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"Elaborate attention and, frequently, adulation have been heaped on the movement by magazines and media. The popularity of the trend is confirmed wherever paperback books are sold. Visibility and popularity, however, do not necessarily certify the worth or soundness of the movement over the long haul. Interestingly, few theological critiques of the Human Potential Movement have appeared."

The Human Potential Movement
By Carl A. Raschke

"Psychoreligiosity," to coin a term, makes use of psychological principles and techniques as surrogates for traditional religious beliefs and practices. It aims to fulfill and gratify inner personal longings for identity and meaning, and this is what the "Human Potential Movement" is all about. In some ways it seems to be a kind of neo-Pietism, and it apparently appeals most strongly to certain sections of the affluent American middle-class.

Whereas classic Pietism emphasized self-perfection through experience of God's love, the newer forms of religious subjectivism seem to be preoccupied with therapeutic psychology. Donald Meyer, in his brilliant historical analysis of the "mind cure" movement, suggests that "here psychology was welcomed on its own terms and in fact often inspirited theology." ¹ From Mary Baker Eddy to Norman Vincent Peale, the spectrum of Meyer's analysis, "mind cure" systems promise health, wealth, and happiness for confused, lonely, and self-doubting people. In the last few years since Meyer's critique, a whole new cluster of "psychoreligious" movements have attracted attention, mainly for the same reasons and among the same middle-class constituency.

The Human Potential Movement has cornered an audience within the middle-class public as well as knocking at the door of the churches, where in numerous instances it has been welcomed and granted entry. At variance in style and rhetoric,

Carl A. Raschke is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Denver. He is a doctoral graduate of Harvard and the author of Moral Action, God, and History in the Thought of Kant (1975), Religion and the Human Image (1976), and The Interruption of Eternity (scheduled for 1977).
¹ Donald Meyer, The Positive Thinkers (Garden City, N.J.: Doubleday, 1965), p. xv.

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but not in substance, with the erstwhile schools of positive thinking, the Human Potential Movement is a multilayered and eclectic blend of the new clinical psychologies with a dash of watered down Zen Buddhism, yoga, or other forms of Oriental mysticism. The distinctly Christian coloring of previous positive thinkers is mostly absent, but the essential gospel remains the same: The God within the self, the miracle of personal self-disclosure, enrichment which comes from discovering the self, and the transfiguration of society through the reintegration of individual psyches.

Writing recently in Christianity and Crisis, John Biersdorf and Gerald Jud defended the employment of human potential methods within the religious community. Acknowledging that the movement is "difficult to characterize fully," Biersdorf and Jud nevertheless zero in on the value of personal growth, or realization of the inner human potential through the raw and vital experience of one's own body and mind. ² The concentration of consciousness on one's own feeling states, fantasies, and ecstasies serves to liberate the self from its dependence on routine habits of cognition and judgment, particularly social and moral ones. In the process, people become "self-actualized" in the jargon of the psychologist Abraham Maslow who has proven a towering mentor for the theorists of the Human Potential Movement. Such people come to savor the experience of their radical uniqueness, together with the inherent possibilities for love and appreciation of other individuals' personalities. Such people, therefore, wrest control of their lives from the despotism of the superego, from habitually acquired standards of self-evaluation and conduct which bar spontaneity and openness. Jud adds to this larger overview with an account of a "shalom retreat" in which the movement's precepts are exercised. The program of the retreat revolves around the unblocking of suppressed feelings and the baring of one's inner depths to a group of supportive persons who are engaged in the same activity.

On the surface, the models and scenarios described by these authors do not diverge appreciably from the pastoral theology of much of today's liberal Protestant ministry, with the exception that the cure of stricken souls is supposed to be carried out in the therapy group rather than in the clerical study. Jud, for example, even goes so far as to link the resources of the Human Potential Movement to the tradition of revivalism in this country, where "doctrine and authority must always be tested on the ground of experience." ³ But Jud's use of conventional theological allusions and images to justify the role of the Human Potential Movement in the churches has a tone of special pleading. The Human Potential Movement in its diffuse and mottled forms only mar-

² John Biersdorf, "The Human Potential Movement and the Church," Christianity and Crisis, 35:54 (Mar. 17, 1975).
³ Gerald Jud, "Shalom Retreat," ibid., 58. A similar comparison between the encounter group movement has been offered by Hendrik M. Ruitenbeek, The New Group Therapies (New York: Avon Books, 1970), p. 45f.

