The Humanistic Revolution in Psychology: Its Inaugural Vision

Theme #1: An Inclusive, Integrative Approach to Psychological Science

Humanistic psychology is sometimes spoken of disparagingly as anti-science in orientation. This is, of course, as untrue as it is unfair. But in reading the inaugural issue of JHP one gets a sense of how such a misconception could have arisen. One will find no null hypothesis significance tests. One will, however, find a pervasive sense that the authors no longer believed that psychological science as it had developed up to that time in history was able to fulfill its promise as an academic or applied discipline. The sentiment was not antiscience, it was rather that psychology had not gone far enough in its approach to its subject matter to reach maturity. The founders of the movement thus felt compelled to hold psychology to a higher standard of scientific responsibility. Does it make scientific sense to study human beings in controlled, quantified laboratory conditions? Does it make scientific sense, albeit of a different and more qualitative kind, to collect data from patients in a clinical context to learn about their intrapsychic conflicts in hopes of helping them to overcome their suffering? On both accounts, the answer was (and is), yes. But the founders of the humanistic movement defiantly insisted nonetheless that first and second force psychology (i.e., experimental/behavioral and Freudian respectively) had not exhausted the scientific potential of psychology.

To make matters worse, psychology had actually developed a series of dilemmas that needed to be addressed. Academic psychology (with its behaviorist leanings) and clinical psychology (with its Freudian leanings) were moving further and further away from one another, contributing to a worsening methodological divide between the worlds of quantitative and qualitative research that is only now showing signs of healing (e.g., the APA’s Division 5 is now called Quantitative and Qualitative Methods). This divide was indicative of metapsychologies at loggerheads, with behavioral theory seeking to oust the inner world of mental processes from the focus of psychology, while Freudian theory seemed to revolve disproportionately around an intrapsychic focus. And yet, in spite of this intradisciplinary bifurcation, the first and second forces of psychology shared hedonistic, reductionistic, objectivistic philosophical underpinnings inadequate to the task of excavating the fullness of human psychological life.

Feeling obligated to uphold the highest ideals of scientific scrupulousness and conscientiousness, humanistic psychology proposed the closest thing to what would be considered a genuine paradigm shift in the discipline (bearing in mind that psychology has never been unilaterally paradigmatic in the strict, Kuhnian sense). The humanistic revolution was an admonishment that psychologists ought to face the very humanity of human psychological life head on and use that kind of understanding as the organizational centerpiece of the science rather than continuing the tradition of relying on metaphors, theories, concepts, and methods more properly suited to nonhuman beings. With his characteristic penchant for reminding us of what ought to be obvious, Maslow (1961) thus observed:

Psychology is in part a branch of biology, in part a branch of sociology. But it is not only that. It has its own unique jurisdiction as well, that portion of the psyche which is not a reflection of the outer world or a molding to it. There could be such a thing as a psychological psychology. (p. 6)

Decades later, the logic of the argument remains seemingly self-evident. But, was it welcome? Sutich (1961) described the situation as follows:

A group of interested and dedicated individuals have carried on a protracted struggle to open up new areas central to the whole field of psychology, often against opposition that seemed insurmountable. It was not only in America . . . Existentialist Psychology and Phenomenological Psychology, among others, sprang up in the course of new attempts to open up the vast and crucial inner life of man. In this country “official” organizations, policies, and journals have been rather inhospitable, to say the least, to the publication of findings along the above broadly stated lines of scientific inquiry. As a consequence, a rapidly increasing number of important contributions have neither been published nor are they otherwise readily available. Moreover, this situation also applies to manuscripts from sources throughout the Free World which have no welcome outlet in appropriate American journals. (pp. vii-viii)

The task ahead was quite ambitious indeed, needing much courage and determination. It was so ambitious, in fact, that the humanistic revolution could never wage its scientific culture war on a single front. To illustrate, by arguing for a radicalized, revised image of humanity, humanistic psychology would then have to also develop a new way of approaching research as a complement to this revision. Humanistic psychology could still utilize traditional methods of research, but they alone would not be adequate to the task of fully confronting human psychological life as uniquely human. This new movement would have to revise the discipline’s methodological approach to its subject matter, embracing a more inclusive, pluralistic approach to data collection. This pluralism would include a newfound respect for various forms of established qualitative inquiry, the development of new methods as called for by the research project at hand, and the integration of methods that had not yet garnered attention within mainstream currents of the discipline, such as phenomenology (Bühler, 1961; van Kaam, 1961).

