Which history of humanistic psychology to write?

Unlike its predecessors (History and Theories of Psychology, and Psychology in Social Context) Jones, Elcock and Tyson is going to be a history of psychology as well as a book about conceptual issues in psychology using history as a way of unpicking why certain conceptual issues continue to be problematic for the discipline. This parallels the way our (well at least mine and Dai's) teaching has changed. It does however open up some dilemmas about how we write some of the historical material. I am going to be writing the 'pre-history' of psychology and the challenge there is to write it in such a way that it doesn't seem there was an inevitable and unbroken chain of ideas from antiquity to the nineteenth century C.E. that led to the modern discipline.

There is a similar dilemma with the history of Humanistic Psychology.

The history as written by humanistic psychologists is, not surprisingly, the sort of old fashioned history we are trying not to do. There is the linking of modern ideas with a very select reading of philosophy. While there is some acknowledgement of what was happening in 1930s European psychotherapy the focus is on the great men (with none of the women mentioned at all) and their ideas are presented without any social context. I find it curious that someone who claims to be interested in a 'holistic' account of humanity writes as if intellectual ideas are forged in a culture free vacuum.

Grogan has written both popular and academic accounts of the cultural context of Humanistic Psychology and in part that is the story that I want to tell, but it is of course a story with a particular lens of the USA. One of the truly fascinating things for me are the looping effects, the ways that ideas in psychology are translated into everyday concepts through (for, example) the lens of popular psychology books and then go on to change the way that people understand themselves and each other. (Dai will be writing more about that in his chapter on everyday psychology)

In reading around the history of Humanistic Psychology over the last couple of days I came across a paper by Kriz and Längle (2012).

Although HP [Humanistic Psychology] is commonly referred to as the third force in American psychotherapy, it is considered the second force within Europe, starting as early as the 1930s (represented by such theorists as Viktor Frankl, Karl Bu ̈hler, Jacov Moreno, and Frederick Perls [see Bonin, 1983]) as a response to, and in dialogue with, psychoanalytic depth psychology in addition to being broadly inspired by philosophy (e.g., Frankl, 1938, 1939). This particular humanistic approach to psychotherapy was, however, soon decimated by the inhumanity of Nazi social policy. (p 475)

Also of interest, to me at least, is the idea the authors raise that in the 1970s when Humanistic Psychology was re-introduced into German universities it was the USA version, without an acknowledgement of the work in pre WWII Germany.

So my manifesto for this chapter is:

1. Include some of the influential female humanistic psychologists in the USA
2. Talk about the looping effects as elucidated by Grogan.
3. Talk about the European history of humanistic psychology.
4. Include something on the way that the export of USA based ideas acts as a form of cultural imperialism.

The last idea will form the core of my half chapter on how psychology becomes a psychology of adjusting people to fit a culturally specific idea of humanity rather than anything else.

Hopefully next week I will make progress on the writing.