Pop Psychology
Pop psychology emerged as a significant movement in the 1960s, challenging the prevailing behaviorist and psychoanalytic paradigms that dominated the field of psychology in the previous decade. Influential figures such as Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, and Rollo May shifted the focus towards self-actualization, a proactive approach to personal growth, and the importance of individual consciousness. Maslow introduced the concept of self-actualization, emphasizing that human potential extends beyond mere survival needs. Rogers advocated for a client-centered, nondirective therapeutic approach that encouraged personal insights and self-understanding. May contributed existential and phenomenological perspectives, emphasizing the depth of human experience.
The movement sparked widespread societal interest, leading to the development of various techniques and training programs aimed at enhancing human relations, such as encounter groups and sensitivity training. Although often criticized as "touchy-feely," pop psychology resonated with many, as it promoted the idea that personal growth is accessible to all, not just an elite few. Its impact extended beyond psychology, influencing social movements and educational practices, and leading to a more humanistic approach in various fields. Despite its decline in prominence, the legacy of pop psychology remains evident in contemporary discussions around consciousness, personal empowerment, and self-help.
Pop Psychology
A movement emphasizing the actualization of human potential. Popular trends in psychology during the 1960’s shifted from models of neurosis and adjustment to those facilitating personal growth and a fuller life.
Origins and History
During the 1950’s, behaviorism dominated psychology in the United States. By focusing on observable behavioral responses to stimuli, behaviorists aimed to demonstrate that psychological life was the mechanistically determined result of cause-effect sequences to be explained from a purely external viewpoint, without recourse to concepts of consciousness or any other notions of mental life. In clinical settings, psychoanalysis provided an alternative, but it also was governed by a mechanical view of psychological life, envisioning all motivation, feeling, and action to be the outcomes of instincts and other unconscious drives. However, although behaviorism and psychoanalysis dominated the 1950’s, three psychologists, Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, and Rollo May, were laying the groundwork for the alternative vision that would emerge in the 1960’s.
Maslow, Rogers, and May
Maslow’s Motivation and Personality (1954) showed that people are not only reactive but also proactive and that human striving is not exhausted by coping with environmental stimuli but has “farther reaches,” including an intrinsic interest in actualizing all potential. Maslow’s specification of this tendency toward “self-actualization” subsequently became a cornerstone in the emergence of a pop psychology devoted to fostering such self-actualization.
Simultaneously, Rogers was developing an alternative approach to psychotherapy. Rather than manipulating the client’s responses (as behaviorists would) or interpreting what they “really” meant (as psychoanalysts would), Rogers advocated a “nondirective” approach, one that would remain “client centered” in order to facilitate a deepening of the clients’ own self-understanding of their experience. His first book, Client-Centered Therapy (1951), had a profound impact as the pace of change quickened in the 1960’s.
May, trained as a psychoanalyst, contributed significantly by introducing European existentialism and phenomenology to American psychology. These philosophies provided powerful ways to attend to the experience of the person and were already used in psychoanalysis in Europe by renowned practitioners such as Ludwig Binswanger and Medard Boss. In Man’s Search for Himself (1953) and Existence (1958), May introduced American readers to a new vision of the human psychological capacity for deeply meaningful experience in a time pervaded by a sense of emptiness, loneliness, and boredom.
In the 1960’s, these isolated voices of protest began to gather momentum and advance a fundamental alternative to psychology’s starkly behaviorist landscape. In place of the prevailing psychology of adjustment, pop psychology proposed a psychology of fulfillment. The larger sociocultural relevance of this change drew an enormous popular response from people attracted by the movement’s timely rejection of narrow ways of living and its aspiration to develop the full range of human possibility.
New Techniques
An early development was the start of “T-groups” human-relations training for managers in business. These were much influenced by Rogers, who served as a consultant. They took the form of what later became more generally known as encounter groups and emphasized sensitivity training procedures for learning to become more aware of one’s actual experience in the moment and those of others. Beyond the corporate world, the prospect of developing fuller capacities for human relations sparked widespread interest, and growth centers were instituted, offering a wide variety of seminars, workshops, and exercises. The most well-known of these is the Esalen Institute in California.
A profusion of techniques soon emerged: transactional analysis, sensory awareness, Gestalt, body work, meditation, psychosynthesis, and even nude marathon encounter sessions. The human potential movement was born. Although its procedures were disparaged as “touchy-feely” by mainstream psychology, one of its central concepts, the idea of “getting in touch with one’s feelings,” had a wide appeal.
The Value of Consciousness
The value the movement placed on immediate experience recognized the worth of a person’s consciousness and so provided a potent antidote to the conformism of the previous era, which sought validation outside the individual. As long as psychology denied validity to consciousness (as behaviorism had done in the 1950’s), norms could be kept at the extrinsic level. Pop psychology’s highlight on consciousness made the intrinsic level a frontier for exploration, with books such as Clark Moustakas’s Creativity and Conformity (1967), May’s Love and Will (1969), and Maslow’s Toward a Psychology of Being (1962, second edition 1968) and Religion, Values, and Peak Experiences (1964).
In place of the 1950’s conformist norm of social adjustment, pop psychology promoted a deeper purpose: the development of intrinsic, creative capacities of consciousness. Such an aspiration necessarily departed from any notions of one-size-fits-all thinking. For example, Maslow’s research on those who had contributed significant innovations clearly showed that their intrinsic motivation was quite distinct from the adjustment model’s reliance on “deficiency needs” as the basis for human striving.