Qualitative methods would be necessary for a psychology that would insist on taking irreducible subjectivity seriously in the establishment of a revised understanding both human existence and objective reality at large (Sutich, 1961). As van Kaam (1961) put it, “A truly humanistic psychology is an integration of the historical and contemporary data and theories of psychology. This integration is based on an open phenomenology and ontology of man” (p. 100). The aim was to pursue a “hierarchical-integrative way of thinking” (Maslow, 1961, p. 2) with the power to synthesize the insights of divergent currents of thought within the field while offering a broadened and deepened scientific narrative for the future of the discipline. Such is the stated penultimate goal of “an integral humanistic psychology” in this first issue (van Kaam, 1961, p. 98). It is further worth noting that the goal of an integral humanistic psychology was not clinically driven. In contrast to the sometimes-disparaging image of humanistic psychology as restricted to clinical concerns, only one article in the inaugural issue focused on psychotherapeutic process (Cohen, 1961), while one other dealt with an alienated type of identity formation noted to be appearing more frequently in clinical settings (Schachtel, 1961).

Theme #2: A Revised Image of Humanity

What does it mean to say that humanistic psychology insisted on taking irreducible subjectivity seriously? The very question suggests that this new integrative approach to psychology was adopting a new view of what it means to be human. Contra reductionism, the authors of the inaugural issue of JHP were quite intent on revising their understanding of human nature to include a more substantive, contributive understanding of subjectivity without succumbing to either a hyperrational intellectualism or a naïve romanticism. Human psychological life cannot be reduced to being a mere function of environmental adjustment, but neither can it be understood as hovering above its concrete situation in any sort of dualist–idealist sense (see Maslow, 1961). Humanistic psychology’s new view would have to allow the social scientist to study human beings without the excluded middle imposed by the subject–object dichotomy. Subjectivity needed to be understood on the basis of its situatedness within worldly conditions, but in a more profound, intimate, participatory way than seeing it as a mere pawn at the mercy of forces beyond its control. The humanists did not avail themselves of cognitive psychology’s manner of retrieving the subject, as it merely provided a reactionary counterpoint to facile materialism by placing a calculating intellect in the proverbial driver’s seat. Instead, the humanistic goal was to understand the intellect as embedded within its lived (i.e., felt, meaning-laden), bodily, and social milieu (see Nameche, 1961).

Pursuit of this goal resulted in a radical scientific metamorphosis. As already noted above, the new metapsychological reorientation demanded a new approach to research, one that would include qualitative methods designed to access this new terrain. But more generally, a reorientation toward the totality of the experiencing-behaving organism turned the humanistic psychologist toward the study of human capacities and potentialities that had “no systematic place in positivistic, behavioristic, or classical psychoanalytic psychologies” (Sutich, 1961). Interest turned to fundamental and diverse human needs, aspects of both human and individual uniqueness, the meanings embedded in the emotional life of persons, future time perspective, psychological health, the contemporary crises of meaninglessness, loneliness, and alienation, and many other topics. In effect, a focus on situated, participatory subjectivity meant confronting the kinds of issues that give human psychological life its truly human quality. Significantly, investigations into lived intellection gave rise to the proto-phenomenological concept of caring cognition (Nameche, 1961). Caring cognition affords profound understandings, but it is not reflexive or abstract as its default state. Rather, it is characterized by affective consciousness and an intimate, global relation to what is known. It does not lose touch with the embodied situatedness of the person or overlook the integrity of being-in-the-world. Caring cognition is capable of being passive in the sense of receptively “letting things be,” allowing what is presented to consciousness to show itself without intellectualistic interference. In caring cognition, mind-body dualism and the subject-object split are temporarily out of action.

