Frontier Struggles

James Schlett

Description

Frontier Struggles provides the first in-the-trenches account of how Rollo May and his ragtag band of New York psychologists in the early 1950s repeatedly beat back the medical lobby's attempts to legislatively reduce the human condition to biology and create a monopoly on psychotherapy.

Sujets

• Sociologie, société et politique
• Psychology

Informations

• Publié par: University of Akron Press
• Date de parution: 28 septembre 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781629221328
• Langue: English

Extrait

Frontier Struggles
THE CENTER FOR THE HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY SERIES
The Center for the History of Psychology Series
David B. Baker, Editor
David B. Baker and Ludy T. Benjamin Jr., From Séance to Science: A History of the Profession of Psychology in America
C. James Goodwin and Lizette Royer, Editors, Walter Miles and His 1920 Grand Tour of European Physiology and Psychology Laboratories
Ludy T. Benjamin Jr. and Lizette Royer Barton, Editors, Roots in the Great Plains: The Applied Psychology of Harry Hollingworth, Volume 1
Ludy T. Benjamin Jr. and Lizette Royer Barton, Editors, From Coca-Cola to Chewing Gum: The Applied Psychology of Harry Hollingworth, Volume 2
Richard I. Evans, Conversations with Carl Jung and Reactions from Ernest Jones, edited by Jodi Kearns
James Schlett, Frontier Struggles: Rollo May and the Little Band of Psychologists Who Saved Humanism
Frontier Struggles
Rollo May and the Little Band of Psychologists Who Saved Humanism
James Schlett
Copyright © 2021 by The University of Akron Press
All rights reserved • First Edition 2021 • Manufactured in the United States of America.
All inquiries and permission requests should be addressed to the publisher,
The University of Akron Press, Akron, Ohio 44325-1703.
ISBN : 978-1-62922-130-4 (paper)
ISBN : 978-1-62922-131-1 (ePDF)
ISBN : 978-1-62922-132-8 (ePub)
A catalog record for this title is available from the Library of Congress.
∞ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).
Cover illustration: Nadia Alnashar
Cover design by Amy Freels.
Frontier Struggles was typeset in Minion by Beth Pratt and printed on sixty-pound natural and bound by Bookmasters of Ashland, Ohio.
 
