170 BOOKREVIEWS

Willard F. Frick, : Conversations with , Gardner Murphy and . Bristol, IN: Wyndham Hall Press, 1989, 186 pp., $17.95, paper ($27.95 cloth).

Willard F. Frick's Humanistic Psychology is a reprint of the same book that was published in 1971. It is based upon "selected and revised material from the author's unpublished dissertation, 'A Holistic Theory of Healthy Personality,' University of Michigan, 1969" (p. 15). Above and beyond his formal research interest, Frick, through these interviews, "wanted to establish real contact with the personalities of the men responsible for the theories. Theories, per se, are likely to represent highly abstract expres- sions of the personalities who developed or created them" (pp. 15-16). Had he fulfilled this projected purpose rigorously, Frick could have contributed something of importance to the area of "the psychology of psychology." Thus his work would have been of immense interest to phenomenological who uphold that psychology is value- laden and that there is an intimate link between the as a biographically situated person and the psychological system he or she constructs or resonates to. Unfortunately, with the exception of fleeting personal revelations on the part of the personality theorists, which are not systematically pursued, Frick fails to deliver on his initial aim. We learn, for example, that Maslow's "humanistic concerns" propelled him to go into psychology from philosophy. Subsumed under these concerns were his interests in American Socialism, the Jewish utopian and ethical tradition, and Watsonian behaviorism:

Clearly the great moment when I went back into psychology was when I read Watson's work and had a great illumination, a great vision about the future.... That brought me into psychology, or back into it, because it looked as if all you needed was hard work and so on. The future looked quite clear. There was a program that all you do is condition everything, etc.... As a matter of fact, behaviorism looked like a program for humanism then, and it was only when it played itself out-when it didn't work out-that I became disenchanted (pp. 19-20).

Although this is a most revealing disclosure, the interviewer fails to pursue it. Were there opposing personal stances in Maslow that predisposed him to resonate to both the controlling-conditioning dimensions as well as the utopian-humanistic dimensions within behaviorism? Similarly, how did Maslow coordinate the contradictory elements in American Socialism and the Jewish utopian and ethical tradition? Or, did Maslow live these 171 contradictions and never really and consciously coordinate and integrate them. Toward the end of the interview, Maslow trivializes the philosophi- cal differences between behavioristic psychology, mainstream psychology, and humanistic psychology. He is "convinced that many of our differences in opinions and philosophy are characterlogical differences and tempera- mental differences" (p. 49). And he looks forward to an "eclectic psychol- ogy" with a more "comprehensive philosophy of psychology." No fleeting, but significant, personal revelations that link the life to the work are unearthed in the interview with Gardner Murphy. The closest is the example Murphy gives of the human being's potential capacity for universal or cosmic awareness:

It is very similar to what you get in Wordsworth's Ode on Intimations of Immorality. It is the experience of the small child in belonging, not just to his parents, or not just to his home, but somehow to this whole universe....

When I saw my wife teaching Sara Lawrence girls eighteen and twenty years old the appreciation of small children, helping them to under- stand and to love small children, I would say that hardly anything in human life could be more beautiful or more magnificent. (pps. 65 and 66)

Although his guiding expression as a practitioner of psychology, "Cast your material into invariant form," comes close to capturing the phe- nomenological spirit, upon further reflection it turns out to be naturalistic and reductionistic: "You can get your phenomenon to the point where you can see that you're not dealing with the whimsies of different media, but with the basic uniformity of the mathematical pattern" (p. 64; my empha- sis). In spite of his "wholistic" approach to psychology which is a byproduct of his eclectic open-mindedness, Murphy is still grounded in natural scientific psychology. It is not surprising, therefore, to hear him say, "I don't think that phenomenological descriptions are very good" (p. 64) in uncovering the cosmic structures of consciousness, and to hear him say further in this imaginative dialogue with humanistic psycholo- gists :

I just don't think that they have a very great deal that's new to offer.... I just say, "Let's use the same careful standards that we would use in any kind of [natural] scientific effort." If they would say, "We're not trying to be scientists," I would say, "Okay, then you've got the whole world of literature and philosophy and if this is your message, fine. But if by humanistic psychology you mean you're going to do more than the playwright and the novelist and the historian can do; if you're going to attempt the discipline of a psychology, a [natural] scientific study, then meet the standards of science." (p. 83)