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ginally comes as ready-packaged for Christian consumption, as Jud suggests. Jud admits that at a certain conference he was "the only person present who had found the Judeo-Christian tradition to be a major "guide and source of insight." ⁴

What the movement represents, therefore, like its predecessors in the vein of psychoreligiosity, is a world vision (one might even say an "ideology") and a collection of maxims for daily living distilled from the ethos of the affluent society. Unlike its predecessors, which profited from the traditional alliance of Protestant Christianity and the dominant culture, the new positive thinking draws on the latest religious and avant garde currents of thought and therefore pilots itself within the secular mainstream.

I

By and large the Human Potential Movement can be separated into four major camps, the theorists, the engineers, the technicians, and the dabblers.

The theorists comprise a number of distinguished psychologists who have furnished a conceptual framework for the application of human potential methods. Among these are Wilheim Reich, the eccentric disciple of Freud who pioneered in calling attention to the influence of the physical body on consciousness and the need for free sexual expression. The grand theorists, particularly Maslow, have for the most part worked at the philosophical level, clarifying the concept of human nature and the objectives of psychotherapy. Maslow has left a deep impression in this respect primarily in virtue of his rejection of Freudian materialism and determinism and his hypothesis that all individuals, regardless of the life circumstances in which they find themselves, have a latent will to be creative, self-transcending, and successful over and beyond the simple desire for security and comfort.

Maslow installed at the core of his psychology Rousseau's notion of the natural innocence and goodness of human beings which need only be emancipated from the shackles of social authority and regimen. It was the tempting assumption, so widely endorsed in the 60's, that all men and women have an "instinctive" capacity for love and constructive behavior which has, nevertheless, been thwarted by a social system that oppresses individuals. The task, for Maslow, was not to change the system, but to enhance the "self-actualizing" capacities of people within it, whereupon the system would reform itself.

Reich adopted much the same stance with his evangel of sexual liberty, which he considered the remedy for so much of the passivity and unfreedom of individuals in society. The bondage of the body to unconscious guilt feelings, complexes, and obsessions was the opposite face of the joy and self-confident energy that people could experience as the fruits of allowing their suppressed natures free play.

⁴ Jud, op. cit., p. 58.

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The engineers are those who have mapped out means for putting the ideas of the theorists into operation. They have developed the organizational and clinical techniques for validating and getting results from the philosophical premises. Customarily the engineers begin with a more simplified understanding of what constitutes the human "potential" that demands to be realized. Thus they strive for respect and recognition of the biological wants of the organism in a given context, as with Fritz Perls and Gestalt therapy; for the enlivenment of bodily responses and perceptions, as in Alexander Lowen's bioenergetics; for healthy acceptance of the "adult" and "parent" components of our personality, as in transactional analysis; for learning to "take responsibility" for one's life, as in "est" (Erhard Seminars Training). Quite often the engineers have incorporated Eastern religious meditation practices into their repertoire, since awareness of one's self and the total life situation is a value common to both the Human Potential Movement and Oriental mysticism.

The technicians consist of the directors, facilitators, and personnel of the various clinics and centers, such as the Esalen Institute in California, where human potential approaches are made available to the public. Generally, the technicians do not maintain any sophisticated theoretical defense of why they are doing what they do, nor do they retail any one particular philosophy or modus operandi. It is they, however, with whom the phrase "human potential movement" is most readily associated, and, of course, they are frequently to be found "leading" ministerial continuing education programs.

The dabblers include writers, clergy, lay people, and other professionals who may have undergone some type of human potential training and have assimilated it to their own belief systems or practical concerns. They cull the "best" aspects of the movement for their own purposes and endeavor to revamp the institutions to which they are bound. Thus among the dabblers can be found the business executive who wants to bring "sensitivity groups" into the board room, or the young pastor who wants to make yoga as popular with parishioners as Bible study sessions.

In short, the Human Potential Movement today is experimental and subject to either applause or catcalls for any of the many features of its intellectual commitments and laboratory skills. Elaborate attention and, frequently, adulation have been heaped on the movement by magazines and media. The popularity of the trend is confirmed wherever paperback books are sold.

Visibility and popularity, however, do not necessarily certify the worth or soundness of the movement over the long haul. Interestingly, few theological critiques of the Human Potential Movement have appeared. In what follows, we will examine four areas of the movement, its subjectivism, its moral anarchy, its romanticism, and its tendency toward psychic manipulation.

