The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God (46 page)

Spock has been compared to Locke and Rousseau in the effect he had on our thinking, and his book was translated into three dozen languages. Published in 1946, it sold a million copies in its first year, four million by 1952, then went on selling a million a year throughout the 1950s. Two-thirds of American mothers read it, and surveys showed that although in the early 1940s only 4 percent of families fed their babies when they were hungry, by the end of the decade that figure had risen to 65 percent. At the same time, children were spanked and scolded less often.

Spock’s importance from our point of view is that from Freud he developed a moral base that sprang from human experience rather than from a deity. His “rules” fostered a belief in the human individual, in dignity and even nobility.
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THE ORIGINS OF SELF-HELP

There were other important secondary effects too. Spock’s book, or rather its success, invited a revision of Freudian ideas, and in emphasizing the emotional satisfaction of being a good mother, it helped to kick-start an
explosion of self-help books, some better than others. This was the beginning of what Philip Rieff would soon call “the Triumph of the Therapeutic,” and it helped establish the therapy boom that we shall be exploring later.

The new ethic, as spawned by Spock, and the new understanding of the overlap between religion and psychotherapy as outlined by Liebman, coincided with a growing criticism of mass culture and the bureaucracy that sustained it while at the same time impoverishing many aspects of life. Here, two European expatriate psychoanalysts were especially influential.

The first was Erich Fromm, a German refugee who had worked for the Frankfurt Institute in Weimar Germany, one of whose projects was an attempt to reconcile Marx and Freud in a critique of modern capitalism. Fromm’s books
Escape from Freedom
(1941),
Man for Himself
(1947) and
The Sane Society
(1955) caught the mood of the moment perfectly. His work described the antagonism between the aims of modern society and the full development of individuals, and the emergence within capitalism of a distinctive form of human character, one with “a ‘marketing’ orientation that compelled people to ‘sell’ their personalities in a social market which rewarded charmers and back-slappers.”

Fromm argued that human nature was, in essence, a cultural product, that the religious quest was basic, and that in modern society the central problem was that real freedom was isolating, making people lonely in a way that they found difficult to manage. “The ambiguity of autonomy had become, for many people, simply unbearable.” For Fromm, the modern world encouraged certain reactions in people that were “non-productive”: people were “receptive” (dependent on outside sources for support and reward), “exploitative” (determined to take what they wanted), “hoarding” (stingy with their goods and feelings) or “marketing” (eager to sell themselves in a personality market).
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Karen Horney was another German refugee, from Berlin. In
The Neurotic Personality of Our Time
and
New Ways in Psychoanalysis
, she argued that aggressive, competitive Western society had produced neurosis in “practically everyone”: this distorted the growth of the personality, fostering cravings for “affection, power, and status,” where conformity was the lowest common denominator of society.

Both Fromm and Horney therefore embraced self-realization as the
goal of life. “Growth” was to be achieved, first, by distinguishing the “real” self from the “public” self, which was in part a “pseudo” self. Underneath the pseudo self and the public self was an original self, a deeper self, which was capable of self-realization. For Fromm this is what virtue was—the expression of one’s “unique individuality”—and it was the job of therapy to realize this unique individuality, the basic currency of which was love. He was highly critical of the Calvinists and of Kant, who deprecated self-love. Only those who truly loved themselves, Fromm said, could truly love others, and this was the basis for living together in society. In
The Art of Loving
(1956), the “spontaneous affirmation of others” in a form of union that would maintain one’s integrity and one’s individuality was identified as the way to realize one’s potential.

