The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God (47 page)

One basic difference between Rogers and Freud lay in the fact that Rogers did not believe, as Freudians did, that therapy needed to be a five-day-a-week affair, lasting for months or years on end before it was effective. Humanistic psychologists thought that situational factors were as important as the early years and the subject’s relationship with his or her parents. The “self-actualizing tendency,” popularized by Rogers, was specifically designed to be political in the widest sense, encouraging people to develop “an optimistic, self-determined, positive philosophy about human exist
ence rather than one that is cynical, negative, and externally determined.” As he himself put it, “it is the
client
[not the patient, note] who knows what hurts, what directions to go, what problems are crucial, what experiences have been deeply buried. It began to occur to me that unless I had a need to demonstrate my own cleverness and learning, I would do better to rely upon the client for the direction of movement in the process.” The therapist, he said elsewhere, should “prize” the client and “demystify” the practice of therapy.

His theories took no account of possible disease processes, unconscious motivation or developmental history. Rogers saw people as being on an endless growth journey, “a journey which is sometimes blocked by negative or incongruent images of oneself”; and freeing them so that they might accelerate the journey became the great challenge of humanistic psychology. This is what came to be called the Human Potential Movement, expressed through more than three hundred “growth centers” in the United States.

At the same time, as Richard Evans points out in his biography, Rogers was responsible for a new level of discontent. “The discrepancy between what people are ordinarily
able
to make happen in their relationships and what they have come to believe is
possible
to make happen . . . is the cause of much disruption in their lives.” Essentially, the Rogers view is “the more the better. . . . Rogers would have you believe that the more congruence, the more honesty, the more intimacy, the more closeness, the more empathy, the better.” He concedes that Rogers has changed the way we all think about human relationships, and given us a new way to be with one another, “an ethical basis for human interaction”; but his methods allow little role for power, status, culture, history, technology or politics, and this is why, perhaps, they have not always brought the lasting change that is promised.

Rogers’s most characteristic idea, self-actualization, “implies that the person is acceptantly aware of what’s going on within and is consequently changing practically every moment and is moving on in complexity.” “I
ooze
toward my future,” he famously said. Rogers saw a division between the ideal self and the real self, his research showing, he believed, that people did not value all aspects of their self equally, and that what was impor
tant for therapy was the picture of the self that they would like to be, as compared with the self as they currently perceived it.
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A HIGHER HUMANISM: THE NEW INTIMACY

In his “client-centered” therapy, Rogers concentrated on the present, accepted the client as a separate person without judging him or her, as an equal, rather than perceiving the relationship as one of the doctor “above” the client. It was this attitude as much as anything else that led him to create what came to be called “encounter groups,” which he thought were “one of the most significant social inventions of this century because it is a way of eliminating alienation and loneliness, of getting people into better communication with one another, of helping them develop fresh insights into themselves, and helping them get feedback from others so that they perceive how they are received by others.” He thought that it would not be a bad idea if universities allowed students time to participate in client-centered therapy, which might help toward the full development of their personality “and provide for an opportunity to become more self-actualized.” (He noted that the universities had never taken to psychoanalysis.)

One of the results of his therapeutic technique, he said, in which the therapist was more a “skill facilitator” than a therapist in the conventional way, was that self-hatred decreased, people became more accepting of themselves, more confident, more constructive. They were moving, he said, from a preoccupation with guilt (the religious imperative) to a preoccupation with identity, shifting from a political view of life to a more philosophical one. There was, however, a danger that the preoccupation with identity was taking the spontaneity out of life. Part of the success of his approach, he said, was owing to the fact that “[t]he churches ceased some time ago to have a significant societal influence.”
15

Rogers concluded that men and women are “incurably social” animals and that “a new configuration” was emerging, “a higher humanism,” in which people had a desire for authenticity and eschewed the old acceptance of authority for authority’s sake, whether in government, military,
church, corporation or school; there was abroad a new wish for intimacy, a distrust of the abstractions of science, and a conviction that “within ourselves lie undiscovered worlds.” This “new configuration,” he concluded, engenders “almost the antithesis of Puritan man, with his strict beliefs and strong controls over behavior, who founded our country. [The new man] is very different from the person who brought about the Industrial Revolution, with his ambition, productivity and greed, and competitiveness. He is deeply opposed to the Communist culture with its controls on individual thought and behavior in the interest of the state. His characteristics and his behavior run strongly counter to the orthodoxies and dogmas of the major Western religions—Catholicism, Protestantism, and Judaism.” In a way, he said, we were seeing a return to the situation of classical Greece or the Renaissance. Given all this, in the modern world what he called “situation ethics” were better than “some absolute ethic,” as for instance laid down by religion.
16

SITUATION ETHICS

This phrase “situation ethics” refers to a movement within religious circles that ran parallel to what was happening in psychology. Traditionally, religious ethics took their color from the Bible or the Ten Commandments, and were held to apply everywhere and in all situations—to be “universal.” In 1954, Reverend Ernest Bruder, a prominent figure in the pastoral care movement, wrote a highly critical review of Monsignor Fulton Sheen’s
Peace of Soul
, which as we have seen was a response to Liebman’s
Peace of Mind
(see p. 352).

Bruder pilloried Sheen for giving the impression that “peace of soul” was a state which could be reached only by accepting the thinking and dictates of others. This was not “peace,” claimed Bruder, but an “unhealthy resignation to authority.” Religious doctrine encouraged an unhealthy state of affairs, he went on, and many agreed. Paul Tillich, H. Richard Niebuhr and Joseph Fletcher all advocated that their fellow Americans oppose “legalism,” as the Sheen approach was called, and cultivate a non-authoritarian moral code “by looking inward and submitting to God’s
love,” thereby challenging the universality of moral principles. Tillich put the new approach well: “Let us suppose that a student comes to me faced with a difficult moral decision. In counseling him I don’t quote the Ten Commandments, or the words of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, or any humanistic ethics. Instead, I tell him to find out what the commandment of
agape
in his situation is, and then decide for it even if traditions and conventions stand against his decision.”

