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Psychologist William R Coulson has given much of his life apologizing for what he and his colleagues have done. Our culture's state of mind has been shaped,
in part, by their influence. This article that follows tells the story of his work years ago.
San Francisco Faith, Eric Reslock (editor of the newspaper) and the headline is "A Diabolical Enterprise: Maslow Was the
Culprit."
Two and a half years ago, George Neumayr, then editor of the Faith,
interviewed William Coulson about his work during the 1960s with Carl
Rogers. The two were among many modern humanistic psychologists who
were invited into seminaries and convents across the United States in
the wake of Vatican II. The council inspired the American Church to
teach to its seminarians the latest ideas in modern psychology.
But to their later regret, Coulson and Rogers found their legacy as
humanistic psychologists to be the dismantling of many convents and
seminaries throughout California and elsewhere.
By the mid-’70’s, both Rogers and Coulson had retracted their beliefs.
But Coulson still believes that their ideas, and the ideas of Abraham
Maslow, in particular, sowed the seeds for the moral crisis in religious
life that is clearly evident today.
After receiving several queries in the past year about the November 1997
article, I called Coulson and asked him if anything had occurred during
the interlude that has caused him to reflect back on his time as a
teacher and lecturer to Catholic religious.
The passing of time has brought to Coulson a new perspective on the
events 30 years ago. For one, Coulson regrets that his colleague, Carl
Rogers, inspired the psychological term ‘Rogerian’. “Carl never intended
to start his own school of thought. He never liked the term,” Coulson
said.
But the passing of time also caused Coulson to search out his own
answers to what went wrong with the Catholic Church in America in the
late ’60s and ’70s. His research has led him to believe that, more than
the work of Carl Rogers, the influence of psychologist Abraham Maslow on
the American Church is under-acknowledged and not well understood.
This was partly confirmed when Coulson examined the journals of Maslow,
not released to the public until 1979, which show the diabolical nature
of his enterprise, and the contempt he expressed for religious people,
some of whom swallowed his ideas, ironically, with little resistance.
A. H. Maslow is the name most often linked with Carl Rogers’ as founder
of the Third Force in psychology, the humanistic alternative to
psychoanalysis and behaviorism. Maslow put his and his colleague’s
status this way in a note recorded ten months before his death in 1970:
The real “seers and creators” of the “unnoticed revolution” in
psychology are few — “it’s really only me and Rogers among the living.”
But, according to Coulson, Carl Rogers hadn’t set out to become a
revolutionary. He was a psychotherapist whose approach “helping
relationships” got applied to other fields, originally against his
wishes. Coulson said, “Maslow was always the revolutionary, always:
leading the way in applying clinical techniques where the creator had
insisted they didn’t belong.”
Coulson continued, “Taking off from Rogers’ early recommendation of
‘nondirectiveness’ — but only in the clinic — Maslow said life itself
would benefit. He even told a Life magazine reporter, ‘We have to teach
everyone to be a therapist.’”
In a paper written for educators in 1958, Maslow offered the opinion
that the average child knows “better than anyone else what is good for
him” and therefore doesn’t need to be told what to do; the child ought
to be treated “permissively,” to make it possible, that is, “to gratify
his needs and to make his own choices — let him be.”
Maslow went even farther in 1965, working a radical idea about
children-and-sex into his book on he psychology of management:
[I]t always struck me as a very wise kind of thing that the lower-class
Negroes did, as reported in one study, in Cleveland, Ohio. Among those
Negroes the sexual life began at puberty. It was the custom for an
older brother to get a friend in his own age grade to break in his
little sister sexually when she came of a suitable age. And the same
thing was done on the girl’s side. A girl who had a younger brother
coming into puberty would seek among her own girl friends for one who
would take on the job of initiating the young boy into sex in a nice
way. This seems extremely sensible and wise and could also serve highly
therapeutic purposes in various other ways as well. I remember talking
with Alfred Adler about this in a kind of joking way, but then we both
got quite serious about it, and Adler thought that this sexual therapy
at various ages was certainly a very fine thing. As we both played with
the thought, we envisaged a kind of social worker, in both sexes, who
was very well trained for this sort of thing, sexually, but primarily as
a psychotherapist in giving therapy literally on the couch, that is, for
mixing in the beautiful and gentle sexual initiation with all the goals
of psychotherapy.
I suppose that for these days this is a wild thought, but … there’s no
reason why it shouldn’t be taken quite seriously, especially for
youngsters and maybe also for the very old people. I guess what I’m
trying to say here is that these interpersonal therapeutic
growth-fostering relationships of all kinds which rest on intimacy, on
honesty, on self-disclosure, on becoming sensitively aware of one’s self
— and thereby of responibility for feeding back one’s impressions of
others, etc. — that these are profoundly revolutionary devices, in the
strict sense of the word — that is, of shifting the whole direction of a
society in a more preferred direction. As a matter of fact, it might be
revolutionary in another sense if something like this were done very
widely. I think the whole culture would change within a decade and
everything in it.
But according to Coulson, when the management book was reprinted in
1998, Maslow’s “wild thought” — his naivete or idealism, if you will —
got cut, though John Wiley, the publisher, didn’t mention that any cut
had been needed. “Probably he wanted to save the author’s reputation,”
said Coulson. “But now something has to be said. Too much damage has
been done, not least among Catholics, and now even a bishop. I say that
because Maslow and Rogers came to Santa Rosa to lecture in August 1962,
when the Santa Rosa diocese was being launched, and Maslow said some
equally unfortunate things about the meaning of life. For one, he
thought therapy could replace churchgoing.” Coulson continued, “I think
some of the problems of the Diocese of Santa Rosa date from that
occasion and others like it in the seminaries, when TMP — Too Much
Psychology — came to call.”
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