Engaged Psychology:

Past, Present, Prospects
 

Craig Chalquist

California Institute of Integral Studies

2013

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Abstract

This article introduces the term “engaged psychology” to describe past and present psychological theory, research, therapy, and practice that moves beyond laboratories and classrooms, consulting rooms and institutes, to enrich, reflect on, and deepen the intersecting structures of consciousness, culture, and planet. Engaged psychologies that address issues of social justice, psychospiritual experience, self-actualization, and ecological awareness contrast sharply with psychologies of disengagement and departure that adjust the individual to appallingly unhealthy and unjust social, financial, and political “realities” while ignoring the degrading ecosphere. Practitioners of engaged psychology face four urgent tasks—epistemological, therapeutic, social justice, and planetary resilience—as shifting climates bring vastly altered cultural, political, and financial landscapes through which humans of today and tomorrow must find our way.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Techniques cannot be neutral…Those who talk of neutrality are precisely those who are afraid of losing their right to use neutrality to their own advantage.

– Paulo Freire (2005, p. 149)

 

As carriers of internal colonization, we may have developed the habit of silencing our own and other's suffering, resistances, and creativity when they come into contact with the official mythologies of normalized culture. 

– Helene Shulman Lorenz and Mary Watkins (2000)

 

We now encounter pathology in the psyche of politics and medicine, in language and design in the food we eat. Sickness is now “out there”... The terms “collapse,” “functional disorder,” “stagnation,” “lowered productivity,” “depression,” and “breakdown” are equally valid for human persons and for objective public systems and the things within the systems... The world, because of its breakdown, is entering a new moment of consciousness...

– James Hillman (1992, p. 96-97)

 

A Glance at Engaged Psychology: Past and Present

Since grad school, where I learned that psychologists could be hired to aim commodities at children, design missile targeting system graphics, certify traumatized soldiers fit for battle, devise campaigns of corporate greenwashing, and invade the privacy of job applicants by applying screening tests, I sought a new term for psychologies whose practitioners placed transformative and ethical work far above schemas for adjusting clients, patients, and the public to the dehumanization of mass advertising, ecological destruction, electronic surveillance, and permanent war waged across a world in rapid decline. Psychological work for sovereignty and emancipation, self-actualization and deeper awareness, intergenerational and ancestral healing, spiritual exploration and reconciliation, just community and economic fairness; for appreciating personal and cultural diversity; for educating the mature and responsible planetary person of tomorrow. Psychological work as if Earth mattered. What should we call it?

Although mainstream psychology yoked itself early on to a limited mechanistic worldview, the field was founded by such creative and embodied presences as William James, who put psychology and spirituality on speaking terms, C.G. Jung, who extended that work into myth, dream, and imagination, and Gustav Fechner, known in psychology textbooks as the founder of psychophysics (physiological psychology) but not as a passionate and complex nature poet who wrote about Earth as a sentient being. Most of his work remains untranslated into English, as does the work of Pierre Janet, who coined “subconscious,” studied emotional interactions between therapist and client, and worked out early trauma theory (Ellenberger, 1970). Mamie Phipps Clark studied the psychological effects of segregation on black children; her research proved crucial to the outcome of the U.S. Supreme Court decision Brown v. the Board of Education. Following the lead of Karen Horney’s interest in the whole person, Abraham Maslow added to his call for a Being-oriented psychology of self-actualizers, a seldom-heard demand for models of human growth toward a viable planetary community (Zweig & Bennis, 1972).

I now think of these founding practitioners as having developed fruitful early versions of engaged psychology, the kind that moves beyond laboratories and classrooms, consulting rooms and institutes, to enrich, reflect on, and deepen the intersecting structures of consciousness, culture, and planet. Although the dimension of engagement does not necessarily depend on school or system—even mechanistically presented behavioral methods can be turned to the service of deep transformation—full engagement requires alignment with views of the person-in-cultural/spiritual/planetary context more holistic, spacious, and deep than those geared for social adjustment or developmental norms imposed from outside. 

