THE HUMAN POTENTIAL: THE CAREER OF AN IDEA IN THE UNITED STATES DURING THE THIRD QUARTER OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Open Access
- Author:
- Lumish, Michael William
- Graduate Program:
- History
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- March 15, 2008
- Committee Members:
- Greg Eghigian, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Gary Scott Cross, Committee Member
William Pencak, Committee Member
Mark Stewart Morrisson, Committee Member - Keywords:
- American History
Cultural History
the Human Potential Movement - 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 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 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.