The Pennsylvania State University The Graduate School College of the Liberal Arts THE HUMAN POTENTIAL: THE CAREER OF AN IDEA IN THE UNITED STATES DURING THE THIRD QUARTER OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY A Dissertation in History by Michael W. Lumish © 2009 Michael W. Lumish Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy December 2009 ii The dissertation of Michael W. Lumish was reviewed and approved* by the following: Greg Eghigian Associate Professor of Modern History Dissertation Adviser Chair of Committee Gary Cross Distinguished Professor of Modern History William Pencak Professor of American History Mark Morrisson Professor of English and Science, Technology, and Society Carol A. Reardon Professor of Military History Director of Graduate Programs in History *Signatures are on file in the Graduate School iii ABSTRACT The Human Potential Movement of the 1960s and 1970s was an expression of a broad cultural trend within American middle-class of the mid-late twentieth century. This broad cultural trend, containing both secular and religious dimensions, represented an effort to promote greater human autonomy and personal authenticity in a wide variety of social relations. It developed in response to prevalent concerns over the supposed “diminishment of the self” within the American middle-class during the Cold War. Those who gave voice to such concerns in the 1950s included influential social critics and cultural critics. Those who recommended solutions included humanistic psychologists and alternative religious theorists. The social critics, such as William H. Whyte, Jr., David Riesman, and C. Wright Mills, argued that the rise of dominating institutions of power, such as large American corporations and universities, created environments that crushed, or warped, human individuality and personal potential. The cultural critics, such as Dwight McDonald and Theodore Adorno, suggested that mass corporate cultural productions, such as movies, sports, and popular television shows, furthered this unfortunate trend by undermining western culture with the dissemination of cultural trash, or kitsch. These criticisms, furthermore, were disseminated to the public in a string of articles found in large-circulation, popular magazines, such as Life, Look, and Time, and were part of America‟s Cold War dialogue with itself. The humanistic psychologists, such as Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, and Rollo May therefore iv promoted methods, such as participatory business management techniques and encounter-group therapy, designed to free Americans from their social-psychological malaise. In the early 1960s, entrepreneur Andrew Kay, of Non-Linear Systems, Inc., hired Abraham Maslow to help reorganize his company along lines consistent with the theories of participatory management; theories that would promote greater worker autonomy, while turning a profit for the company. Such techniques, along with encounter-group therapy, became a trend in American business throughout the 1960s. The alternative religious theorizers, such as Alan Watts and Aldous Huxley, suggested that organized religious institutions were also at fault. The dominant American churches, they charged, buried the spiritual potential of their supporters and they therefore promoted Asian religious practices, such as sitting-meditation and yoga, as practicable solutions. In the early 1950s, entrepreneur Louis P. Gainesborough funded the American Academy of Asian Studies (AAAS) in San Francisco, which he created to foster East/West inter-cultural appreciation following World War II. Under the direction of Alan Watts, Haridas Chaudhuri, and Friedrich Spiegelberg, however, the organization also sought to help their students out of the alleged spiritual quagmire which they believed typified American religious sensibilities. Two students of the AAAS, Michael Murphy and Richard Price, went on to create the Esalen Institute of Big Sur, CA, in 1962. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the Esalen Institute became a sort-of clearinghouse for all things countercultural and it was here that psychology wed religion in the form of the Human Potential Movement. The psycho-spiritual theorizers associated with Esalen Institute represent a veritable who’s-who of the Human Potential Movement, which even came to influence the Episcopal Church in California during the 1960s. From an intellectual historical standpoint, the strands of v social influences derived from post-World War II social critics, cultural critics, humanistic psychologists, and alternative religious thinkers had far-reaching consequences for American lives toward the middle-end of the twentieth century. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: From the Mind Cure to the Human Potential Movement: Liberation, Autonomy, and Human Authenticity in America…………………….. 1 Chapter 1. Invasion of the Body Snatchers: The Critics of Mass Culture and the Diminished American Self…………………. 31 Chapter 2. The Underground Press and the Critics of Mass Culture……………………... 73 Chapter 3. Maslow, Management, and the American Counterculture…………………….. 124 Chapter 4. The Search for Authenticity and the American Academy of Asian Studies…… 168 Chapter 5. Esalen, the Counterculture, and the Human Potential Movement……………… 215 Chapter 6. Traversing the Labyrinth: The Human Potential Movement and the Episcopal Church in California………… 262 Chapter 7, Conclusion: A Summing Up…………………………………………………..... 309 1 Introduction: From the Mind Cure to the Human Potential Movement: Liberation, Autonomy, and Human Authenticity in America The third-quarter of the twentieth century saw, in the United States, the rise of humanistic psychology, transpersonal psychology, the human potential movement, the counterculture, and the various movements for social justice that rocked American life in the 1960s. Each of these developments, at their core, including the movements for social justice, concerned themselves with reshaping the identities of those involved according to perceived social realities and social injustices. During the same period, and not coincidentally, participatory management theory made inroads into American business practice, progressive child-rearing became de rigueur in the white, middle and upper-middle class American home, and, in certain quarters, American religious practice became more progressive, more tolerant, more eclectic, and more “spiritual.” These developments, I will argue, are interrelated, informed by the ideals of liberation, autonomy, and human authenticity, and owe something to the “therapeutic ethos” that Jackson Lears, among others, found prominent in the twentieth century.1 This work, then, is concerned with the ideals and practices through which Americans sought to reshape their realities and identities from the end of World War II through the mid-1970s.2 1 . Although the ideals of liberation and autonomy may seem, at first glance, to synonymous, there are important distinctions to be made. While liberation always implies autonomy, autonomy does not necessarily imply liberation in either its political or religious meanings. For a discussion of the therpeutic ethos and its significance to American consumer culture, see Lears “From Salvation to Self-Realization: Advertising and the Therapeutic Roots of the Consumer Culture, 1880 – 1930,” in The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880 – 1930, ed. Richard Wrightman Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), 3 – 38. 2 Foucault defined such practices as “technologies of the self,” that is, as technologies “which permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality.” See Michel Foucault, Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel 2 My thesis is that following World War II numerous scholars, many of whom were émigré intellectuals, including social critics, cultural critics, humanist psychologists, and alternative religious thinkers, bemoaning the supposed diminishment of the American self in the 1950s, laid common theoretical ground for the developments listed above. The counterculture and its upwardly-mobile twin, the human potential movement, as well as the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, therefore, derived not only from alternative subcultures, such as the Beats, nor strictly from earlier movements for social justice, but also from a prevalent therapeutic trend with a long history in the United States. My purpose, therefore, is not to explore the social history of any particular set of actors, but to explore how a variety of disparate actors, and disparate movements, claimed common ideals and worked them through in different, but culturally interconnected, settings and circumstances. This introduction will outline the flow of these ideals from the middle of the nineteenth century in the United States to the middle of the twentieth century. Although the body of this work is concerned with the period from about 1950 to about 1975, some theory and historical backdrop are, of course, necessary. The Historiography of the Self The central questions are these: What ideals did the various social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, including the counterculture, share at their core? How did these ideals shape the forms and practices of these social movements? Did others share these ideals outside