Although not necessarily rebellious of intent, the boldly engaged explorers mentioned above gave us models and insights of such transformative power that mainstream psychology—mechanistic, egotistic, minimalist in goals, diagnostically literal-minded—held them at the margins of their own field. Even now psychology textbooks mention B.F. Skinner and John Watson, whose consciousness-blurring techniques are wielded by mass advertisers and political opportunists, but seldom Jung, and only then to brand him esoteric: Jung, who drew up useful psychological profiles of Nazi officials and who labored secretly to move Jewish colleagues out of danger. Alfred Adler is noted for his work on the inferiority complex, but not for the community mental health achievements of his network of child guidance clinics. Wilhelm Reich campaigned for women’s rights, and Harry Stack Sullivan supported UNESCO. Ignacio MartiÍn-Baroó was doing research on the psychological impact of political oppression when assassins trained at the College of the Americas (since renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation) murdered him and his colleagues on campus one night at the University of El Salvador. In 1982, psychologists gathered in California and New York at the height of the Cold War to set up PsySR: Psychologists for Social Responsibility.

More recently, ecopsychologist Chellis Glendinning has lectured and written extensively on the harmful effects of political passivity, ecological collapse, and techno-addiction (1994). The steering committee of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood includes ecopsychologist Allen Kanner. Mary Watkins and Helene Lorenz oversaw participatory depth-psychological projects running across the border of South and North America, James Hillman helped found ecopsychology, as did Ralph Metzner, and Jungian analyst Andrew Samuels co-founded Psychotherapists and Counsellors for Social Responsibility. At the California Institute of Integral Studies, psychologist Fernando Castrillon launched and directed The Clinic Without Walls to offer psychotherapy and advocacy to public housing occupants in San Francisco. Jan Edl Stein directs Holos Institute (holosinstitute.org), a Bay Area nonprofit that trains psychotherapy interns in how to help clients reestablish meaningful, healing, and supportive contact with the natural world—a world strangely ignored in most psychological systems and practices.

Engaged psychologists do not always feel summoned into overtly political activities. Some focus on research; examples include Stanislav Grof’s decades of work on birth trauma (2012) and Charles Tart’s on heightened states of consciousness (2001). Others take on scholarly topics relevant for our time of failing institutions and planetary crises: Jorge Ferrer’s work on participatory spirituality (2001), for example, and Joseph Dodds’ on eco-psychoanalysis informed by complexity theory (2011). My own efforts highlight deep connections between “inner” life, personal history, home, land, and Earth (2007). Founded in 1996 by pastoral counselor Howard Clinebell, the field of ecotherapy completes a circle by pairing human healing with that of the world’s (1996; Buzzell & Chalquist, 2009). Ecotherapy moves within the circuit of ecopsychology, the study of the health and pathology of our relations to the natural world (Roszak, Gomes, & Kanner, 1995; Rust & Totten, 2012; Fisher, 2013).

Psychologies of engagement might be grasped more deeply in contrast to their mainstream counterparts.

 

Psychologies of Disengagement

Engaged psychological research, science, scholarship, and practice enhances our sense of aliveness, belonging, community, spirituality, and homecoming to a planet very much in need of appreciation. Disengaged psychology serves power, propaganda, mechanism, greed, and empire.

Shortly after the new field of psychology made its way into American and European laboratories, William James quit the field in disgust over its pedantic and relentless reduction of human complexity to reflex arcs. Not for nothing have so many of James’s biographers referred to him as “Promethean” (McDermott, 1987): his protest proved prophetic.