The idea that to be human means to be capable of a caring, involved, participatory manner of cognizing highlights the role of feeling in humanistic psychology. The importance attributed to feeling in humanistic psychology is best known by way of its centrality in humanistic therapies, but it has the broader significance of that which is most intimate and meaningful to the person in humanistic psychology on the whole. Feeling was taken up as intelligent, and thus neither reducible to being a mere conditioned response, nor an instinctual force that compels. Accordingly, the inaugural issue of JHP highlights the necessity for human beings to be able to feel deeply and in abundance in order to be healthy (English, 1961). Thriving and fulfillment were deemed contingent on the potential for joy, energy or the zest of life, excitement and enthusiasm. There was a newfound interest in and appreciation for the ability to let go in play (broadly construed) and to let oneself be captivated by beauty. The question arose, in Moustakas’s (1961) words:

Are there not many, many human experiences beyond logic and beyond reason, in which it takes courage to live the meaning, to embrace the other, to share a journey, long before there is any understanding or insight or clarification, long before there is any separated knowledge and comprehension? (p. 21)

The response, as Smillie (1961) framed it, was, “I feel that I must find my belongingness and relation to the world of nature . . . rather than in an attempt to supersede myself through abstract formulations and logico-deductive methods” (p. 89). It was an argument for the legitimacy of holistic experience, wherein perceiving, feeling, relating, knowing, and valuing are all seen as occurring simultaneously, prior to the analytic dissection of the phenomenal field.

The argument for the legitimacy of holistic experience extended still further, giving way to a reconceptualization of subjectivity in terms like whole organism, person, and also self as the integrative core of the personality. A holistic analysis of experience eventually finds its way back to the intentional subject itself in its unifying, organizing role as the relatively integrated ever-present backdrop of perception and action. The subject is not reducible to the summation of its experiences, behaviors, or even its traits or potentials, and so it is that there must be room in psychology for the study of the hierarchically organized personality. The psychoanalytic ego, completely immersed in conflict and adaptation, would not suffice. There would be in humanistic psychology a real self, “the I who is well or ill, who sees and hears and touches and tastes and smells, who acts, walks, sits, stands, likes, who is moved by others, by what he sees and experiences” (Schachtel, 1961, p. 113). This core of the personality is rooted in the ongoing flow of experience that precedes the reflexive activity that partitions the world into neat categories. It is not reducible to the Cartesian cogito. It lives within a realm of felt values and is thus capable of an immediate awareness of the deep meaning of its world-relations.

To be sure, the issue of world-relatedness is all-important here. The holistic revisioning of subjectivity proposed by humanistic psychology should not be confused with any sort of anthropological monism that would provide theoretical justification for the often repeated and deeply misguided critique of humanistic psychology as enabling narcissistic self-involvement. The holism of humanistic psychology was from its inception both interpersonally dialogal/dialogical and, more generally, dynamical-dialectical in its overall thrust. In either case, the holism of humanistic psychology always involved ego-transcendence and the problematics of negotiating opposition. With regard to the diologal/dialogical dimension, the concept of personal fulfillment was established on the basis of a need to reconcile egoism and self-denial (Shaw, 1961). Beginning in childhood, self-limiting was considered a fundamental human need (Bühler, 1961). It is through relationship that the child unlocks his or her potentials and begins the processes of differentiation and personal integration. Furthermore, the process of self-creation can only come to fruition via the processes of checking one’s perceptions against those of others (Winthrop, 1961) and expressing oneself fully to others in useful, understandable ways (Moustakas, 1961). Hence, van Kaam (1961) admonished that humanistic psychology was envisioned to be a personalistic psychology that studies the conditions that enable human beings to be themselves in communion with others.

