Craig Chalquist, PhD, PhD September 16th, 2024 (and updated since) Chalquist.com
What might it take to revitalize the Human Potential Movement?
In the past decade, several highly transformative schools and academic programs have gone out of business. Others are in trouble.
At present, I have the honor of chairing a master's program in Consciousness, Psychology, and Transformation, one of the remaining academic programs founded under the auspices of the early Human Potential Movement. It is the oldest accredited consciousness studies program in the US. Formerly under the Department of Holistic Studies at John F. Kennedy University, CTS has evolved to embrace a diverse student body, classes on our relations with the natural world, and recent work in neuroscience, cosmology, integral philosophy, and AI. Other academic programs have not fared so well, reflecting perhaps a waning of the HPM itself. How might it be reborn? Should it be?
Institutional Ragnarok
I taught as an adjunct instructor in the Feminist Psychotherapy program at New College of California in San Francisco when the doors closed overnight. The remaining students were taught out at Argosy University, which also closed. When the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology was bought out in 2012, its doctoral candidates adrift because most of their instructors were fired, I was chairing East-West Psychology at CIIS, which got regulatory permission to accept and teach out these twenty-five or so candidates.
For a few years I taught in the Depth Psychology MA at Sonoma State. Of that program, only a few depth-oriented courses remain. I left that program to work as half-time core faculty in JFKU's Department of Holistic Studies, closed in 2009.
More recently, in 2024 Schumacher College closed as well, with no warning. One of its founders, the exemplary ecologist-philosopher Stephen Harding, died around the time of the announcement. I feel lucky that I knew him and got to teach with him once at Schumacher. He had worked with James Lovelock, co-originator of Gaia Theory, and described Gaia as a consciousness, a mythology (in Joseph Campbell's sense), and a worldview.
My current program, founded in 1979, is seeking permission to teach out students of a consciousness studies program which will close in January 2025. There are other examples of schools and programs fallen by the wayside.
If you wish to go into higher ed to study the depths of consciousness in the context of organismic psychology, story, myth, dream, applied wisdom, holistic philosophy, and the search for meaning, your choices are narrowing. Some of the schools and programs that remain are beset by long-standing systemic issues, as I have so often seen at close range. Can a contemporary mystery school survive in higher ed? If so, can it flourish? The jury is still out.
Another problem is that, aside from rising institutional costs, with the United States far behind other industrialized nations in its fiscal support of higher education, our national obsession with procedures, rubrics, measurements, and learning outcomes has swelled to the point of driving transformative educators from the field. We didn’t sign up to spend all our time categorizing, measuring, and quantifying beyond any reasonable benefit instead of teaching, mentoring, and writing. Overregulation is the most common unconscious academic defense against deep learning. Abraham Maslow named this defense rubricizing.
The deeper problem might be the Human Potential hyper-focus on the heights of human exceptionality, leaving all else—including our intimate relationships with the declining natural world—in shadow. As William James observed, those who find the world already good have little interest in making it good.
Psychologist Rollo May foresaw some of the results of such a blind spot. In a 1982 letter to Carl Rogers, for example, May argued that Rogers underestimated the human capacity for evil. Rogers, he said, attributed evil primarily to social influences, whereas evil is a potential we come in with. Maslow’s position was that evil reflects thwarted growth, a position echoed by Erich Fromm and Karen Horney. I tend to agree with them, especially after six years of counseling violent court-referred men, but the point is that the Human Potential Movement seems to have underestimated the fallibilities, petty envies, competitions, bureaucratic inanities, heartbreakingly fear-based decisions, patriarchal influences, and sheer moral cowardice that come into play when idealistic academics in a competitive and rule-bound industry try to build something beautiful without a grounded awareness of the difficulties. Think positively. Love is all you need.
HMP 1.0: A Glance
The roots of the Human Potential Movement run far back in time and across many cultures and philosophies. A more recent convenient starting point would be The Journal of Humanistic Psychology, published in 1961. Another would be the founding of Esalen Institute, the original East-West psychophilosophical school, in Big Sur, California by Michael Murphy and Richard Price in 1962. That year the American Association for Humanistic Psychology came together. Maslow and Clark Moustakis had been meeting in Detroit to discuss that since 1957. A conference at Old Saybrook in Connecticut followed in 1964.
