Abstract
It was the fall of 1963. Although the Cuban missile crisis had been resolved peacefully 12 months earlier, the Cold War still raged between the United States and the Soviet Union and would soon lead to an escalation of American military involvement in South Vietnam. Led by Mao-Tse Tung, “Red China,” as it was popularly dubbed in the media, had no diplomatic relations with the United States—and civil war in Laos was heightening East–West tensions. Domestically, President John F. Kennedy and his younger brother Robert as U.S. Attorney General were widely criticized among liberals for failing to back civil rights activism sufficiently in the Deep South. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech in Washington, D.C. earlier that summer had galvanized considerable support throughout the country; yet the seniority system in Congress, especially powerful in the Senate, continued to stonewall civil rights legislation. Social mores were rapidly changing. Published in 1962, Sex and the Single Girl, written by columnist Helen Gurley Brown, had sold two million copies in its first 3 weeks (Oullette, 1999). Harvard’s psychology professors Richard Alpert and Timothy Leary had recently been fired for dispensing psychedelic drugs to students in violation of the school’s medical and scientific regulations. Meanwhile, at nearby Brandeis University, Abraham Maslow was teaching an undergraduate course titled “Experiential Approaches to the Study of Personality.”
By 1963, humanistic psychology had emerged as the “Third Force” of personality theory and psychotherapy, seeking to build on the dominant behaviorist and psychoanalytic approaches to offer a new, more hopeful conception of human potential and growth (Decarvalho, 1990). As James Bugental (1964), a leading figure in this movement, effusively wrote the following: A major breakthrough is occurring right now in psychology . . . we are on the verge of a new era in man’s concern about man which may—if allowed to run its course—may produce as profound changes in the human condition as those we have seen the physical sciences bring in the past century. (p. 19)
With Tony Sutich as collaborator, Maslow had recently cofounded the Journal of Humanistic Psychology, and he felt the time was right to offer fresh, innovative material to students. His teaching assistant, Hung-Min Chiang, later recalled, As I understood it, he was highly dissatisfied with the goals and methods of traditional education and was actively in search of some viable alternatives. I was also told that the course was a sort of pilot study in an unchartered waterway and he was eager to have its value assessed as impartially as possible. (Maslow, 2019, p. xxii)
As described in the 1963 Brandeis University Course Catalogue, the course was “a survey of efforts at self-analysis, self-therapy, and self-growth. Dreams and symbol psychology; peak, mystic, and psychedelic experience; archaic and prerational cognition. Recovery of the preconscious” (cited in Maslow, 2019, p. xviii).
Comprising 24 undergraduate men and women who were mainly psychology majors, the course began on September 30, 1963, and ended on January 13, 1964. The class met weekly for 3 hours. Maslow’s intention was to lecture for the first 2 hours and devote the third hour to leading a “Lab in Self-knowledge” (Maslow, 2019, p. xxxii) in his phrase. In practice, though, Maslow’s lectures usually ran for an hour-and-a-half and the labs consumed about an hour; lecture and lab also often tended to merge. On the 5th session, Maslow brought a portable tape recorder into the classroom, and after class discussion about his proposal to tape the rest of the course starting that day, full agreement was seemingly reached to do so. After the course ended, Maslow planned to develop the transcript into a stand-alone book or the foundation for a self-help book. However, he had a plethora of other intellectual projects consuming his attention, and this one never reached fruition by the time of his death from a heart attack in 1970.
Maslow’s daughter Ann Kaplan kept the transcription (produced by Hung-Min Chiang in the late 1960s or early 1970s), and it was discovered in her home by publisher Maurice Bassett in 2010. Bassett and Chiang listened to the audios, correcting and updating the transcription. Finally, in 2019, the unabridged transcript was published as Personality and Growth: A Humanistic Psychologist in the Classroom, with detailed notes providing bibliographic and other information concerning the myriad books, journal articles, psychologists, public figures, and events mentioned by Maslow or his students, whose names were disguised to ensure anonymity. Personality and Growth also includes an introduction by Chiang (originally published in the second edition of The Healthy Personality in 1977) and his summary of the first four, untaped sessions of the course.
So, that’s the back-story. The primary question is whether this book merits contemporary reading: that is, does it add anything significant to Maslow’s body of published work, and more broadly, to the history of humanistic psychology? My answer is a definite yes on both counts. As Maslow’s biographer (Hoffman, 1999), I regard Personality and Growth as valuable not only in helping to “set the record straight” about his evolving views on personality growth, self-actualization, peak-experiences, and related topics but also in providing a different side to Maslow than ever seen clearly in writing before. How so? Specifically, we observe how Maslow at age 55 interacted in “real time” with his classroom students: how he talked about his life, values, and goals, and perhaps even more importantly from our vantage point, what he hoped and wanted his students to say about theirs.
Because Personality and Growth presents a series of discrete classroom sessions involving lecture and discussion, there is little continuity from chapter to chapter. Yet, for precisely this reason, we gain a fascinating picture of Maslow in an almost stream-of-consciousness mode, highlighting personal experiences from his life (marriage, fatherhood, friendships, and dreams) with allusions to founding theorists like Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Lewis Terman, colleagues at Brandeis University, and psychoanalysts in Boston and New York City. Based on such free-wheeling commentary, we learn as never before that Maslow was close with child psychiatrist David M. Levy, who pioneered such clinical concepts as “affect hunger” and “maternal overprotection.”