Produced in conjunction with the University of Akron Affordable Learning Initiative.
More information is available at www.uakron.edu/affordablelearning/ .
For Dan Jones: From home to our frontiers, friends. Always.
When a human being resists his whole age and stops it at the gate to demand an accounting, this must have influence. —Friedrich Nietzsche
Contents
Preface
Abbreviations
Introduction: The Call
Part 1: Origins
1. The Country Is Ailing
2. A Tremendous Army of Maladjusted Persons
3. Hanging Up a Shingle
Part 2: Tensions
4. Insurgency
5. Dead Ends and Revivals
6. Warning Shots
Part 3: Battles
7. Defeat
8. Threats
9. Blitz
10. The Calm before the Storm
11. The Last Stand
12. Victory
Conclusion: Frontiers
List of Psychology Laws, 1945–77
Original Manuscripts Key
Notes
Bibliography
Preface
The call was always for courage: the courage “to meet the anxiety which arises as one achieves freedom,” the courage it takes “not only to assert oneself but to give one’s self,” the courage needed at every step “as one moves from the familiar surroundings over frontiers into the unfamiliar.” 1
It was a call across the decades, one that had come to me when I had most needed to hear it. I was nineteen years old when I first read Rollo May’s Man’s Search for Himself . I had randomly found a reprint of his 1953 book in a bookstore. I had recently survived a brain tumor and had needed to hear about courage perhaps as much as May had needed it the years running up to the book’s publication. May had written Man’s Search for Himself after years of fighting tuberculosis. Of the years he had spent in a sanatorium in the 1940s, May says, “I saw that no one can directly and successfully combat his destiny, but each of us, by virtue of the small margin of freedom that prevails even in the sanitorium bed, can choose his attitude toward that destiny. Shall it be servile abdication or some form of courage?” 2
I knew that question, and I cannot begin to tell how indebted I am to May for rousing in me the “courageous acceptance of the ‘finite’” through my long recovery. I read and reread his books. So, in 2015, when I finished writing my first book, A Not Too Greatly Changed Eden: The Story of the Philosophers’ Camp in the Adirondacks , after five years of labor, the first book I chose to read for leisure was May’s Psychology and the Human Dilemma . I got no more than two pages into it when I found what I knew would be my next book. Almost in passing, May mentions how in the early and mid-1950s his “little band of psychologists who were therapists in New York State was engaged in a battle in the state legislature against the overwhelming power of the American Medical Association.” He continues: “Each legislative session we would be faced with the introduction of a bill to make psychotherapy a medical specialty. We were faced with immediate extinction and had to fight for our professional lives.” May notes how he had been at the “center of the warfare” while leading both the Joint Council of New York State Psychologists on Legislation and the New York State Psychological Association. “Surprisingly, we psychologists won each battle. Ultimately we won the war—for the nation as well as New York State.” 3
I had read this book several times already, but for whatever reason these passages finally stood out. Having worked in the senate in Albany and written about New York history, I was surprised that I had never heard about this “war.” When I tried to learn more about it, I was at a near loss. Roderick D. Buchanan’s essay on “Legislative Warriors” provided an overview of psychologists’ and psychiatrists’ mid-twentieth-century “chronic tug-ofwar over psychotherapy” and briefly mentioned the “tortuous legislative struggle” in New York. The same was true for Gerald N. Grob’s From Asylum to Community and John D. Hogan’s “A History of the New York State Psychological Association.” Shortly before his death in 1994, May had again mentioned these “dangerous years” in the forward to History of Psychotherapy . However, I could find no complete account of the battles fought by his “little band of psychologists” and the impact it had on the profession’s development in New York and beyond. 4
From the little I could learn, it was clear that this crisis over the control of psychotherapy was as political as it was existential. More was at stake than just a profession or public policy. After all, psychologists were not the first to battle with the physicians over the legal right to practice. In the early 1950s, osteopaths and chiropractors, among others, were fighting organized medicine over licensing. While those professionals treat various parts of the human body, psychologists treat what makes us human: the mind. The medical profession’s attempt to claim authority over the mind threatened to statutorily reduce emotions and mental conditions to biology and accelerate the mechanization of human beings as well as their dehumanization. Many psychologists then, as today, did not object to that biological approach because it made psychology a pure science. But May was not one of them. May, a pioneer of existentialism in America, was notorious for embracing scientifically fuzzy concepts, such as the “self,” and he reproached those who dismissed them as unscientific. He said, “It is a defensive and dogmatic science—and therefore not a true science—which uses a particular scientific method as a Procrustean bed and rejects all forms of human experience which don’t fit.” 5
Today, such opinions have relegated May to psychology’s frontiers. He is a fringe figure. He is psychology’s antihero. Rather than fit the profession’s concept of itself, he stood outside it—on the frontier—and inspired psychologists to accept their limitations and develop the powers they never knew they had. Facing the nation’s most powerful lobby—organized medicine—May showed New York’s psychologists were stronger. Rather than seek a return to “old values,” May throughout his career, as his biographer Robert H. Abzug notes, “instead sought to promote individual and social regeneration through the courageous embrace of personal freedom and responsibility not only for oneself but also for the community at large.” That was what he did for the psychology community in the 1950s, and Frontier Struggles is the story of what he called the “greatest courage.” In Man’s Search for Himself , which was published at the peak of the legislative battles, in 1953, he said, “The hardest step of all, requiring the greatest courage, is to deny those under whose expectations one has lived the right to make the laws. And this is the most frightening step. It means accepting responsibility for one’s standards and judgements, even though one knows how limited and imperfect they are…. It is the courage to be and trust one’s self despite the fact that one is finite; it means acting, loving, thinking, creating, even though one knows he does not have the final answers, and may well be wrong.” 6
Wanting to know more about what May had described as the profession of psychology’s “frontier struggles,” I set out for answers. I found many in the special collections of fifteen institutions in the United States and Europe, but chiefly in the Rollo May Papers in the Davidson Library at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the Molly Harrower Papers and Raymond Katzell Papers in the Drs. Nicholas and Dorothy Cummings Center for the History of Psychology at the University of Akron. To piece together this in-the-trenches account of these legislative battles, I used more than 150 original manuscripts, including letters, meeting minutes, and memoranda. There are instances in this book when I have relied on personal accounts detailed in these original manuscripts and other primary sources, coupled with warranted speculation, to set a scene. An example of this practice is seen in the phone call May receives in the introduction and his first encounter with Lawrence Frank in chapter 1 .
At the risk of sounding like a Luddite, I will quote Nietzsche, who said, “Science rushes headlong, without selectivity, without ‘taste,’ at whatever is knowable, in the