Other names directly associated with HPM also include Aldous Huxley (author of The Doors of Perception), Henry Murray, Carl Rogers, Gordon Allport, Erich Fromm, Karen Horney, James Bugental, George Leonard, Fritz Perls (who threw tantrums disguised as "authenticity" during a Maslow presentation at Esalen), Richard Tarnas, and of course Michael Murphy, who coined "Human Potential Movement" in 1972.
From the start, the movement lived both inside and outside academia. An outside example that comes readily to mind is New York Open Center, founded in 1984 by Walter Beebe and Ralph White to underline "holistic, ecological and spiritual values rather than the outdated and ultimately fatal obsession with endless economic growth, materialism and consumerism." Ralph and I created and launched a Certificate in Holistic Psychology that was fun to teach there.
Common ground throughout the HPM included pushing back on mechanistic models for humanity (Maslow repeatedly criticized the behaviorism in which he had been trained) on the one hand and emphasizing the heights and best capacities of humanity, which had been sold short (Maslow again) by psychologies and sociologies emphasizing our dark side, including the pathology of normalcy. Erich Fromm asked about the questionable value of conforming to a sick society. The fact that millions share the same psychopathology does not make them sane.
Experience as trustable and altered states of consciousness received strong emphasis through some scholarly work and psychotherapy but even more in workshops and encounter groups. In some of these groups, participants criticized one another for lapses of authenticity. Wholeness, spontaneity, honesty, and creativity got much attention. (My wayward birth mother, a psychiatric social worker who preached HPM values, told her sister to tell me that "groups are where it's at.")
Historical writings about the HPM tend to focus on humanistic psychology but neglect the wider cultural currents and voices that fed the movement. To name a few examples from my own professional background: Alan Watts was instrumental in founding what became the California Institute of Integral Studies, launched in 1968 by Haridas and Bina Chaudhuri. They in turn were influenced by Aurobindo and Mirra Alfassa (usually known as The Mother). CIIS began as the American Academy of Asian Studies (1951), two of whose students were Michael Murphy and Richard Price.
Jungian practices permeated the movement. Although Jung was critical of Theosophy, yet another strong root of the HPM, his version of depth psychology sprang forth into institutes and societies in many countries. In 1971, what would become Pacifica Graduate Institute started out as a Human Relations Center, a branch of UCSB located in Goleta, CA. One result was an MA in Counseling Psychology as of 1983. Although not self-identified as part of the Human Potential Movement, Pacifica has held Jungian psychology as core to its mission and teachings.
The HPM has been frequently criticized. In 1998, for example, Geoffrey Hill (the social critic, not the poet) made several complaints in "The Failure of the Human Potential Movement," including Baby Boomer emotional immaturity and selfishness, an encouragement to act out such infantilism in groups, a sellout of exploration for comfortable living, an "ingrown" lack of reflection on the movement's shadow side, an attachment to individualistic feel-good experiences, anti-intellectualism ("Lose your mind and come to your senses"), a source of inspiration for the Synanon and Scientology cults, a self-aggrandizing and ecologically blind humanism, and, overall, a promiser of more than it could deliver.
What the HPM, New Thought, and every generationally specific movement lacks is a vision to propagate not only personal empowerment, but planetary empowerment. We don't need more mentalities which empower the one. We need philosophies and practices which empower the many. For unless a movement claiming to offer human potentiality lifts up the dignity of all humanity and nature as its prime priority, it falls far short of being what it purports to be.
We could put all this into a Jungian context: Where society at large (and American society in particular) reinforced structure, age, duty, and other attributes of the heavy and traditionalist senex (Old Man) style of consciousness, the HPM emphasized the childlikeness, spontaneity, freedom, and flights of fancy of the puer (Divine Child) for whom to be pinned down is a kind of spiritual death. But puer cannot live without senex.
