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FIRST INVITATIONAL CONFERENCE
ON HUMANISTIC PSYCHOLOGY

THE AMERICAN ASSOCIATION
FOR HUMANISTIC PSYCHOLOGY

Wesleyan University and Old Saybrook, Connecticut

November 28-30, 1964

INTRODUCTION

If I were called upon to assemble one of those desert island bookshelves and one concerned with humanistic psychology, I'm pretty sure that my first ten choices would include Becoming, Values in Psychotherapy, the Psychology of Personal Constructs, Toward a Psychology of Being, The Broken Image, Man's Search for Himself, Human Potentialities, Explorations in Personality, On Becoming a Person, and Lives in Progress. Thus my pleasure and anticipation may be imagined when I was invited to spend the weekend following Thanksgiving in 1964 with the authors of those key volumes of the third force in psychology. And, far from being castaways on a desert island, we were situated in a hospitable country inn at Old Saybrook, Connecticut.

The occasion was the first invitational conference on humanistic psychology sponsored by the American Association for Humanistic Psychology, financed through the generosity of the Hazen Foundation, and conducted with the cordial hospitality of Wesleyan University under the chairmanship of Robert Knapp, himself an increasingly important contributor to the psychology of man's creative potential. In addition to the authors of my bookshelf ( Gordon Allport, Charlotte Buhler, George Kelly, Abraham Maslow, Floyd Matson, Rollo May, Gardner Murphy, Henry Murray, Carl Rogers, and Robert White), the conference profited from the seminal thinking of such people as Jacques Barzun, Victor Butterfield (president of Wesleyan University), Rene DuBos, Alvin Lasko, E. J. Shoben, and Roman Tratch, Norma Rosenquist, Secretary of AAHP, and Miles Vich, Associate Editor of the Journal of Humanistic Psychology, were on hand to give support and wisdom from their special vantage points.

To aid its discussions, the conference heard papers prepared by DuBos, Kelly, Maslow, May, Murray, Rogers, and Shoben. A summarizing panel was chaired by Charlotte Buhler. Following this note five of the papers are presented in full. A sixth, "Humanistic Biology," by Rene DuBos, has been published in the March, 1965, issue of the American Scientist.

Readers may find interest in some of my personal notes jotted down during the discussions at Old Saybrook. In all truth I feel somewhat apologetic for these since they were made solely for my own enjoyment and before Editor Sutich asked me to write this Introduction. Thus they are very fragmentary, and I am not always sure who said what or which grew out of my own subconscious. So with full bows to all-including those from whom I may be half-wittingly plagiarizing-here are some of the thoughts that came into focus for me.

Humanistic psychology is a centering on experience. . . .Behavior is a by-product. . . .One must make at least an "as if" assumption of choice. . . .Can the scientific functions of a humanistic psychological science be set forth?

Revising our concepts of causality with much help from Matson. . . .Complementarity and indeterminacy, powerful tools to open up possibility. . .

The wonderful quotes: Think it was Rogers who said, "This I believe to be a useful and beautiful way of looking at things." . . . How right to join the aesthetic and the pragmatic. . . Humanistic psychology must recognize the overlap- indeed, the simultaneity- of science and art at so many points. . . Rogers seems to think the patterns in nature are given and we gradually see them more clearly. . . . I tend to think that our seeing is part of what creates the patterns. . . .Rogers again - how he keeps growing and turning out creative ideas! - What is science's goal? "The present day aim of science is to be able to live in terms of process."

Allport quoting Spranger, "To grasp events as fraught with meaning of a totality."

And who was it said, "Love thy nature as thy self"?

- J.F.T. Bugental

(This introduction is from The Journal of Humanistic Psychology, Vol. V, No. 2, Fall 1965, pp. 180 - 181.)