by Colin Wilson
It must be clearly understood that we live in a kind of room of subjective emotions and values. If I am not very careful, the shutters close, and I lose my objective standards. At this point, I may wildly exaggerate the importance of my emotions, my private ups and downs, and there is no feeling of objective reality to contradict me. A child beset by misery is more bewildered than an adult because he has nothing to measure it by; he doesn't know how serious it is. As soon as his mother kisses him and says, There, it doesn't really matter . . . ', he relaxes. If I get myself 'into a state' about some trivial worry, and then I hear that some old friend has died of cancer, I instantly 'snap out' of my black mood, for my emotions are cut down to their proper size by comparison with a more serious reality.
Moods and emotions are a kind of fever produced by lack of contact with reality. The shutters are closed, and the temperature in the rooms rises. It can rise to a degree where it becomes a serious fever, where the emotions have got so out-of-control that reality cannot break in. These are states of psychotic delusion—or perhaps merely of nervous overstrain. The characteristic of these states is exaggeration: every minor worry turns into a monstrous bogey. Inevitably, I cease to make efforts of will—for the will is at its healthiest when I have a firm sense of reality and of purpose. And we have seen what happens when the will becomes passive: the vital forces sink, and, at a certain point, physical health is affected. The 'existential psychologist' Viktor Frankl—of whom I shall speak at length later—remarked on 'how close is the connection between a man's state of mind—his courage and hope, or lack of them—and the state of immunity of his body', and tells a story that makes the point forcefully. Frankl was a Jew who spent most of the war in a German concentration camp:
'I once had a dramatic demonstration of the close link between the loss of faith in the future and this dangerous giving up. F—, my senior block warden, a fairly well known composer and librettist, confided in me one day: "I would like to tell you something, Doctor. I have had a strange dream. A voice told me that I could wish for something, that I should only say what I wanted to know, and all my questions would be answered. What do you think I asked? That I would like to know when the war would be over for me. You know what I mean, Doctor—for me! I wanted to know when we, when our camp, would be liberated and our sufferings come to an end."
'"And when did you have this dream?" I asked.
'"In February, 1945," he answered. It was then the beginning of March.
'"What did your dream voice answer?"
'Furtively he whispered to me, "March thirtieth."
'When F— told me about his dream, he was still full of hope and convinced that the voice of his dream would be right. But as the promised day drew nearer, the war news which reached our camp made it appear very unlikely that we would be free on the promised date. On March twenty-ninth, F— suddenly became very ill and ran a high temperature. On March thirtieth, the day his prophecy had told him that the war and suffering would be over for him, he became delirious and lost consciousness. On March thirty-first, he was dead. To all outward appearances he had died of typhus.'[1]
Frankl's composer friend was physically near the end of his resources; this is why the collapse of his will made such a difference. (Frankl also mentions the unprecedentedly high death rate in the camp between Christmas 1944 and New Year 1945, because so many prisoners had pinned their hopes on being home for Christmas.) It took a year of work in the chewing-gum factory to deplete Maslow's girl patient to the point where she ceased to menstruate. Normally healthy people possess a 'cushion' of energy to absorb shocks and disappointments, and this cushion is identical to the 'surplus energy tanks' of which we have spoken. It is maintained by will power fired by the sense of meaning. We are only aware of this direct action of the will upon the body in physical extremes: for example, if I am feeling sick, I can disperse the sickness by 'snapping out' of my feeling of nausea and summoning subconscious forces of health. If we were more clearly aware of this connection between 'positive consciousness' and physical health, we would treat mental passivity as a form of illness. Another anecdote of Frankl's—from the same book—may be said to provide the foundation of an 'attitude psychology' closely related to Maslow's. The prisoners were transferred from Auschwitz to Dachau. The journey took two days and three nights, during which they were packed so tight that few could sit down, and half starved. At Dachau, they had to stand in line all night and throughout the next morning in freezing rain, as punishment because one man had fallen asleep and missed the roll call. Yet they were all immensely happy, laughing and making jokes: because Dachau had no incinerator chimney.
To summarise: man evolves through a sense of external meaning. When his sense of meaning is strong, he maintains a high level of will-drive and of general health. Without this sense of external meaning, he becomes the victim of subjective emotions, a kind of dream that tends to degenerate into nightmare. His uncontrolled fantasies and worries turn into an octopus that strangles him.
Man has evolved various ways of preventing this from happening. The most important is religion. This tells a man that certain objective standards are permanently true, and that his own nature is weak and sinful. The chief trouble with authoritarian religion is that it works best for intellectually-uncomplicated people, and fails to carry much conviction for the highly sophisticated and neurotic—who are the very ones who need it most.
In certain respects, art succeeds where religion fails. A great symphony or poem is an active reminder of the reality of meaning: it provides a stimulus like an electric shock, re-animating the will and the appetite for life. Its disadvantage is that we all assume that art is 'subjective' by nature, that it tells us about the emotions of the artist, not about the objective world. And so 'when life fails', the effectiveness of art diminishes.
