I am a student at the College of the City of New York.

My career through high school was distinguished and now in college promises to be brilliant. I have been given to hope that I might make some progress in philosphy, my chosen favorite. My writing has been commended warmly by my English professor. I flatter myself that my college education has not been wasted on me. Already I have found keen delight in warm discussion with scholars of the highest order, whose esteem I think I have won or shortly will win. My studies of literature of the world have roused and developed in me a keen, burnng sense of beauty. So a later development, I have found growing within me an ardent, longng love for music. MY critical sense is growing rapidly. Wonderful vistas strech before me, for I can see my mind gradually evolving into a clear-sighted, deeply analysisng instrument. It can grap more readily thoughts which before made me almost weak with exasperation as I tried in vain to tie them together and bring them out into view. I am soberer, sure in m thinking. I have possibility. There is latent power within me. During the last year, I have played with the thought that I might perhaps get a fellowship in philosphy and study at it for some years. I should also study logic and mathimatics, both calculated to clear the mists from my brain, allowing it to work more smoothly. Every civilized society has to carry below the sctions of the masses a dead weight of ignorance, poverty, crime and disease. Every such societ has the great, central section of the masses, a great body which... lives by routine and tradition. It is not brutal, but it is shallow, narrow-minded, and prejudiced... It can sometimes be moved by appeals to its fixed-ideas and prejudices. It is affected in its mores from the classes above it. In the highest excitement, I suddenly saw unrolling before me into the future the possibility of a science of psychology, a program of work which promised real progress, real advance, real solutions of real problems. All that was necessary was devotion and hard work. -(About John B Watson and Behaviorism) I have decided formally that I am not the research or experimenter type. I am rather a dilettante type. My desire for knowledge spreads itself all over the intellectual and refuses to bore in at one particular spot. The emphasis here is all on getting ahead. Gettomg ahead is synonymous with doing one piffling experiment after another and publishing as a result one piffling paper after another.. Two articles are good, four are twice as good. It's all very mathimatical apparently. There is a direct relationship between number of articles published and your goodness as a psychologist. ------------They all remind me of a bunch of businessmen or politicians with their noses in the wind, eager to know what is being done and what are the current folkways among American psychologists. It is fashionable ow to despise Gestalt psychology. Accordingly, they all despise it. If it were the folkway to admire it, they could admire it. They experiment only in problems that are being done at the time... They seem to be a bunch of intellectual castrates... But God dammnit, I'll keep my own intellectual virility if it kills me. To hell with their jobs. In my career as an experimentalist in the laboratory, I felt quite comfortable and capabley heritage of scientific orthodoxy. But insofar as I was a psychotherapist, an analysand, a father, a teacher, and a student of personality- that is, insofar as I dealt with whole persons- scientific psychology gradually proved itself to be of little use. In the 1930's I became interested in certain psychological problems, and found that they could not be

answered by the classic scientific structure of the time. I was raising legitimate questions and had to invent another approach to deal with them. This approach slowly became a general philosophy of psychology, or science in general, of religion, work, management, and now biology. One day just after Pearl Harbot, I was driving home and my car was stopped by a poor, pathetic parade. Boy Scouts and fat people and old uniforms and a flag and someone playing a flute off-key. As I watched, the tears began to run down my face. Felt we didn't understand- not Hitler, nor the Hermans, nor Stalin, nor the Communists. We didn't understand any of them. I felt that if we could understand, then we could make progress. I had a vision of a peace table, with people sitting around it, talking about human nature and hatred and war and peace and brotherhood. I was too old to go into the army. It was at that moment that I realized that the rest of my life must be devoted to discovering a psychology for the peace table. That moment changed my whole life. I consider it quite scientific to work with vague concepts, doing the best we can in the face of complex problems... The true scientist lives in the land of possibility, the land of questioning tather than the area of final and complete answers. He is not content to rest on the accievements of his predecessors... The true scientist continually tries to extend the areas of knowledge and therefore... works primarily with questions rather than with answers. Every true scientist is an inventor. Evry great achievement of every great scientist has always been an invention. He invents new techniques, new concepts, new words, new ways of looking at things, new classifications. He creates an audience. In this sense then, he is always a rebel, a revolutionary. Each new invention, each great discovery creates turmoil behind the lines. The people who have settled down comfortably are shaken and disturbed out of their comfort. They must learn new ways of doing things. They must see things in a different way... It is clear then that any great discovery any new invention... anything which will require a reorganization of the conquered territiory will be fought against, will not be accepted easily. This book is oriented around the basic psychological problems, around the questions which thoughtful men have asked for thousands of years. It is not oriented around the esoteric, guild-like questions which the techical psychologists have concerned themselves with. When we come down to it, the outlook of modern, technological psychology on man makes him out to be a blind, helpless, stupid, even vicious wanderer without purpose in a meaningless worl. Even his wanderings [are portrayed] as being random, senseless products of accdental forces completely external to him, over which he has no control. The turth which we can see more and more clearly is that man has infinite potentiality, which, properly used, could make his life very much like his fantasies of heaven. In potentiality, he is the most aweinspiring phenomenon in the universe, the most creative, the most ingenious. Throughout the ages, philosophers hae sought to understand the ture, the good, and the beautiful, and to speak for its forces. Now we know that the best place to look for them is in man himself. Certainly a visitor from Mars descending upon a colony of birth-injured cripples, dwarfs, [and] hunchbacks... could not deduce what they should have been. But let us not study cripples, but the closest thng we can get to whole, healthy men. In them, we find qualitative differences, a different system of motivation, emotion, value, thinking, and perceiving. In a certain sense, only the saints are mankind. All the rest are cripples. The notion I am working towards is of some ideal of human nature, closely approximated in reality by a few self-actualized people. Everybody else is sick in greater or lesser degree, it is true, but these

