Sample from New Pathways in Psychology: Maslow
and the Post-Freudian Revolution (eBook edition, 2001)
By Colin Wilson
Introductory
Personal Notes on Maslow
SOME TIME IN 1959, I received a letter from an American
professor of psychology, Abraham H. Maslow, enclosing
some of his papers. He said he had read my book The
Stature of Man,{1} and liked my idea that much of the
gloom and defeat of 20th century literature is due to what
I called ‘the fallacy of insignificance’. Maslow said this
resembled an idea of his own, which he called ‘the Jonah
complex’. One day, he had asked his students: ‘Which of
you expects to achieve greatness in your chosen field?’ The
class looked at him blankly. After a long silence, Maslow
said: ‘If not you—who then?’ And they began to see his
point. This is the fallacy of insignificance, the certainty
that you are unlucky and unimportant, the Jonah complex.
The papers he enclosed looked highly technical; their titles
contained words like ‘metamotivation’, ‘synergy’,
‘eupsychian’.
I glanced at them and pushed them aside. Some months
later I came across them again: this time, my eye was
caught by the term ‘peak experience’ in one of the titles,
and I started to read. It was immediately clear that I’d
stumbled upon something important. Maslow explained
that, some time in the late thirties, he had been struck by
the thought that modern psychology is based on the study
of sick people. But since there are more healthy people
around than sick people, how can this psychology give a
fair idea of the workings of the human mind? It struck him
that it might be worthwhile to devote some time to the
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study of healthy people.
‘When I started to explore the psychology of health, I
picked out the finest, healthiest people, the best
specimens of mankind I could find, and studied them to
see what they were like. They were very different, in some
ways startlingly different from the average . . .
‘I learned many lessons from these people. But one in
particular is our concern now. I found that these
individuals tended to report having had something like
mystic experiences, moments of great awe, moments of
the most intense happiness, or even rapture, ecstasy or
bliss . . .
‘These moments were of pure, positive happiness, when
all doubts, all fears, all inhibitions, all tensions, all
weaknesses, were left behind. Now self-consciousness was
lost. All separateness and distance from the world
disappeared as they felt one with the world, fused with it,
really belonging to it, instead of being outside, looking in.
(One subject said, for instance, “I felt like a member of a
family, not like an orphan”.)
‘Perhaps most important of all, however, was the report
in these experiences of the feeling that they had really
seen the ultimate truth, the essence of things, the secret
of life, as if veils had been pulled aside. Alan Watts has
described this feeling as “This is it!”, as if you had finally
got there, as if ordinary life was a striving and a straining
to get some place and this was the arrival, this was Being
There! . . . Everyone knows how it feels to want something
and not know what. These mystic experiences feel like the
ultimate satisfaction of vague, unsatisfied yearnings . . .
‘But here I had already learned something new. The
little that I had ever read about mystic experiences tied
them in with religion, with visions of the supernatural.
NEW PATHWAYS IN PSYCHOLOGY 12
And, like most scientists, I had sniffed at them in disbelief
and considered it all nonsense, maybe hallucinations,
maybe hysteria—almost surely pathological.
‘But the people telling me ... about these experiences
were not such people—they were the healthiest people! .
. . And I may add that it taught me something about the
limitations of the small . . . orthodox scientist who won’t
recognise as knowledge, or as reality, any information that
doesn’t fit into the already existent science.’{2}
These experiences are not ‘religious’ in the ordinary
sense. They are natural, and can be studied naturally.
They are not ‘ineffable’ in the sense of incommunicable by
language. Maslow also came to believe that they are far
commoner than one might expect, that many people tend
to suppress them, to ignore them, and certain people seem
actually afraid of them, as if they were somehow feminine,
illogical, dangerous. ‘One sees such attitudes more often
in engineers, in mathematicians, in analytic philosophers,
in book-keepers and accountants, and generally in
obsessional people.’
The peak experience tends to be a kind of bubbling-over
of sheer delight, a moment of pure happiness. ‘For
instance, a young mother scurrying around her kitchen and
getting breakfast for her husband and young children. The
sun was streaming in, the children, clean and nicely
dressed, were chattering as they ate. The husband was
casually playing with the children: but as she looked at
them she was suddenly so overwhelmed with their beauty
and her great love for them, and her feeling of good
fortune, that she went into a peak experience . . .
‘A young man working his way through medical school
by drumming in a jazz band reported many years later,
that in all his drumming he had three peaks when he
NEW PATHWAYS IN PSYCHOLOGY 13
suddenly felt like a great drummer and his performance
was perfect.
‘A hostess after a dinner party where everything had
gone perfectly and it had been a fine evening, said
goodbye to her last guest, sat down in a chair, looked
around at the mess, and went into a peak of great
happiness and exhilaration.’
Maslow described another typical peak experience to
me later, when I met him at his home in Waltham, Mass.
A marine had been stationed in the Pacific and had not
seen a woman for a couple of years. When he came back
to the base camp, he saw a nurse, and it suddenly struck
him with a kind of shock that women are different to men.
The marine had told Maslow: ‘We take them for granted,
as if they were another kind of man. But they’re quite
different, with their soft curves and gentle natures . . .’
He was suddenly flooded with the peak experience.
Observe that in most peak experiences (Maslow
abbreviates it to P.E’s, and I shall follow him), the person
becomes suddenly aware of something that he had known
about previously, but been inclined to take for granted, to
discount. And this matter had always been one of my own
central preoccupations. My Religion and the Rebel (1957)
had been largely a study in the experiences of mystics, and
in its autobiographical preface, I had written about a
boring office job: ‘As soon as I grew used to it, I began to
work automatically. I fought hard against this process. I
would spend the evening reading poetry, or writing, and
would determine that, with sufficient mental effort, I
could stop myself from growing bored and indifferent at
work the next day. But the moment I stepped through the
office door in the morning, the familiar smell and
appearance would switch on the automatic pilot which
NEW PATHWAYS IN PSYCHOLOGY 14
controlled my actions . . .’ I was clearly aware that the
problem was automatism. And in a paper I later wrote for
a symposium of existential psychology,{3} I elaborated this
theory of the automatic pilot, speaking of it as ‘the robot.
I wrote: ‘I am writing this on an electric typewriter. When
I learned to type, I had to do it painfully and with much
nervous wear and tear. But at a certain stage, a miracle
occurred, and this complicated operation was ‘learned’ by
a useful robot whom I conceal in my subconscious mind.