Men of imagination have always tended to use the self-image method to prevent them from becoming victims of the octopus of subjectivity. It is essentially a method for pushing problems and disappointments to arm's length. Yeats has described how, when he was sure no one was looking, he used to walk about London with the peculiar strut of Henry Irving's Hamlet. In Heartbreak House, Hector whiles away an idle moment by pretending to fight a duel with an imaginary antagonist and then making love to an imaginary woman. But the self-image also plays a central role in all human creativity. The young artist, lacking certainty of his own identity, projects a mental image of himself that blurs into an image of the artist he most admires. Brahms's self-image is half-Beethoven; Yeats's is half-Shelley. And the ultimate value of their work—its inner-consistency and strength—depends upon how deeply they commit themselves to acting out the self-image.
According to Freud and Karl Marx, fantasy is an escape from reality and responsibility. According to Maslow, fantasy is the means by which a determined man masters reality. 'Reality' is the key word in existential psychology. It poses no philosophical problems. It means objective meaning, as opposed to subjective values. Eliot wrote: 'We each think of the key, each in his prison', implying that there is no escape from one's subjective prison. Blake knew better: he agreed that 'five windows light the caverned man', but added that through one of them, he can pass out whenever he wants to. That is to say that by an effort of reaching out to meaning, he can re-establish contact with reality. The situation could be compared to a child who becomes confused during a game of blind man's buff, but who has only to remove the bandage in order to re-orient himself to the room. And the most important point for psychotherapy is that he can do this by an act of will. Mental illness is a kind of amnesia, in which the patient has forgotten his own powers. The task of the therapist is to somehow renew the patient's contact with reality.
The first thing that will be observed about this 'third force psychology' I have outlined is that it is a great deal more optimistic than that of Freud, or even Jung. It implies that all human beings are closer to more intense states of consciousness than they realise. Somewhere in his autobiography, S
tephen Spender remarks that everyone nowadays is neurotic, because it is inevitable at this stage in civilisation. Maslow's feeling seems to be that neurosis is definitely abnormal, and that there is no reason why most people should not be capable of a high level of mental health and of peak experiences.
Among intelligent people, our cultural premises are certainly largely responsible for the prevailing pessimism. The Victorians went in for moral uplift and the belief in man's higher nature. Darwin and Freud changed all that. Darwin showed that we do not need the postulate of a creator to explain why man is superior to the ape. Freud denounced religion as a delusion based upon the child's fear of the father, and asserted that neurosis is due to the frustration of man's animal nature—specifically, his sex drives. After the First World War, despair and frustration became the keynote of literature; the optimists of the previous decade—Shaw, Wells, Chesterton—became almost unmentionable. In science, philosophy, psychology, there was an increasing tendency to 'reductionism'—which Arthur Koestler has defined as the belief that all human activities can be explained in terms of the elementary responses of the lower animals, such as the psychologist's laboratory rat. This reductionism should not be construed as a materialistic jibe at idealism—although it often looks like that—but as a desire to get things done, accompanied by the fear that nothing will get done if too much is attempted. Maslow told me once that a respectable psychologist had leapt to his feet at a meeting of the American Psychological Association, and shouted at him—Maslow—'You are an evil man. You want to destroy psychology.' The irony of the story is that by the time Maslow told it to me, he was president of the American Psychological Association! The old reductionist climate began to change in the early sixties. In Europe, the school of existential psychology was already well established. Sir Karl Popper—one of the original founders of the school of Logical Positivism—was arguing that science is not a plodding, logical, investigation of the universe, but that it proceeds by flashes of intuition, like poetry. Popper's most distinguished follower, Michael Polanyi, published in 1958 his revolutionary book Personal Knowledge, a carefully reasoned attack on the 'timetable or telephone directory conception of science'—i.e. the view that all future books on science could be written by an electronic brain, if it was big enough. Polanyi stated that what drives the scientist is an increasing sense of contact with reality—that is to say, precisely what drives the poet or the saint. In biology, the old rigid Darwinism began to relax; in 1965, Sir Alister Hardy, an orthodox Darwinian, and Professor of Zoology at Oxford, asserted in his Gifford Lectures that the genes might be influenced by telepathy, and that certain biological phenomena are only explainable on the assumption of some kind of 'group mind'. 'Reductionism' was breaking apart.
It was in 1968 that an American publisher suggested to me that I should write a book about Maslow. I asked him how he felt about the idea, and he approved—pointing out, at the same time, that another friend, Frank Goble, was also writing one. I decided to go ahead all the same, and Maslow patiently answered the questions I threw at him through 1969, although a heart attack had slowed him up considerably. At my suggestion, he made a pile of tapes, full of biographical and personal details, some for publication, some not. Meanwhile, I was reading my way steadily through a hundred or so papers he had sent me, dating back to the early thirties, when he was working on monkeys with Harry Harlow. But when I started writing the book, in Majorca, in the autumn of 1969, I realised that it was going to be more difficult than I had expected. I had intended to make it a straight account of Maslow's life and work, a short book that would stick to my subject. But, after all, Viktor Frankl was also part of the subject, and so were Erwin Straus, Medard Boss, William Glasser, Ronald Laing, and many other existential psychologists. Worse still, it was hard to keep myself out of it, since Maslow's work had exerted so much influence on my own ideas, and since we had been engaged in a fragmentary dialogue for the past ten years.