In Europe, Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, converted psychological insights into tools of modern advertising and the engineering of consent; his techniques were admired and imitated by Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels. It was Bernays’s campaigns that convinced women to start smoking, an activity previously restricted to men. In the U.S., John Watson, a president of the American Psychological Association (APA), taught behavioral techniques to mass marketers after losing his professorship at Cornell University. Hugo Munsterberg, an early APA member, started industrial psychology by writing Psychology and Industrial Efficiency in 1912 to place psychological research at the service of commerce and industry. Walter Dill Scott directed psychology into personnel screening and wrote The Theory and Practice of Advertising. Scott, who had arrived at the idea of workplace efficiency while plowing a field, advocated appeals to emotion to override reason and heighten consumer suggestibility.

By 1915, a clothing manufacturer in Cleveland used psychological tests to select workers, in effect corporatizing a now-common invasion of privacy; as a result, by 1917 companies sponsoring psychological research on salesmanship included Ford, Goodrich, Westinghouse, Heinz, Prudential Insurance, and Carnegie Steel (Kimble & Vertheimer, 2003). In most cases prospective and current employees had to submit to being tested, nor could they learn the test results afterward. Psychologist Lillian Gilbreth extended employee selection schemas and workplace efficiency methods to management training. Reacting to all this, journalist Grace Adams, a thoroughly disenchanted former student of psychology, wrote “The Decline of Psychology in America” to criticize the field for so shamelessly selling itself out (Schultz & Schultz, 2011). At a meeting of the American Psychological Association, William Montague protested the overemphasis on behavior and efficiency with a paper titled “Has Psychology Lost Its Mind?” (Schultz & Schultz, 2011).

During WW I, the APA secured funding by mentally testing soldiers and, eventually, by helping the U.S. Army develop psychologically friendly battlefield equipment. Watson served as a military psychologist. Scott won a medal from the Army for helping them select soldiers. B.F. Skinner designed a guided missile system directed by pigeons but failed to secure enough funding to build it because of the invention of radar. That since Descartes “machines have become more lifelike," as he put it, "and living organisms have been found to be more like machines” (1965) he took as a sign of progress rather than as a vast colonization of the social imaginary.

By 1924, John Watson worked as vice president of J. Walter Thompson, one of the largest advertising agencies in the U.S. There he pioneered celebrity endorsements, brand loyalty (with Yuban first, then Camel Cigarettes, Johnson’s Baby Powder, and Ponds), impulse buying, timed obsolescence, and methods for conditioning consumers to want ever-newer products. In her book Breaking the Silence, actor Mariette Hartley described the emotionally devastating impact of Grandpa Watson’s obsessive behavioral regimentation of her family (Hartley & Commire, 2010). This included putting everyone, including infants, on a rigid schedule and limiting the amount of time spent in physical contact.

Meanwhile, fed by military and government contracts, the APA continued to expand. In 1951, the U.S. military established HumRRO, the Human Resource Research Organization, to develop methods of psychological warfare under the direction of psychologist Meredith Crawford, the former APA treasurer, who founded the organization with Harry Harlow (Christie, 2011). By 1952, psychologists and other social scientists were funded by the CIA—in some cases covertly—for conducting research on psychological warfare. According to Patricia Greenfield, Carl Rogers sat on the board of the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, a front for CIA interrogation research; an internal CIA memo he never saw circulated in 1960 to note his research as useful for evaluating techniques that influence human behavior (1977). The Society gave a grant to professor Martin Orne to explore research on hypnosis. From the Korean War onward, in fact, the CIA paid for decades of social science research on mind control. The results landed in the agency’s interrogation manual and, from there, spread to repressive Latin America regimes who made effectively murderous use of it during the 1970s and 1980s.

This is D. O. Hebb, whose sensory deprivation research was funded by the CIA, justifying his torture of research subjects:

 

Hebb was elected president of the American Psychological Association in 1960, and he won the APA Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award in 1961.

