The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment, part 4 of 8
If a healthy person is well-adjusted, what are they well-adjusted to? To a bad culture? To a dominating parent? What shall we think of a well-adjusted slave? A well-adjusted prisoner?
What is sex? How do we explore the mystery of vulnerability? Under what circumstances are the natural functions of the body a revelation of emotional power? What does heat, skin, touch, cum, shit, piss, milk, saliva, mucus or lubrication teach us about intimacy? Can we achieve moments free of all body horror, free of shame, free of worry? How do we explain failure to our partners, or to ourselves? How do we explain illness or disability? But also, how do we explain lust? How do we explain arching our back, or pining someone down, or being pinned down, how do we explain what we want or why do we want it? But why do we want it?
Can we imagine such freedom as a world in which we never fail? A world where our partners never fail us? Beyond sex, a world where every moment is a peak experience, exuberant, joyful, tender? But then, as Auden asked, who can live for long, in an euphoric dream?
Most of us know what euphoria feels like. Some have such need of such moments they chase them with drugs. For reasons unknown, it seems humans are unable to live the mystery forever. Fly as high as you like, at some point you must land.
Peak experiences. Sexual or spiritual, in the comfort of one’s home, or traveling. Memories that stay with us and become part of our identity. Years later we recall the moments, the way the sunlight came into the room, the smell of the person we were near, the healthy way our muscles ached, the clarity we felt in our mind. Why can’t every moment be a peak experience?
There are paths forward, paths that have not yet been explored. Life doesn't have to be boring. The banal doesn't have to be standard. Even if we cannot live forever in moments of pure flow, we can enjoy more moments at the peak than what is now common.
An awakening of sorts has been going on for some decades, but the world keeps derailing our potential education. Movements spring up and then are commercialized and become as stifling as any cult. The leaders of the movements often disappoint. Some teachers engage in unethical and abusive behavior.
None of which changes the simple fact that many of us spend most of our days engaged in banal activities, and yet a more engaging lifestyle is certainly possible.
Again, to bring the subject back to sex, compare your average experience with what you know is possible. If you can imagine how much better that part of your life could be, then you should wonder how much better every part of your life can be.
I'm not endorsing a cult by saying this, I'm simply pointing out what I think is a common sense observation, that modern life doesn't seem well organized for human happiness. While we may not be able to live every moment as a peak experience, it certainly should be possible for more people to experience more honesty, more authenticity, more truth, more liberation, and all of it more often.
The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment
By Barbara Ehrenreich
Copyright © 1983
Page 88-91
Chapter 7
From Conformity to “Growth”: The New Psychology
“Gone is the angst of European existential analysis. Gone too is the doubt and ambiguity of Freudian psychoanalysis. In other words, the demons have floated away. In their place is energy, flow, acceptance, nurture, tenderness, joy.”
Joel Kovel, describing the new psychology in A Complete Guide to Therapy, 1976
Starting in the fifties, psychology also began to revise its view of men’s lives and prospects. In a turnabout every bit as drastic as medicine’s reversal on gender and health, psychology discarded maturity as the universal developmental goal and introduced the doctrine of growth. Where the life cycle had been seen as a quick climb leading to the plateau of maturity, there was now an endlessly upward-curving arc. Where there had been one turning point marked by the completion of the developmental tasks, there was now an ascending and variable sequence of “growth experiences,” which would include, as the new psychology grew emboldened by its own growth, not only routine matters like intramarital adjustments, but divorce, the loss of a job and even, eventually dying as a “growth experience.”
Abraham Maslow announced the new psychology in the spirit of a scientist who had momentarily abandoned his usual caution to leak an astounding laboratory finding to the press:
There is now emerging over the horizon a new conception of human sickness and of human health, a psychology that I find so thrilling and so full of wonderful possibilities that I yield to the temptation to present it publicly even before it is checked and confirmed, and before it can be called reliable scientific knowledge.
...Maslow’s scientific contribution - for he insisted that he belonged to the company of “tough-minded scientists” rather than that of “religionists, philosophers, yearners, utopians, pollyanna’s, etc.” - was to open up to psychology the study of “healthy” people. Freud had gone wrong, he believed, by paying undue attention to the “sick” and neurotic patient, and this concentration had led to an unnecessarily dim view of the human condition. For his own empirical data, Maslow turned to the study of people he judged to be not only the healthiest but also in some sense the best. Problems in the methodology of selection had to be overcome, for he acknowledged that some highly creative people, like Byron, Wagner and Van Gogh, “were certainly not psychologically healthy people.” With the obvious mental cases out of the way, there were still plenty of healthy creative people, and he settled on a list that included Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, Albert Einstein, Eleanor Roosevelt, Jane Addams, William James, Spinoza, Albert Schweitzer and Aldous Huxley. Such people, in Maslow’s judgment, were “self-actualizing”; not only had they mastered the routine business of living (in a way that a drifter like Van Gogh, for example, had not), but they had gone on to realize their fullest human potential. For people like these maturity was not a matter of settling down, but of strenuous ongoing actualization, moving from one “peak experience” to another, ceaselessly, into old age. If a few people could achieve the creative overdrive represented by self-actualization (SA), then why not everyone else? The task for psychology was to help the estimated 99 percent of the population who fell short of SA to grow to the fullest potential latent in their own unique and untapped “inner selves.”
The eventual triumph of the Human Potential Movement, or the “Maslovian Revolution,” is a matter of record. Maslow himself had been one of the first to recognize the growth potential of a psychology that addressed itself to the potential for growth in everyone, and had laid claim, as early as 1962, to “A Larger Jurisdiction for Psychology” (the title of the first section of Toward a Psychology of Being). As human potential therapist and Esalen functionary William Schutz put it, in his book Joy, “If there is one statement true of every living person it must be this: He hasn’t achieved his full potential.” Everyone was a potential candidate for growth, and everyone was a potential winner in the therapies, encounters, exercises and guided experiences that offered, not the painful introspection of classical psychoanalysis, but “joy and more joy.” It helped that the Human Potential Movement, with its emphasis on spontaneity and the goodness of impulses, echoed the hedonistic message of the consumer culture. What was no less important to its success, the new psychology offered its own critique of the consumer culture: It was right to want “something more out of life,” and that “something more” could itself be purchased as one of many commoditized therapeutic experiences including, by the late sixties, Gestalt therapy, nude therapy, encounter groups, primal scream therapy and transactional analysis, plus their combinations and improved versions. At its peak, as Joel Kovel has written, the new psychology was both an industry and a kind of secular religion, enlisting hundreds of thousands of middle-class Americans in the project of self-improvement through psychological growth.
...The charge that the new psychology was “the ideology of conformism” flattens out a real and historic change. “Adjusted to what?” Maslow demanded of the truly conformist psychology which still prevailed, “To a bad culture? To a dominating parent? What shall we think of a well-adjusted slave? A well-adjusted prisoner?”
If the human potential was intrinsically good and, for all practical purposes, uncharted by science, then there was no firm ground left from which to attack the deviant or nonconformist. All trajectories were possible as each unique and groping “self” reached toward fulfillment; the old end-point of “maturity” was gone, and there was no limit on growth.