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II

The Human Potential Movement as a whole has not resolved the dilemma of subjectivity as the focus of its therapeutic. Psychology and pietistic religion have historically taken the problems and personal confessions of its clients as the proper angle of viewing the human predicament. But it has only been the new psychoreligosity which has made the occupation of introspection or the "inward voyage" a supreme end. The subjectivism of pietistic religion grew out of the conviction that the revelation of the biblical God could be reduplicated in every person's inward experiences, even though individuals were not permitted to forswear theological norms in construing those experiences. The subjectivism of clinical psychology has been largely methodological, inasmuch as it has had to recognize the interrelation between mental attitudes or behavior and personal biography. In both cases the idiosyncratic and private dimensions of experience are accorded proper weight yet still must be measured by such objective yardsticks as probity or sanity.

The psychoreligiosity of the Human Potential Movement, however, has translated the method of subjectivity into the doctrine of subjectivism. Subjectivism may be defined as the stance of total disengagement from the meaning systems and value orientations of the communities in which one participates. Philosophically speaking, such a move amounts to solipsism; psychologically, it is close to what Freud dubbed "narcissism," or the immersion in and attachment to one's own unconscious life without reference to a governing reality-principle. The narcissitic bent of human potential theory is affirmed, in the movement's cultivation of personal fantasies without a critical leverage on their innate significance. For example, John Stevens in his book Awareness writes: "Full awareness of my experience requires complete acceptance of that experience as it is. Any demands-by myself or others-to be different than I am, reduces my contact with what I actually experience." ⁵ Similarly, "est" tells its adherents, as a onetime initiate reports in Cosmopolitan, "You are totally responsible for your own life; you are the cause of your own experience." In other words, people are to be persuaded that they can fabricate their own symbolic universes with all the serendipity of stacking lego blocks.

Stevens and the advocates of Gestalt assure us, of course, that absorption in our fantasies and stream of consciousness serves to whittle down our fixations about just what makes up "reality," to temper our rigid ways of sensing and perceiving, and thereby to establish more authentic contact with other selves as well as our psycho-physical environment. On the other hand, the dissolving of all cognitive assumptions about what is sensical and nonsensical may delude as well as liberate. For, as even contemporary phenomenologists insist, reality must be intersubjective as well. The communication of "truth" in the

⁵ John Stevens, Awareness (New York: Bantam, 1973), p. 68.

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Gestalt and other human potential experiences border on this: "I'll tell you my fantasies if you'll tell me yours, but you have to let me be my fantasy and I let you be yours." The reduction of the categories of reality to private constructs reflects what Max Horkheimer has called the "subjectivizing of reason" in modern bourgeois society. The atornization of experience goes hand in hand with the fragmentation of social institutions and the retreat of alienated personalities into the false security of pure immediacy. The emphasis on personal "responsibility" apart from both the perception and performance of social constraints and obligations renders individuals "responsible" only to themselves, to apprehend their surroundings and act on them merely to satisfy momentary needs or whims. Thus it is no surprise that such a psychologist as Nathaniel Branden, who has articulated many of the principles of the Human Potential Movement along more rationalistic lines, concludes that the method of self-actualization leads logically to political libertarianism and Ayn Rand's "objectivism," which is really nothing more than a subjectivism centered on the chase for private advantage and its justification.

III

The Human Potential Movement, characteristically, encourages a break with conventional morality. Since experience itself is radically subjective, so ethics must rest on an unqualified autonomy-one might even say "antinornianism." As Muriel James and Dorothy Jongeward, the authors of a handbook on transactional analysis aver: "An ethical person works for an environment in which people can become winners. He cherishes and actualizes his own potentials and becomes the winner he was born to be." ⁶

The Human Potential Movement seeks to divest its followers of what Fritz Perls has labelled the "should mentality." Joel Latner, author of The Gestalt Therapy Book, declares that "questions of goodness and morality ... are superfluous. The issue is whether we shall realize our possibilities or deny them." ⁷ Furthermore, Latner states that in the realm of social and moral philosophy, the aim must be " anarchy," which he describes as "free functioning in society" or the creation of an "environment" which "must provide a tolerable background within which we can do things that are important to us." ⁸ Such is a systematic refinement of the popular maxim of the 60's, "do your own thing."

Partisans of the Human Potential Movement have repeatedly argued that a balance must be struck between each individual's drive for autonomy, usually in the negative sense of drawing the line where actual injury is inflicted on one's fellow. Yet the metaphysical under-

⁶ Muriel James and Dorothy Jongeward, Born to Win, p. 8.
⁷ Joel Latner, The Gestalt Therapy Book (New York: Julian Press, 1973).
⁸ Ibid., p. 62.