In The Dark Side, Jane Mayer describes how former APA president Martin Seligman was invited by the CIA to speak in 2002 at the Navy’s SERE (Survival, Resistance, Evasion, Escape) school in San Diego (2009). In the 1960s, Seligman had found that by shocking a dog unpredictably, he could brutalize it into total, helpless passivity. His theories were adapted for use in CIA prisons. In 2010, Seligman won a $31 million contract to provide combat resilience training to U.S. soldiers. Reporter Mark Benjamin argues that Seligman’s work also laid the basis for the Bush Administration’s torture program (2010).

Seligman was not the only accomplice. Former APA president Joseph Matarazzo worked with psychologists Jim Mitchell and Bruce Jessen to design a new CIA interrogation regimen (Soldz, 2009), much of it based on techniques employed by Chinese Communist torturers (Shane, 2009). According to the New York Times, these two psychologists were part of what Defense Department officials nicknamed the “Resistance Mafia” of experts on how to survive enemy interrogation (Shane, 2009). The two directed the torture of Abu Zubaydah at a secret CIA detention site in Thailand. Zubaydah was stripped, subjected to sleep deprivation, and waterboarded thirty-eight times before the interrogators decided he didn’t know anything of value (Shane, 2009). These methods were then used on dozens of other prisoners in various locations around the world: on underage prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, for example, the brutality of which has been publicly minimized by psychologist and former APA president Patrick DeLeon. After visiting Guantanamo, APA president Ronald Levant claimed that psychologists were present during interrogations to “add value and safeguards” (Soldz, 2006). Subsequent documentation shows plainly that the psychologists—members of so-called Behavioral Science Consultation Teams—were actually full participants. By 2007, the Pentagon was relying on psychologists for interrogation work rather than on psychiatrists because so many of the latter refused to be involved.

Today, more than three thousand detainees remain at Bagram, where psychologists like Morgan Banks, Bryce Lefever, and Larry James have overseen prisoner treatment programs operating in flagrant violation of international law and of the Geneva Conventions (Bond, Eidelson, Olson, & Soldz, 2012) inspired byfounded in response to the ghastly revelations of the Nuremberg Trials. In 2011, however, James, former interrogation overseer at Abu Ghraib as well, was picked to serve on the White House Task Force for “Enhancing the Psychological Well-Being of The Military Family.” According to ethics complaints filed against him by the International Human Rights Clinic of Harvard Law School’s Human Rights Program, during his tenure at the prison boys and men were threatened with rape and death for themselves and their family members, sexually, culturally, and religiously humiliated, forced to remain naked and cold, deprived of sleep, subjected to sensory deprivation, over-stimulation, and extreme isolation, short-shackled into stress positions, and physically assaulted. The evidence indicates that abuse of this kind was systemic, and that BSCT health professionals played an integral role in its planning and practice (Harvard Law School, 2010).

Of course, the great majority of psychologists and other practitioners of social science do a world of good every day, psychologically, scientifically, and ethically. Hundreds have protested the shadow of their own profession: psychologist Beth Shinn, for example, who after watching president Gerald Koocher denigrate dissenters from APA policy as “opportunistic commentators masquerading as scholars” resigned from the APA in 2007 because “the American Psychological Association continues to condone psychologists’ work in detention centers that violate international law and because of actions by APA’s leadership to discourage dissent from its policies in this matter” (Soldz, 2007). That year psychologist Mary Pipher protested by returning her APA Presidential Citation award. In 2008, psychologist Jeffrey Kaye wrote an article on “Why Torture Made Me Leave the APA” (Kaye, 2008). Because of such push-back the APA finally issued an unconditional condemnation of psychologists’ involvement in torture.

The APA has also been busy on the home front. In California, psychologists not trained in APA programs cannot refer to themselves professionally as “psychologists” because the APA has succeeded in pushing legislation to make this a legally protected term: in effect, a trademark. As of 2007, 25% of clinical psychology doctoral students cannot find internships (American Psychological Association, 2007) because the APA now owns them all through further legislatory acts of flagrant self-promotion. Having ignored ecological destruction, extinction, and climate change for decades despite the urgent warnings of ecologists and ecopsychologists, the APA finally studied the problem and came up with a comprehensive solution: condition people to recycle and to buy more green products (American Psychological Association, 2009).