HPM Updated
Carl Jung can help us begin to reimagine the movement. Although he tended to split everything into opposites, he also showed that the heights of what humans can achieve rest on the depths, that shadow work is essential to self-realization, and that our ties with nature and Earth must be consciously tended. It makes little difference whether mystical perceptions show up on our grids as states or stages as nations fall to authoritarianism while Earth burns. Our greatnesses do not separate us from our weaknesses, they grow from them. Human potential is rooted in human actual. (For a fictional counterpart to all this, consider the Jedi Order, a kind of Human Potential Movement blind to its own dark side. Hence the need for the Sith.)
Movements, worldviews, and paradigms wear out because the guiding stories they tell have become too small to adapt to changing times. Human Potential Movement 2.0 will need the depth and spaciousness to welcome cultural diversity and equity (not just Western samplings of Eastern or Native wisdom), updated cosmological findings (not just misinterpretations of quantum mechanics), holistic and scientific ecology, ecotherapy and ecopsychology, integral feminism, humanistic politics with Earth in mind, wise leadership studies, social and environmental justice, and research on emotional and psychological maturity beyond manic intuitive certainties. For starters.
Speaking of story. In Restorying Our Lore, the dissertation for my second PhD, I mentioned the work of Gordon R. Dickson as one of many examples of how fiction can illuminate life. His Childe Cycle of science fiction tales uses the term “full-spectrum humans” to describe how achieving species maturity involves coloring in different sides of our human character. Maturing is not a pilgrim’s linear progress. We are people of Faith, Philosophy, and War, among other possibilities, and to come of age as ethical-responsible humanity, we must become conscious of all that we are. It is not a matter of growing away from anything, but of growing more deeply into it. Dickson started publishing these ideas in fictional form in 1959.
Dickson also speaks of entering the Creative Universe, the source of the arts that make life worth living. (In my fiction this realm is called the Dreamvale.) As Joseph Campbell pointed out in his later (post-heroic?) work, the makers of myth in our day are writers and performing artists, among whom we might now include filmmakers, storytellers, dancers, embodied philosophers, graphic artists, terrapsychologists, improv actors, enchantivists, and makers of speculative fiction, as my second dissertation argued. These and other at-the-edge creatives are natural kin to the body workers, meditation teachers, holistic psychotherapists, reflective leaders, wisdom educators, nature sages, mystical musicians, dream mentors, and psychedelic guides of the Human Potential Movement.
Telling Larger Tales
In the summer of 2024, an idea resurrected (perhaps unconsciously) from the HPM proved potent in the political arena of the United States: that joy, inspiration, delight, and hope can be more powerful medicines than hatred, bigotry, or scapegoating. Although this wave of enthusiasm did not resolve the contradictions in the political party that fed it, it did offer a weary electorate a fresh glance at new possibilities. Imagine what could be done with talk well walked.
We've also had enough of the dark floods of doom and gloom that abundant research shows is ineffective at motivating us. Quite the opposite: they numb us while raising our psychological defenses. "When you look long into the abyss," Nietzsche wrote, "the abyss looks long into you."
Yes, we need to meet life without denial, and with enough night vision to see and stop wars and genocides, but we can't do that effectively without a place to put our hopes, aspirations, and dreams. It's not enough to show how bad things are: we need visions of how good they can be. How can we move forward together unless we can imagine our destination?
Thomas Berry, Brian Swimme, Joseph Campbell, and other scholars have said that we lack an overall framework for understanding who we are, where we are, and why. We are, historically, between big stories. The world has changed radically and rapidly since the old mythologies explained things to us. While all that is true, I don't see a single story or new myth providing worldwide guidance. Big stories have a way of hardening into monolithic ideologies that support the powerful while excluding everyone else.
I wonder if what would serve us better is a planetary mythology arising from millions of storytellers and other creatives around the world. Here our fictions might frame, support, and inspire more fully than literalized patriarchal creeds exalting vindictive gods and reckless heroes. Our stories might instead point the way toward a world community of our desire. If such a mythology ever did arise, perhaps Human Potential Movement 20 would fuel it with visions of how far we can reach when we dream together.
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