The relationality of humanistic psychology was far from restricted to the interpersonal. The entire approach was designed to be dynamical–dialectical, even in its encounter with other theoretical models of psychology and their research findings. Thus, van Kaam (1961) went on:

The [humanistic] psychologist . . . is suspicious when a . . . psychologist claims that man [sic] is only a mechanistic stimulus-response organism. On the other hand, he is as suspicious when personalistic psychologists claim that man [sic] is only a personal being without an aspect that is measurable and without adjustment to a collectivity. (van Kaam, 1961, p. 100)

Humanistic psychology took the notion of ego-transcendence as necessary for the objectivity needed to accomplish its integrative scientific aims (Sutich, 1961). Alongside this scientific aspiration, human life in general was reconceptualized as an ongoing process of relating and growing through living encounters with the whole of the natural world. The introduction of the concept of caring cognition served to highlight this heightened emphasis on relationality proposed by the humanistic movement, as it offered a two-pronged approach to the person’s intentional orientation toward the world. It was not a celebration of unbridled emotion or a plea to cast reason, disambiguation, and analysis aside. It was not a replacement for the “cold” cognition of rationalistic science (Nameche, 1961, p. 72). Caring cognition, with its emotional depth, was introduced as an attempt to save psychology from the groundlessness of the hyperrational impulse inherent to psychology envisioned as a pure natural science (see Husserl, 1970). Caring and cold cognition were meant to represent reciprocals, two mutually interactive ways in which world-relating occurs rather than one.

Finally, the dynamical-dialectical relationality emphasized by humanistic psychology extended to the role of time in human existence as well. Time was no longer to be considered a simple linear procession, with past, present, and future conceived in the manner of a causal chain. The past does not repeatedly fall into oblivion, nor is the future a mere indeterminacy. The dimensions of time are comparable to “the petals of a flower, which open into the fullness of a rich experience and close again in the quiescence of night” (Smillie, 1961, p. 91). Past, present, and future all simultaneously and continuously intertwine and interact as the person lives out his or her life as an ongoing project. Against the analytic impulse to break psychological life down into compartmentalized component parts, humanistic psychology emphasized the need for an understanding of the personally experienced being of the person as a situated agent, but this being unfolds in time as a becoming. The person, in other words, is a total being-becoming nexus, an amalgam of constancy and change. This, in effect, gives the humanistic revolution an inherently developmental disposition. Self-actualization becomes the name for the ongoing process of reaffirming oneself anew via periods of constructive, productive change, even amid adversity. While learning tends to be most closely associated with behaviorism or information processing theory, the inaugural issue shows that learning was considered central to humanistic psychology as the ability to live paradoxically in multiple dimensions of time and negotiate constancy and change. Human growth and development occur where the person learns to become capable of being fully in the moment while also being able to transcend the present, to become something other than what he or she has been (Shaw, 1961). Growth is not the absence of all conflict. Rather, manageable conflict regularly accompanies the exhilaration of personal accomplishment, the sense that one is alive and capable amid the sometimes stormy, sometime negative conditions of life. In this light, self-actualization has the character of mitigating between conflict and harmony. As Moustakas (1961) described it:

I am speaking about unknown forces in man [sic] merging with unknown forces in the universe and letting happen what will happen, permitting the truth and reality which exists to emerge in its fullest sense and letting the unpredictable in oneself encounter the unpredictable in the other. Then a breakthrough of self occurs in which man [sic] does the unexpected and unanticipated, in which man [sic] emerges newly born and perceives and senses and experiences in a totally different way. (p. 26)