Now I only have to think about what I want to say: my
robot secretary does the typing. He is really very useful.
He also drives the car for me, speaks French (not very
well), and occasionally gives lectures in American
universities. ‘He has one enormous disadvantage. If I
discover a new symphony that moves me deeply, or a
poem or a painting, this bloody robot promptly insists on
getting in on the act. And when I listen to the symphony
for the third time, he begins to anticipate every note. He
begins to listen to it automatically, and I lose all the
pleasure. He is most annoying when I am tired, because
then he tends to take over most of my functions without
even asking me. I have even caught him making love to my
wife.
‘My dog doesn’t have this trouble. Admittedly, he can’t
learn languages or how to type, but if I take him for a walk
on the cliffs, he obviously experiences every time just as
if it is the first. I can tell this by the ecstatic way he
bounds about. Descartes was all wrong about animals. It
isn’t the animals who are robots; it’s us.’
Heaven lies about us in our infancy, as Wordsworth
pointed out, because the robot hasn’t yet taken over. So
a child experiences delightful things as more delightful,
and horrid things as more horrid. Time goes slower, and
NEW PATHWAYS IN PSYCHOLOGY 15
mechanical tasks drag, because there is no robot to take
over. When I asked my daughter if she meant to be a
writer when she grew up, she said with horror that she got
fed up before she’d written half a page of school-work,
and couldn’t even imagine the tedium of writing a whole
book.
The robot is necessary. Without him, the wear and tear
of everyday life would exhaust us within minutes. But he
also acts as a filter that cuts out the freshness, the
newness, of everyday life. If we are to remain
psychologically healthy, we must have streams of
‘newness’ flowing into the mind—what J. B. Priestley calls
‘delight or ‘magic’. In developing the robot, we have
solved one enormous problem—and created another. But
there is, after all, no reason why we should not solve that
too: modify the robot until he admits the necessary
amount of ‘newness’, while still taking over the menial
tasks.
Now I was much struck by Maslow’s comment on the
possibility of creating peak experiences at will. Because
his feeling was that it cannot be done. ‘No! Or almost
entirely no! In general, we are “Surprised by Joy”, to use
the title of C. S. Lewis’s book on just this question. Peaks
come unexpectedly . . . You can’t count on them. And
hunting them is like hunting happiness. It’s best not done
directly. It comes as a by-product, an epiphenomenon, for
instance, of doing a fine job at a worthy task you can
identify with.’
It seemed to me that this is only partly true. I will try to
explain this briefly.
Novelists have to be psychologists. I think of myself as
belonging to the school known as the phenomenological
movement. The philosopher Edmund Husserl noted that all
NEW PATHWAYS IN PSYCHOLOGY 16
psychological acts are ‘intentional’. Note what happens
when you are about to tickle a child. The child begins to
squirm and laugh before your hands have actually reached
him. On the other hand, why doesn’t it tickle when you
tickle yourself? Obviously, because you know it’s you. The
tickling is not something physical that happens when your
hands encounter flesh and make tickling motions. It seems
to be 99% psychological. When the child screams with
laughter, he is tickling himself, just as he might frighten
himself by imagining ghosts in the dark. The paradoxical
truth is that when someone tickles you, you tickle yourself.
And when you tickle yourself, you don’t tickle yourself,
which is why it doesn’t tickle.
Being tickled is a ‘mental act, an ‘intention’. So are all
perceptions. I look at something, as I might fire a gun at it.
If I glance at my watch while I am in conversation, I see
the time, yet I don’t notice what time it is. As well as
merely ‘seeing’ I have to make a mental act of grasping.
Now the world is full of all kinds of things that I cannot
afford to ‘grasp’ or notice. If I am absorbed in a book, I
‘grasp’ its content; my mind explores it as though my
thoughts were fine, thin tentacles reaching every corner of
the book. But when I put the book back on the shelf, it is
standing among dozens of other books, which I have also
explored at some time in the past. As I look at all these
books, I cannot simultaneously grasp all of them. From
being intimate friends, they have become mere nodding
acquaintances. Perhaps one or two, of which I am very
fond, mean more to me than the others. But of necessity,
it has to be very few.
Consider Maslow’s young mother getting the breakfast.
She loves her husband and children, but all the same, she
is directing her ‘beam of interest’ at making the coffee,
NEW PATHWAYS IN PSYCHOLOGY 17
buttering the toast, watching the eggs in the frying pan.
She is treating her husband and children as if they were a
row of books on a shelf. Still, her energies are high; she is
looking forward to an interesting day. Then something
triggers a new level of response. Perhaps it is the beam of
sunlight streaming through the window, which seems to
shake her arm and say: ‘Look—isn’t it all wonderful?’ She
suddenly looks at her husband and children as she would
look at the clock to find out the time. She becomes selfconscious
of the situation, using her beam of interest to
‘scan’ it, instead of to watch the coffee. And having put
twice as much energy into her ‘scanning’, she experiences
‘newness’. The mental act of looking at her family, and
thinking: ‘I am lucky’, is like an athlete gathering himself
for a long jump, concentrating his energies.
What happens if somebody returns a book that he
borrowed from me a long time ago? I look at the book with
a kind of delight, as though it were a returned prodigal:
perhaps I open it and read a chapter. Yet if the book had
stayed on my shelf for six months I might not even have
bothered to glance at it. The return of the book has made
me focus my beam of interest, like an athlete gathering for
a leap.
When something occupies my full attention, it is very
real to me. When I have put the book back on the shelf, I
have un-realised it, to some extent. I have pushed it back
to a more abstract level of reality. But I have the power to
realise it again. Consider the mental act I make when I feel
glad to see the book again. I ‘reach out’ my invisible
mental tentacles to it, as I might reach out my hand to a
friend I am delighted to see, and I focus my beam of
interest on it with a kind of intensity—the kind of
intentness with which a sapper de-fuses an unexploded
NEW PATHWAYS IN PSYCHOLOGY 18
bomb.
We do this ‘real-ising’ and ‘un-real-ising’ all the
time—so automatically that we fail to notice that we are
doing it. It is not just ‘happening’. Like the athlete
gathering himself to leap, it is the deliberate compression
of mental muscles.