It is clear from this transcription that Maslow’s lecture style was avuncular: warm, good-humored, and self-disclosing but always reflecting his self-appraisal as an influential, well-established social scientist. He typically accepted critical and occasionally confrontational remarks from students in a good-natured way. As to content, he consistently sought to delineate psychological health and maturity versus dysfunction and immaturity, as well as how to actualize one’s potentialities. What was Maslow most passionate about in teaching this class? In rough rank order, it seems to me: (1) peak-experiences and their relevance for understanding the heights of human personality; (2) the importance of knowing one’s feelings as a foundation for self-actualization, (3) and, encouraging his students to choose values that enhanced personality growth rather than stunted or diminished it.
Perhaps more so than in his published writings, Maslow emphasized the concept of what he called “foothill experiences:” mildly uplifting moments in everyday life, rather than ecstatic, life-altering episodes. This focus may have reflected Maslow’s belief that most of his students were still too young to have experienced the powerful “peaks” that stemmed from romantic love, marriage, parenthood, career achievement, or even intense aesthetics. In this regard, Maslow was probably correct, for few students in class reported even “foothill” experiences, though shyness about self-disclosing before nearly two dozen peers may have been a contributory factor.
Throughout the course, Maslow asserted that self-actualization is predicated on self-awareness. To this end, he posed a variety of experientially oriented questions to his students, such as “What do you feel when you see a baby?” “What does feeling ‘manly’ feel like? “What does feeling feminine’ feel like? “What kind of music makes you feel most erotic?” and, “What did you feel when you were watching President Kennedy’s funeral on national TV?” A few students responded to the latter question, but most of the other experientially oriented questions were greeted mainly by silence. It is apparent that Maslow was far more concerned with prodding his students into planning productive and societally beneficial lives than with helping them achieve career or financial success. Indeed, in one lecture, he sharply criticized his students’ personal journals for showing minimal interest in utilizing the psychological knowledge they had gained in this course to helping others or creating a better society. “This was a privatist group,” he commented, “It’s characteristic of the culture . . . Altruism, dedication, patriotism, self-sacrifice. There’s little mention of them in your notebooks or in your talks with me” (Maslow, 2019, pp. 346-347).
We unmistakably see that Maslow was adamant that psychology and psychiatry had amassed sufficient knowledge to identify the types of emotional patterns and behaviors conducive to well-being versus dissipation and dysfunction. In this context, Maslow compared his expertise with that of a dentist who can assuredly advise his patients how to maximize dental care, and to that of a physician who can confidently state the necessity of physical exercise for health. “Part of growing up is the whole business of expression, of learning to express yourself . . . This is one example of self-actualization,” he stated.
. . . So I would recommend that {you all} learn to write . . . There’s no way out, whether you like it or you don’t like it. Just like my recommendation, that you must have a certain amount of exercise—walking, swimming, or whatever. (Maslow, 2019, p. 126)
In this light, Maslow emphatically rejected the philosophical viewpoint, just beginning to gather academic steam in the early-to-mid 1960s that all human values are ultimately relative and therefore, none are objectively “better” than any others. In his view, such a position is not only morally indefensible but scientifically so as well. True enough, Maslow addressed this issue in his later writings (Maslow, 1968, 1970, 1971), but Personality and Growth reveals him thundering on it to his students. For example, in the final session of the course, Maslow heatedly stated: Yes. There is such a thing as immorality by the way. If you want to argue that, I’m willing to argue it. People have attacked me in their criticisms . . . about my being judgmental . . . Do you want to argue it? . . . What is not debatable at this point {in time} . . . is this general conclusion . . . in sociology, anthropology, psychology, psychiatry: that the people whose system of values breaks down altogether, the people who become non-judgmental, who don’t know what’s right and what’s wrong—that they’re dead. They’re finished . . . Don’t ever let yourself get into this crazy delusion that you can be neutral about values. Want to try do that? Do it easier: just cut your wrists. That would be faster. (Maslow, 2019, pp. 382-384)
On numerous occasions, Maslow would attempt to buttress his value-positions by citing empirical studies, or lacking those, anecdotal evidence from clinical work, particularly conducted by psychoanalysts whom he personally knew, such as Felix Deutsch or David M. Levy. By the late 1960s, as Vietnam War protests would engulf college campuses across the United States and “Never trust anyone over 30” (coined by Berkeley activist Jack Weinberg) became a mass slogan, Maslow’s avuncular style would appear condescending. Yet, it’s clear from this transcript, that by 1963, this intergenerational tension was already beginning. As one exasperated student said to Maslow, “You start a question which is always directed in your own terms . . . and then when there is silence you begin talking and you keep talking.” To Maslow’s credit, he immediately replied: “Yeah, I’ve been told that by nearly everybody” (Maslow, 2019, p. 191).
As a final observation, I found it intriguing that Maslow devoted considerable attention to the topic of human sexuality: specifically, the role of erotic feelings in romantic love and marriage. In the historical context of American culture in 1963, this focus was certainly ground-breaking if not revolutionary. However, since Maslow did not self-disclose on this topic (but mainly highlighted clinical findings), it is hardly surprising that his students were reluctant to do as well. “What do you really want {when it comes to sex}? What do you really enjoy? What do you really feel? For many women and for many men in many areas of life, they don’t know what they want” (Maslow, 2019, p. 273).
Over the ensuing decades, humanistic psychology has exerted a considerable impact on American culture, though the precise formulations of Maslow, Rogers, May, and other seminal thinkers have often been highly distorted. Unfortunately, this situation still exists today. Both for this reason, as well as for the opportunity to see Maslow as classroom teacher, the publication of Personality and Growth is to be applauded.