Pop psychology reached beyond the prevailing assumption of a narrow self that just wants to feed its mouth and focused attention on the larger, transcendent self by speaking to the best in humans. For instance, Rogers’s client-centered therapy incorporates the insight that the power to heal is already within each person. R. D. Laing, a British psychiatrist, contributed powerfully to this vision with his insightful understanding that even psychosis could be a journey of the human psyche toward fulfillment. His scholarly books during the 1960’s, especially The Divided Self (1960) and The Politics of Experience (1967) became anthems for a vast American audience. His scathing criticism of the medical model’s prevailing tendency to view the psychotic patient only in organic terms revised the understanding and treatment of mental illness. Various American psychiatrists, most notably Thomas Szasz, joined in elaborating this critique.
Pop psychology’s strongest message about the larger realm of human potential stressed its nonexclusive nature: Human potential is not the preserve of the elite or the wealthy. This popularizing movement brought previously elite values to everyone, proffering psychological growth beyond mere adjustment as a universal potentiality. Rather than seeing the average person as deficient, pop psychology addressed an innate potential in all to manifest superior capacity. Furthermore, personal growth was depicted as something that could be cultivated by the individual. In sharp contrast to the behavioristic and psychoanalytic reliance on expert authorities as the necessary agents of change, pop psychology showed that higher levels of human development are attainable by the self or with the help of other laypersons, support groups, or growth centers because of the ultimate ability of all people to come to insights on their own.
Impact
During the 1960’s, pop psychology changed both mainstream psychology and society at large. Its societal impact was largely in leading people to question what they had taken for granted, to examine their own experience, and to reclaim responsibility for themselves as autonomous agents rather than mechanistic robots. These influences reverberated beyond the field of psychology, conjoining and infusing larger social movements such as the antiwar movement, the Civil Rights movement, and the women’s movement.
Within academia, pop psychology also left its mark, as humanistic organizations, scholarly conferences, and journals appeared. Early on the scene were the Association for Humanistic Psychology, founded in 1962, and the Journal of Humanistic Psychology, begun in 1961. In 1964, this ferment culminated in a meeting at Old Saybrook, Connecticut, bringing together many of psychology’s most prominent thinkers to formulate a vision for a “new psychology.” These included Gardner Murphy, Gordon Allport, May, Rogers, Maslow, James Bugental, George Kelly, Moustakas, Henry Murray, Charlotte Buhler, and Jacques Barzun.
Perhaps the most significant long-term impact was the establishment of various graduate programs that taught the foundational insights of pop psychology to the next generation of psychologists. Universities that incorporated humanism into their programs include Brandeis University, under Maslow’s direction; the University of Florida, under Sid Jourard’s leadership; and the Merrill-Palmer Institute, with Clark Moustakas. These various programs built an institutional base to introduce to psychology the study of previously neglected dimensions of human existence such as values, subjectivity, and experience.
Perhaps the high-water mark during the 1960’s was reached when Rogers and then Maslow were elected president of the American Psychological Association (APA), the major mainstream psychology organization in the country.
Subsequent Events
Pop psychology flourished in the 1970’s. In 1971, the APA established an interest group, the Division of Humanistic Psychology, for its members, providing humanism with a home and a platform. This division subsequently launched a journal, The Humanistic Psychologist . More graduate programs began to incorporate humanistic psychology, and psychology began to import insights from the East, particularly from Hinduism, Taoism, and Buddhism. Although humanistic organizations, journals, and schools are still thriving, the momentum that brought them into being has shifted. Pop psychology was the work of multiple leaders, had various levels, and was interpreted various ways and, therefore, had an ephemeral quality.
With the passing of the larger social ethos of the 1960’s, the pop psychology movement receded from center stage. However, it left enduring legacies in a variety of areas. In academic psychology, it has become respectable to talk about consciousness. In psychotherapy, the trend toward empowering people and using self-help and support groups continued, as have the forms of professional psychotherapy this trend promulgated. Beyond psychology, the influence of the movement can be seen most clearly in the fields of education and business. Rogers’s emphasis on students’ intrinsic interest (Freedom to Learn, 1969, and Freedom to Learn in the 1980’s, 1983) inspired a humanistic education movement that fundamentally altered the terms of the pedagogical debate. In business, Maslow applied his ideas to the newly emerging field of organizational development, with books such as Eupsychian Management (1965). He introduced new notions of “bottom-up” rather than “top-down” management that have become the cornerstone of subsequent management theories.
Despite its influence, pop psychology as a movement is rarely discussed in the twenty-first century, and the term is more often used to refer to popular psychology, a nonfiction genre of books explaining psychological concepts to lay readers, of which self-help is one of the most popular subcategories.
Bibliography
Berne, Eric. Games People Play. Grove Press, 1964.
Bugental, J. F. T. Challenges of Humanistic Psychology. McGraw-Hill, 1967.
Harris, Thomas. I’m OK, You’re OK. Harper, 1967.
Laing, R. D. The Politics of Experience. Pantheon, 1967.
Maslow, Abraham. Toward a Psychology of Being. 3rd ed, John Wiley & Sons, 1998.
May, Rollo. Love and Will. W. W. Norton, 1969.
Misiak, Henryk, and Virginia S. Sexton. Phenomenological, Existential, and Humanistic Psychologies. Grune & Stratton, 1973.
Peterson, Severin. A Catalog of the Ways People Grow. Ballantine Books, 1971.
Rogers, Carl. On Becoming a Person. Houghton Mifflin, 1961.