Karen Horney was even more explicit in arguing that moral problems “were involved in every neurosis.” She thought that both children and adults, overwhelmed by a threatening world, “compensated for their anxiety by creating an ideal image of themselves—the ‘idealized self’—which gradually constituted their sense of who they were.” The result was “their self-imposed subjection to ‘the tyranny of the should.’” The unending hunt to realize the perfectionist image inevitably trapped them within “a pride system, which veiled a hidden self-contempt and alienation. Life became a series of hostile inward encounters, with the ‘actual’ self living in a constant tension, torn between the tyrannical demands of the ‘ideal’ self and the insistent efforts of the submerged ‘real’ self to express its need for spontaneous growth.” This meant that, for her, self-realization, the move toward autonomy and fulfillment, was as much
moral
progress as anything else. Here too, then, the overlap between religious and psychological concerns was evident.

All this reflection and analysis came at a good time. Thanks to the GI Bill, there was an explosion of returning soldiers only too keen to go to college, spreading higher education more widely than ever before. The same people contributed to the post-war baby boom, which created more parents than ever before. Many of the GIs had been stationed abroad where norms were different, and where the danger they had been in had been accompanied by a charged sexual atmosphere (who knew what would happen next?), from which there was no going back. All this had ramifi
cations for psychological and religious change. In 1951, the psychologist Carl Rogers claimed that “professional interest in psychotherapy was in all likelihood the most rapidly growing area in the social sciences today.” “Psychology, like God,” said E. Brooks Holifield in his
History of Pastoral Care in America
, “seemed omnipresent, if not omnipotent.” In 1957,
Life
magazine announced: “This is the Age of Psychology.”
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But the change that was being brought about, in America at any rate, was to an extent camouflaged by the fact that various forms of “liberal” behavior were taking place at a very conservative time.

No one illustrates this more clearly than Norman Vincent Peale. Peale was close to the Republicans, to the Eisenhower administration, and to Billy Graham’s National Association for Evangelicals. He was a conservative on racial issues, notoriously advising a young African-American woman not “to provoke matters” by marrying the white man she was in love with. At the same time, and important from our point of view, in his landmark work
The Power of Positive Thinking
, alongside chapters entitled “Try Prayer Power” and “How to Use Faith in Healing,” Peale was paralleling Spock in advocating far more liberal patterns of parenting, and establishing himself as one of the country’s leading proponents of psychological counseling. While he may be best known for his book having occupied the top slot in the
New York Times
best-seller lists for a record-breaking ninety-eight weeks, his more important contribution was his establishment in 1953 of a new type of hybrid organization, the American Foundation of Religion and Psychiatry (AFRP). This had two primary tasks—the provision of psychological training for clerics and the offer of counseling to the public.

A WARMER GOD: PASTORAL PSYCHOLOGY

By the time the AFRP was formed, in fact, psychology had invaded pastoral counseling to the extent that Brooks Holifield could announce the “Renaissance of Pastoral Psychology.” In 1939, pastoral psychology courses in seminaries were rare. But by 1950, four out of five theology schools had one or more people listed as “psychologists” on their faculty.
In 1947, the
Journal for Clinical Pastoral Work
and the
Journal of Pastoral Care
were founded;
Pastoral Psychology
appeared three years later. The latter soon had sixteen thousand subscribers, seven-eighths of them ministers. By 1955, three out of four American seminaries either had their own clinical training programs or were sending their students to approved clinical courses elsewhere, and seven universities, including the University of Chicago, had established advanced graduate programs in pastoral psychology, pastoral counseling or pastoral theology. By the end of the decade, 117 centers for clinical pastoral education had been established.