All this suggests that Maslow is mistaken to believe that
peak experiences have to ‘come’ without being sought. A
little phenomenological analysis, like the kind we have
conducted above, reveals that the P .E. has a structure
that can be duplicated. It is the culmination of a series of
mental acts, each of which can be clearly defined.
The first pre-condition is ‘energy’, because the P .E. is
essentially an overflowing of energy. This does not mean
ordinary physical energy; Maslow points out that sick
people can have P.E’s as easily as healthy ones, if the
conditions are right. If you say to a child: ‘I’ll take you to
the pantomime tonight if you’ll tidy your bedroom’, he
immediately seethes with a bustling energy. The normally
boring act of tidying a room is performed with enthusiasm.
And this is because he—figuratively—‘takes a deep breath’.
He is so determined that the tidying shall be satisfactory
that he is prepared to devote attention to every square
inch of the floor. And the ‘mental act’ that lies behind this
is a certain concentration and ‘summoning of energy’, like
calling ‘All hands on deck’. If I am asked to do a job that
bores me, I summon only a small quantity of energy, and
if the job is complicated, I skimp it. If I am determined to
do it thoroughly, I place the whole of my interior army and
navy ‘on call’. It is this state—of vigilance, alertness,
preparedness—that is the basis of the peak experience.
Healthy people—like Maslow’s housewife—are people
with a high level of ‘preparedness’? This can be expressed
NEW PATHWAYS IN PSYCHOLOGY 19
in a simple image. My ‘surplus energy’ is stored in my
subconscious mind, in the realm of the robot: this is like
money that has been invested in stocks and shares. Nearer
the surface of everyday consciousness, there are ‘surplus
energy tanks’, energy which is ready-for-use, like money
in my personal account at the bank. When I anticipate
some emergency, or some delightful event (like a holiday)
which I shall need energy to enjoy to the full, I transfer
large quantities of ‘ready energy’ to these surface tanks,
just as I might draw a large sum out of the bank before I go
on holiday.
‘Peakers’ are people with large quantities of energy in
the ready-energy tanks. Bored or miserable people are
people who keep only small amounts of energy for
immediate use.
But it must be borne in mind that both types of people
have large amounts of energy available in their ‘deep
storage tanks’ in the realm of the robot. It is merely a
matter of transferring it to your ‘current account.
In a paper called ‘The Need to Know and the Fear of
Knowing’, Maslow describes one of his crucial cases.
‘Around 1938, a college girl patient presented herself
complaining vaguely of insomnia, lack of appetite,
disturbed menstruation, sexual frigidity, and a general
malaise which soon turned into a complaint of boredom
with life and an inability to enjoy anything. Life seemed
meaningless to her. Her symptoms closely paralleled those
described by Abraham Myerson in his book When Life Loses
Its Zest ... As she went on talking, she seemed puzzled.
She had graduated about a year ago and by a fantastic
stroke of luck—this was the depression, remember—she
had immediately got a job. And what a job! Fifty dollars a
week! She was taking care of her whole unemployed family
NEW PATHWAYS IN PSYCHOLOGY 20
with the money and was the envy of all her friends. But
what was the job? She worked as a sub-personnel manager
in a chewing-gum factory. And after some hours of talking,
it became more and more clear that she felt she was
wasting her life. She had been a brilliant student of
psychology and was very happy and successful in college,
but her family’s financial situation made it impossible for
her to go on into graduate studies. She was greatly drawn
to intellectual work, not altogether consciously at first
because she felt she ought to feel fortunate with her job
and the money it brought her. Half-consciously then she
saw a whole lifetime of greyness stretching out ahead of
her. I suggested that she might be feeling profoundly
frustrated and angry simply because she was not being her
own very intelligent self, that she was not using her
intelligence and her talent for psychology and that this
might well be a major reason for her boredom with life
and her body’s boredom with the normal pleasures of life.
Any talent, any capacity, I thought, was also a motivation,
a need, an impulse. With this she agreed, and I suggested
that she could continue her graduate studies at night after
her work. In brief, she was able to arrange this and it
worked well. She became more alive, more happy and
zestful, and most of her physical symptoms had
disappeared at my last contact with her.’
It is significant that Maslow, although trained as a
Freudian, did not try to get back into the subject’s
childhood and find out whether she experienced penis envy
of her brothers or a desire to murder her mother and
marry her father. He followed his instinct—his feeling that
creativeness and the desire for a meaningful existence are
as important as any subconscious sexual drives.
Anyone who knows my own work will see why Maslow’s
NEW PATHWAYS IN PSYCHOLOGY 21
approach appealed so much to me—and why mine,
apparently, appealed to Maslow. My first book, The
Outsider, written when I was 23, was about people like
Maslow’s girl patient-men driven by an obscure creative
urge that made them dissatisfied with everyday life, and
which in some cases—T. E. Lawrence, for example—caused
them to behave in a manner that seemed masochistic. The
book sprang from my own obsession with the problem of
‘life failure’. Auden wrote:
‘Put the car away; when life fails
What’s the good of going to Wales?’
Eliot asks in The Rock: ‘Where is the life we have lost in
living?’ And Shaw says of the Ancients in Back to
Methuselah: ‘Even at the moment of death, their life does
not fail them.’ Maslow’s patient was suicidal because she
felt she was losing her life in the process of living it. Quite
clearly, we were talking about the same thing. I had asked
repeatedly in The Outsider: ‘Why does life fail?’ Maslow
was replying, in effect: Because human beings have needs
and cravings that go beyond the need for security, sex,
territory. He states it clearly in the preface to the
Japanese edition of Eupsychian Management, asserting
that ‘human nature has been sold short, that man has a
higher nature which is just as “instinctoid” as his lower
nature, and that this higher nature includes the need for
meaningful work, for responsibility, for creativeness, for
being fair and just, for doing what is worthwhile and for
preferring to do it well.’
I must outline my own approach to this problem, as I
explained it in subsequent correspondence with Maslow.