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pinnings of this view suggest more an uncritical celebration of personal independence than a careful attention to the tragic conflicts of life where freedoms or potentials must not only be bounded at the out circumference, but taken up into the idea of a corporate purpose. Therein lies the myopia of libertarianism, and laissez-faire social and moral thought throughout history, which categorically commends the rights and initiative of individuals while taking lightly the problems of mutuality, stability, and order. Such thought presumes, as Colin Wilson has said of Maslow's ideas, that "there is plenty enough freedom to go around." ⁹

Middle-class privilege and dominance in American society foster the illusion of a surplus of freedom, which may only arise when more concrete freedoms (such as freedom from hunger, want, exploitation, etc.) are forbidden others by institutionalized inequality. Yet the "new therapies" of the Human Potential Movement trade smugly on this illusion, as Peter Marin has commented in a rather savage article in Harper's. The new therapies "provide their adherents with a way to avoid the demands of the world, to smother the tug of conscience ... (to) allow them to remain who and what they are, to accept the structured world as it is-but with a sense of justice and justification, with the assurance that it all accords with cosmic law." ¹⁰ Marin cites quite a few examples of moral obtuseness by habitués of the new therapies, including the view of a woman therapist herself to the effect that all are utterly responsible for their own fate, including the Jews who must have desired to have been exterminated by the Nazis. When strained to this extent, the "ethic" of autonomy and "freedom" becomes a monstrous mutant. The "freedom to be me" slogan of human potential personalism can have meaning only when it springs out of a sense of communal solidarity in which there exists a set of reciprocal commitments to guarantee the freedom of all.

In other words, "goodness and morality" do count decisively as rules of conduct which insure universal freedom. Biersdorf and others who speak for the movement profess that the spontaneity and the feeling of love which are induced in group therapy have greater power to generate a community of responsible agents than the maxims of rational ethics. Ultimately, this must be the case, as Jesus' condemnation of the Pharisees implies. Yet love must not only be intuitive and esthetic in character. It must be tied to a sense of duty, as Kierkegaard pointed out, or hitched to a conception of justice, as Reinhold Niebuhr contended. A subculture of loving intimacy has value in the final analysis only if it drops anchor in a society where permanent obligations and thejust distribution of freedoms are maintained.

Harvey Cox, writing about his own experience with the Human Potential Movement, puts the matter squarely:

⁹ Colin Wilson, New Pathways in Psychology (New York: New American Library, 1974), p. 174.
¹⁰ Peter Marin, "The New Narcissism," Harper's 251:48 (Oct. 1975).

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The whole group movement teaches that personal interiority cannot become actual without some supportive web of relationships. What some do not see, however, is that a world where greed reigns and people are set against one another by racial, sexual, and hierarchial roles cannot provide such a web. Such a world twists this fragile net into distorting nooses. When the group adjourns, life is still choked instead of linked with the big world outside. ¹¹

The exhortation of the Human Potential Movement to live in the "now," to "celebrate the temporary," ¹² as the title of one such book in this genre intimates, rules out the live possibility of enduring community. For the transience and loss of moral connections in society are the source of much of the present crisis, not their solution. Moral anarchism is an ideology that can only paper over the crisis in the name of a spurious collegiality.

IV

Advocates of the Human Potential Movement like to consider themselves the true "revolutionaries" of the modern world, substituting the "soft" strategies of psychic conversion for the social and political struggle for power. In one respect this position poignantly testifies to the proximate failure of the social activism of the last decade. On the other hand, it also betrays the romantic delusion of the return to innocence. It is the historical fallacy that the overhaul of institutional structures will follow automatically if the inborn "goodness" of human beings is unchained. The Rousseau motif, again, intrudes here.

Transactional analysis targets a major portion of its program toward the recovery of the "natural child," the archetypal font of inspiration and creative play, which is supposedly repressed by stifling moral rules and prescriptions. Eric Berne contrasts his redemptive element in our personalities with the "adapted child," which is the inhibited side of compliant juvenile nature, allegedly the product of social conditioning by parental intervention. Though Berne does not indulge in a cult of youthful sentimentality, the idea of salvation through the affirmation of innocence figures prominently in TA. The implication is that the spontaneity and willfulness of the natural child need to be posed against restrictive authority, as we find in John K. Bontrager. ¹³

But the current alienation and anomie in American society seems to stem less from the persistence of an authoritarian strain in culture than from the evaporation of a coherent and rational system of norms and values to which all can subscribe. It is illegitimate and empty authority which has precipitated the cynicism of our age, as the Watergate episode demonstrated. The natural child is in need of guidance, and the virtues of romantic revolution can easily be twisted into an

¹¹ Harvey Cox, The Seduction of the Spirit (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973), p. 223.
¹² Cf. Clyde Reid, Celebrate the Temporary (New York: Harper & Row, 1972).
¹³ Cf. John K. Bontrager, Free the Child in You (Philadelphia: United Church Press, 1974).