Theme #3: Broadening Scientific Psychology Via an Analysis of Culture

Three core components of what has been covered thus far require revisiting and further articulation: culture, cognition, and human development. Regarding culture, the humanistic critique of psychology was simultaneously a critique of scientific culture, and this critique extended out to a broader critical evaluation of Western culture at large as well. Thus, the humanistic cultural analysis operated on two levels simultaneously. With regard to the culture of science, the idea was that psychology had reached a point of being able to see humans as biocultural, but that this viewpoint was as yet incomplete. There was a lingering question best expressed in the form, “Where am I in all of this?” In other words, where is the agentic self amid the biological and cultural forces impinging on it? The total personality cannot be the mere summation of its biological and cultural determinants. It should be seen as an auto-bio-cultural achievement (see DeRobertis, 2012, 2015; Murray, 2001), but psychology did not possess the courage to embrace the owned quality of human experience and behavior as something other than illusion. Attention was primarily aimed at cultural determinism in this critique. Coming out of behaviorism’s heyday, far less argumentation was targeted at biological reductionism. Thus, Maslow (1961) framed the cultural critique in the following way:

We must not fall into the trap of defining the good organism in terms of what he is “good for,” as if he were an instrument rather than something in himself, as if he were only a means to some extrinsic purpose. (p. 1)

The overall concern here and throughout the inaugural issue was that psychology, under the influence of Newtonian natural science, was creating a sort of template for self-interpretation in Western society that reflected its own rationalistic, mechanistic biases (Nameche, 1961). Conventional psychology displayed a general unwillingness to see relational structures emerge from living meeting or to approach immediate experience on its own terms. It sought to impose a completely rational order on human existence, which, if embraced as culturally “normal,” would ultimately stultify the self-creative process and human development overall (Moustakas, 1961). Academic psychology had become decidedly focused on categorizing, measuring, predicting, controlling, and manipulating. As a consequence, it was sending an implicit message, reinforcing a cultural norm from a position of scientific authority, that being human means to act for functionalistic, adaptive, utilitarian, and even consumeristic purposes. It stressed acting merely “in order to” (Smillie, 1961, p. 90), in the sense of being an instrument of the world rather than a relationship to the world. In effect, it placed human beings on the same level of everything else in their surroundings. There was no way to account for the uniqueness of either the human species or human individuality. Psychology’s best image of human behavior was framed in terms of adaptation, adequacy, adjustment, competence, mastery, coping, in short, environmentally fixated terms, and was therefore considered inadequate to describe the whole, healthy psyche of a person. Why would psychology remain content to cast human behavior in such narrow terms? Because such terms fit in well with a wider cultural need for utility to deal with the challenge of exploding populations unfolding on the heels of industrialization (van Kaam, 1961). Lurking beneath the explicit American moral value on rugged individualism lies an implicit collectivism that manifests in the form of impersonal management collectives, labor collectives, crime collectives, and even science collectives (van Kaam, 1961).

All in all, culture was seen as both central to human existence and paradoxical in nature. On the one hand, it provides opportunities to live and grow. As Shaw (1961) observed, industrialization created a situation wherein the population at large no longer had to be as preoccupied with survival needs. This set the stage for a potentially new ethic of becoming, of finding new possibilities of acting that are useful and understandable to others. On the other hand, culture also harbors the potential to constrict self-development, especially when its value system concerning the relationship between the group and the individual is inordinately disproportionate. Culturally, America was viewed as fraught with contradiction, giving rise to both collectivistic conformity, obedience to authority, and tribalism, as well as blind individualistic rebellion as its counterpoint. In either case, what is excluded is the sense of personal responsibility that is required for genuine relatedness and intimacy. In their place, Western society was left with a growing isolation of morality, loneliness, and alienation that an adequate, mature psychology would have to face.

Theme #4: A Humanistic Cognitive Revolution

As has already been noted, the humanistic revolution proposed a return to the study of cognition, but in a manner that was commensurate with its new, holistic image of human psychological life at large. In effect, it proposed a humanistic cognitive revolution. Yet in spite of the continued expansion and growth of this aspect of the humanistic revolution through the influence of American and European currents of radical empiricism and phenomenology, this appears to have been overlooked in the history of psychology wholesale.