The Outsider had developed from my interest in the
NEW PATHWAYS IN PSYCHOLOGY 22
romantics of the 19th century—Goethe, Schiller, Novalis,
Wagner, Nietzsche, Van Gogh. What fascinated me was
their world rejection. It was summed up by Villiers de
1’lsle—Adam’s hero Axel in the words ‘Live? Our servants
can do that for us.’ Axel asserted that ‘real life’ is always
a disappointment. The heroine, Sarah, has a long speech
in which she speaks of all the marvellous places they might
visit now they have found the treasure. Axel replies that
the cold snows of Norway sound marvellous, but when you
actually get there, it’s just cold and wet” L. H. Myers had
made the same point with fine precision in The Near and
the Far, where the young Prince Jali stares at a splendid
sunset over the desert, and reflects that there are two
deserts: one that is a glory to the eye, and one that is a
weariness to the feet. If you tried rushing towards that
sunset, you would only get your shoes full of sand. It seems
impossible to grasp ‘the promise of the horizon’. And it
was this feeling of despair about the near and the far—the
feeling that they can never be reconciled—that led to so
many early deaths among the romantics: suicide, insanity,
tuberculosis. Obermann, in Senancour’s novel of that
name, says that the rain depresses him, yet when the sun
comes out it strikes him as ‘useless’. This is life-failure.
But man’s achievement is to have created a world of
the mind, of the intellect and imagination, which is as real
in its way as any actual country on the map. Sir Karl
Popper, in one of his most important papers, calls it ‘the
third world.’{4} The first world is the objective world of
things. The second world is my inner subjective world. But,
says Popper, there is a third world, the world of objective
contents of thoughts. If some catastrophe destroyed all
the machines and tools on this earth, but not the libraries,
a new generation would slowly rebuild civilisation. If the
NEW PATHWAYS IN PSYCHOLOGY 23
libraries are all destroyed too, there could be no reemergence
of civilisation, for all our carefully stored
knowledge would have gone, and man would have to start
regaining it from scratch. Teilhard de Chardin calls this
‘third world’ the noosphere—the world of mind. I t
includes the works of Newton, Einstein, Beethoven,
Tolstoy, Plato; it is the most important part of our human
heritage.
A cow inhabits the physical world. It has almost no
mind, to speak of. Man also inhabits the physical world,
and has to cope with its problems. But he has built
civilisation because the physical world is not enough.
Nothing is so boring as to be stuck in the present. Primitive
man loved stories for the same reason that young children
do. Because they afforded an escape from the present,
because they freed his memory and imagination from mere
‘reality’. Einstein made the same point: ‘. . . one of the
strongest motives that lead men to art and science is to
escape from everyday life, with its painful crudity and
hopeless dreariness. . . A finely tempered nature longs to
escape from personal life into the world of objective
perception and thought; this desire may be compared to
the townsman’s irresistible longing to escape from his
noisy, cramped surroundings into the silence of high
mountains. . .’{5}
But my central point is this. Man is a very young
creature: his remotest ancestors only date back two
million years. (The shark has remained unchanged for
15,000,000 years.) And although he longs for this ‘third
world’ as his natural home, he only catches brief glimpses
of it. For it can only be ‘focused’ by a kind of mental eye.
This morning, as I cleaned my teeth in the bathroom a
fragment of Brahms drifted through my head and caused
NEW PATHWAYS IN PSYCHOLOGY 24
that sudden feeling of inner-warmth. The person labelled
‘Colin Wilson’ ceased to matter: it was almost as if I had
floated out of my body and left him behind, as if the real
‘I’ had taken up a position somewhere midway between
myself and Brahms. In the same way, when I am working
well, I seem to lose my identity, ‘identifying’ instead with
the ideas or people I am writing about. But very often, I
cannot even begin to focus the ‘third world’; the real
world distracts me, and keeps my attention fixed on its
banal ‘actualities’ like some idiot on a train who prevents
you from reading by talking in a loud voice.
All the same, this ‘third world’ is a place; it is there all
the time, like China or the moon; and it ought to be
possible for me to go there at any time, leaving behind the
boring person who is called by my name. It is
fundamentally a world of pure meaning. It is true that my
small personal world is also a world of meaning; but of
trivial, personal meaning, distorted and one-sided, a
worm’s eye view of meaning.
It is man’s evolutionary destiny to become a citizen of
the third world, to explore it as he might now explore
Switzerland on a holiday.
It is impossible to predict what will happen to human
beings when that time comes: for this reason. Meaning
stimulates the will, fills one with a desire to reach out to
new horizons. When a man in love sees the girl
approaching, his heart ‘leaps’. When I hear a phrase of
music that means something to me, my heart leaps. That
‘leap’ is vitality from my depths, leaping up to meet the
‘meaning’. And the more ‘meaning’ I perceive, the more
vitality rushes up to meet it. As his access to the world of
meaning increases, man’s vitality will increase towards the
superman level; that much seems clear .
NEW PATHWAYS IN PSYCHOLOGY 25
Boredom cripples the will. Meaning stimulates it. The
peak experience is a sudden surge of meaning. The
question that arises now is: how can I choose meaning? If
Maslow is correct, I can’t. I must be ‘surprised’ by it. It is
a by-product of effort.
At this point, I was able to point out to Maslow a
possibility that he had overlooked, a concept I called ‘the
indifference threshold’ or ‘St Neot margin’. It is
fundamentally a recognition that crises or difficulties can
often produce a sense of meaning when more pleasant
stimuli have failed. Sartre remarks that he had never felt
so free as during the war when, as a member of the French
Resistance, he was likely to be arrested and shot at any
time. It seems a paradox: that danger can make you feel
free when peace and serenity fail to arouse any response.
It does this by forcing you to concentrate.
I stumbled on this concept in the following manner. In
1954, I was hitchhiking to Peterborough on a hot Saturday
afternoon. I felt listless, bored and resentful: I didn’t want
to go to Peterborough—it was a kind of business trip—and
I didn’t particularly long to be back in London either.
There was hardly any traffic on the road, but eventually I
got a lift. Within ten minutes, there was an odd noise in
the engine of the lorry. The driver said: ‘I’m afraid
something’s gone wrong—I’ll have to drop you off at the
next garage.’ I was too listless to care. I walked on, and
eventually a second lorry stopped for me. Then occurred
the absurd coincidence. After ten minutes or so, there was
a knocking noise from his gearbox. When he said: ‘It
sounds as if something’s wrong’, I thought: ‘Oh no!’ and
then caught myself thinking it, and thought: ‘That’s the
first definite reaction I’ve experienced today.’ We drove
on slowly—he was anxious to get to Peterborough, and by
NEW PATHWAYS IN PSYCHOLOGY 26
this time ... so was I. He found that if he dropped speed
to just under twenty miles an hour, the knocking noise
stopped; as soon as he exceeded it, it started again. We
both listened intently for any resumption of the trouble.
