Vision and Aims of AHP -- August 1999,
by Eric Dodson

As some of you may know, this summer I was elected to the board of directors of the Association of Humanistic Psychology (AHP), whose board meeting I attended a few weeks ago in Seattle. At that board meeting, we spent some time exploring AHP’s overarching vision and aims. In the following list, I’ve recast the themes that emerged in somewhat more poetic language. Basically, I feel that continually questing after the poetic pulse of AHP’s enterprise is crucial to maintaining humanistic psychology’s vitality -- both for today and for the future.  I’ve come to sense in our times a powerful tendency to reduce almost everything -- including humanistic psychology -- to the most banal, repetitive and lifeless formulae. For instance, in our commercialized world even "being all you can be" has through sheer repetition become one of advertising’s bloodless gimmicks -- no longer a potent, inspirational call to human possibility and destiny. In essence, I feel that our modern world is placing humanistic psychology in danger of becoming a caricature of itself.  And against that backdrop, one of our challenges lies in resisting the temptation to settle upon any final vocabulary and self-description.  I feel that our world is calling us toward an ongoing re-poeticizing of our common project -- in a way that speaks to what is best in humanistic psychology’s tradition, and at the same time opens up new, surprising connections to our current world (a delicate balance, to be sure). So I offer the following statement of vision and purpose -- both as a personal act of defiance in a world seemingly bent on the banalization of everything, and as an invitation for us all to enter into a more vital, more powerful reinvention of our common enterprise.

      -- Eric Dodson

Vision and aims

- To call humanity toward fulfilling its deeper, more encompassing values and possibilities,

- To stand powerfully and unabashedly for freedom, healthy choice, expression and creativity,

- To quest after community and human interconnection, both locally and across the globe,

- To sense and appreciate the ongoing interweaving of our minds, our bodies, our spirits, and the world around us,

- To give voice to life’s fundamental riddle, and to seek after its greater charm, subtlety and

meaning,

- To expand humanity’s furthest boundaries, and to help our world give birth to its wider

evolutionary horizons,

- To find ourselves open, wild and alive in the passionate welter of life’s core struggle,

- And ultimately to quicken the pulse of life for all sentient beings.

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