WHERE DID THIRD FORCE PSYCH GO?

In 1970, divorced, confused, broke, unable to imagine a future, and living in a derelict house that was supposed to be smeared with human excrement (it turned out to be peanut butter), I badly needed guidance. And I found it. Partly it came from the high school guidance counselor, who had just come from Detroit where he had been trained in the new Third Force psychology (Rogers), and partly I just bought the books. (Maslow, May, Perls, Ellis, Gendlin, Laing, et al.) The “First Force” in psychology was Skinner and Pavlov: the realization of what physiological conditioning could do and therefore what could be “un” conditioned. The “Second Force” was psychoanalysis, a la Freud and company, strictly structured around sex and death. And the “Third Force” was humanistic psychology, people who didn’t ask what the doomed, weirdo, nut-case, broken people were like, but rather asked what a really happy and successful person might be like. And what got them there.

The timing was just right. I thought this information would save both me and the world. So did a lot of others. But then drugs came into the picture and everything was “take a pill.” Chemical restraint. Uppers. And now it appears that if you have a cheek swab, “they” can tell you your problem was inherited as though that were helpful. Or they give you a pill that’s molecularly designed just for you. Luckily I was before these “waves of the future.”

I barely lucked out on the wave of the past, which was electroshock waves. There was a shrink in Great Falls who was notorious for shocking women, esp. tribal women. I was terrified I’d fall into his hands. This was when Martha Mitchell was drugged and shocked back into her childhood and something similar was done to the wife of a corrupt Helena art power. It was real. It was the Russian strategy: define your enemies as crazy and confine them for “treatment.”

There are so many “waves” and “forces” now that they’ve taken to calling “third force psychology” “Humanistic Psychology.” But humans are out of fashion at the moment. Polar bears and coral reefs are in. Anyway, where did all that energy and insight go? By the time I attended the U of Chicago (1978-82), where Rogers had an office just two doors over from my home seminary, it was all considered passé. Just now I printed off a bibliography from the website of the association, and I see some intellectual overlap: Tillich, Buber, Ricoeur, Foucault -- oh, Foucault was BIG, but I could never get a decent explanation out of anyone. Lakoff -- I’m still tracking him. None of these were strictly psych people. Maybe that’s what happened: the ideas escaped from the category of psychology, spreading out through other disciplines.

My psych favs at that time were English, on the shelves at the original Powell’s bookstore in Hyde Park. They were about “object relations” -- Winnicott and Kohut. I called them “teddy bear psych,” but they were sophisticated and influential. An English women’s counselling centre would work with women in distress all day, then meet at four in the afternoon to have tea and discuss what worked. They wrote about it. Not theory, but what seemed effective. A consensus seemed to be building that “work” was too hard -- just give ‘em a pill. Modern life is unendurable in the first place.

Maybe that’s what did in that strain of ideas, but it seems to me, looking at Google (which is neither fair nor particularly effective) that the thinking began to be sentimental, trivial, and -- God help us -- intimidated by all that damned inscrutable literary theory, all the stuff about how what you say is not what you mean and those in power only want to crush you and the only good people are the losers. I’m hoping that maybe that line of thought is weakening.

Another force was probably the neglect of community, except for those tea-drinking English feminists. One did what was right for oneself. Pretty soon there were theories surfacing about narcissism, which soon turned into an epithet to fling at anyone who was non-cooperative. There was some real bite to theories that proposed antisocial narcissism arose from a child (usually but not always male) who had an admiring, super-nurturing mother but an absent/uncaring/passive father. I was shocked to run into people who thought this was normal and not to be criticized because of the genius-level achievements of such people.

The history of thought, in particular the history of science, is a “hot” discipline right now, a kind of meta-discipline, with a special focus on national and international “structures” and financial matters. How is it that we came to believe in a kind of narcissistic capitalism in which private profit dominates every other possible goal? And what role did religion play in this? Was it atheism, the idea that there is no real ultimate and absolute judge? Or was it the Abramic notion that God rewards the virtuous, so how can being rich be bad? If God thinks you’re good enough to be made rich, what possible relevance can some government agency have?
(I’m indulging in the opposite conceit: if I’m poor, I must be virtuous -- a New Testament idea.)

It appears to me that we’re overdue for some reconciliations among schools of thought, some recovery of good ideas from the past, and some new insights -- maybe from ecology or systems management. I think that Nassim Taleb, Thayer & Sunstein, and others are beginning to open up new ideas, “nudging the black swan” so to speak. Maybe we aren’t heading into a Depression so much as we’re embarking on a Renaissance that will simply redistribute a lot of things, wealth included.

In the meantime, I have a LOT of books and more time than most people, plus this stupendous glass screen that gives me access to the world. I intend to read and reread and spend a lot of time just sitting and staring while my head goes round and round. Counselors call that “churning” when no product results. But what if I come up with the cutting edge version of peanut butter?