Finally, as we were passing through a town called St Neots,
he said: ‘Well, I think if we stay at this speed, we should
make it.’ And I felt a surge of delight. Then I thought:
‘This is absurd. My situation hasn’t improved since I got
into the lorry—in fact, it has got worse, since he is now
crawling along. All that has happened is that an
inconvenience has been threatened, and then the threat
withdrawn. And suddenly, my boredom and indifference
have vanished.’ I formulated then the notion that there is
a borderland or threshold of the mind that can be
stimulated by pain or inconvenience, but not pleasure.
(After all, the lorry originally stopping for me failed to
arouse a response of gratitude.) I labelled it ‘the
indifference threshold’ or-after the place I was travelling
through at the time-the St Neot margin.
All that had happened, of course, was that the threat of
a second breakdown had made me concentrate my
attention. I spent a quarter of an hour listening intently to
the engine. The threatened ‘crisis’ made me use my
focusing-muscle, instead of allowing it to remain passive.
Relaxing it—when he said we could probably make
it—caused a rush of pleasure.
The same applies to Sartre. The constant danger of
arrest kept him at a high level of alertness, of tension.
Maslow’s girl patient became so bored with her job in the
chewing gum factory that she allowing the focusing-muscle
to go permanently flaccid.
If you allow the will to remain passive for long periods,
it has the same effect as leaving your car in the garage for
NEW PATHWAYS IN PSYCHOLOGY 27
the winter. The batteries go flat. When the batteries go
flat, ‘life fails’. These ‘focusing muscles’ must be used if
we are to stay healthy, for they are the means by which
the mind focuses on values, just as the eye muscles enable
the eye to focus on distant objects. If we fail to use them
for long periods, the result is a kind of mental
shortsightedness, a gradual loss of the feeling of the
reality of values, of meaning. This explains what happens
if you watch television for too long, or read a very long
book on a dull winter day until your eyes are aching. Your
‘meaning focus’ relaxes as your interest flags, and if you
then go for a walk, everything seems oddly meaningless
and dull. It just ‘is’, and it doesn’t arouse any response.
The Greek poet Demetrios Capetanakis wrote in the
early forties: ‘ “Well,” I thought when the war started,
trying to hope for the best, “it will be horrible, but if it
will be so horrible as to frighten and wake up the mind, it
will be the salvation of many. Many are going to die, but
those who are going to survive will have a real life, with
the mind awake” . . . But I was mistaken . . . The war is
very frightening, but it is not frightening enough.’
The same thought struck me when I read the article
Camus wrote for the resistance paper Combat when the
Germans were being driven out of Paris.(6} It is called ‘The
Night of Truth’ and is full of noble phrases. The skyline of
Paris is blazing, he says, but these are the flames of
freedom. ‘Those who never despaired of themselves or of
their country find their reward under this sky . . . the
great virile brotherhood of recent years will never forsake
us . . . man’s greatness . . . lies in his decision to be
stronger than his condition’, and so on. But Simone de
Beauvoir’s novel The Mandarins begins shortly after the
liberation, and Camus is one of the characters. And they
NEW PATHWAYS IN PSYCHOLOGY 28
drift around the nightspots of St Germain and drink too
much and smoke too much and waste time on pointless
adulteries. What had happened to the Night of Truth?
The answer is simple. Without the danger and injustice
to keep the mind alert, they allowed a kind of innerlaziness
to descend.
But didn’t Camus remember their feelings about a
completely different kind of future? The answer is: in the
real sense of the word, no. Real memory brings a sense of
meanings and values with it. False memory recalls the
‘facts’, but without their inner content of meaning. It must
be squarely recognised that man suffers from a very real
form of amnesia. This is not a figure of speech but a
reality. For the ‘meaning’ depends upon the mind’s power
of ‘focusing’.
Must we, then, draw the pessimistic conclusion that
mankind needs war and injustice to prevent him from
lapsing into a condition of boredom, or at least, of
preoccupation with trivialities? The answer, fortunately, is
no. ‘Focusing’ is a muscle, and it can be strengthened like
any other muscle. Graham Greene, in an essay I have often
quoted, describes how, in his teens, he sank into a
condition of extreme boredom and depression, during
which life became meaningless. He tried playing Russian
roulette with his brother’s revolver, inserting only one
bullet, spinning the chambers, pointing it at his head and
pulling the trigger. When there was just a click, he was
overwhelmed by a feeling of delight, and a sense of the
meaningfulness of life. The situation is fundamentally the
same as in my ‘St Neot margin’ experience in the lorry,
except that Greene’s concentration was more intense,
because the negative stimulus was greater. At a later
stage, I discovered that a mild peak experience could
NEW PATHWAYS IN PSYCHOLOGY 29
easily be induced merely by concentrating hard on a
pencil, then relaxing the attention, then concentrating
again ...After doing this a dozen or so times, the attention
becomes fatigued—if you are doing it with the right degree
of concentration—and a few more efforts—deliberately
ignoring the fatigue—trigger the peak experience. After
all, concentration has the effect of summoning energy
from your depths. It is the ‘pumping’ motion—of expanding
and contracting the attention—that causes the peak
experience.
Another interesting point arose when I was lecturing to
Maslow’s class at Brandeis University in early 1967. I was
speaking about the peculiar power of the human
imagination. I can imagine trapping my thumb in the door,
and wince as if I had actually done it. I can go to see a
film, and come out of the cinema feeling as if I have been
on a long journey. Even so, it must be admitted that
imagination only provides a dim carbon copy of the original
experience. I may try to recall a particularly happy day,
and even re-experience some of its pleasures; but
compared to the original experience, it is like paste
jewellery compared to the real thing. The hero of
Barbusse’s novel Hell, trying to recall the experience of
watching a woman undress, admits: ‘These words are all
dead. They leave untouched, powerless to affect it, the
intensity of what was’. Proust, tasting a madeleine dipped
in tea, recalls with sudden intensity the reality of his
childhood: but that is a fluke. He cannot do it by an
ordinary act of imagination.
