In an interview between William Coulson and Linda Ames Nicolosi, titled âReflections on the Human âšPotential Movement,â published in the Journal of Marital and Family Therapy (JMFT) in December 2000, William Coulson said about Carl Rogers:
âRogers’ books gave voice to something that was already brewing in the culture at that time. In his 1961 book, On Becoming a Person, he wrote a chapter called, »To Be That Self Which One Truly Is.« [..] He was a onetime American Psychological Association president, and he received the APA’s first Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award. He was a weighty authority, and he wrote persuasively. Behavior that would have been confronted by the previous generation as shameful now became obligatoryâaccording to Rogers’ creed, »One must be that self which one truly is.«” âWilliam Coulson
The Human Potential Movement. I was born at the end of it, in 1974, but still, my feet were touched by the dissipating wave as it gently rolled back into the ocean. As a kid this movement gave me much food for thought. 40 years ago the Western world was safer, or more unconcerned, and we kids used to walk home from school, or go by bicycle, bus, hitchhiking, whatever, nobody was in fear for it. One or two or more hours of unaccounted time, Monday through Saturday. Sunday was our parents’s day off, anyways. Lots of time to stroll around the fields with its high grass, hundreds of types of weed and flowers, grasshoppers, ladybirds and many other insects. Time to explore the forest, look for what’s new at the creek running down the foot of the mountain. Time in nature, time for self-reflection, and reflection about the world around us.
In these days I often got thinking about people and why they say what they say, do what they do. For example, some of the other kids in school started using words like âegoâ, âcoolâ and âgay.â Like most kids, I didn’t know what that meant. But I, too, tried to find use for these words and see how grown-ups reacted. âDon’t be doing such gay work!â I once called out towards my father, he was working in the garden on a hot summer’s day. He was genuinely upset about that for days on end, and it took me another decade or so to find out about the bad connotation of that word. But in truth⊠I still don’t know why he was so upset.
Then, a few years later, the New Age wave hit the countryside. A seemingly never-ending stream of enlightened gurus came from all over the world to share their higher states of consciousness in town halls filled to the brim with students, Â and charge real money, in both size and physicality, for one-on-one spiritual readings and partnership advice.
At that time I heard words like true self, higher self, lower self, authentic self, false self, bilocation, infidelity, promiscuity and enlightenment⊠an eclectic mix of helpful tools, fantastic stories and selling-out of various Indian Paramahansas, but also of Western influencers like Louise L. Hay, Eckhart Tolle, Richard Bach, Dan Millman, Esther Hicks, Carlos Castaneda, Leonard Orr⊠I guess the Goodreads list of New Age Books or the Wikipedia page of New Age makes for a nice walk down the old memory lane.
At that time we people were still searching, for something⊠something authentic, true, uncorrupted, pure, original, for That Self Which One Truly Is, as Carl Rogers promised. Or, âsoldâ I might say in hindsight. The New Age, too, is now in the past, and forever imprinted in our Western souls and bodies. And I’m still not sure what that really means, practically.
As I wrote in my previous blog post, titled âWhy children become liars and toadiesâ, I wrote that by the time we finish compulsory schooling we all went through more than 10,000 hours of humiliation and suppression. I quote:
âIn school, we spend well over ten thousand hours of having to sit still and be quiet, donât move, donât eat, donât drink, ask to be allowed to go to the toilet, donât have critical thoughts, read only from the poorly written, heavily censored and haphazardly formatted books that were pre-selected for us, and listen to whatever is presented, by whomever, however badly, yet stay alert and respond to arbitrary questions when addressed, in exactly the way expected.â â Alfons Grabher
There was no choice about it, no choice at all. Either comply, sit through it, or⊠what? Become drug addicts and child-sex-workers, âWe Children from Bahnhof Zooâ? Was that the alternative?
There was no choice, we had to go through compulsory, institutional schooling. Not to mention the dire environment of it. For example, the school I had to go to was constructed in exposed concrete, with long, empty corridors. Everything was cold and hard, similar to socialist-style government buildings, or state prisons. The entrance area for students was underground, badly lit, and divided into cells made of metal bars and mesh. No teacher ever went down there. It seemed like teachers were of a higher status or something, yet one teacher was more miserable and strained looking than the next. And this was supposedly one of the best schools in our federal state.
Nobody of weight and importance seems to be talking about this. People talk about war, gender, abortion, toxic parents, geo-engineering, meat, paper straws and climate change, all difficult topics, but not this. Sure, they have endless talks about school reforms and school improvements, budget and safetyâbut none of this matters, we don’t heal. I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s because of our extensive 10,000+ hours training in self-alianation, lack-of-compassion, deception and self-deception, self-deprecation and making fun of others, you name it, the entire seed bank of evil.
âAbraham Maslow [an American psychologist best known for his theory of human motivation and the hierarchy of needs] condemned Carl Rogers’ idea that we should follow our feelings whether they were right or wrong. Maslow had caught on to the fact that this idea of the human potential movement was a civilization-destroying concept. It failed to understand the reality of evil in human life.â âWilliam Coulson
I don’t think we’re ever going to solve any of these psychological riddles, or dire conditions that plague our societies as a whole, as long as we don’t allow ourselves to look at what has been done to us in school. We need a reckoning. A process of introspection, reflection, and coming to terms with these past experiences, emotions, and traumas.
And then do something about it. Only when we allow ourselves to acknowledge and confront and act upon the difficult truths of what happened to us in institutional schooling will we achieve healing and reconciliation; in body and soul; and become able to live out of motives that are not influenced by the evil seeds planted during our time in institutional schooling. And maybe this will give us reasonable hope for a better future, instead of fear and uncertainty. If that seems something worthwhile having.