In their return to the question of cognition, the humanists were quite aware of the possibility of an approach akin to what cognitive psychology was proposing, but considered it to be rooted in a dualist bifurcation that was only capable of advancing an intellectualist, representationalist caricature of the mind. Any attempt to rescue the mind from its behaviorist exile would have to avoid artificially restricting cognition to its calculative, abstract, compartmentalized, merely adaptive/functionalistic manifestations. For the authors of the inaugural issue, it was disconcertingly obvious that psychology had a disproportionate attraction to this kind of thinking: cold cognition (Nameche, 1961). Cold cognition is devoid of emotion. It is thoroughly analytical. It prioritizes breaking down what is apprehended or experienced into parts and separating things into discrete pieces or categories. It is detached, calculative logic. The way of standard issue Western science, it is a technical kind of reasoning that quantifies and measures everything. Cold cognition sees things at a distance, even if those things are one’s own experiences. The humanists were dismayed at what appeared to be the spread of this highly theoretical model of cognition from within the ranks of natural scientific psychology out to the population at large. As Smillie (1961) described it:

The realm of reason and logic contains within it many of the elements of a game which we play. Although we know it to be untrue, we play that the external world is for us the same external world that it is for others. We experience, but then deny because it doesn’t fit our rules, an immanent belonging to the world and recognize, perhaps only vaguely conscious of it, that we are an essential and integral aspect of what is real. (p. 93)

While acknowledging the important role of cold cognition in the advancement of humankind, the humanistic revolution considered it a Yang that is missing its Yin, the complementary other that anchors it in the human world and thereby completes it. That other is caring cognition (Nameche, 1961). Caring cognition is characterized by a full-bodied, nondualistic relation to what is known that nonetheless does not deteriorate into mere sensualism or some sort of impulsive or superficial impressionism. It is nonrepresentationalist. It is lived understanding, a knowing “in your heart,” so to speak. Caring cognition is receptive, immediate, intuitive, and intimate. It is capable of being guided by affect without merely succumbing to it like some kind of exercise in sentimentalism. Caring cognition is experientially attuned, vitally aware, and capable of being moved to wonder and awe. It is relational, emerging from the pre-scientific, value-laden world of human strivings and goals. In effect, the humanistic revolution endorsed an approach to mentality that insisted on the simultaneity of bodily presence, emotion, evaluation, willing, perception, and other cognitive acts.

Cold cognition and caring cognition were considered a cognitive duet that together allow one to “perceive fully” (Maslow, 1961, p. 5). Psychological scientific objectivity is actually only achieved when both kinds of cognition are employed. How so? Even the rationalist ideal of neutrality is itself only within grasp when the scientist is capable of prudently containing the utilitarian impulse to impose his or her own theories and other attempts at mastery (e.g., environmental controls, measurement strategies, etc.) on to the phenomenon under study. Perhaps the best way to refer to the cognitive vision of the inaugural issue is to use the term whole person cognition to designate the ability to employ both cold and caring cognition as needed in one’s ongoing world-relating activity, as either layman or scientist. It is the propensity to think as “a human being who wishes to live with the other and who is willing to let imagination and comprehension, mental capabilities and compassion mingle freely, to let structure emerge from the living meeting . . .” (Moustakas, 1961, p. 34). Whole person cognition has the fluidity to transcend the seemingly divergent paths of cold and caring cognition.

Theme #5: Humanistic Psychology Is a Developmental Psychology

To be sure, the issue of human development is pervasive throughout the inaugural issue. The focus oscillated between the dynamics of lifespan development and the historical development of Western culture and science, with the two being seen as interpenetrated. Seemingly lost to history, the view embedded in the inaugural issue was commensurate with both genetic phenomenology (Allen, 1976; Husserl, 1970) and ecological systems theory (Bronfenbrenner, 1979). To reiterate, the developmental focus emanated from what was deemed the central role of time in the way that human beings participate in the coconstitution of their lives.