Yet the matter of sex appears to be an exception to this
rule. A man can conjure up some imaginary scene with a
girl undressing, and he responds physically as if there were
NEW PATHWAYS IN PSYCHOLOGY 30
a girl undressing in the room: his imagination can even
carry him to the point of a sexual climax. In this one
respect, man has completely surpassed the animals: here
is a case where the mental ‘act’ needs no object . . .
At this point, Maslow interrupted me to point out that
this is not quite true; monkeys often masturbate. I asked
him if he had ever seen a monkey masturbating in total
isolation, without the stimulus of a female monkey
anywhere in the vicinity. He thought for a moment, then
said he hadn’t.
Even if he had, it would not have basically affected my
point. If monkeys can do problems for fun, perhaps they
have more imagination than we give them credit for. But
the interesting point is that in the matter of sex, man can
achieve repeatedly what Proust achieved momentarily
tasting the madeleine: a physical response as if to reality.
Absurd as it sounds, masturbation is one of the highest
faculties mankind has yet achieved. But its importance is
in what it presages: that one day, the imagination will be
able to achieve this result in all fields. If all perception is
‘intentional’, due to a ‘reaching out’, a ‘focusing’, on the
part of the perceiver, then it ought to be possible to
reconstruct any reality by making the necessary effort of
focusing. We have only been kept from this recognition by
the old, false theory of ‘passive perception’ .
Anyone who did chemistry at school will recall what
happens if you mix sulphur and iron filings, and then heat
them in a crucible. A small area of the sulphur melts and
fuses with the iron. At that point, you can remove the
flame of the Bunsen burner; the reaction will continue of
its own accord; the glow slowly spreads throughout the
mixture until the whole crucible is red hot, and the end
NEW PATHWAYS IN PSYCHOLOGY 31
result is a chunk of iron sulphide. The same process goes
on in the mind when we become deeply interested in
anything. The warm glow produced by favourite poetry or
music is often the beginning of this fusing process.
We are all familiar with the process of a wider glimpse
of ‘meaning’ leading to the revitalising of the will. This, in
fact, is why people need holidays. As life drags on
repetitively, they get tired; they stop making effort; it is
the will that gets run down. The holiday ‘reminds’ them of
wider meanings, reminds them that the universe is a vast
spider’s web of meaning, stretching infinitely in all
directions. And quite suddenly they are enjoying
everything more: eating, reading, walking, listening to
music, having a beer before dinner. The ‘meaning’
sharpens the appetite for life—that is, the will to live.
It is our misfortune that we are not equally familiar
with the reverse process: that a deliberate increase in
willed concentration can also start the ‘fusion’ process
working. This is, in fact, common sense. The deeper my
sense of the ‘meaningfulness’ of the world, the fiercer and
more persistent my will. And increased effort of will leads
in turn to increased sense of meaning . It is a chain
reaction. So is the reverse, when ‘discouragement’ leads
me to stop willing, and the passivity leads to a narrowed
sense of meaning, and the gradual loss of ‘meaning’ leads
to further relaxation of the will. The result is a kind of
‘down staircase’ of apathy. On the other hand, any intense
glimpse of meaning can cause a transfer to the ‘up
staircase’. This is most strikingly illustrated in an
experiment that Maslow’s colleague, Dr. A Hoffer, carried
out with alcoholics.{7} Hoffer reasoned that alcoholics may
be people of more-than-average intelligence and
sensitivity. Because of this, they find that life is too much
NEW PATHWAYS IN PSYCHOLOGY 32
for them, and they drink because at first it produces peak
experiences. But as often as not it doesn’t; then they drink
more to increase the stimulus, and become involved in
guilt and depression. Hoffer tried giving these alcoholics
mescalin-producing a far more powerful ‘lift’ than
alcohol—and then deliberately induced peak experiences
by means of music, poetry, painting—whatever used to
produce P.E’s before the subject became alcoholic. The
startling result was that more than 50 % were cured. The
peak experience is an explosion of meaning, and meaning
arouses the will, which in turn reaches out towards further
horizons of meaning. The alcoholic drinks because he
wants peak experiences, but he is, in fact, running away
from them as fast as he can go. Once his sense of direction
had been restored, he ceased to be alcoholic, recognising
that peak experiences are in direct proportion to the
intensity of the will.
And what should be quite clear is that there is no
theoretical limit to the ‘chain reaction’. Why does a man
get depressed? Because at a certain point, he feels that a
certain difficulty is ‘not worth the effort’. As he becomes
more discouraged, molehills turn into mountains until, as
William James says, life turns into one tissue of
impossibilities, and the process called nervous breakdown
begins. Having recognised that the cause of the trouble lies
in the collapse of the will, there is no theoretical reason
why the ex-alcoholic should come to a halt with the
achievement of ‘normality’.
There is, of course, a practical reason. The will needs
a purpose. Why do we feel so cheerful when we are
planning a holiday—looking at maps, working out what to
pack? Because we have long-distance purpose. One can
understand how Balzac must have felt when he first
NEW PATHWAYS IN PSYCHOLOGY 33
conceived the idea of creating the Comédie Humaine, the
excitement of working out a series of novels about military
life, a series about provincial life, a series about the
aristocracy. . . ‘Building castles in the air’, this activity is
called; but with a little effort, they actually get built. Man
seems to need long-range purpose to get the best out of
himself. And once the alcoholic has achieved ‘normality’
again, he may well say: ‘All right, where do I go from
here?’
If this were true, it would represent a kind of dead end.
For undoubtedly, our civilisation tends to deprive us of the
kind of long-range purpose that our pioneer ancestors must
have enjoyed. But it provides us with something else: the
ability to live on the plane of the mind, the imagination.
And there is a still more important matter we have
over-looked: the mind’s capacity to reach out for meaning.
This is perfectly illustrated by a story told in Romain
Gary’s novel The Roots of Heaven. In a German
concentration camp during the war, the French prisoners
are becoming increasingly demoralised: they are on a
down-staircase. A man called Robert devises a way to
arrest the decline. He suggests that they imagine an
invisible girl in the billet. If one of them swears or farts,
he must bow and apologise to the ‘girl’; when they
undress, they must hang up a blanket so she can’t see
them. Oddly enough, this absurd game works: they enter
into the spirit of the thing, and morale suddenly rises. The
Germans become suspicious of the men, and by
eavesdropping they find out about the invisible girl. The
Commandant fancies himself as a psychologist. He goes
along to the billet with two guards, and tells the men: ‘I
know you have a girl here. That is forbidden. Tomorrow,
I shall come here with these guards, and you will hand her
NEW PATHWAYS IN PSYCHOLOGY 34
over to me. She will be taken to the local brothel for
German officers.’ When he has gone, the men are
dismayed; they know that if they ‘hand her over’, they
won’t be able to re-create her. The next day the
Commandant appears with his two soldiers. Robert, as the
spokesman, says: ‘We have decided not to hand her over’.