None of these shadows—of ecologically destructive industry and mass marketing, of political propaganda, of covert imprisonment and torture, of restriction of psychology graduates’ rights to call themselves psychologists and practice as they see fit—should be dismissed as anomalies. Long-standing and of a systematic pattern, they are inevitable expressions of the ideology of seeing everything from the outside, as separable parts rather than as living relations. As Viktor Frankl pointed out, the foundations of satanic mills like Auschwitz are ultimately laid on the drawing boards of nihilistic reductionists who see living beings as automata (2006).

It’s breathtaking to imagine psychologist Clark Hull spending his entire professional life trying to mathematize human nature, only to admit shortly before his death that his theories probably applied only to hungry rats. The work of cognitive ethologists like Marc Bekoff (2008) throws even this claim into doubt: unlike the research psychologists who manipulate them, rats and other primates show clear signs of empathy when their fellow creatures are being tortured in laboratories.

 

Four Urgent Tasks

To serve culture, spirit, soul, and planet psychologically without being swallowed by pathological social forces and corrupt subsystems—in other words, without being disengaged—presents no easy challenge. How to serve without self-indulgent rebellion or caving in to business as usual? Without succumbing to an idolatry of Progress nor to regressive pre-industrial visions of a paradise that never was?

Engaged psychologists face four (at least!) important tasks that challenge us to go on integrating theory and practice out in the world while addressing the urgent crises of our time: a time in which hoary institutions now collapse under the pressures of global warming, continual warfare, economic disparity, and resource depletion. To touch briefly on these tasks:

The Epistemological Task. It should have been obvious some time ago that a nineteenth-century worldview cannot be up to the challenge of dealing with twenty-first-century complexities of life on this planet. It does not matter if the hydraulics are now known as circuits or the mechanisms as modules. Systems, chaos, and complexity theories, fluid dynamics, depth psychology, epigenetics, quantum theory, holistic medicine and biology: developments in these and other fields (ignoring the spiritual traditions for the moment) have destroyed—not undermined: destroyed—the kinds of oversimplified push-pull cause-effect A=A reasoning that still hampers social science research designs on which depend so many ever-failing and under-performing educational and therapeutic models and programs. Continuing scientific discovery requires a more inclusive, expansive, participatory, and organic worldview in which to serve and flourish. (A quick way to identify disengagement, in science or anywhere else: a small group benefits materially at the expense of someone else.)

As a post-mechanistic worldview comes into focus, the diversity of ways of knowing the world moves into the forefront of engagement. Scientific projects purporting to be the only valid method for discovering truth or reality degenerate from scientific to scientistic, from conscious inquiry into unconscious religiosity. Engaged psychologies move the emphasis from the worship of measurable proof—what ecologist Stephen Harding refers to as “quantificationitis” (2006, p. 31)—to the crafting of substantiation through multiple perspectives and knowledge sources, including those dismissed as merely “anecdotal.” Without the stories behind them the facts mean little; nor will having more of them change the need for new stories about how to live with ourselves and each other on a warming Earth.

The Therapeutic Task. Two of the most influential American mental health organizations have almost totally lost their public and professional credibility, the American Psychological Association for the reasons mentioned above and the American Psychiatric Association for its neo-Kraepelian fixation on diagnostic traits and for psychiatrists’ undisclosed but lucrative ties to the pharmaceutical-industrial complex (Caplan, 1995; Kutchins & Kirk, 1997; Whitaker, 2011; Paris & Phillips, 2013; Greenberg, 2013). The time is ripe for engaged psychologists to compose and commit to a new set of ethical practice guidelines. Beyond obvious professional standards like abstaining from psychological work that aids or abets torture, warfare, patriarchy, consumerism, invasion of privacy, industrial monopoly, or political conflicts of interest, we need new guidelines for charting the living cultural and spiritual dimensions of psychotherapy practice. (In 2013, CIIS and the Institute of Noetic Sciences agreed to develop spiritual competencies for psychologists and psychotherapists.)

