The Road to Malpsychia Humanistic Psychology and Our Discontents by Joyce Milton Encounter, 310 pp., $26.95 WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE between psychology and science? Science describes things that already exist, while psychology creates things that do not have to be. In science, the words "atom" and "molecule" describe nature's building blocks. Atoms and molecules are things of substance, and scientists, recognizing their value, gave them names. In psychology, however, terms like "self-actualization" and "inner self" describe phenomena whose value exists only because some persons awarded them value. In the case of self-actualization, for example, certain psychologists thought the phenomenon important and so they gave it a name--though it is more accurate to say that these psychologists imagined the concept of self-actualization, and by imagining it and giving it a name, they awarded the concept value. Other psychologists think differently, and compose a different language group, and so they describe different things (e.g., the "oral stage" of development, the "inner child"). But in each case, psychologists describe things not because they have value; rather, they have value because they are described. The value of psychology's discoveries exists only in a consensus of minds. WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE between psychology and religion? Joyce Milton wrestles with this question in her new book, "The Road to Malpsychia: Humanistic Psychology and Our Discontents." She examines the twentieth century's failed experiment with humanistic psychology, including the efforts of leading psychologists and social scientists to substitute a secular "religion of human nature" for traditional religion. If psychology tried to compete with religion during the twentieth century and failed, it must be like religion, but also somehow different. In what way? Milton approaches the issue more as a biographer than a philosopher, which limits her success. She examines the dysfunctional lives of thinkers like Abraham Maslow (founder of the concept "hierarchy of needs"), Ruth Benedict (an early opponent of the idea of "normal"), and especially Timothy Leary, the proponent of LSD. Each in his or her own way contributed to the idea that human beings could attain a new and elevated consciousness and become, in Maslow's words, "fully human." For Maslow, the way up was through "peak experiences"--moments when the individual felt himself to be at one with the universe. For Leary, the way up was through drugs. By revealing the instability and downright kookiness of these people, Milton tries to capture the inanity of the entire psychology movement. Leary is the easiest target. He drinks during good times and bad, has four wives, and, before he dies, commits his head to cryonic preservation, hoping that one day it can be brought back to life atop the body of a seventeen-year-old girl. He resents his mother (though so do Benedict and Maslow). He lives as a fugitive. He goes to prison. Any movement that boasts of having someone like him as its poster boy will inevitably fail among the general public. Milton's approach has merit, just as there is merit in warning impressionable youths in love with philosophy about the dysfunctional lives of Nietzsche, Foucault, and Socrates, to name just a few. The defect, even madness, of an idea is sometimes best expressed in the blighted lives of its promulgators. Yet Milton's approach to the conflict between psychology and religion is ultimately unsatisfying. After all, religion has its share of kookiness--remember Jim and Tammy Bakker?--and so the final victory of religion over psychology at the end of the twentieth century cannot be credited to the purity of religion's leadership. AT BEST, Milton reveals a trend that is all too common in intellectual movements: Each generation of disciples lies farther away from the movement's original inspiration, and takes its toll on the original idea. Milton starts her book with a short biography of Franz Boas, the celebrated anthropologist who, early in the twentieth century, correctly exposed the mistakes (and racism) in theories of cultural evolutionism that dominated the times. The cultural evolutionists argued that Anglo-Saxon culture was the apogee of civilization, and that this was so because its members were tall and blonde, not small, dark, and garlicky. Boas countered with the idea that culture was a social construct, that standards of good and evil vary from culture to culture, and that these standards had nothing to do with race or heredity. Boas was a sophisticated thinker, and while he may have been a cultural relativist, there was some truth in what he said. Succeeding generations of thinkers built on Boas's ideas, degraded them, and, curiously, boast of progressively more dysfunctional lives. Maslow and Benedict start the descent with their utopias--and their neuroses. Maslow rediscovers human nature and declares all people to be good. Benedict, who Milton says was more Boasian than Boas himself (an ominous sign of fanaticism), declares that family men are the "aberrations," while those living on society's fringe are normal. Both thinkers apply Boas's cultural relativism to the problem of the self. What results is a personal freedom so boundless that these two people end up seeing only emptiness before them. Benedict feels "deeply alone" most of her life and is chronically depressed. Maslow fares somewhat better, but is always searching, always searching. Next comes Leary, who is even more self-obsessed. At least Maslow had a social conscience. He tried to use his conception of the self to nurture attachments between human beings. Leary, on the other hand, took LSD to retreat into his own little world. For Leary, society barely existed. Tolstoy once said that old age is either majestic, pathetic, or repulsive. Leary was certainly not majestic. One evening, as an old man, he sits in a wheelchair decked out in a dog collar with twinkling Christmas tree lights. It is unclear if his friends laugh with him or at him. This was the logical end for a man who lived as he thought, and whose thoughts were tragic. Finally, there comes a potpourri of New Age spirituality, radical feminism, and self-esteem psychology--the end-stage of humanistic psychology. The touchy-feeliness, the quests for "realness," the hot tubs, and the group hugs all seem wonderfully harmless, though some of the proponents of these ideas live very peculiar lives, which Milton describes well, including the occasional suicide attempt, and even one instance of Holocaust denial. At the end of his life, Karl Marx reportedly said, "I am not a Marxist." If Franz Boas were alive today to see what had been made of his original theories, perhaps he would dissociate himself from the movement that Milton credits him with founding. MILTON'S EXPOSE of the humanistic psychology movement would have been more powerful had she tried directly to answer the question: What is the difference between psychology and religion? The answer explains the failure of humanistic psychology, and the resilience of religion, better than the life of any individual psychologist. The difference between the two resembles the difference between psychology and science, but in this case, instead of reversing the relationship between things and their value, psychology reverses the relationship between the self and the universe. In religion, a relationship is posited between the self (or the soul) and the universe, from which the self draws guidance for its behavior. So many small phenomena compete for our attention every day, and demand from us a decision. How to decide? For animals, decisions are easy, since animals are driven by instinct. But for human beings, who use reason more than instinct, and who have the power to doubt, to worry about unforeseen consequences, and to feel the pang of conscience, a big decision often means confusion. Religion helps by integrating the various phenomena of life into something larger than any single person. People then develop a relationship to that whole, of which they feel themselves a part, and which satisfies their desire for guidance based on something more than just animal instinct. In psychology, the self is used to explain the universe--the exact opposite of what religion does. Humanistic psychologists expand on people's thoughts and emotions to help them make sense of life. They try to erect something solid and enduring in the cross-currents of feeling that eddy about in people's minds. But feelings themselves cannot tell someone what sort of life is desirable, or what is harmful or useless. Few important questions in life can be resolved simply by asking, "How do I feel?" More questions, more unforeseen consequences, and more conflicting desires keep popping up. The desperate effort to find answers to fundamental questions using psychology recalls the vigorous turns of a disconnected car wheel. Humanistic psychology is arrogant because it believes that a theory of the universe can be deduced from a person's own experience. It is socially irresponsible because it advises us to keep our eyes on the weather vane of our own conflicting feelings rather than on the lives of those around us. No society can function long under such a regime. That is why, at the end of the twentieth century, psychology's dream of self-actualization resolved itself in a sigh and then dissolved into apathy. All the bold and expansive ideas, all the feverish energy spent on finding a higher self, ended up in a kind of drowsy selfishness for persons like Leary, in futile gestures for those like Maslow, and, in some cases, a total loss of how to situate oneself in the world. In chronicling the disaster of these lives, Milton has done us a service. Ronald W. Dworkin is a practicing physician and a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.