This was something of a turning point. Freud, though radical in so many ways, had always insisted that humans had limits, and that there were restrictions to what theory could achieve, and in this sense (if in no other) he came close, in mood at least, to traditional religion. But that went against the optimism of the post-war years. What was wanted now was what came to be called “humanistic psychology,” in which the emphasis was on a person’s ability to persevere, to overcome, to triumph; it is now that the words “potential” and “growth” begin to appear and re-appear, and this was reflected not just in therapy but in religion, too. About now, in sermons and in theological works, God becomes warmer, less forbidding, less judgmental.
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Alongside the professional journals in pastoral counseling came the textbooks, and here two stood out. The first was Seward Hiltner’s
Pastoral Counseling
and the second was Carl Rogers’s
Counseling and Psychotherapy
. Between them, these faced head-on the central dilemma posed when psychology was set alongside religion. Humanistic psychology, especially of the non-directive type proposed by Carl Rogers, was democratic and anti-authoritarian. Doris Mode, of the Institute for Rankian Psychoanalysis, objected: “A permissive atmosphere where nothing occurs but an echo of the clients’ own attitudes would indeed be empty of all value and judgment, and thereby of all therapy also.” She did not see how Rogerian therapy could work. Under his system, the therapist was so passive and non-judgmental, expressing no blame at any point, that she felt the therapist had abandoned all values of his own, the end result, she said, being a spiritual vacuum that prevented the patient (client) from ever becoming whole. “If God were not judgmental,” wrote Mode, “there would be no
meaning to life, and if he were not loving, there would be no fulfillment. Both of these concepts must flow through the therapist to the client if he is to become whole again.” Is the concept of wholeness here being used in a psychological or a theological way?

The fuzziness at the heart of the enterprise was shown by the fact that many of the mental health professionals in the American Foundation of Religion and Psychiatry were themselves reluctant to subscribe to any body of religious dogma or doctrine. In 1956, Iago Gladston, chairman of the research committee, admitted that he “dreaded to commit himself to another man’s concept of God” and refused to accept the “propriety” of spiritual counseling, preferring to await further research which would “give the answer as to whether spiritual therapy is a pious hope or an actuality.” In the AFRP, psychology took precedence over prayer and scripture reading.
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The church showed some resistance to certain of these developments, in particular psychoanalysis. Monsignor Fulton Sheen condemned psychoanalysis as a form of escapism, no more than an “unsatisfactory mix of materialism, hedonism, infantilism and eroticism”; and, in contrast to the confessional, therapy offered no norms or standards. “There are no more disintegrated people in the world than the patients of Freudian analysis.” This intransigence didn’t last, however, because in February 1954 Pope Pius XII gave a tentative go-ahead for pastoral psychology, after which more than 2,500 ministers took advantage of a summer course on the subject, held at St. John’s University in Minnesota.

As a result of these various changes, one can say that in America by the mid-1950s, Carl Rogers (and to a lesser extent Abraham Maslow and Rollo May) was more important than Sigmund Freud, and this marks the maturation of the “psychological turn,” the point at which a psychological model of “fulfillment” and “wholeness” began to outweigh the religious concept of “salvation.” This was true not least because of the media’s burgeoning interest in “personal fulfillment,” an obsession that would last for many years and has recently seen a resurgence. Alongside this, less emphasis was now placed on self-mastery than on self-expression.

“OOZING” INTO THE FUTURE

All these matters came to a head in the late 1950s when both Maslow and Rogers attempted to explain and clarify what was happening. At a psychology conference in Cincinnati in the autumn of 1959, Maslow spoke of what he called the “total collapse of all sources of values outside the individual.” He argued that there had been a breakdown of authority, a realization (even then) that neither economic prosperity nor political democracy was able to provide life with value and meaning, and that “there is no place else to turn but inward, to the self, as the locus of values.” Rogers was equally forthright. His main interest was what he called the “self-actualized” individual, by which he meant “the person who is living the process of the good life.” He had found, he said, that such individuals did not depend on the judgment of others or on their own past behavior, nor did they have any need for guiding principles. Instead, he said in his book
On Becoming a Person
, they looked within. “I find that increasingly such individuals are able to trust their total organismic reaction to a new situation because they discover to an ever-increasing degree that if they are open to their experience, doing what ‘feels right’ proves to be a competent and trustworthy guide to behavior which is truly satisfying.”
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There was a growing awareness also, says Alan Petigny, that truth could not be accessed through sacred texts, Sunday school, or an amorphous set of norms commonly known as “the American way.” Nor, for that matter, could science provide the answer, despite its enormous prestige in answering questions of fact. This is where the self-actualizing theories of Carl Rogers came in.