Books

STILL CRAZY AFTER ALL THESE YEARS

America after World War II saw a psychological upheaval without precedent.
By means of drugs , meditation and self-help schemes, millions of people
sought to escape the values they had grown up with, the better to adapt to
contemporary social relations.

In "The Road to Malpsychia," (Encounter, 326 pages, $26.95) Joyce Milton
argues that such seekers for new wisdom were more than a bunch of
eccentrics. They were at the center of "a vast experiment in applied
psychology." Its premise was that human nature provides the beginnings of
an ethical and behavioral compass -- which proved true. Its conclusion was
that "traditional morality" could be painlessly replaced by psychotherapy
- -- which proved disastrous.

The father of this "humanistic psychology" was Abraham Maslow. A protege of
the anthropologist Ruth Benedict, Maslow thought people could have better
work habits and love lives, more spontaneity and less guilt, if they would
only heed the promptings of their inmost character. Progress toward
psychological health ("self-actualization") was to be charted through "peak
experiences," moments of religious vision or amatory transport when people
felt themselves to be "fully human."

Maslow's work found deserved success in the corporate world. His theories
on reducing intracompany rivalry and retraining workers in midcareer are
the bedrock of today's workplace. And Maslow was a scholar of considerable
integrity. He used primate data to show that Freud's theorizing on female
sexuality contained much baseless speculation. He demonstrated that Albert
Kinsey's sex research rested on skewed samples. A ruthless critic of his
own work, Maslow came to worry about the "impossibility of distinguishing
between a healthy peak experience and a manic attack."

He was right to. Maslow's ideas, as Ms. Milton shows, wound up giving carte
blanche to academic con men, like Timothy Leary, who used the lingo of peak
experience to proselytize for LSD. Leary parlayed federal subsidies and
endorsements from credulous clergymen into a Harvard professorship. Once
ensconced, he gave up all pretense of scholarly work, focusing his
attentions on commune living, booze, groupies and radical politics.

If Leary was the most fraudulent of the humanistic psychologists, the
group-therapy guru Carl Rogers was the most damaging. Rogers's
"human-potential movement" popularized such innovations as encounter
groups, the inner child and the group hug. This was therapy for "normals,"
meant to offer perfectly happy people a fuller interior life.

A floundering Christianity abetted his excesses. After Pope Paul VI called
in 1966 for "wide-ranging experimentation" in Catholicism, Rogers sent 60
facilitators to the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in Los Angeles.
Rogers's "touching exercises" turned out to be inconsistent with chastity;
within a year, more than half of the 560 nuns abandoned the order, most as
lesbians. Rogers would later work his magic at a Franciscan seminary in
Santa Barbara, Calif., leaving in his wake America's largest Catholic
pedophilia scandal until the recent one.

Accused of brainwashing and cult practices, Rogers responded by attributing
all such attacks to "the far right." (He was a pioneer in this regard,
too.) But the "feelings revolution" that grew out of his ideas suggests
that there was indeed something empty and opportunistic about them. The
used-car salesman Werner Erhard was only the most renowned of the hucksters
who seized on Rogers's strategies. Erhard's "est" movement, essentially
sadism with a therapeutic gloss, attracted wayward celebrities throughout
the 1970s before a series of financial exposes sent him into European
exile. The ex-drunk Chuck Dederich founded Synanon, which preyed on
vulnerable addicts before turning into a full-blown cult, complete with
militia.

Having captured these often bogus and outsized personalities, Ms. Milton
turns to the mainstream fallout of humanistic psychology, charting its
legacy in the New Age, self-esteem and diversity movements. But at times
she overreaches. Betty Friedan does not belong here, even if she once
sought Maslow's research help. Nor does California's 1987 decision to stop
teaching phonics in grade schools. Ms. Milton has set herself the difficult
task of capturing a Zeitgeist. For the most part, she does so with common
sense and acuity. But like Paul Johnson in "Intellectuals," she is better
at using her subjects' personal lives to expose their hypocrisy and vested
interests than at critiquing their ideas.

Ms. Milton tends to look at flaky pop-psych fads as cause, not effect. She
is just not curious about the desperation that led so many saps to seek
them out in the first place. So she sneers at Timothy Leary's tirades
against "fake-television-set American society." But what halfway
intelligent American hasn't occasionally felt a similar rage? Who can
dismiss Carl Rogers's claim that affluence and "large impersonal
institutions" made postwar Americans "probably more aware of their inner
loneliness than has ever been true before in history"?

Ms. Milton has done a real service in tracing the catastrophic excesses of
postwar psychology. But ensuring that those excesses are not repeated
begins with explaining why postwar "normality" has been for many Americans
a textureless and terribly disorienting state.

Mr. Caldwell is a senior editor at the Weekly Standard.