In June, 1969, I told Maslow in a letter that it looked as if my book about him was going to be part of a larger book about the revolution in psychology, and asked more questions, which he answered on tape. A few days before this last batch of tapes arrived, I received a letter from his secretary telling me that he had died of a heart attack on June 8, 1970. Listening to his voice, it was hard to get used to the idea that he was dead.
I am still not certain whether this is the best way to write the book; but I can see no other. In this introduction I have tried to give a sketchy outline of the ideas that preoccupied Maslow—and myself—during the past ten years. In the first part of the book, I have tried to give a picture of the major trends in psychology from its beginnings in the nineteenth century, through the Freudian revolution, down to Maslow. Part Two deals exclusively with Maslow; it is the book I intended to write to begin with. Part Three discusses existential psychology in general, and attempts to state some general conclusions about the movement. Inevitably, this is the most personal part of the book, and may be regarded as a continuation of this introduction. The ultimate question is not one of psychology so much as of philosophy, or even religion.
Viktor Frankl talks about 'the existential vacuum', writing: 'More and more patients are crowding our clinics and consulting rooms complaining of an inner emptiness, a sense of total and ultimate meaninglessness of their lives'. I coined the term 'nothingness neurosis' to describe this state. But in discussing it, I have tried to avoid generalisations, and to remain faithful to the phenomenological—the descriptive—method. That was always Maslow's own approach.
THE STRANGE STORY OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY
From Beyond the Outsider, 1965
THE TREASON OF THE INTELLECTUALS
In his study of Rimbaud, Henry Miller wrote: 'Until the old world dies out utterly, the "abnormal" individual will tend more and more to become the norm. The new man will find himself only when the warfare between collectivity and the individual ceases.'
The position expressed here was the starting point of the investigation in The Outsider. But in some ways, it is a dangerous half truth. 'Collectivization' is as obvious and unavoidable consequence of social evolution, and individualists have always kicked against it. But from de Sade onward, most of the rebels have seen it simply as a question of 'the individual versus collective man'; consequently, most of the revolts have been explosions of violence that have ended in defeat or reaction. It is true of Miller as well as of Rimbaud, and it remains true down to the revolt of the Beat Generation and the Angry Young Men. Obviously there is a great deal 'wrong with society', in the sense that it is often unfair to the 'abnormal' individual; still, we have not yet reached Dostoevsky's nightmare of a society that favours mediocrity and destroys genius. Until this point arrives, the problem cannot be reduced to a matter of the individual versus collective man. The real problem is to reconcile the demands of a healthy individualism with those of a healthy society. A healthy individualism could be defined as one that is not neurotic or self-destructive. The same is true of a healthy society; it would aim at a heightening of creative vitality in all its members.
A little thought reveals the fallacy of the Rimbaud-Miller type of individualism. Obviously, a healthy society would be a society of healthy individuals. But more than this it would be a society in which the gifted individuals are healthy, since these gifted individuals tend to become the cultural leaders. If the gifted individuals tend to be pessimists who believe that life is futile and man a useless passion, it is not surprising if the cultural atmosphere becomes stagnant. It is a vicious circle; the rebel blames society for letting him down, and turns his back on it. And in condemning the 'sick culture', he is introducing a little more poison into its system. The next generation of rebels find that the situation is still worse, so they again throw the blame on society, and make a hero of the rebel of the older generation—who is actually largely to blame. So it goes on. The rebel is disinclined to believe either that he might play an important part in determining the cultural atmosphere
of his society, or that a society's culture is important to its health. He likes to place the blame on those in power—politicians and businessmen—forgetting that these men are only doing their best to support the society he has rejected. So the spiral of degeneration continues.
It is important to recognize the close connection between a society's culture and its general health. Frederick Wilhelm III of Prussia has often been attacked for his part in promoting Hegel and condemning Schopenhauer to obscurity. In fact, he showed a profounder insight than most princes possess. Hegel's philosophy was optimistic, and he recognized the importance of social stability; Schopenhauer's was pessimistic, and his attitude to politics was wholly cynical. An 'officially approved' Schopenhauer would have been the most dangerous man in Europe. Hegel's influence was comparatively beneficial.
It follows, then, that if our own culture is 'sick', we should not throw all the blame on politicians or businessmen; the thinkers and artists of the past two hundred years are equally to blame. Some have been entirely destructive, like Schopenhauer or de Sade. Most of the others have raised problems that they have left unsolved, or only partly solved. (This list includes almost every important thinker from Coleridge onward.) A very small number have thought the problems through to the end and proposed constructive solutions. (These include Hegel, Shaw and Wells.) Such men are never popular with their 'intellectual peers', since their very existence is an implied reproach. The following generation usually condemns them as shallow, and tries to forget them.