And the Commandant knows he is beaten: nothing he can
do can force them to hand her over. Robert is arrested and
placed in solitary confinement; they all think they have
seen the last of him, but weeks later, he reappears, very
thin and worn. He explains that he has found the way to
resist solitary confinement—their game with the invisible
girl has taught him that the imagination is the power to
reach out to other realities. realities not physically
present. He has kept himself from breakdown by imagining
great herds of elephants trampling over endless plains . .
. The irony, in the novel, is that it is Robert who later
becomes a hunter of elephants. But that is beside the
point. The point is that the will can make an act of
reaching towards meaning, towards ‘other realities’.
In phenomenological terms, what actually happened
when the prisoners began apologising to the imaginary girl?
First of all, they threw off their apathy and entered into a
communal game. It was like a coach-load of football fans
whiling away a tedious journey with community singing.
But having raised their spirits by entering into the game,
they also reminded themselves of circumstances in which
they would normally be ‘at their best’. Gorky’s story
Twenty Six Men and a Girl may be regarded as a parable
about the same thing: the twenty-six over-worked bakers
keep up their spirits by idealising the girl, treating her as
a goddess. . . . And thereby reminding themselves of the
response appropriate to a goddess.
NEW PATHWAYS IN PSYCHOLOGY 35
And this leads naturally to a concept that has become
the core of my own existential psychology: the Self-Image.
A man could not climb a vertical cliff without cutting
handholds in the rock. Similarly, I cannot achieve a state
of ‘intenser consciousness’ merely by wanting to; at least,
it is extremely difficult without training. We tend to climb
towards higher states of self-awareness by means of a
series of self-images. We create a certain imaginary image
of the sort of person we would like to be, and then try to
live up to the image. ‘The great man is the play-actor of
his ideals,’ says Nietzsche.
One of the clearest expositions of the self-image idea
can be found in a story called The Looking Glass by the
Brazilian novelist Machado de Assis. A young man who has
lived all his life in a small village in Brazil is called up for
military service. In due course he becomes a lieutenant.
When he returns home in his uniform he is the envy of the
village; his mother calls him ‘My lieutenant’. One of his
aunts is particularly delighted with him: she invites him to
her remote farm, and insists on addressing him as ‘Senhor
Lieutenant’. Her brother-in-law and all the slaves follow
suit. At first, the youth is embarrassed; he doesn’t feel
like a lieutenant. But gradually he gets used to the idea.
‘The petting, the attention, the deference, produced a
transformation in me. . .’ He begins to feel like a
lieutenant. But one day, the aunt goes away to the bedside
of a sick daughter, and takes the brother-in-law with her.
The lieutenant is left alone with the slaves. And the next
morning, they have all deserted, leaving him alone.
Suddenly, there is no one to feed his ego. He feels lost.
In his room there is an enormous mirror, placed there by
his aunt. One day he looks in the mirror—and his outline
seems blurred and confused. The sense of unreality
NEW PATHWAYS IN PSYCHOLOGY 36
increases until he is afraid he is going insane. And then he
has an inspiration. He takes his lieutenant’s uniform from
the wardrobe and puts it on. And immediately, his image
in the mirror becomes solid and clear. His feeling of sanity
and self-respect returns.
Every day thereafter, he puts on the uniform, and sits
in front of the mirror. And he is able to stay sane through
the remaining week before his aunt returns . . .{8}
Machado subtitles his story ‘Rough draft of a new theory
of the human soul’. And so it is, for a story written in
1882. His hero explains to his auditors that he believes
man has two souls: one inside, looking out, the other
outside, looking in. But this is crude psychology. He means
that the subjective ‘I’ gains its sense of identity from
actions and outward objects. But this implies that the
‘inner me’ remains unchanged. This in turn implies that
the shy, nervous ‘inner self’ is the permanent substratum
of one’s more confident layers of personality, and this is
obviously untrue. Shyness is simply a disinclination to
express oneself out of fear that it will turn out badly;
confidence—such as he gained through the petting and
admiration—is the ability to act decisively.
The key sentence is: ‘The petting, the attention, the
deference, produced a transformation in me.’ For this type
of transformation, I coined the word ‘promotion’. It is, in
effect, a promotion of the personality to a higher level. All
poetic experience is a ‘promotion’ experience, since it
raises the personality to a higher level. One has a sense of
becoming a stronger, or more mature, or more competent,
or more serious person.
If he had been a lieutenant for several years, being
alone in the house would not have eroded his sense of
identity. The trouble is that he is young, and that he is
NEW PATHWAYS IN PSYCHOLOGY 37
only just trying-on a new personality, the ‘Senhor
Lieutenant’. The image of himself in the looking glass
provides the reinforcement he needs.
The resemblance between this story and Romain Gary’s
story of the prison camp need hardly be pointed out. In
both cases, moral decline is arrested by reminding oneself
of something that re-creates the self-image. The weakness
of Machado’s theory of two souls becomes clear when we
consider that Robert keeps himself sane in solitary
confinement by an effort of inner-strength, of imagination,
not by evoking a more ‘successful’ level of his personality.
The elephants are an image of freedom. The sensation of
freedom is always accompanied by a feeling of contraction
of one’s inner-being. Such a contraction occurs when we
concentrate intently upon anything. It also occurs in sexual
excitement, and explains why the orgasm is perhaps the
most fundamental—at least the most common—‘promotion’
experience.
Donald Aldous, the technical editor of a well-known
record magazine, told me a story that makes the role of
the self-image even clearer. Before the war, the B.B.C.
hired a famous conductor to broadcast a series of concerts.
They were to be relayed from the new soundproof studios.