Human existence, seen as a perpetual process of becoming, was developmentally conceptualized on the basis of the twofold nature of the self as both an is and a not yet (Moustakas, 1961) on the one hand, and of actualities and potentialities on the other. Of course, these foci bring new problems into focus, existential concerns that had not emerged from the merely functionalistic level of discourse that had become commonplace in psychology where personal growth was disavowed in favor of adaptation to current conditions. Becoming implicates change. Change means facing the unknown, and the unknown creates anxiety by the possibility of threatening a present security. The more radical the change, the more radical the threat. The more radical the threat, the more radical the anxiety associated with the confrontation with one’s growth potentials. This is the developmental backdrop for Schachtel’s (1961) observations concerning the then emerging impairment of identity formation: the “paper-identity” (p. 110). Paper-identity results from substituting courageous being-in-time (i.e., living amid the ambiguities of process and the challenges involved in actualizing new potentials) for the fantasy of having a fixed, reified self to avoid the struggle of becoming (for a broader developmental application, see DeRobertis, 2017).

The developmental views expressed in the inaugural issue fall within four broad overlapping domains: biological, cognitive, emotional, and social/interpersonal (i.e., the moral-ethical-agency domain, see DeRobertis, 2008; Murray, 2001). Similar to what was said above concerning the analysis of culture, less time was afforded to biological argumentation in the inaugural issue. Nonetheless, it is embedded in the issue as foundational in the sense that constitutional factors were assumed to be at work in development. Maslow (1961) was explicit that human existence is bio-cultural, and even if human psychological life cannot be explained away by biology, an understanding of biology as found in the works of progressive thinkers like Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1968), Jakob von Uexküll (2010), and especially Kurt Goldstein (1995) was considered basic to an understanding of how biology contributes to the ongoing systematic dynamisms that occur throughout the process of becoming (Cohen, 1961; Nameche, 1961; Sutich, 1961). This served as a stark contrast to the blank slate theory of behaviorism, and also as an alternative to Freudian psychoanalysis, since the constitutional dimension of human development was viewed in terms of manifold potentials for growth through productive environmental interchange. As Sutich (1961) noted, humanistic psychology was spearheading the inquiry into areas that were inadmissible in both behavioral and classical psychoanalytic theories, many of which were designed to capture the forward moving processes involved in change throughout the lifespan; for example, creative expansion, growth, need-gratification, self-actualization, higher values, ego-transcendence, objectivity, aesthetics, spirituality, wisdom, truth, play, autonomy and identity, freedom, and personal responsibility.

As is obvious, such diverse interests implicate the other three domains of development as well. Cognitively speaking, caring and cold cognition were held to be developmental emergents. As described by Nameche (1961), infants begin life perceiving and gathering knowledge globally, holistically, caringly. If a congenitally normal baby is treated in a warm, loving way, it tends to respond likewise. It bonds with the mother and eventually becomes capable of empathy. Naturally and gradually it begins to see the world in a more analytical way and becomes capable of smoothly integrating cold cognition into its repertoire of intellectual potentials without sacrificing caring cognition in the process. But, according Nameche (1961), research suggests that the development of cold cognition comes significantly earlier in children who do not receive the best care and love. Cold cognition develops prematurely in the face of elevated fear, threat, anxiety, and discomfort. When an infant is overwhelmed by the feeling that the environment is unsafe and cannot be trusted it hastily leaves the realm of caring cognition and begins to rely too heavily on cold cognition as a means of self-protection.

The study of caring cognition recruited the emotional domain of development in a manner that differed significantly from what would come to dominate the field of developmental studies: genetic epistemology (Piaget & Inhelder, 1969). As Piaget envisioned it, emotions provide nothing of the structuration of human development. They were held to only provide energetics. The very notion of caring cognition flies in the face of this proposition, providing a counterpoint to the algebraic metaphor that guided the entire Piagetian enterprise (Piaget & Garcia, 1989). Whereas the Piagetian view (which influenced the founders of the cognitive revival, see Miller, 2003) would emphasize moving further and further away from a reliance on perception, affect, and action to understand the world “objectively,” the humanistic revolution was founded on the idea that such a disconnect would merely substitute one set of biases (i.e., those rooted in sensualism) for another (i.e., those rooted in intellectualism). Emotional development was to be given a newfound dignity within humanistic psychology. Rather than proposing a pedagogy that emphasized the progressive diminution of feeling, there was to be education in feeling (English, 1961). Reason and emotion were nowise seen as opposites, nor was there an overriding pedagogical value placed on separating perception, affect, and values from knowledge acquisition. Learning to see the world fully, even objectively, involved the felt, lived perspective as well (see DeRobertis, 2008, 2020). As English (1961) put it:

Children naturally seek, and should be encouraged to seek, a direct sensuous awareness of things—to smell the rose, touching also its lovely texture, seeing its form and color, even feeling the sharpness of the thorn, all of this not for an ulterior purpose but for itself. They must learn so that as adults they will have gained what Blake called the refinement of sensuality. Instead of keeping their senses under an iron control we should allow them to develop in their own freedom. There is, of course, a vulgar and immoderate sensibility, just as there is intellectual bravado; but standards of propriety must grow out of the child’s spontaneous feeling, not be imposed upon it. (p. 106)

Of course, such sensibility cannot mature on its own, and this implicates the last of the four domains: the always social nature of development. For the process of becoming a person to unfold one must be able find a milieu in which to act and grow according to one’s truest nature, which entails bringing one’s most genuine, prosocial, value-oriented potentials to realization (Winthrop, 1961). The view embedded in the inaugural issue stressed the need for a social setting in which to learn from others, but also for oneself in the sense of taking up a personally invested, authentic participation in the learning process. Regarding the former (i.e., learning from others), the world of the infant was deemed one of belonging. The world is the infant’s experiential relationship to the world. It is a world of process and of being-with, and so it is critical for the people in the child’s world to meet him or her at the level of bonding, acceptance, mutual understanding, and social interest at large for growth to ensue. Importantly, self-limiting and other basic needs like creativity were seen as developing in large part through play, which was considered a major avenue through which the child was both enculturated and given the opportunity to actualize his or her possibilities for continued relationship to others (Smillie, 1961).

But the latter must also be accounted for (i.e., real personal investment), as the uniquely personal element cannot be totalized or done asunder in the process of learning. Again, Moustakas (1961) put it:

How can the individual develop latent resources and hidden talents, how can he meet the other in a meaningful sense when he is urged to conform, to compete, to achieve, to evaluate, to establish goals? Neither the group nor the individual can grow and develop fully without the other. (pp. 26-27)

Learning is not learning when it is made the empty behavior of an automaton. Learning, to be learning, would have a demonstrable effect on the developing person’s valuing, decision making and goal setting abilities (Bühler, 1961; Winthrop, 1961). As Bühler (1961) observed, such abilities steer the unfolding of the lifespan, but not on an exclusively intellectualist grounds. The relationships that adhere between cognition, valuing, decision making, and goal setting are sometimes murky and cannot be fully captured by representationalist theorizing. Goal patterns evolve over the course of development, tending to grow out of interests and talents discovered through lived interactions with others and things in an environment that provides an open space for the direct sensuous awareness noted above. They materialize from a phenomenal field conducive to vitality, excitement, and enthusiasm, and they come in a variety of forms, ranging from implicit/vague to explicit/articulated, immediate to long-range (e.g., see DeRobertis, 2017).

Make no mistake, however, the inaugural issue was not drafted with rose colored glasses. Cultural critique was quite present in the assessment of the social domain of human development, fit with warnings of the hurried child long before such a notion would become fashionable (Smillie, 1961). There was also a broader concern that American education does not educate the whole person, only the intellect. Formal education was considered to have deteriorated into an abstract, context-free exercise in information acquisition that creates a chasm between the learner’s conceived and operative values. Thus, Winthrop (1961) lamented:

We have failed to take stock of those psychological processes which are intimately bound up with the mental activity of value-discrimination and choice. We have also failed to give sufficient serious concern to those psychological roots of personal and social behavior which would enable us to reflect or contravene our declared values. (p. 36)