In other words, the one axiom to follow was the commandment of
agape
, or the law of love.

In the 1950s, religious leaders began promoting “situation ethics,” and in 1966, Joseph Fletcher’s
Situation Ethics: The New Morality
was published, selling 150,000 copies in the first two years. Fletcher became an intellectual celebrity. Vatican II (1962–65) went so far as to consider what is changeable and what is universal in a moral context.
17

THE APOTHEOSIS OF OPTIMISM

Arguably, the people who benefited most from these changes, albeit not for a decade or more, were women. The United Methodist Church, the second-largest Protestant denomination, opened up its clergy to women in 1956. The Presbyterians and Episcopalians followed suit in relatively short order. The late 1940s had seen the publication of Simone de Beauvoir’s
The Second Sex
(1949) and Ferdinand Lundberg and Marynia Farnham’s
Modern Woman: The Lost Sex
(1947). Particularly among those educated to university level, attitudes toward women working, having careers and even becoming president changed markedly. In the late 1940s, several states repealed laws preventing women serving on juries, more women were going to college (37.1 percent as against 31.6 percent), Equal Opportunity Day was instituted in 1956 and within two years thirty state governors had given it their public support. More women were willing to abandon their virginity before marriage, and more men agreed that it did not matter if their brides were not virgins on their wedding day. The availability of the contraceptive pill in 1960 naturally had a big effect on behavior, and gradually on attitudes, too.

The 1950s saw much less disparaging of women, though many still felt that their biological imperative was motherhood and the kitchen. Abraham Maslow applied his understanding of humanistic psychology to women as much as to men, and in the late 1960s women would find his and Carl Rogers’s theories very helpful in what became known as consciousness-raising groups. Betty Friedan, in her highly successful
The Feminine Mystique
(1963), used many Maslovian and Rogerian concepts such as self-actualization.

One last, and rather different, factor that came into play was, paradoxically enough, science. By the end of the 1950s, it was being increasingly recognized that science, however successful it was in solving questions of fact and in producing new technologies that made life more agreeable, did not solve the enduring questions relating, for instance, to beauty, courage, loyalty—the “realities by which men live in the fullest sense,” as Howard Keniston of the University of Michigan put it. Intuitive understanding, he said, “is the only access we have to the deepest and highest aspects of our individual and collective lives.” Not everyone would have agreed with his words, or their implications, but even Albert Einstein had said that “objective knowledge provides us with powerful instruments for the achievement of certain ends, but the ultimate goal itself and the longing to reach it must come from another source.”
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America’s great turn inward during the 1940s and ’50s, to be followed, to an extent, by other Western nations, marked, in one observer’s words, “the apotheosis of the optimistic portrayal of the self.” It embodied, above all, the decline of the doctrine of original sin: the individual was no longer seen as “inherently depraved”—instead, the self became what one made of it. This freed people, in the words of Norman Mailer, in
The White Negro
, “to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self.”

Thus, as post-war prosperity established itself, for the growing numbers who had left the church the goal of salvation was replaced by that of self-realization. It was conceivably the biggest acceleration in secularization there has ever been, and it laid the intellectual and emotional groundwork for the therapy boom that took place from the 1960s on.

HEIGHT PSYCHOLOGY

The work of the Viennese psychiatrist Viktor Frankl provides an apt link between this chapter and the next, on the Holocaust and its effect on religious understanding and secularization.

Frankl decided to be a doctor very early on, and was fascinated by psychoanalysis. He wrote to Freud while still at school, as a result of which the master submitted one of Frankl’s essays to the
International Journal of Psychoanalysis
. Under Freud’s influence Frankl turned to psychiatry, and by 1939 he was head of the neurology department at the Rothschild Hospital, the only Jewish hospital in Vienna. This gave him and his family some protection against deportation, but in 1942, when the American consulate in Vienna told him he was eligible for a visa that would guarantee his survival, he decided to stay, probably because his parents were aged. In September that year Viktor and his family were arrested and deported, Frankl spending the next three years in four concentration camps—Theresienstadt, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Kaufering and Türkheim, part of the Dachau complex. He and his father had been separated from the rest of the family, and he watched his father die in the camp where they were then incarcerated. When Viktor returned home, he found that his mother, brother and wife had also perished.

Before he went to the camps he had begun a book on a new form of psychotherapy (which we shall come to), but it was confiscated and he never saw it again. His experiences during those years, however, reinforced his beliefs, and when he returned to Vienna he wrote a new book, in nine days. It was published in 1946 in German as
A Psychologist Experiences the Concentration Camp
, the title later changed to
Say Yes to Life in Spite of Everything
; and in 1959 it appeared in English as
Man’s Search for Meaning
. It has since sold more than twelve million copies in twenty-four languages, and has been voted among the ten most influential books in America.
19

Frankl evolved “logotherapy,” by which he meant a system of psychiatric treatment for what he called the “meta-clinical problem of our day”—
namely, the “mass neurosis” concerning the meaning of life. His most vivid insight, he said, had come to him in the camps with his identification of what someone else had called “give-up-itis.” One day an individual in the camps would simply refuse to get out of bed in the morning, dig deep into a secret pocket to find one remaining cigarette, and start to smoke. Inevitably, within forty-eight hours that person was dead.