In the preface to the second edition of Toward a Psychology of Being (1968), Abraham Maslow wrote:
"Much has happened to the world of Psychology since this book was first published (1962) ...I must confess, that I have come to see this humanist trend in psychology as a revolution in the truest, oldest sense in which Galileo, Darwin, Einstein, Freud and Marx made revolutions, i.e., new ways of perceiving and thinking, new images of man and society..."
Between editions of Maslow's classic, on November 28th through 30th, 1964, the original Old Saybrook conference took place in the little New England Town of Old Saybrook, Connecticut. There, as David Elkins recounts it, "at the Saybrook Inn, a resort hotel and spa, the new American Association for Humanistic Psychology was holding its 'First Invitational Conference on Humanistic Psychology'. Abe Maslow was there. So was Carl Rogers, and Rollo May, Charlotte Buhler, Clark Moustakas, Floyd Matson, James Bugental, Miles Vich, Robert Knapp, and a host of other luminaries including Henry Murray, Gordon Allport, George Kelly, Gardner Murphy, Robert White, Rene Dubos, Norma Rosenquist, Alvin Lasko, Victor Butterfield, E.J. Shoben and Roman Tratch."
The original Old Saybrook gathering, though but one significant event, is often credited as a landmark moment in the history of humanistic psychology. The "revolution" Maslow describes had opened doors, some then newly cracked in the field, like Creativity research; others which had been systemically shut to psychology, such as consciousness and self exploration; other doors to European existential-phenomenology, and still others to Eastern philosophical traditions.
Read David Elkins' article, Old Saybrook I and II: The Visioning and Re-Visioning of Humanistic Psychology, from the December, 1998/January, 1999 issue of the AHP Perspective.