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egotistical thirst for power, so that Rousseau becomes Robespierre. In a cultural and moral vacuum the defense of innocence, if unchecked by the sense of human finitude and sin, may turn into a charade of violence and tyranny. On the other hand, it may, as Rollo May points out, ¹⁴ also become a subterfuge for those who are unwilling to take lasting responsibility for their lives, to let themselves be commanded, by demonic forces. The "children of light" are betrayed by the "children of darkness," to employ Neibuhr's metaphor. Without a reflective plan of social action, "soft" revolution inevitably falls prey to Machiavellian machinations.

V

The tacit danger of the Human Potential Movement, however, is not so much its political naiveté as its failure to renounce manipulation as a strategy of conversion. Mind cure psychoreligiosity has always been manipulative in many respects. It has sought to foster the feeling of power, self-esteem, and happiness in people without modifying the real conditions of life in which human dignity and well-being can thrive. The Human Potential Movement has gone even farther in developing a "technology" of "altered consciousness," put into practice by the "engineers" and "technicians."

Edward Sampson, in his Ego at the Threshold, assails what he calls the "constructivist" psychologies employed in the movement. "The constructivist," Sampson writes, "who creates or controls persons by manipulating their symbolic universe, is indeed ... manipulative ... For a while giving each of us the sense that our choices have been made freely and we are the creators of the world to which we respond, the constructivist in fact manipulates the symbolic forms which constrain us to see things in particular ways while we remain unaware that we are so constrained." ¹⁵ It is probably no accident that many of the new therapies employ such terminology as "programming," "pushing buttons," "scripts," and "strokes" in describing the ways in which we learn to be "free." Even Maslow, the doyen of the grand theorists, has succumbed. In his Eupsychian Management, written in 1965, he sought to work out a manual for business executives to get more performance out of their employees. Maslow believed that alienation in work could be eliminated not so much by altering the patterns of hierarchy, dominance, and even economic exploitation as by redirecting people's perceptions of the jobs they plied through the application of "scientific principles."

This identification with important causes, or important jobs, this identifying them and taking them onto the self, thereby enlarging the self and making it important, this is the way of overcoming also actual existential shortcomings

¹⁴ Cf. May's discussion of this point in his book Power and Innocence (New York: W. W.Norton and Co., 1972).
¹⁵Edward Sampson, Ego at the Threshold (New York: Dell Publishers, 1975).

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...For instance, science is a social institution, with division of labor and colleaguehood and exploitation of characterological differences. This is a technique for making uncreative people creative, for enabling unintelligent men to be intelligent ... for permitting limited men to be eternal and cosmic. ¹⁶

One is reminded how the medieval church told the impoverished serfs that their lot was God's will, and how modern companies change the title of "secretary" to "administrative assistant," or how the author of Fascinating Womanhood glorifies female subordination to the male. "Positive thinking" becomes a placebo in place of positive reforms.

VI

The Human Potential Movement with its emphasis on a psychoreligious conversion does not go far enough in confronting the challenge of salvaging human relationships from the shipwreck of contemporary society, and it also runs the risk of providing an answer that is more alarming than the dilemma itself. Psychoreligiosity may very well end up as the "opiate of the middle classes," to embroider on Marx's expression. The use of opiates, as Marx saw, is a symptom of a disease camouflaged as a remedy. As Thomas Oden, who has worked carefully with the Human Potential Movement, observes, "the encounter culture is a relevant response to the mourning of interpersonal depth, but an incomplete and unstable one. It is a clue to a deeper hunger and alienation in our society." ¹⁷

The Human Potential Movement may very well serve as a prod to the established churches to appreciate the greater spiritual needs of their parishioners, just as the Great Awakening of the eighteenth century held up to the face of the American Protestant clergy the mirror of their own feckless orthodoxy. But the incentive toward reformation should come from within the matrix of Christian faith and ethics, from within the context of disciplined activity and social engagement, not from a pseudo-community of programmed, emotional agitation. Still, instead of exiling the Human Potential Movement from the Kingdom, pastors might be well advised to accept it as a voice of the afflicted and to recognize that it has sought to confirm the inner life in a way which formal worship often has not.

The church can rise to the challenge of the Human Potential Movement by rediscovering the authentic prophetic resonance in its own tradition and by replenishing the enduring springs of religious meaning for which those abandoned in the wasteland of contemporary culture thirst.

¹⁶ Abraham Maslow, Eupsychian Management (Homewood, Ill.: R. P. Irwin, 1965), P. 9.
¹⁷ Thomas Oden, Game Free (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), p. 133.