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This chapter concentrates on the life and work of psychologist Abraham Maslow. In his influential book Motivation and Personality, he embraced holistic ideas explicitly: “Holism is obviously true—after all, the cosmos is one and interrelated; any society is one and interrelated; any person is one and interrelated.” Inspired by Gestalt psychologist Max Wertheimer and anthropologist Ruth Benedict, Maslow crafted a humanistic psychology that focused on the healthy, whole, and “self‐actualized” person. His holism bestowed personal meaning, gave him a means for discussing social change, and countered reductionistic, mechanistic approaches inherent in behavioral and Freudian psychology. As he concentrated on the development of the healthy individual, he also imagined a future world of self‐actualized individuals knit together in a “eupsychian” (psychologically whole) paradise. He hoped for the establishment of just, democratic, peaceful societies. His holism was thus about the community as well as the individual. His work influenced psychology, education, countercultural philosophies and practices, the Esalen Institute and other personal growth centers, business management, and the holistic health movement.

This chapter considers the relationship between psychological thinking and the emergence of what has been called the ‘permissive society’ in the post-war era. It suggests that counter-cultural groups regularly associated with a permissive shift were in fact attracted to psychology because, like many earlier in the century, they recognized it as a potential source of values and a new politics. In fact, the psychology that rejected values was that represented by Hans Eysenck and behaviourism. Nevertheless, through case studies of anti-psychiatry, humanist psychology and the growth movement, and consciousness-raising within feminism, the chapter traces a crisis of confidence in the 1970s in a politics of the personal and in psychology as a source of social rather than merely individual well-being. The great advance of a ‘therapy culture’ in Britain has largely been a subsequent phenomenon — in the excitement of the 1960s and 1970s, this was still on a relatively small scale.

In the 1960s, the psychologist Abraham Maslow became the public face of humanistic psychology, an interpretation of human nature that he spent decades developing and that stressed the fulfillment of each individual’s inborn potential. This chapter analyzes the counterculture’s uptake of Maslow’s ideas. To judge by Esalen’s ready adoption of his psychological approach, the chapter argues, first, that a certain kind of explicitly unconventional science held enormous appeal for members of the counterculture. Second, the chapter explores the apparent ease with which Maslow traveled between hippie retreat and corporate boardroom, a movement indicative of a broad exchange of people, practices, and ideas between the counterculture and the establishment, as the precepts of humanistic psychology pervaded both. Third, the chapter analyzes the reciprocal influence between this major psychological theorist and his countercultural followers. Though he was often dismayed by the hippies’ attitudes and antics, Maslow shaped his notions of psychological growth and of the ideal society in response to his experiences in countercultural contexts. The leaders of Esalen, meanwhile, appropriated his ideas without slavishly following them, adapting his theories of self-actualization and peak experience in new ways to meet their own needs.

As children of survivors moved into young adulthood in the 1970s, some of them fused feminism, ethnic politics, and humanistic psychology to develop a collective identity as the “second generation.” Their quest to separate from their parents made them, paradoxically, more likely to listen to their stories, and more likely to coax their parents to share their stories with them. Armed with a new, more affirmative understanding of the status of victimhood, descendants urged their peers to “break the silence” about their familial legacies and make storytelling a vehicle for self-transformation, collective identification, and social action.

Existential-humanistic psychology recovers neglected philosophical and spiritual categories regarded as proper to human being, in contrast with animal life or inanimate systems. Existential-humanistic proto-discourses are important to Vincent McHugh’s I Am Thinking of My Darling (1943), in which an emerging ideal of personal authenticity queries the American Dream in 1940s’ New York. McHugh’s critical utopia contrasts with the ponderous extrapolations of Colin Wilson in The Mind Parasites (1967) and The Space Vampires (1976), and Doris Lessing in The Four-Gated City (1969). Both these authors – despite their widely differing positions in the literary canon – use science fiction as a didactic and futurological (even prophetic) medium in which existential psychology serves as the supposed rationale for spiritual apotheosis (including the cultivation of psi powers). A more fruitful post-war deployment of existential-humanistic psychology can be found in texts such as Theodore Sturgeon’s ‘And Now the News …’ (1956), Naomi Mitchison’s Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1962) and Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), which critique the instrumental tendencies of mainstream psychology.

This chapter discusses the characteristic of picturebook psychology, which represents and textualizes child play, focusing on author-illustrator Maurice Sendak. Picturebook psychology began with child study, child analysis, and progressive educational work and has since been revised by humanistic ego psychology and bibliotherapy. In Where the Wild Things Are (1963), Sendak updates Freud’s famous dream of the Wolf Man, giving picturebook psychology a neo-Freudian makeover and establishing psychological wildness as the very stuff of child life. The chapter concludes with some discussion of the 2009 film version by Spike Jonze, as well as Dave Eggers’s novelization, published the same year.

This chapter recounts the intertwined dramas of May’s personal and professional life in the early 1960s, one that sees him participating in the founding of the Association for Humanistic Psychology and participation in the arts scene of New York even as his marriage deteriorates and reflects in some sense trends in the culture.

May turns to writing a fond and interpretively acute short book on his relationship to Paul Tillich-Paulus—and runs into difficulties with Hannah Arendt’s own memoir of her marriage. He then publishes The Courage to Create. May becomes more and more alienated in New York, feeling drawn to California and its more open and psychologically progressive atmosphere. He accepts a Regents Professorship at the University of California Santa Cruz, but has a mixed time because of health problems and marital strife with Ingrid. At the same time, May becomes more critical of the more narcissistic and quick-fix nature of some of the humanistic psychology movement, and he along with others convene as theory conference to establish a more serious and scientifically sound basis for the movement,also one that focused on social issues in addition to personal well-being. By fall 1975, he moves to Tiburon, California, and separates from Ingrid.

His work on Kierkegaard and exposure to Existentialism motivated May to collaborate with Henri Ellenberger and Ernest Angel to produce a volume, finally published in 1958, that introduced Existential Psychology to the American profession and public. Existence received wide exposure in lay and professional worlds and remains an influential text. He then participated in the founding of the, a journal called Existential Inquiries, and an APA panel that was soon published as Existential Psychology (1961). These events marked a turning point in psychotherapeutic practice and in part led to the creation of a related movement—Humanistic Psychology.

This chapter explores the origins of pragmatism between 1898 and 1916. Intellects like Herbert Schneider, Joseph Blau, and others, kept the pragmatic tradition alive, but it became highly visible when Richard Rorty confronted that tradition with its own limitations. The neopragmatic movement brought new readers to the texts of Peirce, James, Schiller, and Dewey. James brought pragmatism to religion, to humanistic psychology, and to the sociology of science. Pierce influenced the notion of scientific method, legal interpretation, and linguistic analysis. Dewey brought pragmatism to American culture through his work in education, political practice, and aesthetic practice by way of his work with the Barnes Foundation.