The Transition
Today’s Post
Last week we opened the subject of psychology as offering a secular approach to what the mystics have been practicing for millennia: finding God by finding ourselves.
- Recognizing God as the agent of the upwelling of complexity in Cosmic evolution
- Becoming aware of the presence of this upwelling in our own personal evolution
- Finding God in our search for our fundamental selves.
We saw how Freud pioneered this undertaking in his objective, secular and empirical manner (as opposed to that of the religious intuitive and scriptural-based approach). We also saw how, while offering a magnificent array of new concepts, and working empirically, Freud’s psychology nonetheless seemed predicated on a very negative assumption of our basic selves. To him, meditation, even via psychology, can be very dangerous indeed, since it shows our basic selves to be highly unreliable, even untrustworthy.
This week we will address an orthogonal approach to psychology which emerged in the last century. This different approach, while also consistent with the empirical perspectives and methods of science, assumed a core of the human person which was radically different from Freud.
From Freud to Existentialism
As we saw in the previous post, Freud was successful in developing an integrated system of thought which objectively addressed the whole of human activity. He pioneered the understanding of the human in terms of inner energies, motivations, stimuli and even “economies” that determine his development from birth to death, and did this while adopting the objective approach of science. His treatment of human irrationality and sexuality is unmatched. However, his underlying materialism, misogyny and overall pessimism left him with a definitely pessimistic outlook on the human person’s potential for satisfying relationships and personal maturity.
But we can find agreement between Freud and Teilhard on several things, such as the existence of a personal core of energy which underlies human growth and relationships, and understanding love as manifest in the reciprocal exchange of this energy between individual persons.
They sharply disagree, however, on the nature and source of this energy, and the role that this reciprocal exchange could have in positive growth, maturity, and even creation of the person involved in its exchange. The difference between these two perspectives sharpens further when they are applied to human relationships at the social level.
Freud’s thinking began to be reevaluated and modified as the increasing number of Western psychologists created a large body of empirical data which could be analyzed to support or challenge the propositions which originally formed the basis for Freud’s thinking. The relationship between the analyst and the analyzed evolved as well, due to the increasing educational level of the middle class, the growing acceptability of psychology by religion, and the emergence of expectations on the part of those undergoing analysis.
The Pioneers of Existentialism
In the mid twentieth century, several psychologists emerged with a distinctively different and more positive understanding of the human person and the dynamics of personal growth and relationships with others. This approach generally became known as “existential”. Their general methods became known as ‘counselling’, and adopted by religion as “pastoral counselling”.
Rollo May understood the basic tenet of existential psychotherapy as “that which stands with scientific analysis as expressed in the genius of Freud”. However, he saw the empirical data that science also brings into the picture as unfolding the understanding of the human person on a deeper and broader level than Freud. This deeper understanding assumes with Freud that it is possible to have an objective ‘science of man’. It does not, however, ‘fragmentize’ him by breaking him down, as did Freud, into compartments, and thus lose the grasp of the ‘whole’ in the tangled archipelago of the ‘parts’. Unlike therapeutic interpretation as practiced in Freudian psychoanalysis (which consists of referring a person’s experience to a pre-established theoretical framework) ‘existential’ interpretation seeks to understand how the person himself subjectively experiences reality, then works with him toward actualizing his potential to become whole.
With May, psychology began to progress from analysis and diagnosis to guided inner search. In doing so, it was emerging as assisted secular meditation.
Instead of focusing on psychopathology and what goes wrong with people, Abraham Maslow formulated a more positive account of human behavior which focused on what goes right. He was interested in human potential, and how it could be actualized. He believed that each person has a desire for self-fulfillment; namely, the tendency for him to “become actualized in what he is potentially”.
As we have seen, this requires us to first find ourselves, and then cooperate with the primal force which rises within us and in which lie our potentialities.
Ashley Montagu believed that as a consequence of humanity’s unique evolutionary history, in which
We are required to be highly cooperative to survive, human drives are oriented in the direction of growth and development in relationship and cooperation. He believed that what we are born for is “to live as if life and love were one”. Like Teilhard, he subscribed to the belief that evolution rises along an axis, and that we are located, both as individuals and society, on that axis.
These pioneers believed that the core of human personality is positive, not irrational and weighted toward destruction as Freud believed. Their clinical experience led them to recognize that the innermost core of man’s nature, at the deepest layers of his personality, the base of his “animal nature” is actually positive, basically socialized, forward-moving, rational and realistic. They saw the goal of psychology as first helping us find this inner self, then helping us learn to cooperate with it.
In scientific circles, however, this was a difficult concept to accept. In psychology, science’s first foray into the human psyche, Freud and his followers presented convincing arguments that the id, man’s basic and unconscious nature, is primarily composed of instincts which would, if permitted expression, result in incest, murder and other crimes.
In religious expressions as well, especially in the Luther-influenced conservative Christian traditions, our culture has been permeated with the concept that the human person is basically sinful (Luther’s “piles of manure covered by Christ”), and only by something approaching a miracle can this sinful nature be negated. The whole problem of therapy, as seen by these groups, is how to successfully hold these untamed forces in check, rather than have them emerge in the costly fashion of the neurotic.
In contrast, the existentialists believed that the reason for this negative belief, held by many psychologists even today, lay in the fact that since therapy uncovers hostile and anti-social feelings, one must assume that this proves the deeper and therefore basic nature of the human person to be unrelentingly negative. Only slowly has it become evident that these untamed and unsocial feelings are neither the deepest nor the strongest, and that the inner core of human personality is the organism itself which is, in addition to self-preserving, also highly social and capable of perfection.
The Next Post
This week we saw how the basic tenets of psychology began to evolve in the twentieth century from seeing the personal core as ‘dangerous’ to seeing it as a positive and trustworthy basis for human personal growth and successful relationships. Next week we will look in more detail at how one of the most pivotal Existentialists applied this approach and the results he recorded.