Because psychotherapists who work humanely with clients cannot treat them like machines to be fixed and plugged back into a system in widespread breakdown, new and innovative sources of revenue beyond the control of insurance companies and governmental whim will have to be discovered. Many psychotherapists who supplement their income by teaching, writing, and offering presentations and workshops might reflect on creating new therapy practices in which business, education, religion, government, and the public are the clients.

The Social Justice Task. Although engaged psychologists have fought classism, sexism, racism, and other forms of marginalization and bigotry for more than a century, the political and financial manipulation of large populations for private gain requires the spread of these and other social cancers. Controlling resources other people need to live requires constant scapegoating and exploitation of the groups who end up on the bottom; ongoing deregulation and privatization of these resources guarantees ever-widening gaps between haves and have-nots as fantastic amounts of wealth are funneled upward and outward into offshore bank accounts and other secret locations that keep currency from flowing where it is most needed. An engaged psychological analysis of the structures that power this international program of hydraulic despotism could educate the public about who controls what and reveal opportunities for collective empowerment and problem-solving.

We also need to continue our psychological work with people excluded from the benefits of viable community life. A recent visit to San Quentin State Penitentiary, for example, where CIIS students and faculty lead educational programs, showed me that prisoners managing the organic garden know more about the ecological state of the planet than one could tease out from the news media. Imagine a network of voluntary prison think tanks working on the environmental problems of our day: a useful alternative to exploiting the prisoners for their labor. As one inmate told me, “What happens to Earth eventually happens to everyone.”

The Planetary Resilience Task. The unprecedented extreme weather burning and drowning our planet over the last three years was powered by heat trapped by greenhouse gases pumped into the atmosphere twenty-five years ago. Since then the quantities of carbon released into the sky have accelerated. The resulting superstorms, droughts, and floods do not signal a new norm: they are mild compared to what’s coming. We know from our own history that rises and falls of nations correspond with changes of climate; my Anglo-Saxon ancestors were driven by changing weather out of their farms and homelands and into the British Isles.

As extreme weather pulls apart nations and communities, denial of global warming and mass extinction has dropped to the point where even American politicians agree in private that something must be done to cool down the Earth. But no one agrees on what to do about the millions of people stuck in terror and paralysis over the multiple ecological disasters bearing down on all of us. At CIIS I have designed a Certificate in Ecoresilience Leadership to train mentors to facilitate Ecoresilience Circles (“heartsteads”) in which frightened people can speak their feelings, hear current scientific data on environmental shifts, learn about actions being taken to adapt to these shifts, move from perceived helplessness to readiness for participating in change, and network heartsteads together to form a pool of knowledge and best practices and a research web for studying how transformations of consciousness can lead to lasting cultural change.

However, ecoanxiety represents the surface of a broader discontentment: that of disconnection from the natural world. “We still have not, in any meaningful way, arrived in America,” notes Wendell Berry (2002), an observation given additional force by the global spread of industrialized colonialism as nations position themselves to fight over dwindling resources. By and large, our relations with the natural world remain those of mobile, restless spectators. All this leaves a powerful hunger for connection and deep homecoming, a hunger that fully surfaces as soon as it is named, and, when it is not, creates symptoms as its signals.

With the hunger runs a desire to live more lightly and sustainably on this planet. But how are busy people to figure out ways to do that? We know what psychologies of disengagement and departure look like, but what do our psychologies of engagement, belonging, and homecoming have to offer towardfor strengthening our networks and communities to face the new realities of living on a rapidly changing planet.?