degrees are much less important than we have thought... There seems no intrinsic reason why everyone shouldn't be this way [self-actualizing]. Apparently, every baby has possibilities for self-actualization, but most get it knocked out of them... I think of the self-actualizing man not as an ordinary man with something added, but rather as the ordinary man with nothing taken way. The average man is a human being with dampened and inhibited powers. If we want to answer the question, how tall can the human species grow, then obviously it is well to pick out the ones who are already tallest and study them. If we want to know how fast a human being can run, then it is no use to average out the speed of the population; it is far better to collect Olympic gold medal winners and see how well they can do. If we at to know the possibilities for spiritual growth, value growth, or moral development in human beings, then I maintain that we can learn most by studying our most moral, ethical, or saintly people. The psychology of 1949 is largely a psychology of cripples and sick people... I see a large portion of the theoretical structure of current psychology as based upon the study of men at their worst, men in dire and acute emergency, men reeling under constant threat and frustration. Under such circumstances, how could it possibly be discovered that man had capabilities higher than... the neurotic? This is little like Kohler's [Gestalt cofounder] comment on the maze... as an instrument for measuring intelligence. He said, Even the greatest human genius could not show his intelligence in a maze. The science of psychology has been far more successful on th negative than on the positive side; it has revealed to u much about man's shortcomings, his illnesses, his sins, but little about his potentialities, his virtues, his achievable aspirations, or his psychological height. It is as if psychology had voluntarily restricted itself to only half its rightul jurisdiction, and that the darker, meaner half. In a word, I contend that psychology has not stood up to its full height and I would like to know how this pessimist mistake came to pass, why it has not been self-correcting, and what to do about it. We must find out not only what psychology is, but what it ought to be, or what it might be, if it could free itself from the stultifying effects of limited, pessimistic, and stingy preoccupations about human nature. For one thing, I am not only the disinterested and impersonal seeker of pure cold truth for its own sake. I am also very definitely interested and concerned with man's fate, with his ends and goals and with his future. I would like to help improve him and to better his prospects. I hope to help teach him how to be brotherly, cooperative, peaceful, courageous, and just. I think science is the best hope for achieving this, and of all sciences, I consider psychology most important to this end. Indeed, I sometimes think that the world will eather be saved by psychologists- in the very broadest sense- or it will not be saved at all. Self-actualizating people, those who have come to a high level of maturation, health and selffullfillment, have so much to teach us that sometimes they seem almost like a different breed of human beings. But because it is so new, the exploration of the highest reaches of human nature and of its ultimate possibilities... is a difficult and tortuous task. The power of the peak-experience could permanently affect [one's] attitude toward life. A single glimpe of heaven is enough to confirm its existence even if it is never experienced again. It is my strong suspicion that one such experience might be able to prevent suicide, for instance, and perhaps many varieties of low self-destruction, [such as] alcoholism, drug-addiction, and addition to violence. This book is not an argument within orthodox science. It is a critique of orthodox science and of the

ground on which it rests, of its unproved articles of faith, and of its taken-for-granted definition, axioms, and concepts... It is my impression that the weaknesses of classical science show up most obviously in the fields of psychology and ethnology. Indeed, when one wishes knowledge of persons, or of societies, mechanistic science breaks down altogehter.