the ungrounded nature of this diversion. When people get into this state they often seem to confuse smiling with insight. There is a lot of talk about losing the ego, but I don't think we ever really lose our ego. What we lose are false images of the ego, false boundaries to the ego. But the ego does not really die, it just has to change. I have never met anyone who seemed to me to have lost his ego, have you?
7. Expertism
Humanistic psychology is essentially anti-mystification. It is noticeable how the most central figures in humanistic psychology are also those who use jargon least. So to use vast numbers of technical terms and highly specialised vocabularies may make one feel more like an expert and one who knows, but they are not really much to do with humanistic psychology.
8. Sexism
Sexism is the oppression of women and all that is feminine. It usually involves reducing women to the rigid roles which represent the only proper ways of being female in a patriarchal society - almost always service roles of one kind or another, but also idealised moralistic roles. Humanistic psychology is dedicated to questioning all rigid roles whatsoever, because they represent one of the main ways in which potential is limited, by self or others. But it is all too easy for patriarchal patterns to creep back into the practice of humanistic psychology, because they are so all-pervasive. So most groups have male leaders, most of the most famous and highest-paid leaders are male, and most of the participants are female. In many groups, the heterosexual couple relationship is emphasised and underwritten. In some groups, the women are treated differently from the men. Child care is very often not taken care of as an issue in weekend groups. Women may find it exhausting to keep on fighting these patterns all the time, and there is no excuse for the men in humanistic psychology to avoid awareness of these issues.
Similarly with racism, it is important to be aware how easy it is for racism to creep in. There are very few black faces in humanistic groups or gatherings, even though it is one of the aims of humanistic psychology to work for the recognition of difference and the welcoming of diversity. 9. Eclectic Mish-mash-ism
One of the strengths of our general approach is its adventurousness - the way in which we are prepared to try things out and see whether they work or not. But pushed to a one-sided extreme, this becomes a nervous search for novelty and fads. If we put disparate things together and try to make them fit without really integrating them properly, the work of forging new theories and new unities of theory and practice is avoided and side-tracked. This is not what humanistic psychology is about.
If we want to steer clear of these heresies, diversions and aberrations we have to keep open and keep on learning. We have to use our vulnerability to let in reality, and sometimes the hard lessons which society and history teach us. We cannot learn much when all our defences are up. It is the horror, and the shame, of the world we live in that so often we seem driven to defend ourselves, forced to raise our barriers. It takes real inner strength, and staunch allies, to keep on going for a better world. Humanistic psychology stands for this unafraid look at the personal, the social and the spiritual.
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Association for Humanistic Psychology