The orchestra had never played there before, and the
rehearsals lacked vitality. They explained that the studio
was too dead: they could not hear the echo of their own
playing. Donald Aldous was given the interesting job of
arranging a system of loudspeakers around the walls that
relayed the sound back to the orchestra a split second
after they had played it, like an echo. As soon as they
could ‘hear themselves’, the playing of the orchestra
improved enormously.
What is at issue in all such cases is a certain innerNEW
PATHWAYS IN PSYCHOLOGY 38
strength. Captain Shotover in Heartbreak House tells Ellie
Dunne that as a young man, he ‘sought danger, hardship,
horror and death’—as captain of a whaler—‘that I might
feel the life in me more intensely’. That is to say, he
sought conditions that would keep him at a high level of
tension and alertness, so as to develop the inner-muscle of
concentration. And note that the function of this muscle is
to produce a sense of inner-freedom. When it is feeble, I
am easily bored, depressed, made to feel sorry for myself.
I am a moral hypochondriac. When it has been
strengthened by a long period of alertness and effort) I
feel equal to most emergencies, and this is the same as to
say that I feel inner-freedom .
The self-image notion is of immediate relevance to
Maslovian psychology. And here we touch upon the very
heart of the matter, the most important point of all.
Let us consider the question: what is the mechanism by
which a ‘self-image’ produces ‘promotion’? The answer is:
it provides me with a kind of artificial standard of
objective values. It gives me a sense of external meaning.
Why did the peak experience under mescalin cure the
alcoholics? Because the peak experience is a flood of
meaning, obviously pouring in from outside. As it pours in,
you ask yourself the question: Why doesn’t this happen all
the time, if the meaning is always there? And the answer
is obvious: because I allow the will to become passive, and
the senses close up. If I want more meaning, then I must
force my senses wide open by an increased effort of will.
We might think of the senses as spring-loaded shutters that
must be forced open, and which close again when you let
them go.
It must be clearly understood that we live in a kind of
NEW PATHWAYS IN PSYCHOLOGY 39
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
NEW PATHWAYS IN PSYCHOLOGY 40
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 twentyninth,
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.’{9}
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 PATHWAYS IN PSYCHOLOGY 41
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
NEW PATHWAYS IN PSYCHOLOGY 42
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 selfimage
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
NEW PATHWAYS IN PSYCHOLOGY 43
how deeply they commit themselves to acting out the selfimage.
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, Stephen 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
NEW PATHWAYS IN PSYCHOLOGY 44
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
NEW PATHWAYS IN PSYCHOLOGY 45
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
NEW PATHWAYS IN PSYCHOLOGY 46
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 19th 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.
NEW PATHWAYS IN PSYCHOLOGY 47
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.
NEW PATHWAYS IN PSYCHOLOGY 48
PART ONE
I
The Age of Machinery:
from Descartes to Mill
ACCORDING TO MASLOW, mental health depends upon the
will fired by a sense of purpose. When human beings lose
their forward drive, the will batteries become flat, just as
a car’s batteries become flat if it is left in the garage all
winter. The result is a feeling of ‘life failure’, a loss of
instinctive values. In Maslow’s psychology, the central
place is given to the sense of values the human response to
what is worthwhile.
It is one of the absurd paradoxes of psychology that it
has taken three centuries to reach the conclusion that man
actually possesses a mind and a will.
Some time in the 1630s, the philosopher Descartes was
intrigued by the automata in the royal gardens at
Versailles. When the water supply was turned on, musical
instruments played: nymphs vanished into the bushes, and
a menacing figure of Neptune advanced on the intruder
waving a trident. It was not long since Harvey had
discovered the circulation of the blood, and many
physiologists believed that the nerves were tubes that
conducted the ‘animal spirits’ round the body. Descartes
found himself speculating about what distinguishes a man
from an automaton, and concluded that it is simply that
his mechanisms are more subtle. There was no question, of
course, of believing that man is merely a machine; as a
NEW PATHWAYS IN PSYCHOLOGY 49
good Catholic, he knew that man possesses an immortal
soul. But it seemed to him highly likely that plants and
animals are nothing more than automata, driven by their
sensations and desires. Even in man, he wasn’t certain
where the mechanism ended and the soul began; he
decided that the body and soul interact in the brain’s
pineal gland. The mind, according to Descartes, can exist
and think quite apart from the brain.
Descartes was timid by nature. When he heard that
Galileo had been seized by the Inquisition for declaring
that the earth revolves around the sun, he decided against
publishing his own system, contained in a book called Le
Monde. An expurgated version appeared after his death.
Other thinkers were bolder. Thomas Hobbes, an
Englishman and a Protestant, visited Galileo in 1636;
although Galileo had recanted his heretical ideas three
years before, he was still under house arrest. Hobbes
began working on his own system of nature, and it was
intended as a blow against religious bigotry. The mind, he
said, does not exist, for it is a contradiction to talk about
an ‘immaterial substance’. Even God, if he exists, must be
made of something. It follows that thoughts are the motion
of some refined substance in the head. Imagination is
basically the same thing as memory—a kind of faded
snapshot of past events. Both memory and imagination are
no more than ‘decaying sense’, like the after-image you
get if you close your eyes after staring at a bright window
frame. Moreover, said Hobbes (still defying the Pope), the
driving motives of human existence are fear and the desire
for power. Generosity and disinterestedness are only more
subtle forms of the will to power.
Hobbes, it must be remembered, was a contemporary
of Shakespeare and Milton; he lived in an age when the
NEW PATHWAYS IN PSYCHOLOGY 50
burning of witches—and atheists—was still commonplace.
Any scientific man with a mind of his own felt the need to
tilt at the colossus of bigotry that still ruled the lives of
most people in Europe. The best way of undermining
superstition was to continue the work of men like Giordano
Bruno and Francis Bacon: to write books glorifying the
power of reason. Philosophy, Hobbes said, is a form of
calculation that uses words instead of numbers. It has no
business with belief or superstition, only with what can be
known for certain. Anything worth understanding can be
understood scientifically. The scientific definition of a man
is not an immortal spirit (saved from damnation by Jesus),
but a group of material particles in motion.
All this is not an expression of intellectual defeat or
nihilism, but the defiant expression of a credo of freedom.
(And even in England, the publication of such ideas was not
without its dangers; Hobbes anticipated charges of heresy
by fleeing to Paris.) To begin with, ‘reductionism’ was
forged as a weapon of free thought.
End of sample from New Pathways in Psychology.
